Status and Outlook for Biopharma R&D With John LaMattina

Speaker 1:
Welcome to TD Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.
Steve Scala:
Hi, I am Steve Scala of the TD Cowen pharma team, and I'm delighted to be here with Dr. John LaMattina for today's episode. Dr. LaMattina is the former senior vice president of Pfizer and president of Pfizer Global Research and Development. In this role, Dr. LaMattina oversaw the drug discovery and development efforts of over 13,000 colleagues in the US, Europe and Asia. While at Pfizer, Dr. LaMattina led the development of treatments for cancer, smoking cessation, rheumatoid arthritis, and HIV. Dr. LaMattina is the author of numerous scientific publications, holds a number of US patents and authored three books, the most recent of which was published within the last couple of years, and is entitled Pharma and Profits: Balancing Innovation, Medicine and Drug Prices. Currently, Dr. LaMattina is senior partner and member of the board of directors of PureTech Health. He also serves on a number of other boards.
John, thanks so much for being with us today and we very much look forward to this conversation about a very dynamic sector.
John LaMattina:
Oh, thanks Steve. It's a pleasure to be here and to talk to you again.
Steve Scala:
So people in the industry, whether it be investing, academia or industry, are all wondering about the future of the biopharma industry and therefore it's great to be with someone with such deep insights. Maybe I can just start out by asking, where does pharma R&D stand today in your view? Is it expanding? Is it retrenching or is it in steady state?
John LaMattina:
Well, it really depends on the company you're with, I guess. If you're in a place like Novo Nordisk and Lilly, you're expanding. You're capitalizing on the great GLP-I drugs that have come out, game changer drugs like that. If you're at a company like Pfizer, you're undergoing major cost-cutting exercises. Ironically, four years, three years after the launching of the COVID-19 vaccines and the paxlovid, that success was short-lived, and now Pfizer is going through a retrenchment. So I guess on balance, I would say steady state. While I just focused on big pharma, I'd say with biotech that's the same sort of thing, because biotech is really fueled by investments and investments have not been growing a lot over the past few years. Maybe that'll change now with the new administration coming in. We'll see.
Steve Scala:
So that actually leads me to my next question and that is, do you believe that the biotech industry is more innovative, creative, and making greater advances relative to pharma? And if you do believe that, then what explains that difference?
John LaMattina:
So I'll explain to the audience that I was at Pfizer for 30 years and I've been involved with biotech now for the last 15, but I don't think there's any big difference between innovation. Let me make a couple of points here. Number one, biotech companies are small. They tend to be based on a single platform or a single compound or two. And the success rate for biopharma as I've been experiencing it is not that much better, if at all, than big pharma. I find very creative people and great scientists in both venues. But pharma, biotech R&D, pharma R&D is very tough and you have the same failure rates going forward. I like to make one other point while I have this topic, and that is interestingly, people don't realize that back in the eighties and nineties, half of big pharma revenues tended to come from in-licensed compounds.
The same is true now. And people talk about, well, pharma acquires all these things. Yes they do, but that's always been the case. Instead of in the nineties or so when we would license company compounds from Japan or small European companies, et cetera. Now you're doing it from biotech companies. And so there's an important ecosystem that exists between biotech and big pharma, and I think each are dependent on each other. Biotech gets some funding from a big pharma. Big pharma gets potential products, and so it works both ways. But I'd say about half of the drugs from big pharma are internally developed, and so as a result they bring stuff in from the outside where they have potential holes.
Steve Scala:
Great. You somewhat already answered this question, but let me pose it anyway. Some believe that the pharma industry R&D efforts will slowly erode under global drug pricing pressures such as IRA in the US.
John LaMattina:
Oh, I think that's a really important point. The landscape is changing dramatically, and I want to raise two points about the IRA in particular. First of all, people assume that you're cutting revenues from pharmaceutical companies and that's not going to impact R&D. Well, the fact of the matter is pharma companies invest 25% of top line revenues into R&D. That's a pretty standard number. So if as the proponents of the IRA are saying you're going to reduce spending by Medicaid by tens of billions of dollars, of course it's going to have an impact on R&D. You're going to have smaller R&D organizations. You're going to have fewer programs going forward.
And so look, I appreciate the fact that the American public in particular wanted price controls on drugs. And so that's given, but this is the result of it. You're going to have less R&D, period. The other point since I am on this topic now and a bugaboo I have, is that the IRA was set up poorly with terms of which drugs that you would start bidding on, start setting the prices for. So for small molecule drugs, the price setting begins after nine years, which means that so a drug's been on the market for nine years. At that point, government can come in and start setting prices for it. For large molecule drugs, interestingly, they decide that wouldn't happen until 13 years expired.
