Motley Fool Money - JP Morgan Healthcare Conference Highlights

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Weight loss drugs are taking center spotlight, but other developing treatments could change how we live. Deidre Woollard caught up with Motley Fool biotech analyst Karl Thiel to discuss: - Biogen’s next shot at an Alzheimer’s treatment. - Why companies can’t “muscle their way” into making new molecules. - How NVIDIA could change drug development.  - Moderna’s vaccine strategy Companies discussed: LLY, NVO, GPCR, NVDA, DXCM, NVDA, BIIB, GEHC, MRNA, NVCR, VRTX Host: Deidre Woollard Guest: Karl Thiel Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Tim Sparks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Yeah, right. And this is a meeting where the very biggest companies are completely dwarfed by the size of a trillion-dollar company like invidious striding into the room. It associates biotech with one of the biggest buzzwords of the last year, which is AI. And that's that's exactly what he was there for. I'm Mary Long, and that's Carl Teal, a motley fool biotech analyst. Deidre Willard caught up with Carl to get some takeaways from the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, where healthcare and biotech companies tell investors what they're up to. Deidre and Carl discuss how Vertex Pharmaceuticals could change pain medication,

why winners will probably keep on winning in the weight loss drug space, and a cancer treatment that's frustrating investors. Something that happened last year, the big story of, you know, GLP1 drugs and diabetes care kind of reinvigorated, it seemed to me, the whole space in general. I mean, that's probably overstating things. But you saw these companies like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordics. They had this monster year.

They couldn't get these drugs out fast up. Every time I turn on the TV, somebody is offering a new service trying to get these drugs out. So this seems like an overnight success. But this is like a two-decade story. What is happening in this space? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say that it's a two-decade story because I don't think many people appreciate that.

I mean, the first GLP drug that came out was a drug called Bias. and it was actually created by a company called Amelin and Lily bought them. So Eli Lilly was in it from the very beginning. That was 2005. You know, that's iterations ago. That drug was not nearly as good as what's on the market now. But even Ozempic has been on the market since 2017. And so you see that what's happened in the past year or so, a lot of it's word of mouth.

And it's surprising how important that can be to a drug. You know, even when all the data is there, it's, you know, social media chatter, if you look at it, was basically nil on these drugs until around mid-2021, and then early 2021, and then kind of went asymptotic in mid-2020 as kind of people just started steamrolling on what these drugs could do and how amazing it is. And frankly, that data came out saying that not only did these drugs help you lose weight, but they might actually be cardioprotective, they might actually help with things like heart disease, where in the past a lot of weight, lost drugs have been pulled off the market because they ended up actually doing some damage to the heart.

Yeah, I do remember the whole Fen-Fenn controversy. Right. And then that's just one of them. But yeah, absolutely. And so tell us a little bit more about what else is happening because it's not just these two companies anymore, right? It's not just these two companies. In fact, it's, and from an investor viewpoint, it can be a little frustrating because there's so many people now chasing after this that it can be really hard to tell who the winners are going to be. You know, GLP1 as a target is not something that any one company can own. They can own the specific chemicals that interact with that target, but they can't own the target.

So lots of people are going after it. And, you know, you've seen some interesting deals in the space. I mean, there's a company structure therapeutics that went public despite, you know, there being an almost complete freeze on IPOs because of interest. in their drug in the space. You saw a big acquisition for another company called Carment around that. But, you know, if I had to look out there and say who's got some of the most interesting stuff going, you're going to have to look to, I think, some of the bigger players, right?

Because if there's one thing we saw, it's that if you're successful in this, even a big company like Lilly or Novo Nordus can't keep up with demand. And so they've already put a huge amount of investment into the manufacturing that can be used for these drugs and potentially for successor drugs. So, you know, I would say that the incumbents are doing a lot to kind of keep themselves in the lead, even though there are other companies that are likely to come along and likely to be other successes and more dealmaking. And I mean, honestly, that's what that's what we want in the end, right?

