November 22, 2022 • 51 mins
In this episode, Nick Goldner and Jacob Glanville share their founder journeys and discuss platform technologies in biotech. They delve into the business models of Resistance Bio and Sentivax, strategies for infectious diseases, and the challenges of scientific entrepreneurship. The conversation shifts to fundraising experiences and understanding investor feedback, concluding with visions for the future of biotech.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:10):
I mean, I love how evolution, which is likethis fundamental principle of life, can be
applied so universally across differentdiseases because it's fundamental.
It, like, it is the thing.
That allows change to happen.
And if you understand that, you understandthose rules, you can develop therapies that
just couldn't have before.
(00:33):
Today, an FX bio general partner, Omri Jewelry,is sitting down with Jacob Glenville, founder
of Sentivax, and Nick Goldner, founder ofResistance Bio to go deep on platforms and
biology.
Here's our conversation on how an Evolu areaapproach can lead to better cancer therapies
and universal vaccines, how to make keydecisions as a scientist's founder, and their
advice for fundraising and tech bio.
(00:54):
Let's jump in.
Pete like to say that what doesn't kill youmake you stronger.
But in biology, we know that usually whatdoesn't kill you mutates and tries again.
We see it all the time.
It could be cancer that Pete resistance tomedication, off the medication, and come back
(01:15):
stronger every time.
We can Pete it with bacteria that getresistance to antibiotics.
And new virus strains that can elude immunitywhen we get vaccines.
And so today, we have really amazing, guest.
We have Jake and Nick, Each of them arededicated to solve this hugely important
problem.
Jake is working on viruses with his universalvaccine company, Sentivax, and Nick with his
(01:39):
company resistant bio trying to tackle thecancer resistant problem.
So when can Nick and Jake?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Great to see you.
Okay.
Let's start with a quick, the quick background.
Like, how did you became a satisfactoryfounder, Nick?
Yeah.
I'm a 4 season Pete.
And, during that time, I lose about £30 inabout 3 months.
I lose so much blood during that time that Iactually have to stand up a few minutes before
(02:02):
class is is over to keep from fainting so thatI can actually make it to my next class.
And so while I'm very publicly suffering, fromwhat will be later diagnosed as Crohn's disease
very good family friend of ours, Sonya, this,single mother.
She's a war refugee.
She's the scientist all around badass, secretlybattling cancer.
(02:22):
And so, you know, we're both in this situationwhere the people who are supposed to be able to
help us, our doctors are just at a loss.
They're floundering.
Right?
They don't know what to do.
And so she helps me through this really toughtime.
And after months of searching for an answer,we're both put on therapies that send us in
permission.
And for the first time in a really long time,we both have hope again.
Now fast forward, it's my sophomore year ofcollege, and basically everything shifts.
(02:46):
I'm on this quadruple dose, my my therapy, andI have this in my arm from the surgery.
And as I'm walking away from the hospital, Ihad just fired my because he was like, well,
we'll just put you on more drug, and it clearlywasn't working.
And so, like, I needed new options.
I get this call from signing.
She says, hey.
How are you doing?
And I said, I just got the hospital, and shesays, well, I hope you got good news because
I've got some pretty terrible news, like cancerrelapse.
(03:08):
And, you know, for her, the the the goal Right?
Cause she's a single mother is to survive longenough for her son to, you know, get through
college, get a job, and so that he can thrive.
And so during this time, you know, I I go andget my PhD.
She's, you know, on this new medication.
And while she's, you know, being killed by thiscancer, she dedicates her life to kill cancer.
(03:29):
And we would go back and forth, you know,talking, you know, about what I was studying on
antibiotic resistance and what she wasphysically experiencing home as a cancer
patient.
And with the advances of modern medicine, this,like, just tough as nails woman, like, actually
does it.
You know, she beats cancer long enough, to seeher son thrive.
And, like, I it it was just an incrediblething.
(03:49):
And so in the winter of 21, Sonya passed away,she died of cancer during the height of a COVID
pandemic, because the cancer found a way tobasically beat the best therapies that we had
available, like cancer 1.
And in biology, we often focus on thisquestion, of, you know, what is the start?
How does cancer exist?
You know, where does cancer come from?
(04:09):
But really, we need to be asking ourselves thesecond question, which is How does cancer
survive our best attempts at trying to kill?
Because it can do things that we can't evenpossibly imagine, and that's what resistance
bio does.
That's what we're here to do.
We're here to figure out all the different waysthat cancer can fight back so that we can
develop therapies and diagnostics that helpguide cancer decisions so that we can fight
(04:34):
cancer and let patients win.
No.
You're pressing on the story.
I actually didn't know it, so amazing.
Thank you.
My, my own well, my uncle had polio.
My grandfather died of tuberculosis.
And, I mean, the reality is with Pete talkabout humanity being its own worst enemy and
it's nonsense.
