Patrick Girondi, a biomedical executive behind San Rocco Therapeutics, reveals how his $150K-per-patient gene therapy for thalassemia was sabotaged by Bluebird Bio and Third Rock Ventures, inflating prices to $3.1M via insider trading, costing taxpayers $230B over 100,000 patients. With backing from the Walton family ($23M) and allies like RFK Jr., Trump, and Pence, Girondi’s company plans a 2026 relaunch, targeting Big Pharma’s monopoly while his son Rocco awaits a cure. The fight exposes systemic corruption in gene therapy pricing and regulatory capture, linking pharmaceutical greed to broader political realignment. [Automatically generated summary]
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And we're back in the Stone Zone.
Joining me now is Patrick Garandi.
Now, if you met Patrick Garandi, you would not know that he's a biomedical company executive who has spent a life trying to find the cures and treatments for rare diseases.
You might think that he was a very hip jazz musician or an A-less celebrity, but Pat Garandi is a respected, well-known leader in the field of rare diseases.
He's traveled all over the world, counseling medical centers on the strategies to be most effective when it comes to rare diseases.
He's devoted his life to curing sickle cell disease and thalassemia after his own son, Rocco, was diagnosed with thalassemia as a child.
An early pioneer in the field of gene therapy, Pat Garandi has fought big pharmacoruption every step of the way in the court of public opinion as well as in the courts to save his own son and others from these debilitating conditions.
It's an honor to have this courageous fighter with us today in the Stone Zone.
Patrick, welcome.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
So let's kind of start from the beginning.
Explain to folks exactly what gene therapy is.
Sure.
So once you identify the therapy that creates a genetic disease, once you know what that gene is, then there's a possibility of delivering that gene to enough stem cells in a patient's body to where the patient defeats the disease or is no longer symptomatic.
And you can do that either by changing the gene, which is called gene replacement, which is what we do, or you can edit the gene, which is what CRISPR does.
So your company, San Rocco Therapeutics, developed a superior gene therapy for the treatment of sickle cell disease.
You would think that this would be greeted as great news, but instead it landed you in court and in the front pages of the New York Times.
So tell us what happened.
Sure.
So my son was diagnosed with thalassemia, which is a cousin disease of sickle cell disease.
Both of them are created by a defective beta-globin gene.
And I was told that my son wouldn't make it to be a teenager.
I dedicated, I was a trader at that time.
And Oprah Winfrey Show, I was an American success story, very fortunate.
And I dropped everything and decided that I needed to cure the disease.
In 2010, my company delivered to the world the first commercial batch of gene therapy.
Up until then, it cost about a million dollars per patient to produce it, and it took about 18 months' time.
Instead, we made enough gene therapy to cure sickle cell disease or thalassemic patients.
We basically made the vector for $150,000 per patient.
At that time, we were sabotaged by Third Rock Ventures and a company called Bluebird Bio.
Bluebird Bio became a high flyer at about $12 billion market cap in 2018.
So this is an extraordinary story.
Big Pharma, basically with a more expensive treatment, blocked this breakthrough technology that you put together, no?
Yes, it's exactly true.
So Bluebird Bio said, you know, in 2013, after they had sabotaged our product, basically, we weren't aware of that yet, but they said that they would treat patients for around $750,000 per patient.
In 2017, when we realized what had happened through discovery in the court system, we went after them.
And in 2020, we finally settled out of court and we were getting back into the business of curing patients.
We were the first actually inpatients in 2012 in a clinical trial in the United States.
Bluebird Bio, however, got approved in 2000, December of 2023.
And instead of charging $750,000 because they didn't have any competition, which was us at one time, so they charged $3.1 million per patient.
We can treat the patients for $800,000.
These are both large sums of money.
To what extent are taxpayers picking up the tab for these treatments?
So there's basically 90% of all thalassemic and sickle cell disease patients are on some form of Medicare or Medicaid.
To treat a patient with gene therapy costs, listen to the company, cost my company, excuse me, cost my company somewhere around $500,000 just for hospital costs and for the creation of the product.
So after you add overhead for the company, et cetera, et cetera, like I said, I promised Bobby Kennedy that we'd keep the price under $1 million per patient for the next 10 years.