You're looking for incremental improvements in the drugs. You're looking for enough competition, hopefully to push prices down. So that would be a good thing. But if there's one company that I think is kind of interesting in this area, it is people are talking about Amgen a fair bit because they have a drug called, well, people are calling it Meritide because the full name is a little cumbersome to pronounce. But it is a dual mechanism of action drug. So it's a GLP drug, but it also has another gastric inhibitory mechanism of action. And so, you know, they're trying to address. And I think this is going to be a real discussion over the next few years, which is that, oh, these drugs, they're great.

They take a lot of weight off. But now what? Do you stay on them forever? I mean, all indications are as soon as you go off them, the benefits of them are gone. Is it okay to stay on them for a decade, for two decades? I mean, that's not really been studied very much, nor has it been studied if there's ways to wean you off them. And there's a lot of questions. And, you know, people are also concerned about things that are, you know, along the lines of if you lose this much body weight, a lot of it's going to be muscle, not just fat.

You know, there's a lot of issues. And I think one thing that Amgen is really hoping they have is a differentiated drug in that they're hoping, you know, for one thing that it can be dosed out less frequently, which would be a modest, convenient thing. But they also are hoping that it will have kind of a longer maintenance period of effectiveness, possibly even after you stop using it. And that's very much still to be determined. But they're investing big in the area and there should be data later this year. So that's going to be an exciting thing, I think, to watch out for. Well, and I saw that InVIDIA's CEO came to the conference and they have a relationship with Amgen.

I think anywhere that Jensen Huang goes, interest tends to follow. Yeah, right. And this is a meeting where the very biggest companies are completely dwarfed by the size of a trillion-dollar company like Nvidia striding into the room. It associates biotech with one of the biggest buzzwords of the last year, which is AI. And that's exactly what he was there for. Amgen was one of the sort of early adopters of Nvidia's Biognimo platform, which is basically it's a set of APEA. APIs and other tools for kind of plugging into their supercomputing to do biological generative AI. But what they announced at the meeting was a much broader partnership.

And it's built on Amgen's decode arm. And that's a whole story in and of itself that I probably shouldn't go into. But it's fascinating. Decode genetics was once an independent company. It's an Icelandic company that existed for reasons just unique to what Iceland is all about and Amgen ended up buying them. And they have all of this unique data. They've since expanded well beyond the Icelandic population so that they have deep, deep data on millions of people. And so that is something that Amgen can plug into this generative AI platform and see

where it goes. And, you know, I mean, this is this is very early, but it's just interesting to see that Amgen is, I think, in a way, taking it more seriously or at least publicly more seriously than a lot of other companies. You know, it's a space where you can't just, you can't just muscle your way into kind of calculating the perfect molecule, the sort of physical space. There's too many possibilities. Even the biggest supercomputers would take millions of years to sort of calculate all the possibilities that you could have for molecules to do binding.

But with generative AI, it's possible that there's a lot of things you could really speed up. And, you know, it remains to be seen. but it's really interesting to watch Jensen Huang get up on stage and talk about this partnership with Amgen and where it could go. Yeah, wow. Yeah, we're definitely going to have to keep track of that one. Going back to the GLP1 drugs, you know, when they first came out, everyone said, well, this is going to be terrible for the continuous glucose monitors.

Nobody's going to need those anymore. It's all going to be solved. And that isn't the case. I was listening to the Dexcom presentation. And, you know, it's interesting because they talk about the situation. of course, more than one in four health care dollars spent on diabetes. But they were also, they introduced this stelo, which is for people that aren't on insulin. And it's this for type two diabetes. And they actually talked about working with the GLP1 drug therapy. So this is really

interesting. Is this going to be a platform sort of beyond just type one diabetes management now? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you know, first it's important to point out that the Dexcom serves, you know, traditionally serve people with type 1 diabetes where you're dependent on insulin. And that is not related to weight loss in any way. That does not impact the course of that disease. So that business is unfortunately, I guess, safe for them. But they also have a big business in helping people who do have type 2 diabetes. And you could theorize that that will be impacted by some of these GLP1 drugs. Yeah, the stello platform is really interesting. It's just announced it to the ideas that you can be not on insulin. So you're not really using it as a paired insulin pump. What you're really doing is you're monitoring your blood sugar to figure out how to do things, how to eat in ways that are going to work better. So that's something you could use in conjunction with a GLP1 rug. It's something that could possibly use to maybe help people wean off these in a more effective way down the line. So it's really smart planning on their part. You know, it's too early to say,

