Dave Ricks is the CEO of Eli Lilly. He is responding to claims by tech VCs that AI startups will fully automate drug discovery end-to-end.
Opinion
Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks says biotech venture capital is totally broken
“We can talk about venture and biotech in a second because it's totally broken.”
Opinion
Dave Ricks: Consolidated pharmacy benefit managers make every decision for self-enrichment
“What happened is, you know, the, like any consolidated terminal state of an industry, what's the term, the in-ification of their service, is they just become so, every, every action they make is about their benefit, not the customer.”
Assertion Supported
Eli Lilly CEO: Tirzepatide surpassed Keytruda as best-selling drug ever
“And then terzepatide, which you asked how much money we're making, but in, actually in Q-two, we reported global sales, which surpassed Keytruda to becoming the best-selling drug in the world, actually the best-selling drug in the world of all time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dave Ricks: Poor US insurance coverage drives patients to gray market GLP-1s
“We're not used to it in the United States. Because we, one, have a, for most people, a pretty good system to subsidize some of the benefit via the insurance markets, so there's not a lot of incentive to go outside the system. That's different for these drugs, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dave Ricks: Competitors cannot match our manufacturing scale without Chinese state backing
“And unless some Chinese state-owned enterprise gets in this business, it'll be very hard for others to build that out and follow.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dave Ricks: Chinese entities use AI to reverse-engineer and hack chemical patents
“China's getting very good at patent hacking. So what they do is they look at that chemical structure. They work backwards, sometimes driven by AI. Algorithms define chemical structures that will behave similarly, but are outside the patent scope, and they go f…”