Right?
It's pathogens than our most ancient enemies.
They affect Beller one of us within months ofbirth.
(04:55):
And they kill more than than every generationand every war combined, and they'll they'll
keep doing it.
Because the cancer is the battle with That's animportant one.
We need to attract that too.
This is a battle with without.
There's there's an opportunity with infectiousdisease to eliminate it.
And I think that's what's drawn me to this.
So when I sold my last company, the normalthing to do would be to go out onto a beach for
(05:18):
a couple years.
And I definitely had people tell me that, like,oh, goof off.
Right?
And and the reason I didn't, and the reason Ifounded Cinevax was that I had been building a
technology to focus the immune system on thesites of viruses that can't mutate the the
Achilles heel.
And they all have them.
And we've only really been aware of this for,like, the last 20 years, but flu and
coronaviruses, HIV, they have these littlesites.
(05:40):
And if you can just focus on them, you couldhave broad spectrum vaccines.
And the reason that I felt like I couldn'tleave is that the technology was working.
And, you know, I I've gotten proud of what Idid at Distributed Bio.
I'm proud of that company, but if I look at,like, the legacy of my work, It's like maybe
over 20 years, 25 years that the drugs that Iproduce, the 78 antibody therapeutics, and the
(06:00):
partners will will have its day, and then asmart people will come along and new drugs will
come along, and that'll be the limit of my myperiod of influence in biotechnology.
But with vaccines, I looked at what we weremaking, and I realized, you know, smallpox was
on the face of the pharaohs.
You know, it killed ancient kings.
And yet in 1980, we eradicated That's like aremarkable accomplishment to end the pathogen
(06:21):
forever until the end of time.
And then we stopped.
We we it's ridiculous.
It's like it's almost like space flight wherewe were able to get to the moon and then we cut
it out for 40 years.
And I have to think that we can do better thanthe seventies, particularly in this this
biotechnology revolution that we're currentlyliving in and surfing on, you know, the the
pressure from a recent pandemic.
And So I had this technology, and I'm like, Ican't walk away from this because this would be
(06:44):
the single greatest achievement I could do inmy lifetime to affect the largest number of
people in my own generation and everygeneration that comes after because eliminating
a pathogen is is it's it's it is unique inmedicine that a vaccine can eliminate the
disease.
And so that's the reason I found the companyand drove my wife nuts and and went from out of
the frying pan and into the fire because we hadthis opportunity to go create this broad
(07:05):
spectrum vaccine technology and have that kindof lasting impact that I I just didn't think
any Beller.
Any other work I would do would be able to liveup to that level of accomplishment.
And so I felt that I had an obligation to doso.
And so that's what that Cinevax does is wecreate universal vaccines.
Amazing.
Amazing impact.
And that was the next question, the impact, butit's pretty obvious that if you figure out that
a conserved mechanism of resistance for cancer,you can make a big dent there.
(07:29):
And then if you figure out the common, conserveareas of viruses and create vaccines against
them and eliminate forever.
You know, what a big impact.
And by the way, I think both companies havesome revenge to do prevention cancer and
prevention COVID.
And and the eventual evolution, because whenyou think about it, that's exactly what we're
(07:49):
doing.
That's a bad side of evolution.
Everything that, you know, grows fast andmutates.
There is always genetic changes.
And, especially if you're trying to kill it,you create a lot of genetic, evolutionary
pressure to survive and also survive thrive.
So we need to actually figure out the wayaround it, which is pretty hard.
So we answered about the impact question, but,let me dig a little bit more about the platform
(08:13):
itself.
You know, within effects, we like to invest inin platform technologies.
What make your call take a a platformtechnology?
Yeah.
So the biggest thing so I'm I'm amicrobiologist by training.
So I grew up, you know, studying bacteriafiguring out for instance, purposes, when you
think about resistance, we think aboutantibiotic resistance.
That's the canonical mechanism by which we seefailure when it comes to therapies.
(08:35):
What we were able to do is build a clinicalmodel of resistance pre clinically.
So we were able to take that resistancemechanism, create that environment, Pete it
into the lab.
We were able to identify the target of a, youknow, $1,000,000,000 a year drug where, most of
the information that was known was that it, youknow, broadly targeted the outside of the, cell
membrane.
We were actually able to figure out thespecific, you know, phospholipid that they that
(08:58):
that this thing was targeting because we wereable to understand how the bacteria was going
to change and modify itself.
And so we took this evolutionary approach in myexperience with Sonya and my my own, you know,
disease, you know, was able to understand thatresistance is a universal feature.
It's not something that goes away, Morgansiloed to antibiotics or viruses.
This is really something that the yin and yangof life.
(09:20):
Right?
We get put into this really tough situation.
And, fundamentally, what we're trying to do isfigure out what are the different things,
choices that can be made both, you know, from aperson's perspective, but from a cellular
perspective, how do I survive, you know, inthis really tough environment?
