Chapter 63: The First Product (4)
—Every second week of March is World Glaucoma Week. It’s a week of campaigns to raise awareness for glaucoma, one of the three major causes of blindness. The organizers of this week are the World Health Organization, the World Glaucoma Association, and the World Glaucoma Patient Association.
Professor Shin Jung-Ju of Yeonyee Hospital said on the radio.
—Oh, I didn’t know there was something like that. World Glaucoma Week?
The interviewer replied to Shin Jung-Ju.
—Yes. Coincidentally, the second week of March happens to be the week when Phase Three of the glaucoma trial ends. I think this year’s glaucoma campaign will be quite hopeful.
Shin Jung-Ju said.
—Then maybe this week will be called the Glaucoma Conquering Week from now on.
The interviewer said with a chuckle.
—That’s right. Especially with A-Bio’s product, not only are they providing the treatment, but they made a stem cell production kit and have decided to supply it to the world. With this product, you can easily design stem cells and optic nerves with patients’ somatic cells from anywhere around the world.
Shin Jung-Ju explained.
—Wow, so are you saying that we can do it without a scientist?
—Haha, no. You still need someone who studied stem cell differentiation. People will be able to make somatic cells into optic nerves following the experimentation method provided by A-Bio after receiving training from them.
—I see.
—But the efficiency of the treatment increases exponentially compared to if A-Bio and their hospital treats patients.
—Of course.
—Yes. There are more than forty-five million glaucoma patients in the world. That’s the entire population of Korea. How could the A-Bio hospital treat them all by itself? And because glaucoma originates from age, the patients don’t have much time either. It’s hard for them to wait for their turn.
Shin Jung-Ju said.
—I see.
The interviewer replied.
—A-Bio would have earned a lot of money, and their stocks would have surged if they just provided the treatment and monopolized it. Perhaps this way would have been better to establish their identity as the first-ever next-generation hospital.
Shin Jung-Ju added.
—But I think that the fact that they went out of their way to develop a kit and have decided to supply it to the entire world was truly a humanitarian decision. They were thoughtful of the people who wanted to see their grandchildren’s faces just one more time before they died. It was truly brave and clever. I personally think highly of their decision.
Even before the excitement subsided, there was more breaking news.
[Launching of A-Bio’s next-generation hospital]
[Alzheimer’s expert, Professor Koh In-Guk of Sunyoo Hospital joins A-Bio.]
[Professor Rebecca of the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute joins A-Bio.]
[Professor Sung Yo-Han, the first primary doctor of the glaucoma trials, joins A-Bio.]
[The doctors of A-Bio’s next-generation hospital will be the best in the world from the start.]
Articles poured out.
[A-Bio Hospital performing glaucoma treatment and accepting appointments...]
[A-Bio secures small intestine organoid technology and will use it when treating patients with intestinal diseases.]
[Artificial organ technology comes within reach.]
[A new paradigm of intestinal disease treatment.]
[Organoids in one hand, stem cell therapy in the other: what kind of place is A-Bio?]
[More precise diagnoses, more powerful treatment.]
The internet was going wild.
—Holy crap.
—It was the twenty-first century yesterday. What century are we in today?
—They destroyed one of the three blindness-causing diseases. Wtf.
—I don’t even know what an organoid is. Everything that's been coming out recently is so out of this world. All I can manage to understand with my brain is glaucoma.
—Current med student here. I’m glad and also sad at how the amount of testable material is increasing.
—I can’t believe we’re treating glaucoma. My father has glaucoma. I should take him there. Are there a lot of appointments?
—But isn’t it still dangerous? We don’t know if it’s safe or not.
└ It already cured a thousand patients. Cure rate is one hundred percent and the side effect rate is zero. Statistics don’t lie. Don’t ever ignore Phase Three again.
But the good news was far from over. As they had sown many seeds at once, there was a lot to reap. A new drug that was more impactful than the glaucoma treatment or organoids had finally entered clinical trials.
[A-Bio’s Amuc, a type-2 diabetes treatment, enters the first phase of clinical trials.]
This news was so powerful that it completely outweighed all the other good news that came out about A-Bio. Three hundred million people from all over the world suffered from this disease.
Everyone’s eyes were on A-Bio.
As A-Bio showed huge results right before Amuc went into clinical trials, the impact this news gave was stronger. Since they had conquered glaucoma and organoids, areas that seemed impossible, there were high expectations that the same thing was going to be possible with diabetes.
“This is insane...”
Samuel, the editor of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and its journal, Science, was screaming out of joy.