I think that's backwards. Small molecule drugs tend to be easier to administer. They tend to be a lot cheaper. And if anything, they should be encouraged as opposed to large molecule drugs, which tend to have to be administered in clinics, doctor's offices, et cetera, and tend to have a longer patent life as well as less likely to be prices eroded by generic forms, or biosimilar in the case of large molecules. So there's a double whammy here, and where your listeners may be interested in that is that I think companies are switching out of programs for small molecules or at least rejiggering the balance that they might have.
They might have half their programs in small molecules and half in large molecules, maybe even more in small molecules. I think what's happened is a lot of companies have gone back and said, look, it costs just as much to discover and develop a large molecule as a small molecule. If we're going to have a longer patent life for a large molecule, shouldn't we rebalance our portfolios to have more large molecule programs than small molecule programs? You'll have better pricing, you'll have less price controls put on them and less erosion to generics going forward. So I think you're seeing a little bit of that as well.
And while I'm on the soapbox, Steve, let me make one more point, and that is the great American price controls that exist are the patent system. Once a drug goes off patent, the sales plummet for those drugs, small molecule drugs in particular, not as much biosimilars, but that's getting better as well. When Lipitor went off patent, this is under my Pfizer days, the sales of Lipitor at Pfizer dropped 95% in 12 months. Stunning amount. The generic form of Lipitor, atorvastatin is that I think the third most prescribed drug in all of the United States. And you can buy it for pennies a day, pennies a day.
That's amazing when you think about it. At my age now, I want to contrast this with hip replacements because I am a baby boomer and I have a lot of friends going to get replacements these days. Cost of hip replacements never goes down. Hip replacements don't go generic. They go up five, 10% a year. And so you want to make a dent in healthcare costs, you want to focus on things like that as opposed to drugs, which end up saving the healthcare system lots of money and really benefit everybody. All right, enough of my speech.
Steve Scala:
If IRA were law 20 years ago when you were in a leadership position at Pfizer, do any drugs come to mind that might not be available to patients today because maybe Pfizer would've made the decision not to develop them because of the economic realities of IRA?
John LaMattina:
Well, you know 20 years ago was a different time because the large molecule antibody biologics area of R&D was really just starting to grow and grow a lot. I think the difference you would find is you'd have a smaller portfolio. You wouldn't have as many people in research, you wouldn't be able to do as many things. You might cut out certain therapeutic areas that didn't offer big commercial promises or more speculative perhaps. You might not have done anything at all in Alzheimer's disease as an example. And in those days, 20 years ago is was not now, in oncology research you might've scaled that back for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the lack of understanding 20 years ago about the type of pricing you could get for oncology drugs. Now my former company, half its R&D efforts I believe, certainly half its pipeline is pretty much in oncology. So it's a big difference there.
Steve Scala:
So we talked about the potential impact IRA could have on R&D, but what about just the challenge in drugging, even more elusive drug targets, more elusive biological targets. Do you think that that is a real issue and do you think the industry is up to the task of doing so?
John LaMattina:
Oh, I don't think it's an issue. I think it's more once the genome was somewhat unraveled and you got a better understanding of what biological issues somebody might have based on their genetics, you got to really expand the kind of targets you could have. I was just talking to somebody the other day recommending a job in biotech biopharma R&D because I think the opportunities are growing dramatically right now in terms of target identification.
Now the challenge is you could identify a certain enzyme or a receptor that may play a role in a disease, but it's all hypothetical at that stage. You've really got to go in and find a compound to test that hypothesis and then approve whether or not that blocking that enzyme or receptor actually has a beneficial role in treating a disease. And in fact, that is a lost importance of biopharma and pharmaceutical industry. That is the industry proves or disproves medical hypotheses. It's great to have all this basic research being done, but until you actually get a molecule large or small and show whether or not the hypothesis is right, you're nowhere. And that's what the industry does. And I don't think anybody appreciates that. It's not done at the NIH, it's not done at academic institutions or research institutes. It's really done by the biopharma industry, and that's the major contribution that makes to society.
Steve Scala:
So taken together and stepping back. We have some pressure points with IRA, but then of course on the other hand, we have even greater technologies that can exploit these known targets. On balance, are you bullish on pharma R&D going forward? Are you kind of reserved? Or would you say you're downright bearish on the outlook?