And what we realized was that we weren'tlooking at cancer in the environment that it
was, you know, natively presented.
Right?
(09:40):
We were basically taking calf serums like babycow's blood and plastic and growing, like,
human cancer cells in this, like, these petridishes, and we're like, why doesn't our cancer
drugs work?
Like, what's what's wrong with us?
Like, you know, it's like, well, nobody hascancer that's, like, bathed in cow's blood.
Like, no person on earth has that.
And so why would we expect to get a reasonableresponse of translatable bonds from that kind
(10:04):
of experiment.
And so we went back and looked at all thesedifferent assumptions, and we said, how can we
make a system that's as close to human,environment as how can we create something that
takes into account the entirety of a cancerpatients, you know, treatment?
They don't stop getting treatment after 7 days,but we develop drugs in the 7 day time You
know, they have billions of cells, millions ofcells, and we have to be able to account for
(10:26):
all the heterogeneity and diversity that thosedifferent cells can have in terms of which, you
know, paths that they choose.
But because we're not thinking of this as,like, a diverse, you know, you know, organism
that's separate from, you know, our our bodies,we're thinking of it as just this homogeneous
cancerous blob.
We're losing out on all of the the nuance.
That's important to actually understand thiscancer, which is why, you know, we focused on
(10:48):
understanding cancer resistance and cancertherapies from a genetic standpoint.
We have a particular mutation.
Things are are changing in this particularcancer.
This is the driver of the cancer.
But oftentimes when you target that driver withBRAF, you know, targeted therapies or KRAS
targeted therapies, the cancer basicallyadapts.
They make modifications to that particularprotein because that's not the thing with
keeping it alive.
(11:09):
It's the thing that started the cancer, butit's not thing that's keeping it alive.
And so while we have all of these therapeuticmodalities, whether it's antibody, small
molecules, CAR T therapies, bi specifics.
That was essentially the the bottleneck.
How do we create molecules that target all ofthese different proteins?
Now the bottleneck is kind of shifted.
It's no longer how do we create chemistry andtherapies that go after a particular target.
(11:30):
It's how do we go after multiple targets atonce to fundamentally shut down all the
potential options for a particular cancer.
And right now, there aren't technologies outthere that enable you to see how the different,
targets actually connect together, how they'regonna respond over the long haul.
And that's what our, that's what our, rescuesystem fundamentally does.
We're able to culture these cells, developresistance, and understand that long term
(11:53):
biological problem that they're going to solvefor and then develop therapies that
specifically prevent that from happening.
Amazing.
James?
The question was platform.
The question was so in NFS Bio, we like toinvest in platform technologies and what to
make your call take a platform tech.
So what makes our core tech, a platform tech isis pretty simple and straightforward.
(12:14):
We and many others for 20 years have known whatthe problem is that when you make a vaccine,
And look, I love vaccines.
They're the greatest medical advance insanitation and fire in terms of the number of
people protected, but they do a poor jobagainst rapidly mutating pathogen which is why
the initial waves of great success were againstpathogens that don't mutate that quickly.
So you could make a vaccine.
(12:35):
And even though the pathogen, like the cancers,they're constantly evolving, but some evolve
slower than others.
For the slower evolving pathogens, youvaccinate and the antibodies you produce mostly
are gotten across the pathogen and andtherefore you can knock it out.
The problem is that we have a bunch ofpathogens that evolve much faster.
And they do it on purpose to escape our immunesystems And it's a problem because it means
(12:55):
what you're injected with is not the same thingas what you're infected with and the infection
escapes.
And this is why we're stuck in this Bellerending cycle of having to make a new vaccine
for flu twice a year.
That's why we're updating the coronavirusvaccines and why they gave us all those crazy
shots is because the truth is it wasn't it wasincreasingly different.
The new virus from the original coronavirusstrain, and so they were just boosting you over
(13:16):
and over again to get what little antibodiesyou had left that were relevant to to to be as
abundant as possible.
And it's why we don't have, like, a working HIVvaccine yet.
So that was sort of the problem.
Morgan long time, people were just, you know,tearing their hair and saying, oh, it's
hopeless.
You can never around this, we'll just be stuckin this never ending syssophistician cycle
with, the flu and so forth.
And then this beautiful thing happened about 20years ago, people started saying, wait, Hold on
(13:39):
a second.
Like, when we're looking some people, theselucky devils are hitting some genetic jackpot,
and they're producing these broadlyneutralizing antibodies that we're binding
conserve sites on the virus they're, therefore,neutralizing all of them of a class of, like,
influenza or all of HIV.
And that was, like, sexy for 2 reasons.
One is that told you that the virus has had anAchilles heel.
There's some spot they could mutate or thevirus died.
And if you can get an antibody against it,you'd be protective.