the product itself goes. It's a little bit aimed at the idea that I forget the wording that they used, but I mean, they sort of implied that this might be something that you could even get without a prescription, that it's kind of consumer aimed and meant to be relatively affordable. So, you know, the kind of health gadget space that has taken off in many ways, you know, they could kind of tap into some of that. I wanted to also touch on Alzheimer's disease drugs, because that was another big thing that they talked about, a lot of the conference. And in some of the presentations they talked about the difference between in the past, you know, the drugs were just to sort of treat the symptoms. And now they're getting deeper into catching it faster and maybe

slowing the progression. So it seems like there's a shift in the way that we consider Alzheimer's disease treatment in general now. Yeah. So this is biogen's second Alzheimer's drug. Their first one was called Adjahelm. It did get approval. It was very controversial. And they pulled it off the market because basically nobody would pay for it. You know, the impact of the drug was weak enough and the price high enough that essentially nobody was willing to reimburse for it. But Lekembe, the newer drug, has, you know, I think a stronger case to make. And in fact, they're saying that they're, you know, insurance reimbursement is not an issue for them. They've got a full approval that that opens them up to Medicare reimbursement, which is obviously critical for a sort of age-related disease like this or age

correlated disease like this. And I think what's interesting is that the amyloid hypothesis, the idea that by reducing amyloid plaque, you're going to change the course of Alzheimer's, it makes a lot of sense on a surface level, but the idea was all but hanging by a thread a couple of years ago because drug after drug showed that it could reduce amyloid plaque and it was not impacting the course of disease. And so people were kind of giving up on this idea. And that, you know, Aegehelm changed that a little bit. Now I think Lecombe and Lily's Donanamab that's in progress, I think has gotten this back. But part of it is the idea of that, yes, it can have an impact on disease, but, you know, it might be important. The earlier you can intervene might become more and more critical.

And so that's certainly an area that they're looking at with this. Yeah. And I think that's interesting because GE healthcare, which is, of course, a spinoff from General Electric, they have this new way of imaging the Alzheimer's brain to try to detect those amyloid plaques, you know, because it does seem like it's all about getting in, getting in as soon as possible. And I know on the Lilly presentation, they also talked about that the Donimabab probably murdered that pronunciation, but that if people take it earlier, sometimes they can reduce the potential of getting it. So it seems like there's all these different ways that companies are coming at this right now. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, there's actually a couple of, there's some late stage clinical work being done on the basis.

of using these essentially as preventative drugs. Now, the way they're enrolling the trials is that you have to have, you know, no measurable cognition decline. So you're asymptomatic, but you do have amyloid plaque. And so why would you know that you had amyloid plaque if you're not having any symptoms? Well, it's because you're considered to be a very, very high risk patient for reasons of genetics or family. And so those are going to be really interesting studies.

I mean, that could make a huge, huge difference if you find that these do change the course of illness. Now, by definition, kind of have to be fairly long-term studies in order to be able to see that. So, you know, we're talking about results in like 2027, I think biogen or really ESI, which is the kind of senior partner with Lekembe. I think they're talking 2026. They're hoping to submit. but, you know, still a ways off before we see much about that. Yeah. Well, there were so many companies that presented at the conference.

I think I've listened to maybe 10 presentations. So just for anybody listening, if you are invested in any biotech company, go look on their investor page see if they presented because they may have it. It's really interesting. But there's a few that I wanted to talk about with you that I know a lot of people are curious about what's happening. And one of them is Moderna. You know, I did this interview with Bethany McLean who wrote Big Fail, and she was talking about Moderna, kind of going from a teenager to an adult as a company during the pandemic. And so you've got a company that's in an interesting spot.