John LaMattina:
I am in the middle here. I think the scientific opportunities are great, but I think the pressure on pricing is really going to curtail the amount of money being able to invest in R&D. So ironically, at a time when I think there's great opportunity scientifically, you could have fewer scientists trying to find answers and solutions to these diseases. So that's the unfortunate aspect of all of this.
Steve Scala:
So we're aware of some efforts to curtail drug prices, but do you have other views on what should be done about drug prices, any kind of novel thought process as to how drug prices could be curbed without maybe hurting the underlying ability of the industry to be creative and innovative?
John LaMattina:
Yeah, so let me go off in a few different directions on that question. First of all, if somebody were to say to you four or five years ago that the industry was going to come up with a drug, actually multiple drugs that would reduce type 2 diabetes, that would cause people to lose 10 or 15% of their weight, that would reduce cancers due to obesity significantly, that might play a role in addiction. And now more studies coming out showing that they reduce arthritis in obese people and reduce heart attacks and strokes. You would have said, my goodness, these are wonder drugs. These drugs would save the healthcare system billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, they would be worth a tremendous amount of money.
Well, those drugs now exist in the GLP-1s. And now of course, so what are people complaining about? Well, the prices. Well, how do you price any kind of literally society changing drugs? Well, you try and balance the impact that you have with these drugs on lowering healthcare costs and all the way trying to make significant money for your company so you can continue to grow R&D efforts. So you continue to come up with the next big breakthroughs. But unfortunately, what everybody is focused on are the pricing of these drugs.
Now, having said that, if you have insurance, and good insurance by the way in this country, you're not paying all that much for these drugs. I'm going to say on the order of a couple of hundred dollars a month. And I may be wrong on that, but it's not all that great. The problem is if you don't have insurance, you're paying a much higher price for these drugs. And of course the healthcare system is bearing the brunt through insurance payments of these things. But having said that, the overall benefits of these drugs are enormous.
So if I talk about drug pricing, a couple of things have changed in the past five or six years. One is that most companies now when they come up with a new therapy are going to payers, insurance companies and saying, oh look, we're coming up. We think over the next 12 to 18 months we're going to have a new drug to treat whatever disease. We are thinking of pricing it at this level. Here is our rationale for these pricings. Do you agree or disagree? And that has actually been a pretty good move on the case of drug companies because they get buy-in from payers. Early on they get feedback and that will help them launch a drug and not have rather people focusing on the importance of this new drug, focusing on the price. So I think that's a big method going forward.
The one change I would make, because I think the poster child of pricing unfortunately, was with Humira and AbbVie where they created a patent thicket, which is legal and they didn't do anything illegal or immoral really, but which extended the franchise of Humira far longer than it really probably should have been and enabled pricing increases each year going forward as well. I think that I talked about, as Peter Kulczynski has quoted, The Great American Drug Deal. The Great American Drug Deal of the patent system is such that you have a social contract with the American people such that you get a patent. So you can sell your drug for 12 or 14 years depending on how much patent life you have when the drug gets approved, and then after that it goes generic. And I think laws should be adjusted so that that happens. And there aren't really unnecessary extensions that create something being on patent for 20, 22 years or something like Humira was.
Steve Scala:
Great. Maybe we can pivot a bit and chat about AI. What role do you think AI will play specifically in pharma R&D in the future?
John LaMattina:
Well, the great impact of AI is to take enormous amounts of data and help you be able to focus on key things. Interestingly enough, I had one of the companies I'm working with, we had an expert come in from LA to talk about AI and I came away with the sense that this could be a tremendous help I think in clinical trials and gleaning out activities, beneficial activities, maybe negative activities, maybe help design in clinical trials and picking out patients along the way. I'm not so sure yet. I mean AI is used certainly in drug discovery aspects. But actually in finding new targets, or actually designing from scratch a new molecule based totally AI, I think we're still not quite there yet, but it's got promise and obviously people are working on it and over the next four or five years, things could change dramatically there.
Steve Scala:
And what are your views on China as a source of biomedical innovation?
John LaMattina:
Well, it's an interesting question. China is such a closed system that not a whole lot I think gets out there. Ironically, maybe eight, 10 years ago there were these big worries because China was building these enormous R&D facilities, dozens of them throughout the country. And we thought, boy, they're going to blow us away in all this. And it really hasn't quite happened yet. So again, another area where of course you've got money being invested there, right? You've got very smart people there and obviously they have access to technologies, but haven't quite seen an explosion that would have me worry just yet. But again, five years from now, that could be totally different.