(14:01):
And second, it told you Pete could produce Andas soon as we found that out, then the question
was like, well, wait a second.
Why aren't our vaccines always doing that?
If it's always there, why do we always miss?
And that created the arms race to try to makeuniversal vaccines.
The problem is that the immune system is supercomplicated and diverse, and the tools were
relatively primitive to go crack open the hoodof this engine that wasn't working to try to
(14:21):
fix it.
I just kind of got lucky.
I was at the right place at the right timewhere I started looking in immunology and
computational systems immunology right when thearms race of the better, faster, cheaper genome
sequencer had reached the point that it insteadof in a warehouse, it fit on a bench top.
And I had started applying it to looking at theimmune system of immunized animals and people
try to figure out why we miss.
(14:41):
And problem to make it simple is that there'shuge numbers of ways antibodies can bind to a a
spike protein, and most of those sites couldbind to can mutate.
And it's only a few sites that that don't.
And the odds are, like, a 100,000 or a1,000,000 to 1 to hit the right site, which is
why some people made them, and they publishedon it, but most people miss because the right
answer is hidden in a notion of wrong answers.
And so our technology platform, which thepatent, the Jonas patent, and the series of
(15:05):
patents that follow, or just solve that generalproblem is how do you focus the immune system
on the conserve sites?
And the way we do it is taking an evolutionarysnapshot of lots proteins, mixing them, and
then diluting them so that only the shared sitethat hasn't mutated in a 100 years is at a high
enough concentration by having small amounts ofmultiple proteins, only the shared site is
abundant.
(15:25):
And therefore, the entire immune system focuseson the shared site.
This turns out to work amazingly well.
We've applied it to influenza, and that's thething we're initiating manufacturing on with
the help of an FX starting in January.
We've applied it to, earlier to thecoronaviruses and HIV.
We've even applied it we ask ourselves, wedon't think it's just viruses.
We we think there's other pathogens we couldtackle, like malaria, fungi, some bacteria, not
(15:48):
everywhere.
There's some pathogens like tuberculosis.
It doesn't really mutate quickly to escape, butit's got other problems.
But there's, like, 18 pathogens we can think ofright now that are really important.
We even to test it, we went all the way out tosnake venom, and we took snake venom from 14
species from all around the globe, and we mixedtogether a tiny amount of 14 different.
And that produced ultra broad response.
And that that really speaks to the breadth andthe power of the platform.
(16:10):
And and the other power of the platform is thatit's tractable.
You can build this thing.
Sometimes in synthetic biology, people come upwith some cool thing, but you're you're never
gonna construct it.
It's never gonna be stable in a syringe.
You're never gonna manufacture enough for it tomatter, or it's gonna be crazy expensive.
Whereas our technology, the the power of it isthat we have a lot of flexibility to
bioengineer is what's gonna work right, and wecan mass manufacture it on commoditized
(16:30):
equipment globe, which means we can actuallychange change that globe.
You have to say that's the kind of the joy ofinvesting in companies in the space, not just
the joy of working with you guys, but justthinking about the impact, you know, when the
thing would work, you know, get a revenge onCOVID, one injection to for all to to squash
all the mutation.
But, you know, in in Jurassic Park, they saidthat life finds a way.
(16:51):
So how can you be sure that nature andevolution won't find a way through your
approach too?
Right, Jake?
Sure.
So, I'll answer it and then I I'm I'm I'm sureNick's gonna answer this question as well
because we actually work in very parallelworlds, which is cool.
The 1st generation of vaccines that eradicatedsmallpox and bought got pretty close to
eradicating a bunch of other pathogens.
(17:11):
Those ones overcame.
You know, those ones, all pathogens evolve.
It's just those ones weren't evolving fastenough compared to the advantage of the
vaccines that were offered.
The challenge with the ones that can stillevolve to escape is that we need better
focusing on more conserve sites.
To focus on a conserve Pete, the same thing asto target a pathogen that evolves less quickly
because that site evolves less quickly.
And so all we need is to improve our pacing.
(17:35):
Nature can be clever, but nature's lost to usbefore.
We crush smallpox.
We've crushed most of others.
We can beat this.
It's really just a racing game and putting abetter engine under there.
That's gonna give us that advantage.
The way to think about it with flu is that thesites that we're targeting haven't changed.
One site has changed in thousands of years, andthe other site we know hasn't changed in at
least 200.
And so those that gives you a sense of, oh, howthe hell is it gonna change in the next 20
(17:58):
years.
And and I think it's gonna be tough to winagainst everyone in these pathogens, but I
think we can start eradicating a new generationof pathogens in our lifetimes, and that will
benefit people a 1000 years from now.
Amazing.
And, you know, it's it's always fun to thinkthat we can't we can't be clever, you know,
small human nature.
So Yeah.
It is awesome mutants.
Smash the mutants.
Smash the mutants.
(18:19):
Yeah.
