 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. So we're doing a special series of podcasts which I'm recording over Google Hangouts so we're doing audio and video because for some unknown reason people don't want to come see me face to face right now. But there's always opportunity and the cool thing is I'm able to now podcast with people from all over the world so we're going to get an amazing eclectic mix of people from different industries, different perspectives to share their story and tell us you know their thoughts and feelings on what's going on right now and all of that cool stuff. Hope you enjoy it. Please subscribe in all the usual places and enjoy. Cool, I'm alive. Thanks for joining me on the podcast and today it's great to be joined by Tim Zoo who's an investment associate at ARIX Bioscience. Tim, how are you doing? I'm doing well, hope you're keeping well as well. Very good, very good. Whereabouts are you? I'm spending some time in Boston right now. It's not quite yet the center but we're riding the wave up still. Awesome, awesome. Well look, I'm super keen to speak about COVID-19, how close we are to cure vaccines, testing, like all of that good stuff. But maybe just to start with, I mean what's the state of play? Certainly where you are. Yeah, I'm in Boston, you know, not quite New York status. I was in New York so I am actually based out of New York normally and they're long lines for supermarkets. They really crack down, the streets are empty for good reason. Here in Boston a little bit more relaxed people are running along the trails but still quite somber. When did you leave New York? About a month ago, yeah, before this all got really heated. Fine, and so what's Boston's like home for you? So I do have friends and family here, sorry, I'm spending some time here. Crazy, crazy. Is it going to get, I've got a lot of friends talking about that someone's just around the corner and everyone says that the virus might calm down and heat, is that true? Well there's a lot of papers out there trying to do that exact analysis and I think most are concluding no. They're doing analyses where they look at the temperature, look at the humidity, look at where the virus is spread and you know places like Singapore actually haven't had a lot of cases so that was kind of the impetus to do that type of analysis but in general people are concluding no, we can't contain the virus with weather alone. Dan, I'll get back to all the WhatsApp groups with, no that's not true. How does it actually work at COVID-19? So it's a virus, it's very much like the cold virus which is also a coronavirus except this one is quite a lot more dangerous. It has between a three and five percent mortality rate which is much higher than what we see with common cold. The other thing about it is that it's very very contagious as everyone knows now, a lot of people are asymptomatic. Nowadays when you go and hear about people doing serology testing, basically checking who has antibodies, we've started doing that here, figuring out who has had the virus before and you go on the street and 30-40 percent of the people here in Boston, they did a little street canvas, actually have had the virus before in some of these studies, yeah. Crazy, but it exhibited no symptoms. No symptoms for the most part, yeah. Why? We don't know yet. I think young people seem to be fighting off the infection, sometimes they don't even know that they had it, but certainly elderly people and those with any kind of comorbidity, so heart disease, diabetes, anything like that, they're at a much higher risk and that's what we know so far but really the biology there is not fully understood. Okay, so you're finding then most of the people who make it to ICU, let's say, are older and have got these underlying conditions, so obesity, diabetes, etc. Yeah, and I have a friend here who practices at Mass General, one of the big hospitals here, and she's pointing it out to me as well that definitely there's a social economic disparity that we're seeing as well because folks who can't afford to stay at home with their jobs are the ones going out and getting infected, so certainly that's a big factor here. I heard that I'm going to get this wrong, but like 170th Street or something in New York is an area of a lot of Latinos and population and a lot of them have to travel into the city and so apparently correct me if I'm wrong that that station was so busy and has been so busy. Yeah, yeah, I was just driving out there in the Bronx and it was pretty scary during all of this. Yeah, it's true, I mean I drove into, I'm quite near the city of London, I'm about like two miles away so I drove in, I needed to grab something from my office and it's interesting, the only people that are around are lower paid workers who are really keeping everything together like postmen delivering posts, security guards, cleaners, you know the kind of unsung heroes if you like, why everyone else is hiding at home avoiding infection, these people are out and so real credit to them I think. Right, why is COVID so frighteningly successful, why is it so good at spreading? You know if I have the answers to that I think we have a vaccine right now, I think we don't fully know why it's so successful but you know one of the main things and why it's different from SARS for instance or the Mediterranean respiratory syndrome or MERS which are both coronaviruses as well is that