Steve Scala:
Maybe we could pivot once again and talk about R&D productivity. There have been many attempts to measure and compare R&D productivity. Do you have a preferred metric and which companies do you think rank particularly high on that metric?
John LaMattina:
Well, I don't have a preferred metric per se, and I haven't really done an analysis since my days at Pfizer about looking at our productivity relative to other people. Look, I always believe in the power of numbers. I always believe in diversity in your portfolio in the given areas that your company wants to work in and try to find a number of molecules that could probe a lot of different areas. I wasn't one to bet all-in on one area per se. I had like to have a bunch of chips. I wasn't going all in on red or something like that. I'd like to have a bunch of chips across the table to maximize my chances of success. And then if you find something, then really hammer it home at that stage.
So I would always look at people's pipelines. Amazingly now you can go on any company's website, any company now, and look at their full development pipeline from phase one through phase three, and then even post-launch, evergreening, broadening utility of a certain compound like a JAK3 inhibitor initially for rheumatoid arthritis and then for all sorts of skin diseases and other immunological conditions.
And you can get a read from that as to what's going on and how successful they are. And I would worry, I guess if I had two companies of sort of similar size and one had half the pipeline or the other. I'd be a little bit worried about that. I was always encouraged by having a broad phase one pipeline and letting phase two be the area to separate things out. Having compounds where you can get to a quick decision, a quick phase two study where you can see whether or not the drug actually works, I thought was key. So having development programs that would get us to that decision quickly I think was important. I still think that's very important.
And then this is a big difference between big pharma and smaller companies. When a big pharma gets a negative result, they're going to be quick to move on. A small biotech company that maybe has a pipeline of one or two things, if a compound fails or looks shaky in phase two, this is the only game they have in town. So a lot of times they'll say, well, maybe we'll redo the clinical trial and look at it in this way, or maybe it might work in this different indication, so let's do that. And rarely does that ever succeed. That's one of the benefits big pharma has. You can kill quickly and not cause the company to go under. You've got all sorts of other options to go forward with. So I always like having lots of options in my pipeline.
Steve Scala:
And sticking with the R&D topic, what portion of R&D success do you attribute to luck?
John LaMattina:
Oh man, it doesn't hurt to be lucky, Steve, but rarely do you find something, I'm trying to look back on my career. So Lipitor was a bit of luck in that it was going to be the fifth, and that program almost got killed by Warner-Lambert. It's a wonderful story about how one passionate researcher, Roger Newton, who's the biologist in discovery on the statin program at Warner-Lambert believed in the compound. Even though preclinically there wasn't anything, he thought there was some inklings that could show it could be better than the existing statins at the time. And so there was a meeting at Warner-Lambert, they were going to kill the program. And Roger as the story goes, got on his hands and knees and begged for them to continue the program because he thought this would be special without any really conclusive evidence to prove that. And they went into phase one studies and showed that it was twice as good basically as the existing statins out there.
That was a bit of luck in that. I think the management at the time said, well, let's try the phase one study. We've come this far and then we'll get Roger out of our hair and move on. It turned out to be at the time the biggest selling drug of all time. So sometimes I think that's a bit of luck in making a decision to continue with something and you can see what happens. But things like that happen. That's terrific. But well, let's go to the GLP-1s. I don't think anybody projected that these drugs that were initially looked at for a diabetes would have such a biological effect across so many parameters and have such profound weight loss. I think that wasn't planned for, so that's kind of luck.
But it was designed, right? They had GLP-1 treating type 2 diabetes and lower plasma glucose levels, and that worked. But boy, the effects on the gut were just spectacular. So yeah. But you have to have drugs to really test, molecules to test and to run the clinical trials to justify that. But I would hope to be lucky anytime. I would not shun that at all.
Steve Scala:
So let's just dwell one more moment on the portfolio topic. So a portfolio varied across therapeutic category and modality, of course diversifies risk, but it also adds complexity. So what do you view as the perfect balance between these features, diversity but also complexity? Where do you strike that balance?