I mean, so I think one of the things aboutevolution that, was really scary to me at the
beginning was that there's so manypossibilities that things could do so many
different ways that a particular cell or anorganism could solve a particular problem.
I mean, like, we're doing that right now with,you know, the thousands and thousands of people
studying cancer.
We're looking at it in a different way, youknow, and applying a different approach.
(18:41):
And so when it comes to cancers, what werealized was that there are a lot of rules that
these cancer play by, but we don't know whatthose rules are.
And so it's gonna do something that it knowshow to do because it either has the, machinery
or infrastructure in place, or it'sproliferating in such a way that it can sense,
(19:02):
you know, when things are going wrong and makeadjustments so that cell maintains that
survivability.
And what we found was that the problem isn'tthat there are too many resistance mechanisms.
It's that we just haven't learned enough aboutall the different evolutionary pathways that a
particular cancer can take.
And so once you start to figure out theserules, and really apply pressure to these
different cancers with the different therapiesthat we've developed as well as novel ones.
(19:23):
What we're able to do is come together withthis kind of atlas of resistance.
What are the, you know, multiple universes withwhich that this cancer can adapt and how do
these different, adaptations interact with eachother?
Because we're we're basically gone from the daywhere, you know, we can go after single
particular proteins in the cancer space.
We have to go after a multiplex you know, amulti targeted approach.
(19:45):
Because if we're not going after multipledifferent sites, we're allowing back doors for
cancers to escape through.
And so eventually, we'll get to a point wherelife won't find a way, but we still have to
understand the rules and the the, the thedifferent, you know, techniques that these
cancers have, to survive.
Now let's switch gears and talk about the darkside, the business mode Right?
(20:08):
So both of you have your bio platform and youmonetize it in a different way.
Right?
So resistance, Beller our pharma companieswhile during that time, get a lot of data that
will allow you to develop your own drugs, whileif Sentipac is actually developing your own
vaccines all the way.
Right?
So can you expand your business approaches andhow your platform allow you to try different
(20:30):
models?
Yeah.
Our, you know, our approach is prettystraightforward.
We are producing a broad spectrum vaccine forinfluenza.
We're initiating manufacturer, and we're gonnastart phase 1 clinical trials.
After that, we're gonna work on phase 2 andphase 3 clinical trials.
And there's non dilutive potential funding fromgovernment agencies to potentially support
because pandemic preparedness and seasonalprotection from influenza is a big deal that
(20:55):
governments care about.
So we it's not a guarantee, but we fit right ina in a place where even before the pandemic,
governments knew that there have been 5pandemics of the last century in influenza
alone and more are coming.
So that's a straightforward model for us, andand we're following the same model, the same
playbook for coronavirus and HIV, line them up,produce them, knock them through.
Along the way, another part of our model isthat they there are veterinary applications for
(21:18):
some of our vaccines.
And, for example, pigs also get influenza, andit's a $180,000,000 per year Morgan.
No.
I don't wanna turn into a veterinary, vaccineproducing company.
My focus is on humans, but, I think that firstoff, they're actually echoing next Flint,
there's a real danger in bioscience wherepeople sometimes produce these very artificial
models, and then they convince them.
So they go through this ridiculous model thatthey've set up to prove success, and then they
(21:41):
Pete shock later when their drug fails.
And it's tautological, and the best way todefend yourself by that is to not work on the
easy and obvious model, like a mouse all thetime.
Miles are a terrible model for flu.
They don't really get flu.
You have to engineer them.
People have come to wrong conclusions for mice.
And also, like, you make the best vaccine for amouse.
Like, you have nobody's gonna buy that.
Nobody cares about versus pigs.
A farmer loves that pigs.
(22:02):
Your vaccine better work.
They they get the same kind of flus we do.
It's a $180,000,000 market, and that's helpfulto us.
So what we do is we are aiming to license thatvaccine out to veterinary groups.
That's an earlier source of revenue for us.
It's also just great, a great opportunity toestablish and get our our our broad spectrum
vaccine technology out and commercialized in amass way.
(22:22):
And as I mentioned earlier, pigs are the majorsource of new pandemics.
So they get infected with human viruses, pigviruses, and bird viruses, and they shuffle
them up on these mega James.
And that's how new pandemic pop out.
And so being able to have vaccinated pigs isone step closer to pushing influenza out of the
human experience.
And so that that's our market.
You can't always do that for every virus.
But anytime I can, I always use the animalmodel?
(22:44):
It might be a little more expensive, but it'smuch more relevant.
There's a market for it, and you're making sureyou build a drug that And I think that that's a
hidden and invaluable part of making sure thatyou you don't waste time on tricking yourself
through an artificial model.
And and so that's that's our business model.
I I actually really love that.
I mean, I think one of the things that'simportant for, people in the infectious
diseases, to to really understand howinterconnected these web reservoirs are.
