Targeting plants used across cultures

Viswa explains mining ethnobotany and cross-cultural use to prioritize plants for study.

Play episode from 01:03:43

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Episode notes

For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” The mission is personal: he grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer whose medicine his family couldn’t afford. Many life-changing medicines, including morphine, aspirin, and metformin, originated in nature, but there has never been a reliable, scalable way to systematically explore its chemistry. Colluru founded Enveda in 2019 with $55,000 of his own savings to change that. The company has since identified 18 drug candidates, with three now in clinical trials.

In our conversation, we explore:

Why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature (and why that was a massive mistake)
How Enveda built a system to decode unknown molecules in nature
The deeply personal story of his mother’s battle with leukemia and how it shaped his life’s work
Why old ideas, from immunotherapy to natural products, often hold the most latent potential
How Enveda developed 18 drug candidates for about $1 million each instead of $10-15 million
Enveda’s three leading drug candidates targeting eczema, obesity, and ulcerative colitis
Why first-in-class medicines capture the vast majority of returns in pharma
What competitive table tennis taught him about building companies

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Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction to Viswa Colluru

(03:57) His father’s pharmacy and early exposure to Western and Ayurvedic medicine

(07:06) Early pull toward technology

(09:29) His mother’s leukemia diagnosis

(14:24) Studying Biotechnology