Why drugs that work in the lab fail in people

Enveda Founder and CEO Viswa Colluru believes we have been looking for new medicines in the wrong places for decades.

In the Season 1 finale of Forecast 2050, I sat down with Viswa and Pablo Lubroth, VP of Special Projects at Enveda, to discuss why 9 in 10 drugs fail in clinical trials despite Big Pharma spending $276 billion in annual R&D, how AI is finally unlocking 99% of nature's chemistry that we've haven't been able to read, why the incentive structure of biotech capital markets is actively bad for patients, why insisting on understanding how a drug works actually slows down drug discovery, why aging may not be inevitable, and why mental health is going to be the defining medical crisis of the next 25 years.

Extended Show Notes: https://finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p/3dc95f79-4a7e-4c80-9630-970c1e6e2117

Transcript (with helpful links!): https://finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p/beb7222d-efd1-472b-85be-09d7a7faf1a5

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:09 The Quintessential Problem With Drug Discovery

04:57 Pablo’s Journey to Enveda

06:29 Insisting on Understanding Biological Mechanisms Slows Down Drug Discovery

09:39 Science Has Been Divorced From Human Experience

12:22 Scientific Reductionism Has Not Led to Better Drugs

19:31 Lessons Learned From Big Pharma Missing Out On GLP-1s

22:11 Capital Markets Disinventivize Risk-Taking and Harm Patients

28:12 How to Prioritize Which Illnesses to Cure

33:38 Prediction and Prevention is a Better Strategy Than Treatment

38:27 Drugs to Make Us Limitless Like Bradley Cooper

42:53 Aging is Not Inevitable

43:34 Everyone Has a Chinese Peptide Guy

50:13 The Loon Shots for 2050

52:39 Mental Health Will be The Biggest Challenge for 2050

54:46 The AI Revolution in Medicine

Viswa Colluru is the Founder & CEO of Enveda, a clinical-stage biotech company using AI to discover new drugs from nature. He built Enveda from $55K of personal savings into a unicorn with over $500M raised and multiple assets in clinical trials. Before founding Enveda, Viswa was the first Innovation Scientist and Product Manager at Recursion Pharmaceuticals. He holds a PhD in immuno-oncology from UW-Madison.

Pablo Lubroth is a VP of Special Projects at Enveda and the Co-Founder & Editor of Decoding Bio. He previously built and led the biotech practice at Hummingbird Ventures and co-hosts the annual AI x Bio Summit at the NYSE. Pablo holds degrees in Neuropharmacology and Biochemical Engineering from UCL and an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge.

Viswa on X: https://x.com/viswacolluru

Pablo on X: https://x.com/pablolubroth

Enveda: https://enveda.com

Decoding Bio: https://www.decodingbio.com

Forecast 2050 is a series about the next 25 years—and the builders, thinkers, and leaders shaping what comes next.

Finn on X: https://x.com/FinnMurphy12

Finn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finn-murphy-16160465/

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