(23:08):
And so often when you look at a lot of thesecompanies, they're so focused on just, like,
the patient They're not looking at the broaderproblem, and I love this evolutionary approach.
Focus on the problem at the source and alsotake care of it and the patient.
That's not something that you typically see.
Cool.
And, Nick, so what can you tell us aboutresistance, biode, business model, and how do
you apply the the platform approach to to workon different components?
(23:33):
I was listening to, like, Jeff Bezos.
And when he was doing his, like, Amazon, like,what made Amazon Amazon?
And why did he focus on books initially?
And so initially, I focused on bacteria, butthere's really not a market for bacteria
antibiotics just don't work really well.
But there are 100100 of different types ofcancers.
Just like there are, you know, all thesedifferent books.
It's one of the biggest categories of disease.
(23:53):
And each cancer has multiple different subtypesthat you have to understand.
And so to me, cancer was the biggest subset ofdisease that had a, that had evolutionary games
that we could learn in stand without having toworry about, like, outside reservoirs of, like,
resistance coming in, like, you know, cows forantibiotic resistance, you know, bringing that
(24:17):
into the community, most patients who havecancer aren't gonna give their cancer to
somebody else.
And so we can actually look at theseevolutionary trajectories and pathways in a
given patient, knowing that they're not gonnabe spreading different James, from patient to
patient, we could really focus on what doescancer in non small cell lung cancer do?
And how does it, and how does it evolve?
(24:39):
And so what we realized was that there's justso many cancer types out there, and there are
so many targets, that it was almost it it wasa, it was a selfish decision to only bring this
kind of platform internally because it has somany applicabilities to all the different
compounds that are out there.
We really wanted to make sure that we werepartnering with companies So they understood
(25:00):
all the land mines that were in front of theircompact, right, because, like, everybody has to
walk across this field, to go from discoveryall the way through to an NDA approval.
And post marketing, you know, adoption.
And this landline, you know, this this thisfield of landlines that's there, these
experiments to try to, like, reveal where theseland mines are.
We can only Pete, like, a step or 2 in a ahead.
And so what our system allows is for somebodywho's at the preclinical stages, I have a
(25:24):
molecule, I have a particular Morgan, we canbasically reveal to them the entire landmine
field, going from the beginning to the end.
We could tell them does your molecule even havea path through.
Right?
And so we like to partner with companies onreally understanding not only what is the
target that they're going after, but how doesthat cancer respond to that therapy over time
(25:44):
so that we can better hone in the patientpopulation as well as start to identify
combination therapies Flint.
And kind of getting to your point too, Jacob,about, like, this evolutionary conservation.
What we noticed is just much like, you know,those airplanes that airplane design the
Beller.
Right?
Basically,
like, you
know, you had the airplane bomber going in anddropping bombs during the Pacific, you know,
(26:04):
World War 2, and the planes that would comeback that had all the bullet holes those those
were the areas of the plane that you didn'tneed to reinforce because those were non lethal
areas.
Every part of the plane that didn't have abullet hole, that was the part that if it got
hit, it would break apart.
And so we can also start to identify theseevolutionarily conserved spots within the
particular target protein, not just from anevolution standpoint, but from a perturbation
(26:27):
standpoint, many of these proteins have neverbeen perturbed, and so there hasn't been an
evolutionary pressure to change.
And so this allows us to actually figure outwhat are all the different ways that we can go
after this particular protein now that there'sa way to go after and target that in a non
natural way.
And so this allows us to understand this newkind of panacea of evolutionary changes that
(26:49):
happen only as a result of us developingtherapies as a community to target these cancer
types.
Like, we're we're literally creating anevolutionary field that exists before these
therapies Pete, existed.
I actually use that exact same analogy when wethink about our work.
Your stuff is really cool.
So it seems like you you have the ability togo.
You could provide an advice on creatingcombination therapies pretty effectively
(27:11):
because you can basically do the intersectionof the 2 fields and understand how to maximize
restriction points.
Do you also look at staging?
Because it also seems like you might be able toprovide guidance of a molecule on what age is
most appropriate for a cancerous progression.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think one of the biggest things thatwe're running into is a lot of patients are
treated with chemotherapy up front because theydon't know that targeted therapy could be
effective.
And so what happens is we have thesechemotherapies.
(27:33):
You get given to these patients.
They lose their hair.
They lose that, that self dignity.
I mean, these are, these are the quotes fromPete that I've talked to.
And more importantly, what happens to thecancer is you've created, an an event where
you've basically told the cancer to, like,break apart all of its DNA and the stuff that
dies bright the stuff that survives now hasthis recombined genome that's so much more
(27:53):
complicated, so much more difficult to Pete.
And now this patient, because they've giventhem chemotherapy as the very first therapy.
This patient is now on a trajectory of pooroutcomes.
