00:00Today on Forbes, this secretive billionaire thinks he can cure HIV. Here's why.
00:07It's opening day at the Reagan Institute's new building, a sparkling 323,000 square foot glass and steel edifice on Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
00:18Governor Maura Healey, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and presidents past and present of MIT, Harvard, and Mass. General Brigham are sipping lemon spritzers and nibbling hors d'oeuvres.
00:30A choir of a dozen scientists and staffers start singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
00:36Everyone is here to toast Philip Terry Reagan, the billionaire founder of software company InterSystems, and his wife, Susan, also an executive at the firm.
00:46The Reagans have donated $400 million for research to harness the immune system to fight disease.
00:52Soon, instead of singing, these same scientists will be running experiments in a bid to cure one of the world's most elusive viruses, HIV.
01:02Giving a rare interview, Reagan, who is 74 years old, says, quote,
01:07We started to evolve this whole idea of a Manhattan Project on HIV.
01:12Reagan is referring to America's massive R&D program to build the first atomic bomb during the Second World War.
01:19Reagan, who is the sole owner of InterSystems and is worth an estimated $3.1 billion, believes, despite all good evidence to the contrary,
01:28that we are on the cusp of a similar scientific breakthrough when it comes to curing the estimated 39 million people worldwide living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
01:40It's a bit crazy. After all, huge organizations with vastly more resources than the Reagan Institute have spent decades trying to develop an HIV vaccine.
01:50After years of trials and a $500 million pledge, Johnson & Johnson pulled the plug on its last large-scale trial in 2023, a vaccine based in part on Reagan Institute research.
02:01In total, governments, nonprofits, and companies have spent about $17 billion on HIV vaccine development over the past two decades, per the HIV nonprofit Avac.
02:12Not a single one has made it beyond Phase III clinical trials.
02:17Reagan, however, is not deterred. He says government funders typically evaluate research proposals not just upon their importance, but also on the likelihood of the experiment working out.
02:29That never made sense to him. He says, quote,
02:36He believes his efforts, focused on funding riskier, earlier-stage research, will succeed where bigger players have fallen short.
02:44The need is dire. In wealthy countries, HIV and AIDS have been largely contained by expensive drugs.
02:51But the disease still killed some 630,000 people in 2022, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
02:59The CDC says about 1.2 million Americans are HIV positive. The lifetime cost of treating each person is around $420,000, according to a 2021 study.
03:12Reagan's approach has been to bring together scientists who don't typically collaborate, including doctors, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and virologists.
03:22The goal is to re-engineer people's immune systems to cure them, which could have far-reaching implications for other diseases, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cancer.
03:32Reagan says, quote,
03:41Reagan remains optimistic about the possibility of an HIV cure in his lifetime, in part because he has taken a similarly methodical and long-term approach to building his software business.
03:52In 1978, Reagan started Interpretive Data Services, which he would later rename InterSystems.
03:58While other database management companies like Oracle and SAP offered businesses a way to structure transactions into neat rows and columns,
04:06Reagan took a gamble on a different type of database, coded in an early programming language known as mumps, and organized like tree branches linking back to central trunks.
04:16It was fast and reliable, and soon adopted by the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical records.
04:22InterSystems grew slowly. It took 24 years to get to $100 million in revenue, driven by its two largest customers, the VA and the electronic health records company Epic Systems.
04:35It took another 21 years to get to $1 billion by 2023.
04:41For full coverage, check out Katie Jennings' piece on Forbes.com.
04:46This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
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