He built a reputation for being a being a savvy investor in emerging markets and mining, and in doing so amassed a personal fortune in excess of £500 million.
Now Jim Mellon is turning his attention to the field of biotechnology as the source of his next “money fountain”. Here in the second installment of a three-part interview we quiz Jim on the potential new medicines that have the capacity to transform society, and discuss how this might happen.
Proactive Investors: Your book paints a Utopian vision of an era very soon in which people will be routinely living to the age of 120. How do you support this thesis?
Jim Mellon: The assertion is based on good science.
Man has been presented by a map of his own existence in the form of the human genome. It is like having a book that you don’t understand and you can’t read.
Gradually the computing power has caught up – and very, very fast.
And by the way you can have your whole body sequenced and get the results back in 10 days at the cost of about $1,000. The first sequencing cost about $5bn.
And the reading of that sequence is going to give all sorts of medical benefits.
For instance if a couple wants to have a child, but one them carries a genetic defect that leads to one of these orphan diseases, that will be pre-selected out at birth. So a lot of these difficult to treat orphan diseases will just disappear in the procreation process.
Proactive: What about the big killer diseases such as cancer? Will we ever conquer them?
JM: In the past slash, burn and poison [surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy] meant a 50 per cent survival rate. Today 80 per cent [of cancer sufferers] survive. So we are already getting there.
The two that bring it down are lung cancer and pancreatic cancer. Better diagnostics and improved, targeted treatments will work too.
Proactive: What other advances are we seeing?
JM: You are going to get a lot more personalised medicine. If you have a variant of one cancer, and I have the other then we will be on different treatments, but hopefully with the same outcome.
I think that cancer will be almost totally cracked in a relatively near future.
The tests and the drugs will go together.
Proactive: But it is not just about cancer is it? There are so called lifestyle ailments such as obesity, and type-two diabetes.
JM: Caridio death is a very interesting. The incidence of heart attacks and strokes has gone down dramatically in the last 10 years.
One factor is lifestyle improvements, such as quitting smoking, which has had quite an impact. The other is mini-aspirin, statins and [cholesterol-busting] beta blockers. I think in the case of statins we will all be taking them like multi-vitamins. And for obesity we have three drugs that are about to be approved in the US in area where surgery is normally the only real alternative.
Proactive: With a growing ageing population neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are a major cause for concern. What’s the prognosis?
JM: Technology is allowing for the first time the unraveling of this most complex and dangerous diseases of our time.
One in two people over 85 has Alzheimer’s. How do we pay for the care that is required to nurse these people? We have to find a cure. And we are much closer to that than many people expect.
Proactive: And is realistic to be talking about living until 120?
JM: Life expectancy for someone born today is 100. How does life expectancy go to 120-130 as we suspect? Well, it is gradualist. So cancer cures might add six years, and the heart attack improvement another three years and the reversal of the obesity epidemic perhaps a couple after that. It is a cumulative progression above the baseline.
Proactive: And what’s the point of living so long, if it is going to be a miserable old age?
JM: What I see is a move from what I call an ‘illderly’ to the ‘wellderly’ population.
Osteoarthritis a very big problem. If you have a fall you end up in hospital and are very likely to die.
By the time we reach 100 there is going to be much higher quality of life.
That transition from ‘illderly’ to ‘wellderly’ will be driven by people like us who see all the problems of old age that we don’t want to happen to us.
So we are going to force governments to make sure certain things happen. And the technology is here now.
There is a lot of work going into osteoporosis, arthritis and without a doubt there is a big improvement on the way.
A lot of the latest treatments for arthritis are disease modifying not just treating the pain. And inflammatory area is going to be a much bigger area.
Jim Mellon’s book Cracking the Code is published by Wiley. For more details, click here.