Whereas if they just took the time to figureout what is this cancer doing, what is the
cancer like going to do in the future?
We can actually start to put the right patientson the right therapies up front so that we can
(28:15):
guide the tumor to a state of susceptibilityrather than a state of, you know, there's no
there's no solution.
We can't we've we've screwed up too much.
And so this is a way for us to simplify theproblem, that is so complex.
Yeah.
I love how you create a theater where thecancer is actually you know, doing the
experiment for you.
It actually shows you all the different waysyou can mutate out of the drug.
(28:38):
Yeah.
It's it's kind of like ENDers James, right?
Like, let the bugs tell us, you know, like,love the bugs, you know, like, figure out
exactly all the things that it's gonna do sothat you can beat them.
I mean, that's that's the it's the sameapproach.
Really empathize with the cancer.
Figure out what it wants to do and then usethat as the means of killing it.
The gateway is all the way down.
It's similar to what we do with the the virusesis like I love the viruses that have been
(29:02):
around for a while, like flu and HIV becausethey've given me these massive databases and
sequences, and it does the same thing.
It immediately tells me they can serve sites.
It lets me pick and for the ones that I don'thave as much luxury.
It's like coronavirus is newer.
So we have enough variants to pick, or, butwe've actually built a mammalian displace where
we have a synthetic library of 100 of 1,000,000of novel RPDs.
(29:23):
And we so we searched through that to be ableto better explore a space where nature hasn't
given us the freebie of huge numbers ofsequences.
So it sounds analogous to what you're doing insome ways.
That's very cool.
I mean, I love how evolution, which is likethis fundamental principle of life, can be
applied so universally across differentdiseases because it's fundamental.
It, like, it is the thing that allows change tohappen.
(29:44):
Right?
And if you understand that, you understandthose rules, you can develop therapies that
just couldn't have existed before.
And, I'm really excited to see what the worldlooks like.
With these new vaccines and, you know, withthese new cancer therapies.
Yeah.
The the reason why, both of you are in thispodcast together And that's a great segway for
the next question because, you know, you allyou all have amazing platform companies, and
(30:08):
platform companies means that you can do a lotof things as part of the beauty of the company.
You you have many indication you can go after,and and you can publish some of them.
It opens up a lot of doors, on the businessside.
But then the one of the major pain points forall our companies is deciding what to do first
because you can do so many things and you don'thave enough money to do everything that you
wanna do.
(30:29):
So the main question is like, how do you decidewhat to tackle first?
Like, you know, how do you choose?
So I choose in the same way that cancers in ourbody chooses who takes over and the virus is
chewed.
And that is you you have them Beller it out andthen may the fittest one win.
And So what I do is I ask myself what are thevarious applications that we could work on, and
(30:50):
you know that each one that you work on is anopportunity cost to work on a different one.
And so you rank them and you make a decision ofwhat's the coolest thing you could possibly
work on.
I've done this my whole life.
I like coming up with new ideas.
What I typically do, I have a series of blackbook behind me.
And I write them down in that book, and Iignore it for a couple of weeks, and I come
back and continuously review.
And over decades of doing that, what ispercolated to the top are the things that I
(31:12):
think of all the things in there.
These are the coolest.
These are the most Morgan, and these are thethings that have the biggest impact.
And therefore, nothing else deserves to climbup above that in the ladder.
And and that forces you, first off, to pickyour your greatest works to work on, and it
gives you a sense of, okay.
I I know that I could do that, but if youjuggle more than too many balls, you're gonna
start dropping them.
And and so that's basically the strategy is amerit based dominance of, of the most valuable
(31:37):
target areas.
And The other principle is there should be, anetwork of relatedness.
If you're working on more more than one thing,there should be active synergy between the
things.
So the empowering one empowers the other.
If you're working on 3 disparate things, that'sthe worst case scenario.
If you're working on 3 things that are allactually same thing in their Flint and learning
from one thing empowers the other.
(31:57):
And you have, tools that they're all gonna flowthrough, then what you have as a pipeline and
your invite in for any any any optimization onany step of that pipeline will benefit all of
the programs.
And that that's that's that's where you'resurfing.
That's where you really wanna be on top of thatwave.
And so that's that's our tactic.
Think that last piece that I listened to my mylab team was just like, Jake, no more.
And so then, that also is the feedback point.
(32:20):
Yeah.
I think I think for us, we So we didn't thinkwhat we initially offered was cool enough.
And so, like, for us, like, we, we developedthis this box.
We drove resistance to it.
Created the cell population, identified acombination of drugs, drove resistance to that,
then identified a triple combination thatprevented the cancer from, like, actually
evolving or escaping.
So we spent a whole bunch of time building thisthing because we thought that anything less
(32:43):
than that wasn't going to be sufficient for ourpharma partners And then we started talking to
our pharma partners.
