I'm Sam Tsimikas. I'm a cardiologist. I trained at UCSD. I'm also a physician-scientist, so I'm very involved in research.
Cardiology represents a field that is very action-oriented, and there are a lot of patients with serious cardiology problems. It has a lot of solutions, but it's still the number one cause of death in the Western world. There’s a lot of opportunities for new developments.
In the early 2000s, we were in this void of cardiology where we had statins, but there wasn't a lot of new stuff coming on. And many of the diseases were what we call undruggable. So the field kind of got stuck. And so we needed some revolution of some new technology to be able to address that.
Ionis was the first one really to be able to provide a new approach for many diseases that before could not be treated with medications, and that approach is antisense technology and broadly RNA therapeutics.
ApoC-III came to be discovered as a potential target that modifies triglyceride metabolism. We've actually published the first paper that showed that inhibiting apoC-III reduces the risk of pancreatitis. So that was brand new biology that actually Ionis discovered.
I like to relate this to somebody gets dropped off in the jungle and you need to find your way out. And what Ionis represents is the company that actually found a way out and now we created a path for others.
In this modern age, patients need hope and that's what we offer. Not only hope, but now we offer actual treatments.
My ultimate goal personally, and I hope we can accomplish that at Ionis, is to make these cardiovascular diseases primary care diseases. You get your flu shot and you get your drugs for your lipids and then you come back the next year. That's aspirational, but that's something that we're actively working on to be able to achieve that.
Our legacy should be that we were brave enough to try to find solutions for many diseases and that others then followed us because we were successful. That is an incredible legacy. To be able to say this tiny little company in Carlsbad created treatments for 10 different diseases before anybody else thought of it. That would be an amazing accomplishment, and I think it's realistic.
