Name: Brainstorm Health: Implantable Drug Could Prevent HIV
Uploaded: 2017-05-03
Duration: 5 min 43 s
Description: Intarcia’s Kurt Graves demos a matchstick-size drug that could prevent HIV at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference.

[ MUSIC ] I have a sneak peek at the future of a technology in medicine that we are trying to bring in the market to both treat and prevent some of the biggest chronic diseases on the planet. Our company is called Intarcia. I'm gonna focus a little bit on HIV. We actually have raised about $ 1. 7 billion to date. We've been working on what I'm gonna show you right now. For about 10 years and we have a product, our first product is the first once or twice a year treatment for the treatment of type two diabetes that's filed with the FTA right now. So when you're filed with the FTA, you don't really talk about those products. So I'm not gonna talk a lot about that but I'll talk about what we're doing with Bill Gates. [ UNKNOWN ] Gates foundation To develop the first once a year prevention therapy for HIV, which is something really important for millions and millions of kids particularly in Sub- Saharan Africa. They've done so well with treatment that they reduced the transmission from others to babies so much that they not have the largest youth population in Sub- Saharan Africa ever. And Bill came to me last June and said Kurt, you've got some really cool technology. I wanna understand them more. We've been looking for a couple years a way to try and develop a once a year prevention treatment for HIV. Do you think you could do that? And after a lot of discussions back and forth, we figured out that we probably could do that. And December last year, right at the end of the year He made $ 140 million initial investment in the company. But he will fund this all the way through completely for this therapy we're looking to bring to market for each of [ INAUDIBLE ]. So I'm gonna tell you really three things today and do a quick demo. What's the problem we're trying to solve? Chronic diseases is our focus. Pills and injections tend to work pretty well for short term acute conditions but they don't work well at all for chronic diseases and the major reason no matter what chronic disease you're talking about including things like diabetes over a 12 month period 60- 80 % of people stop taking their medicine at some point in time. And that ladies and gentlemen is what causes Healthcare cost and morbidity and mortality and all these bad things to happen. Two days ago, an article came out in The Lancet for type 2 diabetes. The global cost of managing type 2 diabetes in 2015 in the world was $ 1. 3 trillion just in one year. A large large part of that because people aren't controlling complying on their medicines. Estimates right now that 70, 80 % of people stop taking their pills or injections during the year. You can imagine that people don't take their pill or injection for the treatment of a disease just how hard it is to get people to trying to take a pill or injection to prevent a disease. And that's why Bill came to me and said, how do we take your technology to do a once year prevention therapy. Because with HIV, he can't afford to have a day while you're not treated if you're exposed to HIV you're gonna get it. That's why our technology is so important. So that's the unmet need that we're trying to solve. Here's how we do it. I got to leave myself a minute to do a procedure, I've got two left [ LAUGH ]. We have two technologies that we combine with medicine. The first one are chemist invented, they invented a way to keep medicines, proteins, [ UNKNOWN ] antibody fragments stable at body temperatures for over thee years That's incredible because most of these medicines break down in a period of a couple of hours. They can take a medicine that would break down at room temperature in two hours, put it in the same thing our chemists invented and keep it stable at 104 degrees for three and a half years. That's the enabling secret sauce of our company. The second one I hold right here in my hand. This is a little tiny osmotic minipump that when you place it right under the skin and I'm gonna show in a 30 second procedure, delivers a precise amount micrograms of medicine every day for a full year. So we make three- month pumps, 6 month pumps, and 12 month pumps. So three things in our products, the stability technology, the delivery technology and then the medicine. Whether it's for diabetes, whether it's for HIV, we're working on obesity, we're working on autoimmune disorders. We're going after the biggest problems on the planet to introduce a totally new way to deliver medicine. We do it in five simple steps. I've got 55 seconds left You clean the area so there's no risk of infection. You numb it, so the patient can't feel anything. You barely nick the skin, you place it right under the skin, and you put a sterile strip and a bandage and you're done. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna clean it, I'm gonna place it right here. I'm gonna numb the track so the patient doesn't feel anything. I'm gonna barely Nick the skin, right here. You just barely nick it, four millimeters wide, that's it. You're numb, you're not feeling that. I take my mini- pump, I put it in my tool, right here, which is to place it, I get my spot where I want to place it, I've simply put it right under the skin, and in about five seconds. I pull back and voila, I just put a mini pump right under your skin. I put a [ UNKNOWN ] strip and a Band- Aid right there. And you've got your once a year treatment. Hopefully, a prevention therapy that we're working on for HIV or the other diseases I talked about. You come back a year later. You're asking, okay, Kurt, well, you put it in. How do you get it out? I simply put this here I numb the area and clean it again. I'm just gonna barely nick the tip of the skin on this device, after it's numbed. I just barely nick right there, and boom. Took me five seconds to get it out. I take it out, I load a new one in the device. I put it right back in the same spot and you're treated for another year. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed your sneak to the new way to treat chronic diseases and prevent them one day, thank you very much. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Brainstorm Health: Implantable Drug Could Prevent HIV

Intarcia’s Kurt Graves demos a matchstick-size drug that could prevent HIV at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference.