Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC EXCLUSIVE interview with Scott Sperling, Thomas H. Lee Partners Co-CEO; Alex Denner, Sarissa Capital Management Founding Partner and Chief Investment Officer; and Dr. Christiana Bardon, MPM Capital Portfolio Manager, from the CNBC Delivering Alpha Conference, which took place on Wednesday, September 29th.
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Sperling On Healthcare Capacity
Based on what we saw in COVID that there's a need for more capacity in our healthcare system, to address the needs of patients, either at lower acuity levels, all the way up to those high acuity patients that a Mass General or Brigham would deal with.
Sperling On Advance In Therapy
We're seeing is my colleagues mentioned enormous advance, particularly in areas like cell and gene therapy. Now the flip side of that is, it is very, very expensive. We decided, for example, about a year and a half ago to invest more heavily in a set of therapies Carty therapies. And we spent about $50 million on fewer than 25 patients. So these are very expensive therapies and raise the total medical expense of the system are very important. And so it's crucially important as providers to look for other ways to reduce the total medical expense of the healthcare system in this country.
Sperling On High End Care
We've had major efforts on making sure that we have the ability to continue to provide that very high end care to people no matter what the cost is, even as we work very hard to create the efficiencies that allow us to provide care to more and more patients, even while we may have to take lower and lower rates from Medicare, Medicaid and other such payers
Bardon On Covid Capital
We've seen a lot of capital inflows into the sector because of that interest during COVID, we've seen record financings and IPOs. Overall, that's a good thing for our sector because it means that our companies are well financed to take their drugs to the clinical trial and regulatory process. In the short term that's a little bit of overheating in the sector which is okay, but we're seeing a little bit of market correction because of that.
Bardon On Getting Prices Down
The way to get prices down is not through regulation and not through some of the I would say aggressive means that Congress sometimes, supporting, how did the prices of Hepatitis C drugs come down: one competition which is a good old fashioned principle of capitalist environment better competition we started to have multiple drugs that were developed in that same medication, and two: what we also saw is innovation we saw new studies that emerge, which show that you didn't need three months of therapy but rather maybe two months or even one month of therapy would be sufficient to cure most patients. So from that perspective I would say that, you know, let's keep in mind what we're developing from us for make sure that they demonstrate the value. And let's let competition and innovation, help to improve that
Denner On Vaccine Development
When you see that it's possible to go to develop a vaccine on, on the order of approximately a year where no one thought it was impossible before one can say the same thing about many other therapies. And I think that the industry is looking at things that way.
Denner On Vaccine Timeline
We will see timelines improve for a lot a lot of the therapeutics I sort of believe that pretty strong.
