My name is Leonardo Javier Da Corte Sanchez, I’m a 19 year old biomedical entrepreneur, researcher, founder, and primary investigator of Intranel Labs, a company focused on making life saving medication more affordable and accessible for everyone. I immigrated to the united states from Venezuela 8-12 years ago, and having seen how limited access to basic healthcare and medication can cost lives I knew I couldn’t sit by and let it happen here too.
When my little brother was around the age of two, he developed a serious peanut allergy. Whenever he ate one, or smelled even traces of any type of nuts he’d go into severe anaphylaxis. When I was young, I was eating some chocolate and my little brother got curious about what I was eating, I was around 5 at the time and I didn’t know that he was allergic so I gave him some. A few seconds later he started choking and all I could do was watch while my parents rushed to give him an epi pen. After that day, I promised him that someday I’d help make sure he didn’t have to worry about allergies, and that I’d cure them for him. Thankfully, someone beat me to it, with the food and allergy institute and several other organizations creating cures for allergies, with very high success rates matching their very high costs.
But what about those who can’t afford those expensive procedures? We’ll they’re stuck with what my brother is currently stuck with, epinephrine autoinjectors. However there’s been a longstanding phenomenon in the medical industry where people discover a way to fix a problem at a low cost, and they rack up the cost by 100x due to greed. It happened with band aids, with the infamous case of the $629 band aid, which I found absurd. Because even if they only charged $7 for the band aid, its public knowledge that the cost to purchase band aids in bulk from china is less than a cent, something that many US companies do to cut costs. So if companies are allowed to cut costs, why cant we?
This question has always puzzled me since I was 14, which lead to me joining my highschool biomedical program along with some health clubs. And after hundreds of thousands of hours studying over the course of 4 years, along with 1 year of pure biomedical research into bioethics, the answer for why this happens is still lost to me. Thankfully, my school allows you to take 3 electives, and the second one I chose was business and that one taught me the reason on day #1. Supply and demand, the most simple and overused concept any economics major will hear, if people want something, and they’ll pay a lot to have it, then have them pay a lot. This is why hundreds of medical companies have gotten away with their absurd pricings, and I plan to stop this practice.
This is one of the reasons why I vocalized to my fellow business partners, Luigi Schiavone and William Rivabem that its so important for us to vocalize and advertise our methods of development. Because if we don’t, we might get carried away with pricing and take part of the industry that we sought to end. I want to help people, and I want to be crystal clear while doing so, so I hope you’ll come along in our journey and learn the way we do things.
Thank you for reading!
Socials:
Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonardo-da-corte-sanchez-b8a0ab31b/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leodaborte/