so many patients are asymptomatic and by the time you know you figure out that you have an outbreak already 20% of the population has already had it and spread it, so that's really been the problem. And how does actually work if we go into the science a little bit? Yeah, so what it does as everyone knows it causes pneumonia and so what it does is the virus like a lot of other viruses basically infects the cell it enters the cell it replicates itself so it has RNA most people know about DNA but it's a single-stranded DNA in a sense an RNA and once it gets into the cell it has its own enzymes that will help to basically replicate that RNA signature and create proteins create more viruses and also just hijacks the cell so in these cases it would be cells in the lungs cells in the nose hence you know a lot of people actually lose their sense of smell that's one of the early signs that we're finding out so once it replicates it the little virus particles bud from the human cells and the human cells basically die and then there's a major inflammatory response so that the human immune system reacts to all of this and tries to contain it and we think that actually has a major sort of bearing on why this disease is still deadly especially in that elderly population so a lot of these drugs that we're looking at actually are meant to protect the lung or tamp down on the inflammatory response okay and you mentioned you mentioned smell is a symptom so what are the others so it's it's a cough high temperature and smell are they the kind of the three main yeah some of the less specific ones headache you know people don't really get runny noses or anything like that it's very much based in the lung dry cough is usually the first symptom a lot less fever as you pointed out yeah yeah fine is it true also that you can get bigger doses if you're if you've been surrounded by more people with the virus so like hospital workers for example if they're exposed to loads of people do they get it can you get it more aggressively or yeah I think that's the thinking a lot of the doctors in Wuhan were very very young and this is why people were very scared at the beginning some of them were in their 20s and the thinking is that because they were around so many patients with virus that they over time that load did contribute to their illness I think on a scientific level that also makes sense we know that a lot of these viruses can mutate over time we know that there's a lot of different strains and there's actually studies now to identify the different strains and you can actually tell a European strain from a US strain and the idea there is that yes yes wow hearing that just in the last few days and the idea there is that if multiple strains get together in a human actually there's a possibility that they could exchange you know information in a way and become more deadly as a team so I think that's scientifically why that could be happening so how how come say to complete um so if it originated in Wuhan let's say which is the the overriding view right started in Wuhan and then it left Wuhan how come it's it's it's been what like um it was the end of last year or beginning of this year it started to the travel the world it's amazing quickly you can tell whether it's a European strain versus an American strain I guess versus an Asian strain right yeah yeah yeah I was a friend of mine was telling me they were doing some testing in New York and the conclusion was actually a lot of the virus came from Europe not from Asia all right yeah yeah yeah wow just someone came okay so it came to Europe first and then hopped over it's quite interesting because because New York has got a big Asian population right like when I walked around feels like more than more than Europe does um yeah very interesting yeah crazy um interesting and so you mentioned the immune system so so you're saying that really our immune system isn't hasn't been effective at combatting the virus and in fact it's it's helped to make it a bit more effective or yeah so um you know people are uh in the ICU and and there's studies coming out now where they're measuring the levels of interleukin six which is one of the chemicals that the immune system releases when it's in danger and actually they're finding that there's a little correlation between those kinds of immune markers and how sick the patients eventually become and it turns out there's one of the drugs um at Tosilizumab which is being made by Roche is already used in um rheumatoid arthritis for instance they're looking to reposition it so that potentially can work in these patients who have high IL-6 levels so there's a lot of that kind of science going on trying to figure out that inflammatory response and in many ways uh in diotech and in medicine this is a bit of a holy grail right if we could really figure out inflammation we would cure a lot of disease but in this case the biotech is able to call in some of these drugs and see if they work in these um in these times amazing let's dive into that in a sec yeah one question I really wanted to ask so so if we've kind of understood now that the immune system hasn't been effective at fighting it um but then we see in hospital mostly people who make it to ICU have underlying health conditions diabetes obesity etc so I always felt that you know like a really good healthy lifestyle improves your immune system and helps you fight off these