did you ever want to develop a product
that really changes the world if it was
an app it would take you on average
$200,000 and one year of work and your
odds of being financially successful
would be around one in 10,000 so do you
think this is hard well if you were in
my field developing new medicines your
odds would be very similar one in 10,000
but the major difference would be you
would need to spend ten years of work
and on average 2.6 billion dollars so
and that shows you that innovation in
medicine is fundamentally different from
innovation in information technology you
need to spend 10 times the amount of
work and you need to spend 10,000 times
the amount of money to develop a new
medicine but I personally people will
know me I’m not really that much
interested in money but what interests
me is what kind of impact we can
generate by using this kind of money and
in order to have an idea in order to
quantify what impact in medicine
actually means I came up with the
concept a concept of impact level impact
level is the order of magnitude of human
lives improved this sounds very
complicated but it’s actually very
simple so I’m going to tell you what it
is an example 10 to the power of one is
10 so if you improve the life of 10
people then this would be impact level 1
and improving the life I know I don’t
just mean making them feel a little
better I mean really saving lives or
significantly extending the healthy
lifespan of a human and you can take
this to the next level 10 to the power
of 2 would be hundred or hundreds of
people which would be impact level 2 and
so on impact level 3 it’s thousands of
people you would help and so on and so
on
and so on and as soon as we come to
impact level six and this is what I
would call a truly a high-impact
medicine because it cures millions of
people and that I consider to be a major
impact and a major contribution to
society and of course what we were all
want is ultimately we want to help the
people of the world to improve people’s
lives and to save lives in the order of
magnitude of billions and this would be
impact level nine now let me tell you a
little story about the first modern
medicine that actually reached impact
level nine imagine it’s 1928 you are a
Scottish microbiologist in London hard
to imagine nowadays and you’re trying to
work on Staphylococcus bacteria
Staphylococcus bacteria at the time were
very dangerous pathogens so people that
got wound infections with the
Staphylococcus in many cases they would
die of the infection because there’s no
cure at all but you’re working with this
with this pathogen and it’s just before
your summer holidays and what you do is
you take one of these typical petri
dishes with agar in it and you put some
of the bacteria on top so that when you
return from your holidays the bacteria
would have grown nicely and you can use
them for an experiment and so you go on
holiday and then you come back from the
Scottish Highlands fully energized and
you look at your culture and this is
what you see Oh green fluffy mold has
spoiled your bacterial culture really
disgusting so what would the average
researcher do throw it away right so
start a new experiment but not you
your reaction would be oh this is
interesting
you would have a closer look and you
would see this strange halo around the
mold and as soon as you do some analysis
you find out that actually this strange
halo contains dead bacteria and then you
make this really amazing conclusion that
the mold is producing something that
kills bacteria and the rest is history
so in 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered
the first antibiotic which is penicillin
and it took until 1940 to actually to
prove sufficient quantities to treat
human beings but from that time on
diseases that were actually absolutely
deadly at the time so wound infections
syphilis could be easily cured and since
this discovery actually over a billion
people benefited from penicillin so this
makes this drug impact level 9 so now
let’s let’s take a deeper look into the
history on of such high-impact medicines
and I’ve just done the analysis that I
just look at the last century and what
you see here is the number of
high-impact medicines completely novel
treatments that hit the market in each
of those decades and the first
interesting finding is the 80s seem to
have been a very productive period where
a total of nine different completely
novel cures for major diseases came to
the market such as human insulin for the
treatment of diabetes or such as TPA for
the treatment of heart attacks and
strokes so very important discoveries
where the drugs actually hit the market
so but what I was expecting was because
everybody’s talking about exponential
development was an exponential
development of these high-impact new
medicines and the only thing that’s
actually exponential is the money that
is being spent on research and
development so there seems to be a
disconnect between on one hand
investment in research and on the other
hand the type of impact that is being
generated for Humanity
and I would just like to give you an
example this is this is one of the big
game changers in modern medicine who in
the room knows praziquantel show of
hands one two not that many this is
because we are not in Africa Prezi
quantal was developed in the 70s and is
actually extremely effective for the
treatment of parasitic worms especially
this fell on the right side here which
is called a blood fluke schistosomiasis
schistosomiasis and it looks in some
cases like this poor little child and
the light on the left side so the liver
is basically full of those worms and and
actually 280,000 people are dying of
this disease every year but despite this
very good effect of this drug it’s
tablets you just swallow them and the
worms go away this drug was never
commercially successful actually in 2007
the company American Darmstadt decided
to basically switch to the Prezi
Quantrill donation program with the
w-h-o the World Health Organization and
since then mac was only donating the
tablet so since then five hundred
million tablets have been donated to
basically people in Africa mostly
schoolchildren and more than 100 million
of those were treated with these tablets
so talking about absurdity we’re looking
here at at a drug that actually has an
impact of at least level eight so
hundreds of millions of people and on
the other hand a complete financial
failure this is quite absurd and the
question is why is this and if we look
for a comparison who in the room knows
Botox show of hands quite a few this is
what I expected it’s to to get rid of
these nasty wrinkles you have in your
face great drug generated in 2015 sales
of over three billion dollars but not
really a life-saving drug I would say
and so very low impact level and this
shows you a little more this this
absurdity so if as a conclusion if if
it’s not money that is driving
high-impact innovation what is it
any idea the all very shy well you
probably note its curiosity right the
curiosity that led Alexander Fleming to
turn a failed experiment into a
discovery that truly changed the world
so what do we learn from this maybe we
should focus less on money maybe we
should focus a little more on impact and
maybe we should focus more on curiosity
driven research so more of us actually
reach impact level 9 thank you
[Applause]
