Book Chapter: Retrotope-The Next Big Thing
With the permission of McGraw Hill, a pre-publication copy of Chapter 13 from “Get to Aha! Discover Your Corporate DNA to Dominate the Competition” by Andy Cunningham.
What could be better than being part of the Next Big Thing? Who wouldn’t want to have a piece of a Next Big Thing company—an Apple Amazon, Google, Netflix, or Salesforce—right on the cusp of takeoff?
Making the leap from potential Next Big Thing to actual Next Big Thing can be a particularly fraught exercise. Especially in the astronomically expensive, our-way-or-thehighway pharmaceutical arena. More often than not, researchers, scientists, and Big Pharma will have nothing to do with you or your big idea. Retrotope Inc., a privately held clinical-stage pharmaceutical company based in Los Altos, California, faced that very problem in its goal to change aging as we know it and to put an end to the ravages of many degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. To achieve that objective, the company, which was incorporated in 2006, has been advancing a revolutionary unified theory of aging and degeneration that could result in dramatically new approaches to fighting disease. It has also created a new category of drugs composed of
proprietary, reinforced compounds that both treat degenerative diseases and improve quality of life as we age.