“How many cover-worthy papers are we getting? A type-2 diabetes treatment, commercialization of the glaucoma treatment, and organoids? Organoids?!” Samuel exclaimed in excitement. “Jessie! Should we buy a lottery ticket? With this luck, don’t you think we’re going to win the Powerball or something?”
“We have a lot of important papers, so let’s not get distracted and focus on editing these well. It’s over if we make a bad impression and we lose Doctor Ryu to Nature.”
“Hahaha! Never. But seriously, how can a company like this exist? They got all of this data in just a couple months?”
“They studied type-2 diabetes and glaucoma for over six months,” Jessie pointed out.
“Only six months. Even in the last half century, there was no work that crushed type-2 diabetes this much. And glaucoma was an incurable disease.”’
Ding!
Jessie’s phone rang.
“We got another paper from A-Bio,” Jessie said. “The first author is Carpentier. Study of spinal nerve differentiation with induced pluripotent stem cells...”
“Oh God! Thank you, Father! Thank you for letting me live in the same generation as them!” Samuel shouted.
Jessie tried her best to smile. Samuel stood up from his seat and got close to her.
“What did they do?”
“How should I know? I just got the paper too. In the abstract... Um... It says that they succeeded in regenerating spinal nerves. They performed the treatment on spinal damage model mice and succeeded in making them walk.”
“If this was a civilization game, Korea would claim the Scientific Victory.”[1]
“I don’t play games, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jessie looked through the paper, then found something.
“Oh, but if you look at the letter to the editor, they’re asking us to publish this slowly.”
“Why?”
“It says that they have to put an embargo on the automatic death technology for stem cells for a while.”
“Okay! We can do that for sure.”
“Other than that, Samuel... What do you think? About releasing an A-Bio edition.”
“This definitely deserves a special feature. It’s going to be difficult to choose a cover, but this is crazy. Seriously, if all of this is true, A-Bio will dominate the first fifty pages of this month’s Science.”
“Let’s get an interview from Doctor Ryu when we release the feature.”
“Good idea. You’re going to go, right?”
“Of course.”
“I think A-Bio will publish more papers, so why don’t you just stay there instead of coming back?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I am, but I can seriously consider it if you want.”
“... Let me go to Korea first.”
“Jessie, think about the day when all of this technology gets commercialized and provided to patients. It’s insane. It’s not just a step forward in medicine, you know that, right?”
“It’s like accelerating on a car,” Jessie agreed. “Samuel, the glaucoma treatment kit was commercialized and released, right? I think that will be key. If that is safe and works perfectly all around the world, A-Bio will have a clear path ahead of them.”
“Phahaha. They had one thousand patients for their third phase, and their cure rate was one hundred percent. The power of A-Bio’s clinical data is probably legendary in the pharmaceutical industry. Since it’s the first ever stem cell therapy, Doctor Ryu probably conducted it really strictly because he was worried about people doubting its safety. What kind of accidents will happen?”
Samuel laughed. He said, “Anyway, hurry up and go to Korea!”
“Do you know how many papers I am editing right now? I have to finish that and go.”
“Oh, you can push that back a few days.”
“This is a paper from Harvard Med, too.”
“I’ll talk to them myself if they say something to us because the editing is taking too long. So, hurry along. I’ll book the ticket for you.”
“... Okay.”
* * *
India was called the world’s pharmacy. It was because this was where all types of new drugs were replicated. The reason this was possible was because the Indian government’s patent laws were a little different than the world’s.
Normally, the drug had to show novelty or some sort of special advancement when getting a patent for a new drug. But the Indian government was very generous regarding this issue. They acknowledged it as a new drug even if it was slightly different, and they disregarded existing patents from multinational pharmaceutical companies in their country. They had a lot of conflict with international companies because of this, but the company that had the worst relationship with them was Schumatix.
Schumatix was selling a drug named Gleevec that treated leukemia at a very high price, but India made a replicate drug. Schumatix immediately sued the companies that designed the replicate drug, but the Indian government didn’t care about the international verdict and just protected their own companies. To be completely honest, the Indian government had completely ignored international patent laws.
But it was also true that Schumatix could no longer sell Gleevec however they wanted, making a net profit that was one hundred times more than the production cost, as the Gleevec-replicate drug manufactured in India made its way around the world.
‘If this goes well, the Indian government will also take on some damage. They’re basically failing once at getting on stem cell therapy, the world’s new medical trend.’
Luca Taylor, the CEO of Schumatix, was sitting in his office, lost in thought.
Bzzzz.
His phone rang.
“Hello.”
—It’s Andrew. I’m calling you to give you an update.
“Good. How is it going?”