John LaMattina:
So a company actually sets the therapeutic areas you going to work in and the emphasis in your therapeutic areas. And after all they get that, right, because they're the ones funding you. But within therapeutic areas, I would look for a balance in terms of precedent and unprecedented. By that I mean if you have a portfolio, if everything's unprecedented, you say, wow, we're doing stuff that nobody else is doing, et cetera. That's true, but there tends to be a lot of failure there. And so you want to also have some precedented work where you say there are drugs to treat certain type. Well, I'll give you a great example that came out of PureTech, a company called Karuna that's [inaudible 00:26:51]. PureTech though in the early days were looking for new drugs to treat schizophrenia and hadn't been a new drug for schizophrenia in 25 years. And people, not everybody is well served by current treatments. And so there's an opportunity there.
And the PureTech scientists came up and said, well, Eli Lilly had a muscarinic program some years ago, and their drug worked pretty well in the clinic for schizophrenics, but unfortunately they had too many associated side effects due to the muscarinic mechanism. So they said, well, why don't we come up with a compound that was a peripheral anti-muscarinic and combine it. It wasn't even come up with, it was one known that was the peripheral anti-muscarinic that was well known and established and combine it with the Lilly compound and see if we can get the beauty of the Lilly compounds benefits without the side effects. So I would argue that was a precedented type of approach, creative, novel in that if you can go up with something totally new, and it worked.
And it worked so well that we spun the compound off into a separate company called Karuna. And the drug was approved, Rx was approved by the FDA last summer, and I believe Bristol Myers bought the company for about $12 billion. So again, not a whole new mechanism. We didn't come up with a whole new mechanism for schizophrenia, like some XYZ that maybe came up through genetic studies. But nevertheless, something that was novel and worked pretty well. So that's the kind of balance you're looking for. You want to have something that has some rooting and potential success, but which is not so totally unprecedented. So you want to have a balance in your portfolio. Do you make it 60/40 one way or another? You can decide, but that's what I always tried to look for.
Steve Scala:
Let's pivot once again and talk about M&A. What's your view of large scale M&A? Is it helpful to an R&D effort or is it a deterrent?
John LaMattina:
Well, so you're talking to somebody who was part of the Warner-Lambert acquisition at Pfizer, who then was part of the Pharmacia-Upjohn acquisition at Pfizer, and who then left Pfizer before the Wyeth acquisition because the big merger acquisitions are somewhat difficult to say the least. I in fact wrote one of the most cited papers I ever wrote was in about 2009 in Nature Medicine, The Impact of Mergers on Pharmaceutical R&D, because the impact on R&D is enormous. It sets the company back in R&D, I'd say about a year. And that's because, okay, now you're merging portfolios and the company is buying Warner-Lambert Parke-Davis, not just for Lipitor, but for all their other portfolio items.
But then you also buy their discovery research efforts. And you have your portfolio and discovery at Pfizer. They had their portfolio. So now you spend time merging the portfolios, what stays and what goes. You do the same thing in your development portfolio. So compounds in phase one, phase two, even phase three, our commercial people might've had different views of their commercial people as to how the compounds should be developed or what type of indications or what kind of patient populations. In the meantime, you're merging research organizations. And so you don't need two of this role or two of that role. So you're cutting back. And this is the awful word of synergies. When a company we're doing mergers or we're going to get more sales, but we're getting synergies. Synergies means that you're cutting out duplication. You don't need two molecular genetics groups. You don't need two drug metabolism groups. It takes about a year to go all this.
And then by the way, Steve, there are winners and losers. So now you're trying to build an organization of trust, when the chances are more Pfizer people in an acquisition will stay than the acquired company. And you may say that's stupid or wrong, but that's just how things work out. So you're the purchaser. You tend to have certain biases along the way. It is difficult. So we did one in 2000, we did another one four years later, and then they proposed to do another one four or five years later.
That's a very difficult thing for an organization to sustain. And so that was one of my greater disappointments. Now you hear about bolt-on stuff and making smaller acquisitions to bring in certain types of expertise. And that I would be more in favor of because there it's more a matter of adding into the company, adding another small part of it. You're not rebuilding HR or whatever. You're taking something, absorbing something into the initial organization, which probably wouldn't amount to much, maybe 5%, 10%. So that I think is from my personal taste, having experienced the worst, I think is a better way to go.
Steve Scala:
Before we leave the topic of M&A, maybe we could touch upon Seagen. So this was a bold strike by Pfizer. It was a big acquisition to bring in an important technology. I realize you're a step removed from Pfizer, of course, but what are your views from afar of the Seagen acquisition?
