Bristol Myers Drug Pivot

Martin Shkreli shares how he transformed a discarded Bristol Myers drug into a successful kidney disease treatment.

"We went to this company that had a license from Bristol Myers. Bristol Myers spent $50 million developing this drug for hypertension and quit because it didn't fit their portfolio - hypertension is very boring and doesn't need another medicine, there's like 60 hypertension drugs.

We approached the company and said we'll take this asset, find investors, and build a company around it. They agreed to sell it for $2 million. We sent them $1 million initially, which was embarrassing because we couldn't come up with the full amount immediately. We had to ask for 30-90 days for the second million.

After researching on PubMed, I decided instead of hypertension we should target a rare kidney disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis. We did clinical trials, the trial worked, and the rest is history. It took $100 million to develop the drug. The company is now worth $1.5 billion, and the drug specifically is probably worth around $1 billion. The drug just received FDA approval a couple months ago - it's called Filspari. I named it Sparsentan when we started.

I left the company halfway through this process, but all the same plans continued. I'm really happy it's FDA approved now. So often in biotech, people start companies, extract equity value as they go public, and then the company's drugs don't work. Getting a drug FDA approved on my first try was a nice feather in my cap, and I'm happy for the people who are now getting this prescription for their kidney disease."