things you know healthy diet good exercise good sleep and so forth is that not really so effective at combating this particular virus or do you think people who are pretty you know who are healthy eating well good exercise not a beast like you know fit people are better at combating it yeah I mean a lot of these health conditions like heart disease or diabetes you may not think that they really affect the immune system but in the background these conditions all weaken the immune system you know I did a lot of um medical sort of claims research so working with actual large population data uh during medical school and we have this index uh you know some may know as the trial synchrony index where you basically get one point for every one of these conditions and you do these analyses and you look at which patients have complications after surgery for instance and it's really correlated with how many of these conditions people have so all of these things um are additive on the immune system interesting so you can't help get the virus that that happens but in terms of effectively beating the virus healthy healthy lifestyle good exercise nicely like healthy lifestyle will definitely help you it can set you up but it's not uh everything that you need so you still see a few young people get the virus which is very unfortunate yeah can you get it again once you've had it I hear you know that's one of the big questions right and uh you know for instance you may read in the news that in South Korea they're doing some retesting um and they're finding that you know they're making these claims that you know 15 percent of people got the virus again you never know if it was because they had a false positive on their first test you know a lot of this test is actually done with uh PCR so they're looking for uh DNA um that uh polymerase chain reaction so they're actually replicating the DNA and looking for virus right DNA right um so this kind of stuff tends to linger around you're not just finding the virus itself but you're finding bits and chunks of DNA uh that are that are still around so you know until we have um you know serological test which is a test that looks for antibodies against the virus that's very conclusive for whether you've had the virus before until we have that and you can track over time that these patients are getting the virus I wouldn't say again I wouldn't say that um you know this virus is you can re-contract which is which would be very problematic for our health system yeah fine so we're not quite sure it's probably you probably can't contract it again but we're not quite sure yet we're not quite sure yeah we hope not that would be very for vaccines for treatments that that would all be very very difficult to deal with yeah yeah let's cover the test now actually yeah quite useful so I know there's a few right like three or say different ones can you run through the different types of tests yeah so there's the so the PCR test I was mentioning it's probably very very sensitive but you know the test results may remain positive over time there was someone who tweeted from Boston that they tested positive like 37 days later uh they were still positive by that test so 37 days later after their first positive they were still positive yeah so that goes to show right that that's not the best test um there's also an ELISA test which looks for proteins it's trying to identify proteins that are specific to um to the virus that's a little bit better um and then finally there's a serological test which is looking for antibodies so the antibodies that your immune system is making against the virus and that's probably the best way to know for certain if someone has been exposed but unfortunately that test you can't know when that happened because for the most part once you start making antibody you're going to make the antibody for a long time at least that's what we hope so those are kind of the main tests and they all have their pros and cons right so so with the antibody test um so if I've had the virus I'm I've recovered I'll still have the antibodies in my system and would test positive on that test presumably yes um and that's I think very critical to reopening the economy and you can imagine that if a bunch of people have been who have been sitting at home who may have been exposed we don't know so if everyone could get that test then you could know who's safe to go out assuming no one can get reinfected and assuming that you know they're reasonably healthy those are the types of people um who we think can probably go out and restart their jobs because they're probably immune to the virus okay how accurate is it I I've heard reports that it's not great yet you can imagine that um you know the antibodies to these viruses uh there may be numerous and we need to figure out which ones are best so there are multiple types of specific antibodies that are targeting the virus right we need to figure out which one is most specific to someone definitely having overcome the virus uh and that test will probably improve over time from what I hear right now it's not at an accuracy level where we can be too certain what's a good accuracy level that's like that can be relied upon I think over 90 95 percent we're getting there um but obviously you know the older you are the more risk you're gonna be at um so a false negative would be far more harmful and someone over 40 for instance and you