A biotech investor turned a $2 million bet into a $1.5 billion company by licensing a failed hypertension drug from Bristol-Myers Squibb and repurposing it for a rare kidney disease. The drug, now called Vilspari, won FDA approval and could treat ten other diseases. He found the opportunity by searching PubMed.
We went to this company with $2 million and turned it into over a billion. This company that had the license from Bristol, we got them the $2 million. Instead of hypertension, we showed this rare kidney disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis. And if you just go on PubMed and you have the willpower, you can learn a lot about medicine and you can become a billionaire. This drug was an endothelin receptor antagonist. It inhibits a protein called endothelin and its function. There's actually probably 10 diseases that this drug could be beneficial for. I made a list of those and I said, okay, well, which one of these is going to work for sure? Now, the problem was nobody on Wall Street really liked it. I slowly kind of cobble together some money. We decided go public. We raised some money. We started doing clinical trials. The trial worked and the rest is history. The value of the company is, is $1.5 billion. The value of that drug specifically is probably around $1 billion. In this example, you didn't get the drug to the point where people were buying it or using it. It hadn't been FDA approved. It was a long marathon of running studies. And then as the data came in, now it's FDA approved. It's called Vilspari.