But however, like I said, Bluebird Bio for gene replacement charges $3.1 million.
And CRISPR, which is gene editing, and it cures the exact same patients, is charging $2.2 million per patient.
So if you multiply the difference between $3.1 million per patient and $800,000 per patient, which we believe is the fair price, is the right price, times 100,000 patients, the taxpayer is basically theoretically defrauded out of about $230 billion.
Yeah, that's the back-of-the-envelope number I came up with.
At some point, you notified New York Attorney General Letitia James about this precarious situation regarding children in New York State with sickle cell anemia.
I believe you met with her.
What were the results of that?
Yeah, so in 2018, we basically, after we did discovery in our court case, we realized that there was this horrible criminal sabotage that happened, including insider trading.
So Bluebird Bio traded up to a $12 billion market cap that has raised a total of $4.2 billion in the marketplace.
And they were getting ready to treat patients with what we believed was a less safe drug because they were using our first generation of our drug.
And since then, we have improved it.
And so we went to Letitia James' office.
Excuse me.
One of our guys actually met with her, but I met with her office probably 10 times.
We brought her everything.
We brought her all of the emails.
We brought her all of the court evidence, which pointed to criminal activity to sabotage our product and to boost the cost of gene therapy for sickle cell disease.
We went to her first in May of 2019.
We instantly were pushing back and forth all the way until 2024.
And the answer was always the same, that she didn't have the resources to go after the people who were costing the lives of sickle cell disease children.
This is an incredible story.
I have to ask you, as a high school dropout, how did you assemble a team to take on big pharma in the way you have?
Well, initially, I started investing all of my own family money.
Like I said, I was a ragsterich story on Oprah Winfrey.
I was in Playgirl Magazine, is one of America's Most Oliver Bachelors with Magic Johnson and Sylvester Stallone.
So once my son was diagnosed, I stuck all my own money.
I stopped trading and I stuck all my money, own money into curing the disease.
And by doing that, I won a lot of heroes and a lot of people who thought that I was a hero and a lot of people who wanted to collaborate, including some of the top researchers in the United States, including the head of gene and cell therapy at the NIH, Dr. John Tisdale, an incredible person.
And I also attracted the Walton family.
The Walton family, meaning John Walton, they had son Lucas.
Lucas had a rare disease.
We got involved in 1995, and he was partners all the way to 2004.
And the Walton family, over the last 20-some years, have also put in about $23 million into the project.
But by being the father of a sick patient, being very serious about all of this and not chasing the money, just chasing the cure, it actually won me tons of wonderful allies, including Dan O'Connor of Trial Site News, Professor Frank Park, Dr. Lucha Luxato.
It goes on and on and on, all of the wonderful people who are helping us.
Because this is obviously, for some people, not about a cure or treatment, but about making money.
Are you concerned that these powerful big pharma corporations will move to try to stop you again?
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That's always a possibility and always a concern.
We know how these huge multinational corporations work.
For them to knock somebody off is not a big deal.
Somebody dies of a heart attack or gets hit by a car and something like that.
However, you know, I've met President Trump.
I've met Vice President Vance.
I'm very close to Robert Kennedy and him, Senator Tim Scott from North Carolina, have all pledged to make a gene therapy for sickle cell disease and thalassemia, my own son's disease, accessible.
So at this time, if they decide to do something against me, I think they'd have a lot of, they'd have to think about it a real act before they would do something.
But of course, it's always a concern.
Well, we obviously not only pray for your safety, but we pray for anybody who's afflicted with these horrific diseases.
I really think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the standout appointees by President Trump.
I knew him casually before he himself ran for president, had a high regard for him then.
What impresses me most about him is when you watch him prior to his appointment, even prior to his candidacy, running first as a Democrat, then as an Independent, and ultimately putting his own personal ambitions aside to endorse President Donald Trump, forming a powerful new political realignment,
because I think millions of common sense-minded Democrats and independents followed him in the last election.
But what impresses me the most about him is that in any format, whether in a panel or whether questioned about his beliefs, he never makes any statement that he can't back up with solid research from a credible source, whether it's a trial or whether it is a study.
And that, to me, earned my respect.
I also think it was disgusting the way that big media tried to just erase him, just to try to censor him entirely.