probably want to be a little more certain than that before having them go out yeah so these so these are available currently but not reliable enough yet to say okay cool you've had it you could go back to work or you could wear a t-shirt saying I've had the virus or whatever yeah um I think it will still take some time and and those are also the tests where we want to be able to make millions and millions and make them there of tests and make them quite reproducible um so we're definitely not there yet um on that type of test in particular when when when do you think um we're gonna get there and and that more will be ready available I think this type of test is very feasible we have this type of test for so many different diseases um including viral diseases so I think it's a matter of time um and you know a lot of the big companies that are making these tests like rush you know are very very uh strong have a very strong history of being able to manufacture large numbers of those types of tests um so reliably that's that's also the other important part um so I think we should be able to get there in a matter of months uh short months okay yeah okay great so once that happens it feels like the economy can start to to open up a little bit right yeah and I think even without that you're seeing that in some countries they're starting to talk about you know people under 20 or people under 30 people under 40 who are definitely are at lower risk even without the test I think you can start considering reopening the economy but I think you have to be really really careful because that you know I would say in China for instance you know I grew up there for a few years of my life there's definitely just the culture of wearing masks you know during SARS you saw that happen but it never happened in the western world until now um and I think it's just a cultural thing in a way that yeah I also heard do you right uh I also heard in in in Asia that people spit more on the street whereas in Europe America we blow our mazes tissues did that spread disease a bit more as well for us in disease I think in theory it does um people spit on the street uh but people are also wearing masks so that that's the way to go if I had to get on the no so on the on the masks um I read something I read some problem is like problem is reading things half the time you've got no idea what's accurate or not but does the masks stop you getting the virus or really stop you spreading the virus so there have been actual science experiments where they measure how far the particles go and they uh so so that the science is that the biggest particles as you can imagine are the most dangerous because they're going to land on someone they're going to stay the virus is going to be able to stay hydrated in this particle for a longer period of time but the smaller particles are the ones that travel farther and the masks actually uh sort of stop less of that right because they're smaller so it is a bit of a trade-off but I think the consensus is that if you can at least stop a lot of the big particles which the masks even a homemade mask would would help with I mean may not be 100% but it definitely could help there that you're going to stop a lot of the transmission of the disease oh okay so you suggest like we should get on the masks because finally got on it cvc said everyone should be wearing some kind of cloth covering them they go out here though in london it's not the case it's not we've not been the case that the fire unless I missed it I mean the government haven't been saying here you've got to wear a mask because I know in other places you've got to wear a mask to go out here it's not been the case and maybe it should be um you know I think maybe also after this you'll see you'll certainly see more people keeping their distance long after this is it's been very interesting to see how society starts to change after this what do you think what do you think of the um the bluetooth um apps track that they're the tracking apps I know they're using it in Singapore I think I spoke to a friend of mine what do you think about that I think it's also a cultural thing I think in Asia you know not to be political but in China people are used to being tracked in that way um and you know I just think our culture in the west may not be willing to to uh to give up that kind of information but you know you see these um I don't know if you saw that uh sort of anonymized uh tracking system where they looked at they zoomed in on this beach in Florida and then they tracked all the phones across the country that was scary right that is that is it's crazy it's a fine line I mean if the if the data's anonymized and this is the kind of line that you know people don't trust I guess I mean I mean certainly it's going to would be proved to be very useful certainly to warn people to keep them indoors and those kind of things I'm uh I'd be surprised if we see it in there in the US and the UK we do have an app in the UK I'm not sure how how widely it's been downloaded and adopted but we're also quite cautious on the security thing here yeah that it's interesting moving on to biotech and big pharma so I'm interested to hear like what their response has been um in terms of of the drugs available to treat COVID patients yeah there's been a a really big response um and and I think as I write about in this blog you really see how much pharma and biotech have