Keep pulling the thread on David Ricks.
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are currently serving less than 20 million people with GLP-1 drugs, out of a potential total addressable market of one billion people with overweight or obesity.
Excluding Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical sector trades at approximately 12 times earnings, which David Ricks attributes to a near-zero return on R&D investment.
Eli Lilly has reduced its drug development timeline to approximately 8.5 years (2.5 years preclinical, 6 years clinical), which is nearly half the industry average of 15 years.
An AI-driven intervention at Eli Lilly improved process efficiency by 8% in a key production bottleneck, allowing the company to ship 7-8% more product, worth hundreds of millions to a billion dollars in revenue.
David Ricks predicts that successful implementation of AI could cut Eli Lilly's drug development times in half again.
China has reduced its "drug lag" for patient access compared to the U.S. from seven years to less than 12 months, surpassing Europe in speed of access.
A recent study from the U.S. Veterans Administration, in which Eli Lilly participated, showed benefits of GLP-1 drugs for schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and alcoholism.
Eli Lilly has reduced the time from receiving Phase 3 results to submitting to the first regulator from six months to a matter of days, with a record set for ZepBound.
The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund owns over 1% of Eli Lilly, a stake valued at $8 billion.
Diseases that are downstream consequences of obesity account for approximately 40% of all healthcare costs in developed economies.
David Ricks estimates that medical science currently understands only about 10-15% of all biology.
David Ricks believes the pharmaceutical industry is not yet close to inventing new drugs solely with AI, as wet lab validation and strong data sets remain critical.