—Doctor Daniel got a kit and has safely returned to Schumatix India.
“Yes. Yes!”
Luca Taylor clenched his fists.
—We gathered quite a lot of patients, but we are thinking of inducing cancer in one of them.
Andrew said.
—The success rate was one hundred percent for a thousand people, so it would be weird if there were a bunch of cancer patients.
“That’s true. How many patients are there?
—We have gathered around one hundred people. We are only going to induce cancer in one of them.
“Who are they? I hate people like family or something like that begging and pleading, you know that, right? You have to do this as quietly as possible.”
—Of course. We have been advertising that Schumatix India is using the new glaucoma treatment and treating the poor, free of charge, for charity.
Andrew said.
—The Dalit[2], beggars from Mumbai, and a sick, lonely elderly man all the way from New Delhi. It was a hassle bringing him here.
“Who is the target? The old man?”
—The old man is over seventy. Even if we induce cancer in him, it won’t have much of an impact. People might just say that it’s because he’s old since there were no reports of side effects when they treated a thousand patients in the clinical trial.
“Good. Great job. Then, who’s the target?”
—It’s a man named Ardip. He’s in his thirties, and he’s healthy except for the fact that he has glaucoma. He has a limp in one of his legs, but it’s okay. He was born in a prostitution hole, and his mother died as soon as he was born, meaning he has no family. He grew up running errands for the gang members that managed the prostitution hole for food and was beaten regularly. He wasn’t educated and he has no relatives either.
“Alright, good. What stage are you at right now?”
—We have obtained the patient’s somatic cells and have treated it with the first kit. After the dedifferentiation ends, we will begin the surgery.
“Who did you say was the lead surgeon?”
—It is Professor Martin from France. He specializes in eye diseases and is highly respected in medicine. He put his gown on to come to this crappy neighborhood and examine patients in the spirit of service.
“You picked a good person. You set up a CCTV in the operating room?”
—Of course. We got Professor Martin’s consent as well.
“Alright. If we did this much and we release the video, we can sway the public that the procedure itself wasn’t the problem. Let’s use Professor Martin’s reputation,” Luca Taylor said. “No matter how good Martin is, unless he has microscopes for eyes, how can he know whether he has stem cells or optic nerves in his needle?”
—I will contact you if there are any updates.
“Okay. Good work.”
After ending the call, Luca Taylor put his legs up on his desk.
“India. A garbage country that only knows how to replicate drugs,” he said to himself. “This is why Asian monkeys who haven’t properly developed new drugs can’t make it. Look at them opening their markets right away as soon as Ryu Young-Joon makes a product that’s getting famous.”
Other countries reacted quite passively to Young-Joon’s glaucoma treatment. Even though he had results of successfully treating a thousand patients, the government’s regulations did not ease. As it was the first ever stem cell therapy, they were going to see the vibe of how it was going in other countries and slowly lift their regulations.
However, the reason that pharmaceutical companies from all over the world sent their technicians to A-Bio to be trained was that they knew the regulations would be lifted soon; it wasn’t easy to get amazing results like a cure rate of one hundred percent on a thousand patients. They were still prohibiting stem cell therapies because they were waiting for the right time.
But this was an opportunity for Luca Taylor. Once they lift regulations and begin administering the glaucoma treatment, it would be too late for them. It would just be considered a huge outlier among the overwhelming amount of successful results from all over the world.
‘Strike first.’
Luca Taylor had to dominate it first. Before other countries began glaucoma treatment, he had to reveal the side effects to the public and shock them to create a fearful environment.
That was why Luca Taylor picked India. As loose as their regulations on new drug patents were, they weren’t that picky about using new drugs either.
“To be honest, Pfizer, Conson & Colson, A-Gen should all be grateful to me.”
Luca Taylor leaned back in his chair and raised his glass. It was a bit of an early toast.
“I’m giving them time from that pharmaceutical monster. They should use this opportunity to get ahead. Venture companies are like a house of cards, so they’ll come falling down with one hit, and we can steal some people and technology in the meantime.”
He finished his drink.
“A good plan.”
He thought his plan to screw over India, the people he found most irritating, and Young-Joon at the same time was brilliant.
Luca Taylor was satisfied.
1. There are various types of victories in civilization games, one of which is the Science Victory, the ending given after becoming the most advanced in science and technology. ?
2. A word that refers to members of a low-class Hindu group that is outside the caste system. This word was declared illegal in India and Pakistan. It was used in this sentence as Andrew and Luca are being very demeaning and do not view these patients as people, but subjects they are using to screw over Young-Joon. ?
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