learned in the last you know century and they're bringing it all to fight the virus um so I write about you know antivirals the classic drugs like tamaflu um but you know ideally more tailored to the virus that you know could prevent the actual replication of the virus um all of those steps I mentioned are being targeted you see drugs that um they're bringing in from uh you know other diseases like pulmonary fibrosis right so they're bringing those drugs in with the hope that you know part of the mechanism of those diseases overlaps with that lung injury that we just spoke about uh so and then the all the inflammatory anti-inflammatory drugs you see like the IL-6 drug I mentioned yeah that's a drug that's gaining a lot of momentum and a lot of different indications all autoimmune conditions what is that drug exactly so it's tosylismab IL-6 so it's used in rheumatoid arthritis it's used actually for CAR-T so if you're aware of CAR-T it's used to kind of prevent the CAR-T which is basically infusing T cells to kill cancer T cells are immune cells that are you know bring on the immune response but it also harms some of the normal tissue and causes you know toxicity to the brain and also releases a bunch of chemicals that make the body feel like it's um sort of in danger so this IL-6 drug is actually used to prevent some of the complications associated with CAR-T therapy for instance so that's just one example of you know being creative taking uh something that already is approved or in phase three trials very far along and very quickly we'll be able to see if they help some patients uh so you've got so it sounds like you've got different categories you've got like drugs that are already being used for other to treat other illnesses diseases and so forth they are kind of being remodeled retested yep yep yep uh and the third category I didn't mention earlier is you know there are actual targets on this virus that people are going after with novel antivirals so um for instance um yeah you know blood pressure medications like called ACE inhibitors so lysinopril is one of those um actually people found out that the virus uses ACE2 this this um this molecule on the surface of human cells to get into the cell so that was a bit of a serendipitous finding a few years ago with SARS and now we're finding that this virus also uses ACE2 so you have a company called Veer uh basically developing an SIRNA so it's a small interfering RNA that actually will knock down the human levels of of ACE2 in hopes that it will basically close all the channels that the virus uses to enter the cell so that's one example of you know new ingenuity coming in to try to combat the virus and this is and this and these drugs are to combat the virus if you've got it um to try and essentially cure you and help your body fight it off yes yes yes the idea is that once you close as many of those doors as possible that gives you your immune system a chance to combat the virus right because this is really both multiplicative because once the virus kills one cell it releases millions of virus particles and it goes those millions of virus particles goes on go on to the next cells so really anything you can do to pause that or slow that down in theory you can cure a patient right and so a treatment maybe might look like a combination of some of these drugs that are on trial exactly yeah yeah and then on the testing side are they actually of these new drugs are they are they big sample sizes yet i mean presumably it's been quite it's not been too long are they just small sample sizes how kind of how quickly will they start to get to market yeah it's been a major challenge uh you know i'm sure everyone's been reading in the newspapers about remdesivir which is gilead's drug and then hydroxychloroquine and all the tiny little trials that they're running in china you know the parts of their world like the hydroxychloroquine trials from france very famous everyone talked about it you know president trump has you know made some statements in the news about that the issue is all of those trials are not good quality and in sort of the medical community we care a lot about the quality of these trials so some of these trials are basically you follow a cohort of patients but you don't give another group placebo or sort of just blank pills right so you have no idea if those patients just weren't all that sick and that's why they all got better you also have no idea if it was just that hospital sometimes that these studies bring in control groups from another hospital and they try to do the matching and they try to make these patients about as sick as one another but it's always tricky to interpret those types of studies so what i would say is you know remdesivir for instance hydroxychloroquine novartis and gilead have both launched large randomized trials and that's what we really need to know in a couple months we're going to know with some pretty good certainty whether these drugs work or not and the FDA the WHO they also have initiatives to basically run three 400 patient trials randomized to organize all the hospitals to run this so that we get the best data readout possible and we know for certain whether these drugs work or not nice so what's it what's it what's a solid number of participants i would say um three 400 patient study so at least 200 in each group so control and and drug typically for most of the studies that we see in biotech gives you a good chance of finding a good effect but we obviously don't know how strong the drug is going to actually work but in these times you kind of just have to run with it usually in pharma they spend a lot of time thinking about well we think it's gonna have a 20% of specs and we think that we want to power this study so that it's going to have a 95 chance of showing that and we want to make sure we don't disappoint our shareholders but uh you know in this time of age you just have to run with it and hope for the best yeah yeah it usually takes years to get these things to market right yeah it must be uh it must be strange strange for the scientific community you're like right i need it to market in like two months like crack on and let's get it done it must be uh it must be weird for these guys and girls to kind of adapt a little bit to that yeah yeah yeah you know i think a lot of ways it's not unlike oncology or you know a lot of these cancer drugs that we're testing they're very competitive right you see five six companies working on the same exact target you know as the venture calculus we have a lot of difficulty picking out which one to support because they're all the same and in this way it's also this is the holy grail this is what everyone's thinking about right now and everyone's trying to be the first to show data and this is it's a really noble thing because we need as much as we can get um at this point awesome so it's like it sounds like it's super charged everyone to like really get on it right for society for profit too if there happens to be the ones i mean it's it's a good if i could have a nickel for every company who's come to rbc firm saying oh well we had this neurodegenerative drug uh so for Alzheimer's and now we think it actually has an effect in coven 19 yeah i would be a very wealthy man if i had a nickel for every company who's done that in the past two months i mean that's a great thing that's a great thing some of them are more plausible than others and of course uh you know the later stage it is so if they're already in phase two phase three we're much more comfortable with how safe those drugs are and we understand the biology much more from previous trials so you can be a lot more confident in making some of those claims but we see quite outlandish things yeah what's what's what's looking the most promising so in a couple of months time what do you think we're going to see kind of being used quite widely yeah i think um you know uh hydroxychloroquine it has its safety issues um but you know there there's enough of um as enough small randomized trials i think to really investigate that i think if it were to work well um in a large trial i could see it being rolled out it has its safety concerns you know it causes arrhythmias heart issues for instance uh so something to be very careful there uh remdesivir you know there have been some major trials in china that gilead has put on um that they canceled they stopped midway because they quote-unquote couldn't enroll enough patients and that really makes people wonder you know just not believe that it was going to work i you know it's it makes you wonder if um it's it's a lot of hype um but you know in the next two or three months we will also know the NIH is putting on a three four hundred patient trial uh to just to do that um let me look through my list i think those are the most promising antiviral drugs i think a lot um we haven't talked a lot about convalescent serum which is basically taking antibodies from a patient who has uh fully recovered from COVID-19 actually that has a strong history in SARS um where they actually were able to do that in china and there were a few studies there uh i think there are a lot of potential there the the the biggest potential there is that in the future once we identify what those antibodies are we won't need to extract it from patients who recover we'll be able to just engineer in the lab once we know exactly which ones they are uh that that's not be cool so you think that could be quite effective because i had one of my colleagues uh just recovered and she was going to donate some of her blood for research and stuff um which is very interesting there's a lot of potential there um and we have some companies out there like cicada who do a lot of work um with that plasma so for instance they uh have the treatment for hemophilia they're one of the leaders there uh and you know once we figure out you know that this works that's still a question that this works and um we know exactly which antibodies there are ways to move very quickly on that yeah yeah what about vaccines they are the bigger the other big topic how close we to a vaccine that's i think the biggest open question um you know we've as you know we have tried and failed to drug the common cold or to develop a very good vaccine for the common cold and that is also a coronavirus um and so we've tried a multiple of different options so there's like the classic live attenuated virus where they take live virus and they uh basically remove its ability to kill human cells and then put it back so that's something that will generate a very strong immune response but unfortunately a lot of viruses in particular we've had trouble developing those types of viruses uh vaccines because you can't work with the live virus very easily um and you also worry about causing um COVID-19 right with that