Jesús Purroy: Impact through biotech
This week, the TTI Interview Series covers our member Jesús Purroy. Jesús is a biologist turned science manager turned social entrepreneur. He founded, and currently leads, Àvida Biotech. Feeling the obligation to communicate science to broader audiences, part of this work is to help researchers and clinicians with their efforts to bring the results of their work to society. More generally, Jesús is an avid reader, an amateur musician and a father of two teenagers.
In this interview, Jesús talks about biotech through an impact lens and tells us about his new business model within the pharma industry. He argues that there is no single solution to the challenges facing the world, but that we should all contribute in our own sectors.
The impact lens in biotech: a new business model for the pharma industry
Jesús, tell us a little bit about your work and how it intersects with the impact space.
I am working to reduce the global burden of infectious diseases, particularly diseases that affect people in low- and middle income countries. These are not the highly profitable markets that the pharma industry prefers, and they rely largely on government-funded programmes and non-profit interventions. Just look at the way the COVID-19 vaccines are distributed. Diseases such as Dengue or Zika are not a business proposition that will make investors or industry execs pay attention to a pitch.
Our technology allows us to develop vaccines that don’t require refrigeration or injection, and this simplifies the logistics in a way that makes it viable to sell these products in places that are now below the profitability line. If you don’t need a refrigerated truck and the same truck that delivers food or supplies can deliver drugs, many things become possible. With this at the core, we want to explore a different business model in the pharma industry - based on many small transactions, instead of a few large ones. This also applies to industrialized countries: diseases such as bronchiolitis pose a disproportionate burden on children from low-resource households. If we make affordable drugs and sell many of them, the overall result is a profitable company.
All this only makes sense from an impact point of view at the moment, because it would be much easier to just do standard drug development. We would still be helping many people but it would not solve SDG #10: reduce inequality in the access to drugs.
Impact through biotech from an individual person’s view
Do you have your own definition of “impact”, Jesús?
I like to think that impact is a change in someone’s life that helps this person move towards a better situation as seen from that person’s point of view. This may sound a bit complicated, but I was very influenced by Hans Rosling’s “Factulness” and by Banerjee & Duflo’s “Poor Economics”, and I avoid as much as possible to judge what a good life is.
What would you say is one of the most important issues that need to be solved within the next decade?
There are many urgent issues, and they are all connected. An improvement in poverty indicators reflects on health or education indicators and vice versa. I don’t think you can solve climate change without good governance, but you cannot have that if you don’t solve hunger, education or health… any way you look at it there is no one single issue that underlies everything else. So the important thing here is that we are all adding something to a partial solution, however small this contribution may be. When people ask me for career advice I tell them to pick one or two things that they care about and find a path to make a dent in these issues. My main driver is SDG #3 (Health and Wellbeing) but even in this one there are infinite ways to contribute. I guess that people who start their professional life these days can still become lawyers, engineers, agronomists or whatever, and find their own personal way to work on the bigger issues.
Profitable impact biotech investing & new innovations to reduce inequality
Could you tell us what you think are some of the biggest challenges in the impact space, standing on the way of efficient solutions?
Impact investors in health are afraid of drug development because it is risky and it has long return times, and they tend to focus their efforts on solutions that take less time to reach the market, such as medical devices, e-health tools and other applications. There is nothing wrong with these, of course, but this forces the high-risk, high-impact drug development projects to seek funds in the standard investor market, and these guys are not keen on the impact element. So we need to convince them that impact investing is not inherently less profitable than what they are doing now. We also need to convince impact investors and other values-oriented funders that they need to widen the scope to include high-risk proposals.
In health, there is a larger issue that has to do with inequality. Where I live I have access to tax-funded healthcare and a choice of private insurance providers. If I become ill tomorrow and I need some treatment, whatever it is, I know I will get it. I cannot conceive of the idea of not receiving life-saving medical care because I cannot afford it – or receiving it and then becoming bankrupt. And yet, for many people globally this is a fact of life. Again, there is not one single solution but there has to be a way to include more people in the “serviceable obtainable market”. It may involve new technologies, new business models or something completely new that somebody will come up with.
The impact angle in biotech
Jesus, tell more about the long-term vision of your & how you measure and quantify impact.
I am in the early stages of a very long journey, so “long-term” for me has a lot to do with finishing the work I started. We have seen with COVID-19 vaccines that the development times can be reduced dramatically if the incentives are right, but unless we can benefit from underlying events like that, I am looking at ten years or more before I can say that I have had any impact at all on anybody’s life. Of course, once this gets going the figures will go up very quickly, so I guess that by the time I am ready to retire I hope to see a sizable reduction of the burden caused by diseases such as Dengue and bronchiolitis. This is quite easy to measure, so there is no mistaking that the introduction of a drug or a vaccine made some disease become a rarity. That would be a team accomplishment, of course, but I would celebrate my part in it. Along the way I hope to inspire more people to look at careers in biotech from the impact angle, and make it a normal part of the conversation when evaluating projects.
Impact value in health
What are some of the misconceptions you’ve recognized about “impact”?
Often people use the word “impact” as a generic term, and in health anything you do has an impact on people’s lives: whether it is a new diagnostic device, a new drug or even a change in a clinical protocol. If people understand different things by the same word this is bound to cause confusion. Some investors like to say that they are into impact but they use the same decision-making criteria as any other investor, and it is often difficult to argue the case that one project has a focus on impact with metrics to support it.
I have had some intense discussions about the impact value of projects in health. Many times these are standard projects in health that have nothing particularly social about them: no metrics, nothing in their business model to distinguish them from any other proposal coming from a hospital or a research institution. Other times these are proposals that target wellbeing, convenience or even self-image but they are not meaningful regarding impact metrics. I get particularly worked up with projects that promote organic farming and reject biotechnology tools that would make farming and food more healthy and environmentally friendly. I see these as lost opportunities, many times with a lot of bad science behind them.
I don’t know if this happens in other sectors, but in health there are a lot of grey areas that border on pseudoscience, and these make great business opportunities that can pass for impact proposals.