So even when he did get on, say, CNN or one of the three networks, they would severely edit his interviews, never allowing him to fully and completely express himself.
It was a news blackout that this administration opposes.
I think one of the three pillars of this new coalition is free speech.
And the fact that he's changed the vaccination advisory board makeup, the fact that he is outlawing certain toxic additives, dyes, and other chemicals in our food, things that have already happened long ago in Europe that will now happen now, shows me that his commitment to make America healthy again is very serious, very much on target.
I notice that he is relentless in his efforts.
I admire him tremendously.
I don't know him as well as you do, Pat, but I think he's among the president's very, very best appointees.
Folks, if you're just tuning in, this is the Stone Zone.
I'm Roger Stone, and we're talking to Patrick Garandi, one of the most respected leaders in the field of rare diseases, a man who's fighting big pharma to bring a less expensive treatment for those with sickle cell disease.
Don't go away because we'll be right back to talk about this David and Goliath struggle and how Pat Garandi has given everything he has for his own son and for others afflicted with this horrific disease.
You're in the stone zone.
I'm Roger Stone.
Whatever you do, please don't touch that dial.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network Zone on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
And we're back in the Stone Zone.
We're talking to Patrick Garandi.
He is one of the most respected and well-known leaders in the field of rare diseases.
He has put his entire fortune and future into the fight against big pharma corruption and an effort to find a less expensive and more effective treatment for sickle cell disease.
He was motivated by the illness of his own son.
If your son Rocco could join us now, Patrick, what would he say?
Well, you know, Rocco has thalassemia, but I've always, I mean, he's never been a thalassemic patient.
He's always been a boy and then a man with thalassemia.
I think he's kind of tired of waiting because since 2010, I've been saying, son, you're going to be cured next year.
You're going to be cured next year.
And these criminals, I don't know what else to call them, have actually cost years of my son's life and the lives and years of many children with sickle cell disease and people with thalassemia and sickle cell disease.
But Rocco is a fighter and he just says, you know, Dad, just keep it up.
Just keep it up.
I'll hold on.
You just keep it up.
It is a riveting and I think highly motivational story.
You can read about the famous San Rocco Therapeutics Bluebird Bio Memorial Sloan Kettering court case.
It was very well covered in the New York Times.
I also want to thank you, Patrick, for that audio clip that you sent me.
Very, very cool.
What is next for your company?
What happens next?
Yeah, so we have now produced enough vector for 60 patients.
We are amending the clinical trial IND.
Like I said, we were the first, ours was the first vector in patients in the world in 2012.
And then again, it was sabotaged by Bluebird Bio and Third Rock Ventures.
But we now are going to start recruiting patients.
The product is 30% more efficient than the approved Bluebird product, which is called Zinteglo.
It's much more patient-friendly than the CRISPR product, which is called Casjavi.
And we're working with Bobby Kennedy.
He's hired, like you said, some incredible people.
His chief of staff, Stephanie Speer, Prasad, Macri, Batharit Shira.
They're all incredible people.
And we're working basically with all of them.
We made the promise, and Bobby made the promise, and Senator Tim Scott made the promise.
President Trump knows about it and is committed, as well as President or Vice President Advance, that we're going to, in President Trump's administration, bring forward an accessible gene therapy for sickle cell disease and thalassemia.
And we're right on target to do that.
We should be treating patients again, the latest by the beginning of 2026.
All right, well, it is an inspiring story of one man's struggle against big pharma.
Of course, our greatest interest is in the children, praying for the children afflicted with this horrific disease.
Patrick, thank you for bringing your story here into the Stone Zone for this inspiring discussion.
God bless you, my friend, and good luck in your struggle to bring a more affordable treatment to the American people.
And I share your high regard for Robert Kennedy and his mission to make all Americans healthy again.
Pats, thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
And you know, I know how influential you were getting Bobby to support President Trump.
And I really do believe that that's what put us over to the top.
So I want to thank you because I was involved in some of those conversations and back then.
So thank you.
You're an incredible patriot, Mr. Stone, and I'm a huge admirer of you and your books.
Thank you and God bless you.
It is really a realignment to change the face of American politics.
Thanks for joining us today on the Stone Zone.
Until tomorrow, God bless you and Godspeed.
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Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.