kind of vaccine so the first vaccine that went into the clinic was from Moderna um so they have an mRNA vaccine which means they just took the sequence of the virus they cut out a snippet that they think will generate an immune response and then they just manufactured that in the lab and turned into a vaccine we don't yet know so that's a very quick way of developing a vaccine this is usually something that took 10 years but they got into the clinic within two months right um and that's that's very impressive um but what we worry about there is that just a little snippet of mRNA isn't going to generate a long immune response um so there's a couple other approaches there's actually an approach in China at long story short there's even approaches that we haven't fully succeeded in developing a vaccine within the past in China they're working on basically taking human immune cells programming them to respond to coronavirus and then putting them into the human as a kind of like live vaccine in a way so long story short lots of different approaches we don't even know for instance if uh antibodies alone will be sufficient to give um provide a response so if you induce the human immune system to produce antibodies if that's enough alone we'll kind of have a hint when we look at the convalescent serum studies and whether those work or not but there the the response that the human immune system needs to make could be much broader than that and that's what makes these vaccines so difficult to develop because you run into these unpredictable uh sort of uh hit roadblocks because actually the immune response is a little bit broader than what we think so that's a very long-run hit answer that's great so these vaccines it sounds like they might take the longest to develop of the things you've talked about so actually a lot of them are in the clinic and we'll have a sense even this fall um with phase one phase two trials uh of whether uh these work at least in the short run the challenge there is that we want a vaccine ideally that you know at least helps 80 percent of patients that's been the bar in the past and we want to make sure that these vaccines keep patients immune for six months 12 months so that's why these trials take a very long time and the FDA has in the past had a very high bar for what they want to see I think in this day and age we have to make do with what we have as soon as something begins to work um we're going to try to commercialize it so actually I think that we might see vaccines um you know early next year really start to take shape and maybe it's before some of these very targeted antivirals like those ACE2 ones I mentioned uh really uh you know uh it can take off as well so it's all in the mix I love it no I love it where's where's the money going is it on is it on testing is it on vaccines is it on um on the drugs why are you seeing more people invest their money in time um I think drugs still um are going to take the lion's share the truth is in the past our entire biotech field has neglected vaccines because it's a 10-year path you know uh sometimes you can't really make money off of them very easily I I do think that we're going to see more prioritization towards vaccines in the future you see some of these companies uh you know getting 200 million dollar collaborations for instance Fosin has a collaboration in China where they put in 200 million dollars on a relatively new technology and mRNA approach right so I think this is in a way actually encouraging the field as a whole long that this this has happened um that we're going to actually reprioritize some of our efforts towards some of these new technologies amazing so just to sum up now in the post-COVID era once this is blown over do you see this having an effect on the on the biotech and pharma industry in the way that they work maybe the speed um the way they're able to bring these drugs to market yeah I think um what we're going to see in the short run is that the FDA is going to have a somewhat lower bar because we need to for COVID-19 um maybe we'll learn that you know our bar has been too hard in the past some people have criticized for the FDA for saying well you guys insisted that this drug have 30% effect but we have 20% effect why didn't you approve it so I think um maybe some of that culture will will carry over there's certainly going to be a major slowdown in drug delivery right now so I think that there's going to be a bit of a pent-up need to kind of move quickly right after I can definitely see that happening a lot of VCs I know are in this time of uncertainty are slowing down in their investments thinking that maybe in a few months the world will have completely changed and some of these companies who don't have a lot of cash right now will actually be quite desperate in a few months so I think there's some kicking the can down the road but overall I think it's it's going to dramatically change I think um how we how we think about prioritizing especially towards um sort of anti-infectives which have been so neglected for so long yeah amazing awesome thanks so much for that great to hear great to hear what's going on and hopefully next time we speak it'll be face-to-face again over some time and uh yeah who knows when we'll be able to travel again but um you know hopefully we'll be in the next couple of months and see you too yeah awesome thanks very much have a good one thank you keep well