There's big money to be make in drug development. But is that necessarily a good thing?

Pharmaceutical companies capitalize on years of R&D work with exclusive patents. Approved drugs typically commercialize in developed markets that can support higher pricing through mature insurance reimbursement networks.

Yet serious diseases don't only occur in the developed world. Billions of people in developing economics need treatments as well. And they're often not able to afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs for innovative approaches such as CRISPR gene editing or CAR-T gene therapy.

There's currently an unmet market need for treating serious chronic conditions like Alzheimer's Disease in a way that isn't prohibitively expensive. And sometimes, it's worth veering from the herd and thinking about big problems in an entirely new way.

In today's 7investing podcast, 7investing lead advisors Simon Erickson and Dana Abramovitz chat with Mei Mei Hu, the co-founder and CEO of Vaxxinity (Nasdaq: VAXX). Vaxxinity is using a disruptive synthetic peptide platform to provide cheaper, safer, more convenient, and more effective medicines for chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. It is also developing a late-stage vaccines for the prevention of COVID.

In the conversation, Mei Mei describes how Vaxxinity's technology is "turning the human body into its own drug factory" to avoid the excessive costs and immune response issues of traditional monoclonal antibodies. She discusses their unique approach to clinical trials, the progress their making in their programs, and what it's like to be the CEO of a newly-public company.

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include United Biomedical and Vaxxinity. 7investing’s advisors or its guests may have positions in the companies mentioned.

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