Building a Rare Disease Company: Neil Kumar on The Long Run

Neil Kumar is today’s guest on The Long Run.

Neil is the founder and CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based BridgeBio Pharma.

Neil Kumar, CEO, BridgeBio

BridgeBio got started a little more than 10 years ago with an idea of creating what it calls a “hub and spoke” business model for rare disease drug development. The hope was to find opportunities that were biologically compelling, but didn’t neatly fit into one of the existing platform technology companies of the time. Neil and colleagues hoped to package them together in a portfolio to improve the risk/reward ratio for investors.  

It’s worked out. The company has an FDA-approved product on the market that’s generating blockbuster sales — $108 million in revenue in its third quarter on the market. The drug is acoramidis (brand name Attruby) for transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, sometimes called cardiac amyloidosis.

That drug has quite a story on its own. But BridgeBio isn’t turning out to be a one-hit wonder. A couple of positive clinical trial readouts this year show it has a chance to become a truly unusual creature – a truly diversified, independent biotech company with multiple cash-flow generating FDA approved products.

Neil has thought long and hard about how to mitigate risk, and how to create value for investors in this most challenging of scientific businesses.

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Please enjoy this conversation with Neil Kumar on The Long Run.