Alzheimer's is the only top disease with rising death rates and no cure, despite $7 billion in pharma failures. Genome sequencing costs have plummeted from over $100 million to under $1,000, enabling a new approach: collecting live brain tissue from Parkinson's patients during surgery, sequencing it, and building disease models that could finally crack neurodegenerative drug discovery.
Chapters
I talked about some of the challenges with drug discovery.
In no other disease is it as.
Severe as in neurodegeneration. Alzheimer's disease currently.
Is the only disease.
That has actual growing death rates.
And it's the only disease of top.
Diseases in which there's no drug that.
Can slow, prevent, or cure. These diseases, as we all get older.
Will be increasingly affected by these diseases.
So why can't we figure it out?
It's because these diseases are incredibly complex.
And the traditional drug discovery method isn't sufficient to tackle them.
In fact, in the last year, there have been $7 billion Alzheimer's failures from big pharma. And in fact, last year, Pfizer announced.
That it was shuttering its entire neuroscience.
Division, laying off over 300 employees.
But what is less written about is.
The scientific and technological renaissance that's actually.
Happening in neuroscience right now. I think it's super interesting because any.
Time you have a big incumbent that is turning away from a huge untapped market, combined with a convergence of technological.
Advances, you create this Moneyball opportunity for.
Smaller companies to really come along and transform the entire landscape.
Now, I'll talk about a couple of these advances.
The first, of course, is genomics.
So in 2000, some of you might.
Have seen this figure.
In the 2000s, it cost over $100 million to sequence a single genome. Today, it costs less than $1,000.
And in fact, this has dropped so.
Quickly that it's even surpassed what's predicted by Moore's law of computing costs.
And so, just like the decline in.
Computing costs has fundamentally changed the way we interact with the physical world, I.
Think that this increase in genomic data will change the way we think about disease.
Now, I'm going to talk about three additional technologies that we use at Verge.
To get a leg up on drug discovery. The first is that we are one.
Of the first to actually be able.
To collect brain samples and sequence them.
From live patients with Parkinson's disease.
This is deep brain stimulation.
It's an advanced in surgery that allows.
Us to implant a device into a.
Patient'S brain and turn it on to.
Prevent Parkinson's patients from having tremors.
But there's also a second unexpected advantage.
Here, which is that we can actually.
Access patient tissue from a patient while he or she is still living and.
Sequence it to be the first to.
Get an unprecedented glimpse into earlier disease progression. We've also started single cell sequencing, which is a technology I think will revolutionize genomics in the next five years.