that really changes the world if it was
an app it would take you on average
$200,000 and one year of work and your
odds of being financially successful
would be around one in 10,000 so do you
think this is hard well if you were in
my field developing new medicines your
odds would be very similar one in 10,000
but the major difference would be you
would need to spend ten years of work
and on average 2.6 billion dollars so
and that shows you that innovation in
medicine is fundamentally different from
innovation in information technology you
need to spend 10 times the amount of
work and you need to spend 10,000 times
the amount of money to develop a new
medicine but I personally people will
know me I’m not really that much
interested in money but what interests
me is what kind of impact we can
generate by using this kind of money and
in order to have an idea in order to
quantify what impact in medicine
actually means I came up with the
concept a concept of impact level impact
level is the order of magnitude of human
lives improved this sounds very
complicated but it’s actually very
simple so I’m going to tell you what it
is an example 10 to the power of one is
10 so if you improve the life of 10
people then this would be impact level 1
and improving the life I know I don’t
just mean making them feel a little
better I mean really saving lives or
significantly extending the healthy
lifespan of a human and you can take
this to the next level 10 to the power
of 2 would be hundred or hundreds of
people which would be impact level 2 and
so on impact level 3 it’s thousands of
people you would help and so on and so
on
and so on and as soon as we come to
impact level six and this is what I
would call a truly a high-impact
medicine because it cures millions of
people and that I consider to be a major
impact and a major contribution to
society and of course what we were all
want is ultimately we want to help the
people of the world to improve people’s
lives and to save lives in the order of
magnitude of billions and this would be
impact level nine now let me tell you a
little story about the first modern
medicine that actually reached impact
level nine imagine it’s 1928 you are a
Scottish microbiologist in London hard
to imagine nowadays and you’re trying to
work on Staphylococcus bacteria
Staphylococcus bacteria at the time were
very dangerous pathogens so people that
got wound infections with the
Staphylococcus in many cases they would
die of the infection because there’s no
cure at all but you’re working with this
with this pathogen and it’s just before
your summer holidays and what you do is
you take one of these typical petri
dishes with agar in it and you put some
of the bacteria on top so that when you
return from your holidays the bacteria
would have grown nicely and you can use
them for an experiment and so you go on
holiday and then you come back from the
Scottish Highlands fully energized and
you look at your culture and this is
what you see Oh green fluffy mold has
spoiled your bacterial culture really
disgusting so what would the average
researcher do throw it away right so
start a new experiment but not you
your reaction would be oh this is
interesting
you would have a closer look and you
would see this strange halo around the
mold and as soon as you do some analysis
you find out that actually this strange
halo contains dead bacteria and then you
make this really amazing conclusion that
the mold is producing something that
kills bacteria and the rest is history
so in 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered
the first antibiotic which is penicillin
and it took until 1940 to actually to
prove sufficient quantities to treat
human beings but from that time on
diseases that were actually absolutely
deadly at the time so wound infections
syphilis could be easily cured and since
this discovery actually over a billion
people benefited from penicillin so this
makes this drug impact level 9 so now
let’s let’s take a deeper look into the
history on of such high-impact medicines
and I’ve just done the analysis that I
just look at the last century and what
you see here is the number of
high-impact medicines completely novel
treatments that hit the market in each
of those decades and the first
interesting finding is the 80s seem to
have been a very productive period where
a total of nine different completely
novel cures for major diseases came to
the market such as human insulin for the
treatment of diabetes or such as TPA for
the treatment of heart attacks and
strokes so very important discoveries
where the drugs actually hit the market
so but what I was expecting was because
everybody’s talking about exponential
development was an exponential
development of these high-impact new
medicines and the only thing that’s
actually exponential is the money that
is being spent on research and
development so there seems to be a
disconnect between on one hand
investment in research and on the other
hand the type of impact that is being
generated for Humanity
and I would just like to give you an
example this is this is one of the big
game changers in modern medicine who in
the room knows praziquantel show of
hands one two not that many this is
because we are not in Africa Prezi
quantal was developed in the 70s and is
actually extremely effective for the
treatment of parasitic worms especially
this fell on the right side here which
is called a blood fluke schistosomiasis
schistosomiasis and it looks in some
cases like this poor little child and
the light on the left side so the liver
is basically full of those worms and and
actually 280,000 people are dying of
this disease every year but despite this
very good effect of this drug it’s
tablets you just swallow them and the
worms go away this drug was never
commercially successful actually in 2007
the company American Darmstadt decided
to basically switch to the Prezi
Quantrill donation program with the
w-h-o the World Health Organization and
since then mac was only donating the
tablet so since then five hundred
million tablets have been donated to
basically people in Africa mostly
schoolchildren and more than 100 million
of those were treated with these tablets
so talking about absurdity we’re looking
here at at a drug that actually has an
impact of at least level eight so
hundreds of millions of people and on
the other hand a complete financial
failure this is quite absurd and the
question is why is this and if we look
for a comparison who in the room knows
Botox show of hands quite a few this is
what I expected it’s to to get rid of
these nasty wrinkles you have in your
face great drug generated in 2015 sales
of over three billion dollars but not
really a life-saving drug I would say
and so very low impact level and this
shows you a little more this this
absurdity so if as a conclusion if if
it’s not money that is driving
high-impact innovation what is it
any idea the all very shy well you
probably note its curiosity right the
curiosity that led Alexander Fleming to
turn a failed experiment into a
discovery that truly changed the world
so what do we learn from this maybe we
should focus less on money maybe we
should focus a little more on impact and
maybe we should focus more on curiosity
driven research so more of us actually
reach impact level 9 thank you
[Applause]
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