Naveen Jain and Reid Rubsamen describe the Immunity Project, a partnership between a for-profit biotech and a nonprofit that aims to develop an HIV vaccine. The vaccine would be nasal, inhalable, and stable at room temperature to reach people in low-resource countries without expensive cold chains.
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So let me give you some information about our structure, because our structure is actually very unique. Immunity Project is actually a partnership between a for-profit biotech and a 501 nonprofit called Until There's a Cure. And this for-profit biotech has all of the patents, all of the technology related to this vaccine platform that we're working on. And this vaccine platform may have other use cases. There may be other viruses that we can target with this vaccine platform. But for HIV in particular, at the end of the day, anyone who invests money— and I'm an angel investor too. I've invested in over 30 companies, so I think about this every day. People who invest in for-profit projects are looking for a financial return. That's just the reality of the situation. The people in general who are living with HIV do not have the money to spend on drugs, and especially very expensive drugs. I'm sure you guys saw all the press about that creepy dude in New York who raised the price of his drug he bought by 5,000% or whatever the egregious amount was. And as I'm sure you guys probably know, in general drug companies raise the prices of their drugs Far and above any rational amount that you would expect them to raise their price. I mean, you're talking about tens or hundreds of percent a year in some cases. So we don't really want to play in that space. I mean, I think what we're saying to you is that is fucking broken. That is wrong. That's not the way that we should play ball. So in my opinion— and look, I'm just one dude on a rock in space, right? That's all I am. But in my humble opinion, I think that's totally fucked up. I think that we should be focused on solutions. I think everyone's health matters. Why does someone's health matter and then someone else's health doesn't matter? I mean, that's crazy too. I think that this should not be something that we're focused on profits and charging someone $1,000 a pill. Can you believe that? $1,000 a pill? A pill someone has to take every single day? I remember I once went to an event. And I don't want to say which event or whose event, but I went to an event. And I got to meet some marketing folks from a couple big drug companies. And it was a really fascinating conversation, because I just sat there like a lump on a log, really quiet, just listening. And what I heard them say just, it made my blood boil. So they were talking about a chemo drug and how this chemo drug, the patients take it for 6 months or 7 months or whatever it is, and then they stop. They stop taking it. And if they could just get the patients to take it for another 10 more days or 20 more days, the company would literally make an extra billion dollars or something like that. Some crazy outsized return if they just— we're able to get people to take it for a little bit longer. And so they were thinking about how to do this from a marketing standpoint. Do we work with the oncologist? Do we try to communicate with the patients, like, hey, take the drug longer? I just started thinking, I'm like, are you even thinking about the side effects of these drugs? There's a reason why people stop taking the damn thing. They take it because at that point, it's not helping them. It's like the risk-reward, equation has stopped working for them. That's the reason why they stopped taking it. And it was dumbfounding to me. It was shocking to me that we were even having this conversation. So I don't want to be a part of that, man. Fuck that. That's crazy. So actually, we forgot to mention 2 really key things about this vaccine. that I think are also really important things. So one, our plan is to make it nasal inhalable. So Reid, in his past life at Aerodyne, invented inhalable insulin. And so he's got a lot of experience in inhalable drug design. I think that's really, really powerful because if you think about distributing a vaccine for HIV throughout, for example, Africa or other sorts of places in the world, If you have to have something that is injected, that requires trained personnel on the ground to make sure that people get the right dose and all these sorts of things. But if it's nasal inhalable, you might be able to solve for a lot of the logistics problems that exist in terms of actually distributing a vaccine like the one we're proposing. Second thing that's really important to know is that our plan is to make it room temperature stable. So why is that important? Well, most vaccines require something called cold chain. So they need to be essentially refrigerated from the point of development or creation in a factory all the way through to final distribution. So you can imagine trying to distribute a vaccine in a place where they likely don't even have electricity, let alone regular consistent refrigeration, and distributing a vaccine in those areas of the world is really challenging. So if you have a vaccine that is nasal inhalable and room temperature stable, you actually have a real shot at solving this problem, which is really our whole point. That's the whole reason we're doing what we're doing. So you're saying that the
