The Future Of Drug Discovery Is 4 Billion Years Old (Viswa Colluru, Founder & CEO at Enveda)

"Most often, we tend to conflate innovation and novelty. But if I look around, most things that have changed the fabric of our lived experience were actually not new when they did." — Viswa Colluru

For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” The mission is personal: he grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer whose medicine his family couldn’t afford. Many life-changing medicines, including morphine, aspirin, and metformin, originated in nature, but there has never been a reliable, scalable way to systematically explore its chemistry. Colluru founded Enveda in 2019 with $55,000 of his own savings to change that. The company has since identified 18 drug candidates, with three now in clinical trials.

In our conversation, we explore:

• Why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature (and why that was a massive mistake)

• How Enveda built a system to decode unknown molecules in nature

• The deeply personal story of his mother’s battle with leukemia and how it shaped his life’s work

• Why old ideas, from immunotherapy to natural products, often hold the most latent potential

• How Enveda developed 18 drug candidates for about $1 million each instead of $10-15 million

• Enveda’s three leading drug candidates targeting eczema, obesity, and ulcerative colitis

• Why first-in-class medicines capture the vast majority of returns in pharma

• What competitive table tennis taught him about building companies

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Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction to Viswa Colluru

(03:57) His father’s pharmacy and early exposure to Western and Ayurvedic medicine

(07:06) Early pull toward technology

(09:29) His mother’s leukemia diagnosis

(14:24) Studying Biotechnology

(16:07) Graduate school

(17:55) Studying immunotherapy when it was unfashionable

(24:23) Innovation vs. novelty

(27:24) Lessons from table tennis

(32:05) Joining Recursion

(37:10) Learning urgency and courage

(40:42) What launched Enveda

(45:40) The limits of reductionist drug discovery

(49:53) Chemistry-first approach

(52:17) Raising $225K and investing $55K personally

(56:04) Initial studies and targets

(1:04:30) Three categories of leading drugs: Eczema, obesity, ulcerative colitis

(1:13:27) Why GLP-1s are not the whole answer

(1:18:27) Enveda’s long-term vision

(1:21:31) Book recommendation

Follow Viswa Colluru

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viswacolluru

X: https://x.com/viswacolluru

Resources and episode mentions

Books

• Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone: https://www.amazon.com/Hit-Refresh-Rediscover-Microsofts-Everyone-ebook/dp/B01HOT5SQA

• The World of the Cell: https://www.amazon.com/World-Cell-7th-Wayne-Becker/dp/0805393935

• String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis: A Library of America Special Publication: https://www.amazon.com/String-Theory-Wallace-Library-Publication/dp/1598534807

• The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life: https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/0393088812

People

• Satya Nadella on X: https://x.com/satyanadella

• Pablo Lubroth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablolubroth

• David Foster Wallace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

• Chris Gibson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-gibson-5ab66065

Other resources

• Enveda: https://enveda.com

• Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21845-chronic-myelogenous-leukemia-cml

• Gleevec: https://www.novartis.com/us-en/content/gleevec%C2%AE-tablets

• The Moat of Low Status: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-moat-of-low-status-68a

• Learn to love the Moat of Low Status: https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/learn-to-love-the-moat-of-low-status

• Roger Federer vs Pete Sampras | Wimbledon 2001 fourth round | Full Match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uJ2IyL0cPc

• Goliath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath

• Recursion: https://www.recursion.com

• Celebrating the Departure of an Outstanding Employee (Chris Gibson’s post about Viswa): https://medium.com/recursion-pharmaceuticals/celebrating-the-departure-of-an-outstanding-employee-65db2455fd1f

• Silk Road: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road

• Artemisinin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin

• GW Pharmaceuticals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW_Pharmaceuticals

• Cannabidiol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol

• CERN: https://home.cern

• GWAS: https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Genome-Wide-Association-Studies-GWAS

• Charlie Munger’s quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8690661-take-a-simple-idea-and-take-it-seriously

• Modern drug discovery using ethnobotany: A large-scale cross-cultural analysis of traditional medicine reveals common therapeutic uses: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37701812

• Analysis of virus genomes from glacial environments reveals novel virus groups with unusual host interactions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4490671/

• Rinvoq: https://www.rinvoqhcp.com

• Dupixent: https://www.dupixent.com

• Humira: https://www.humira.com

• Singulair: https://www.drugs.com/singulair.html

• Eli Lilly: https://www.lilly.com

• Keytruda: https://www.keytruda.com

• Merck: https://www.merck.com

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