John LaMattina:
So yeah, I left Pfizer about 15 years ago. So what I know of Seagen is what I read in the trade press and et cetera. As I said earlier, Pfizer's put a big bet on oncology. It's a big part of their portfolio and one that's been very successful, which is great to see. They had a big hole in their portfolio with the Seagen technology, and that is ADC. So Pfizer took some of the, I guess, vaccines money that they made and invested in Seagen. Now, I'm not savvy enough to know that they overpaid, did they underpay? Well, most people are claiming they overpaid. I don't think the benefits of Seagen are going to be seen for a few years until all these molecules wend their way through phase three. It has certainly increased their portfolio and certainly increased the number of opportunities they'll have in treating different types of cancers. But it's a wait and see attitude.
So I'm not one to be critical of people who are pretty smart people who made this bet, and a big bet, and we'll see what happens. But it's so obviously given them a lot of visibility, including with activist shareholders, which I guess is not something you'd like to see.
Steve Scala:
Industry-wide. What do you view as the most promising areas of drug discovery, and are there any pipeline candidates specifically in those areas that have caught your eye?
John LaMattina:
No. I would say I think, well, first of all, the obesity story, the GLP-1s are a story for the next decade. The current compounds are great, but they're not perfect. Having oral versions of these things will be important, and the need is so huge that there's still opportunities out there.
What's interesting has been the rebirth in neurosciences. When I left Pfizer, despite the fact that we had been successful with Geodon and schizophrenia and Zoloft for depression and other areas like fibromyalgia, [inaudible 00:34:47] but neuro-derived. Pfizer made have made the decision to get out of neurosciences because people were well-served at that time, you're talking about 2008, 2010, with existing therapies, all of which were generic and all of which were pretty safe. And what happened was we learned that, like I just talked with schizophrenia, that yes, a lot of people are well-served, but a lot of people aren't that well-served. And by the way, if you come up with something that may be a third line therapy, you can get significant pricing for it. Because in schizophrenia, for example, the outpatient costs are enormous, and the health costs are enormous to people, and the quality of life is awful for not only the patients but their family.
So I think now there's a renaissance in neuroscience because of the fact that you can get this type of pricing for third level, third-tier drugs. That makes it a worthwhile exercise to do. And the clinical trials are doable and probably even better done now than before. And of course, when you talk about the brain, you talk about Alzheimer's, and that's the big one going forward. You have some drugs now that are okay, not great. They don't really cure the disease. They postpone it for a finite period of time. So that whole area of the brain, I think will be hopefully a major area going forward.
Steve Scala:
Maybe we can conclude today's conversation with some questions specifically about Pfizer. Where do you believe Pfizer, R&D and the company overall stands today relative to its competition?
John LaMattina:
Oh boy. Again, I'm not that close enough to say what they're doing or not doing. I think they have a pretty good pipeline of drugs. Unfortunately, the street, and many of your listeners may not agree with that. It's a good organization. Scott said, well, they're about to undergo a change. Mikael Dolsten, who had been the longest-serving head of R&D, I believe, in the industry, which itself is a feat. So that speaks well of Mikael and the job he did. But they're going to now switch leadership, so it'll be interesting to see who they pick and where they go for a new head of R&D.
Look, it's a good organization, really good scientists, Steve. But I can say that for all sorts of places. The organization that saved the world with the vaccines and also with Paxlovid is a pretty good organization. In fact, what people don't appreciate is they worked, particularly the Paxlovid team. Pfizer closed the labs only for two weeks up in Cambridge, Mass. And then what they did was they went back into the shift work and they set up the labs with plastic separators so that people wouldn't expose themselves and worked on that Paxlovid and got that out in unbelievable time. And it's still an important drug for people who are still contracting COVID-19.
But all that work and that focus and the development work also took 18 to two years of time out of them. And I don't think anybody ever gave them credit for that. Yes, they did have good sales, but now it's unfortunately with the cutbacks. So look, all these organizations, Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, GSK, Novartis, they're all great companies. They've got great scientists working, and we're lucky that they exist. They go in cycles. We're in the Lilly, Novo Nordisk cycle now. We were a Pfizer cycle a few years back. We were in a Merck cycle with Keytruda and things. So everything goes in cycles, and fortunately there are more ups and downs.
Steve Scala:
Well, great. Well, that's a great way, I think, to end this conversation. It's been fascinating, John, and very much appreciate your time and your insights, and we look forward to monitoring this fascinating industry as it continues to progress in the future. So thank you once again.
John LaMattina:
Thank you for having me. This has been a lot of fun for me to do.
Speaker 1:
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