Fireside Chat, Interview, Conference Presentation
Ryan Watts, CEO and Co-Founder of Denali Therapeutics
- Denali aims to effectively treat neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS, with a specific near-term strategy of generating value through milestones in lysosomal storage diseases like Hunter syndrome, which carries an expected 90% success rate based on technology rather than biology risk.
- The company initiated a Phase 2 efficacy study for ALS immediately prior to the conversation and expects to begin dosing in late-stage pivotal studies for Parkinson's disease and Hunter syndrome approximately seven years from the company's founding.
- Future outlooks project an evolution toward preventative medicine where patients identify risks via genotyping, fluid samples, and scans, with the expectation that this approach will mature into a reality within roughly 15 years to allow for toxic protein removal before dementia onset.
- Long-term goals involve solving challenges in neurodegeneration within the current lifetime, treating subsets of Alzheimer's based on known genetic architecture and evolving toward precision treatments defined by the molecular architecture of the brain or genome rather than broad disease categories.
- While specific approval dates for preventative medicines remain uncertain, the company anticipates increasing the overall probability of success through continued development efforts despite potential failures in the pursuit of treating genetically understood subsets of Alzheimer's and other unknown subsets.