Building an AI-Powered Pharmaceutical Services Business: VIDA CEO Susan Wood (Part 4)

Susan Wood: There are people out there who are walking around with a prevalence of lung disease that they’re not even aware of. You can have low-level or medium-level lung disease and not feel that much difference in your day-to-day life. When you have a pandemic and you have this acute impact on your respiratory system that has somewhat reduced the lung function anyway, those people would have poorer outcomes.

Sramana Mitra: On the consumer level, you had a lot more awareness?

Susan Wood: Right.

Sramana Mitra: What path did you follow to go to market? Do you now sell to hospitals or diagnostic clinics?

Susan Wood: Our largest entry point is directly to the pharmaceutical sponsors. There’re classes of drugs and therapies that we want to get to patients earlier and with better quality. We can do that with our solution. Pharmaceutical companies also want to do the same thing. They want to do it cheaply. They want to do it on a different timeline. They want to make sure that they can appropriate that drug to the right patient at the right time.

Sramana Mitra: You test before administering that drug.

Susan Wood: They need better data and we give them better data.

Sramana Mitra: From a sales and business development point of view, how does this work?

Susan Wood: I have a big clinical trial. I have a trial for a severe asthma drug. We can measure the outcome in multiple ways. The traditional way is a pulmonary function test. It’s a global measurement, but you’re not able to find, at the regional level, that the airway wall thickness is thicker.

We can do that at sub-millimeters. We can find out whether it’s working. We can find out if a compound is not working. In phase three, we have a much more precise outcome measure.

Sramana Mitra: You sell to pharmaceuticals running clinical trials.

Susan Wood: Yes. We offer them very precise validated biomarkers. We offer them additional services. There are fundamental inefficiencies of running a clinical trial. It doesn’t matter if it’s cardiac or respiratory. Just getting data from A to B. We monitor everything for them.

Sramana Mitra: How do you think about TAM? What are the deal sizes of these kinds of deals?

Susan Wood: We’ve calculated it to be almost $50 billion. If you look at each drug to get to market, it takes $1.6 billion for a respiratory drug. Of those respiratory drugs, almost 60% of them fail in phase three.

We’re going down a 10-year timeline that has a higher likelihood to fail. That’s a lot of money and a lot of opportunities. There are certainly lots of ways where we can run that trial much more efficiently and there are also lots of ways to make it of higher quality.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building an AI-Powered Pharmaceutical Services Business: VIDA CEO Susan Wood
1 2 3 4 5 6