Vaccine revenue declining. It's got the RSV vaccine that it's bringing out. But then it's also trying to build this pathway with maybe a combination vaccine and more vaccines in the future. So how are you thinking about Moderna now? You know, I think they're really interesting. I also thought it was interesting that Stefan Bancel was not actually at the meeting. It was one of their senior executives that was there. I don't know what the story is there.

But, you know, they've really, so there's a couple of companies I think about in this space. Obviously, the other, you know, when you think about the two vaccines for COVID, there was Moderna and there was Pfizer. But Pfizer's technology really came from a company called BionTech, or, you know, or Beyond Tech, I guess is how they pronounce it. And I think those two companies are really interesting. They both have a lot of core IP in this MRNA space. And they're taking kind of two different paths. Moderna is really doubling down on the vaccine business.

And so that's a little tough because right now everybody's kind of waiting to find the bottom in COVID vaccine sales. You know, that, I mean, they came in with, I think, 6.1 billion in actual vaccine sales in 2023, not counting some deferred payments, which is, I mean, that's a great business going forward, you know, if they can maintain that. They're only guiding for $4 billion this year, and then they expect it to start growing again in 2025. Well, with that kind of base, you can fund a whole lot of research. And they have a very, very rich pipeline. Their RSV drug, I think is interesting. I also think it's a little, it's a little bit tough because they're going to be

third to the market with an RSV vaccine. There are RID two that got approved this past May, one from Pfizer, one from GSK. Neither of those are MRNA vaccines, so theirs is different, but I haven't, it looks similarly effective. Like it doesn't, like there's not an immediate advantage that you would see. Now, I may be not fully informed on that, but I'm not, you know, I think it's going to be a little bit of heavy lifting for them coming into the market. Obviously, they're working on flu vaccines, which would really make sense if you can get that in a combination with a COVID shot. That would certainly help them break into the flu market, which is a, you know, that's a sizable market that's kind of led by Cinoffi right now. So, yeah, I think it's, I think they're in a good position.

I think I would really love to see them have some successes in kind of the cancer space in some areas outside of traditional yearly vaccines as well. that would, I think, just get people more excited about the platform. And that's a little bit more where Beyond Tech has focused. Yeah, and I think for Moderna, that's probably a way off. You mentioned cancer, which is a good segue to talk about Novacure. This one is interesting because it's had such a journey in the market. You know, one of our biotech analysts was talking about it the other day. And he kind of started with this huge sigh because, I mean, the technology is interesting.

So it uses these tumor treating fields to treat cancer. But, you know, it's really disappointed investors. Some of the initial trials weren't as promising as, as, you know, people are hoping. So what happened and what should we be thinking about this business now? Yeah, I just resisted sighing myself. You know, I mean, I'm a shareholder in Novacure. I think, I believe in the technology. I think it's, I think it's pretty amazing.

And they are, they are for better or worse, they are. going it alone. Like, nobody else is really in this area. I mean, they have kind of all the IP around the space. And as far as I know, nobody else is really even trying to do this. So, yeah, the idea is that you put a tumor within an electric field, basically stop the cells from dividing successfully. It messes up the way they align when they divide and they basically just kind of split and die. And this is amply shown to work, right, in glioblastoma, which is the most common form of brain cancer. I mean, it absolutely, even if the challenge with this is that to work,

you should really wear the device 24-7, you know, all the time. That's when you really, that's people who do that or come very close to that have a really, really, really huge survival advantage over people who don't. But even if you wear it half the time, you do get some survival advantage of doing this. And so the idea has been they can tune the frequency to any type of, of cancer cell. So it should work broadly. And what happened is they kind of got, they had two different things happened in 2023, which are sort of unrelated. One was that they had the results of their lung cancer study. And this was really, really awaited because it's so much of a

bigger market than brain cancer. And the study was successful. It did show that it worked. But when you looked at how the study was conducted, basically standards of care had changed while the study was ongoing. And so they kind of answered a question that nobody was asking anymore. And so even though I think their plan is they've already submitted for approval of the device in lung cancer, they plan to launch it late this year. And they have a whole campaign. They think that they can get buy-in for it. I think everybody is thinking it's going to be a real uphill climb to get people to prescribe

it because it doesn't, they don't have the data to show that it helps in exactly the way that lung cancer is treated now. they are doing that study to have a more of an apples to apples case to make, but that study is not going to be done for several years. So that was kind of that that was the first one. But, you know, it was still no knock on the technology, which seemed to, you know, still to work really, really well. Then the second thing happened was their ovarian cancer trial. And that one just straight up failed. It's hard to know why.

