The Great Peptide Debate with Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione

**John Coogan** (0:00)
The Peptide Debate. Welcome to the stream, guys.

**Jordi Hays** (0:03)
How are you guys doing?

**Martin Shkreli** (0:06)
Hey, how's it going?

**John Coogan** (0:07)
Thank you so much for taking the time. Why don't you both start with an introduction on yourself and maybe your core thesis around peptides? Martin, why don't you go first? Oh, Max.

**Martin Shkreli** (0:20)
Okay, sure.

**John Coogan** (0:21)
Let's start with Martin.

**Martin Shkreli** (0:22)
Yeah, so I'm the pharma bro. I represent the interests of the, I guess, viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry, including but not limited to Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, etc. I'm sure those guys love that.

**Jordi Hays** (0:40)
You're the face of pharma, whether they like it or not.

**Martin Shkreli** (0:43)
There you go. I'm a self-trained biopharmaceutical expert. I think I can speak at a pretty high level about every inch of the pharmaceutical industry. I've discovered brand new drugs. I've acquired drugs. I've commercialized drugs. I've, just about anything you can do in the drug industry, I've done it. And so, I'm very concerned about the peptide craze. I think it comes mostly out of psychological issues, which we'll discuss. The need for identity, control, distrust of institutions, all kinds of things like that, are leading to what we're seeing today.

**John Coogan** (1:22)
Great. And Max?

**Max Marchione** (1:24)
Hi, I'm Max. Former peptide skeptic turned peptide believer. I run a healthcare company called Superpower. And our thesis is that the health system today does a good job when you're sick. It doesn't do a fantastic job at preventing things, and actually allowing people to be their best selves. I say a former peptide skeptic because they seem scary, and I say a converted believer because I spoke to dozens of doctors and heard hundreds of clinical vignettes from people who had their lives change. Now, I don't believe all peptides are safe. I do believe we need more research. But I think there are a subset of things that have improved people's lives. I also think as a modality, peptides are one that are more interesting than before, now that injecting is normal, now that wellness and optimization is normal, not just treating disease, and now that we have AI for things like computational discovery. So we're early, we need more research, but I think peptides are exciting.

**John Coogan** (2:28)
Martin, I'll let you just respond.

**Max Marchione** (2:30)
Yes.

**John Coogan** (2:31)
It seems like you have something on your mind. But it would be useful to at least define the conversation a little bit more because when we say peptides, we could mean ozempic, prescribed by a doctor for someone who has diabetes and is very overweight. It could also mean the Wolverine stack taken by a 15-year-old in a gym in Miami. There's a wide gap here. So let's maybe narrow it down a little bit to probably off-label use. I don't know exactly where things start to get fuzzy for you guys, but defining a little bit more of where the actual point of debate because I imagine that there's agreement with the extremes.

**Martin Shkreli** (3:13)
Yeah, I mean, isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever? You know, isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using, you know, GPT instead of using AI or something like that? Like, there's a specific meaning, like peptide has this very specific meaning, and they're not new.
They're 80 years old. People have been using peptides forever. And in fact, in pharma, you try to avoid peptides because of their inherent weaknesses. You go for small molecules or really large molecules like antibodies. Peptides are sort of the worst of both worlds. So the idea that we've taken this kind of like last place drug class and then turn that into like the standard bearer for do-it-yourself medicine is kind of humorous to anybody who actually understands pharma.

**Max Marchione** (4:00)
Except that the last drug class has the potentially most impactful drug of all time, the most set of drugs of all time, the GLP-1 receptor agonists. So I'm not saying we only have peptides in the toolkit. I'm saying the genie is out of the bottle and we cannot ignore peptides as a tool in the toolkit. Small molecules, just like, I guess framing it for people who don't kind of understand the difference between these things. Small molecules are made synthetically. Peptides tend to be derived from what already is happening in the body. DNA is the building block of the body and encodes for RNA which produces proteins and peptides. So these peptides naturally occur. Now, can sometimes be hard to pattern to naturally occurring things? You can, but it's a little bit harder. Small molecules, on the other hand, are things that humans design to block biology, to block, typically block something that is happening in the body. And again, I'm not saying small molecules are bad, but they're kind of the two different modalities we're talking about here. And we've seen one category of peptides, GLP-1s already changed the world. And my contention is that there are other categories of peptides that are under researched but have really interesting kind of clinical vignettes that might change the world going forward.