I mean, they do have to tune this to the frequency of each kind of tumor cell type. And for whatever reason, it didn't seem to work there. So that gets people really nervous about, you know, what's coming next. And there are a number of key events this year. Well, it's, you know, they have, they have enough cash. They've got runway. But I think is it that investors are wondering if the business is smaller than anticipated if it maybe doesn't work for all cancers. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, well, part of it is that the glioblastoma business, you know, it produces about $500 million in year in revenue. So it's a fine business. And it's something that if they wanted that to be their only business, they could make that profitable. It's just that that has not grown. I mean, that has just kind of flatlined, right? They're not showing much success in getting beyond sort of 40% market penetration.

And there's really no reason for that. I mean, there's a convenience aspect with the treatment, but they really should be able to get more people on that therapy. And so there's a question about why can't they do that? And now with lung, if that's not going to really be able to hit in the market and ovarian failed, all of a sudden you start looking at this as a, a much less interesting company. So they just, they need a win, right? I mean, the stock is just, it's languishing and I think it's going to continue to languish until they have some kind of win.

This quarter, late this quarter, they're going to have the top line results of their meta study, which is looking at brain metastases from lung cancer. So we'll see how they do there. Let's talk about another V company. Let's talk about vertex, because this is what I know a lot of people are watching. So it's got that core business of cystic fibrosis. And now it's, also sickle cell, sickle cell disease. But the thing that I found interesting is where they might be going. Because they talked about two huge opportunities, neuropathic pain, a non-opioid solution for neuropathic pain,

and type 1 diabetes. So thinking about where this company is now and where it might be going. Is it as big as they say it could be? Yeah, you know, I had, to me, this was always like that this, everybody obviously focuses on the cystic fibrosis business, which has driven this company to, you know, I mean, it's fantastic. Few companies dominate one disease area as much as Vertex does in cystic fibrosis. I mean, they've been incredible about developing therapies that address more and more of the various sort of genetic versions of this disease you can have. And it's been, you know, great for patients as well as shareholders, I think.

And then, you know, then a lot of attention was put on their efforts in gene editing and sickle cell disease. And I always saw this pain drug is this like kind of lottery ticket sitting there. You know, whenever you have studies in this kind of area, it always makes me nervous because it kind of comes down to how people feel. Right. So you, it's like a lot of studies of antidepressants. You put people on a placebo and oftentimes they'll feel better, you know. And so what you'll often find is that, like, yeah, the drug seemed to work on an absolute basis. They felt better after they took it than they did before they did, but so does the placebo group.

And I always, and pain isn't quite like that, but, but, you know, there's a similar element to it. So I was always worried. But as more data comes along, I'm starting to actually feel much more hopeful about this drug. They had some, you know, their initial phase two work was in basically pain relief after like a bunion removal or a tummy tuck, things like that. So acute use, you know, you're going to use it for a little while while you recover. But the data that they came out within December was looking at peripheral nerve pain from associated with diabetes. So this is a chronic use drug, right? And obviously a chronic use market is going to be a bigger deal for them.

And it looked like it performed, it wasn't a head-to-head study. So, I mean, you can't really say anything definitive, but it seemed to perform actually somewhat better than the drug Lyrica, which is widely used in this. market. And beyond that, Lyrica, the whole appeal of this drug is that by its very mechanism of action, it should really have zero addictive properties. And Lyrica is not a terribly addictive drug either, but it is a scheduled drug. I mean, it's a Schedule 5 controlled substance. And more than that, it's associated with weight gain and some dizziness. And there's certain people who just don't seem to respond to it. So, I mean, this could be, you know, it's not going to take on the the biggest heavyweight pain, but it could be a really, really significant drug for them.

So it's very exciting. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about. And The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.