They were like, wait, wait, wait, you cancreate a cancer resistant cell line, and it's,
like, accurate.
We were like, yeah.
Yeah.
But, like, That's not the cool part.
The cool part is that we can make combinations,and then we've done it.
Like, that's a great part.
They're like, no,
no, no, I don't
give a I don't care about that part.
I care about the fact that you were able tocreate stable resistant cell line with novel
(33:07):
compounds and existing ones, and it was, like,relevant to the patients.
I'm like, yeah.
Yeah.
But, like, that's that's easy for us.
Like, that's not the exciting thing.
It's like, all this other stuff.
It's like, no.
We had to listen to our customers, and ourcustomers told us This is what we want.
This is where your technology fits in, and allof the stuff that we wanna do later on, it
(33:27):
still fits into the process.
We had to figure out where are we gonna sell,this technology first.
And once we found that kind of access point,that was where we were able to then develop
those technologies and really focus on thatpart.
And I think if I had, like, a superpower, itwould be clarity.
Like, how could I tell the story to my team andto our investors and to our stakeholders in the
simplest, most impactful way possible.
(33:49):
And if I could do that, like, everything elsewouldn't matter.
Right?
Like, I could hire the right operations people.
I could hire the right scientists.
Because I could tell a compelling andconvincing story.
And that's really what I focus on in my day today is how do I simplify my message, to be that
person?
It's so fun.
It reminds me of first ball meeting where I I Istopped after half the meeting.
(34:09):
I I I told you something to the point of, like,some companies are telling you to shut up and
take our money.
Yeah.
And it's very possible.
Why why aren't you taking their money?
Beller, we weren't really sure
if it
was gonna be good enough.
You know, it's like all that, like, impostorsyndrome.
And then, like, when you had people, like,telling us that, like, hey, you actually have
something that's not, like, correct, but it'slike, where's money?
(34:31):
It was like that retraining of that academicmind.
Right?
Like, it's, you know, it's, it was difficult.
And so I I think that's the thing that I wouldalso recommend, like, scientific founders is
really take all of the learning that you got ingrad school, especially the negative stuff
around the culture, that stuff and really askyourself, how does that, help or hinder me
(34:51):
moving forward?
And what about this, this environment?
Can I create in, in my company?
That's gonna actually make the company better.
Cool.
So, again, moving to another gear.
So both of you have recently raised your seedround benefits, you know, we love to be able to
lead those rounds.
I guess I'll start with Jake because we justannounced today about your 10,000,000 that
(35:14):
around.
But what did you learn during the fundraisingprocess?
And what question did investor ask you themost?
Sure.
So first off, thanks in effects.
Woo hoo, Some of the things I'm gonna say areunique because of the I was I would spare to
say this was a unique funding cycle in thislast year.
But I I came into it kinda unique because in mymy last company distributed bio, I never
(35:34):
fundraise for it.
It was profitable from the We took a $1,000,000loan at one point from a group called Broad
Oak, but otherwise it was always profitable.
And so it was like a professional at doingbusiness pitches for partnerships.
And we did 78 antibody discovery andoptimization campaigns, but I never did venture
pitching.
So I and I I built up that business and look,that works, and out of it, but the truth is if
(35:55):
you wanna do something really big, that's notgonna cut it.
I can build a service business like that, and Ican get to a certain level.
But to change the world, it's not That's notgonna work.
And so to get into clinic and to reallyescalate, you need partners.
And it's it's not just the money.
It's also that you guys have, like, globalnetwork and you have expertise, and you've
watched a bunch of companies go through thisprocess successfully.
And all of those things are critical to go tothe next step.
(36:17):
So my experiences were, I would say initially alittle rocky.
I was, like, getting ready to do it, and I wasrealizing the culture is a little different,
right, because the the type of things that youcare about in a are gonna be different.
And the other one was I learned pretty quickly,but there was a boot up phase of being like,
okay.
There's certain expectations of the structureof a data room and the structure of pitch deck.
And the structure of the kind and the thepacing of, various activities to basically
(36:39):
prove that you have your ship together.
And and and to make digestible.
It's not just enough that it's in there.
It needs to be kind of in a cultural formatthat people are used to reviewing to try to to
be respectful to the time of the personreviewing it.
If it looks weird, it's gonna be harder forthem to look So I think that was a little bit
of my my early boot up phase.
And then, the kinds of questions they ask, Idon't know, they all kinda sense to me,
(37:00):
honestly.
Like, I I learned to do business really from myfather running a restaurant in a hotel in
Guatemala, and it's like, this businesstranslates everywhere.
You have basic things.
It's like, okay.
Can you build it?
Can you get people to show up to buy it?
Do you have the right group of Pete?
And are they doing the right things?
And and, you know, are you gonna be able toacute and how are you gonna handle it when
things go wrong?
And I think though and and is it gonna makemoney?
(37:22):
Have you priced everything successfully?
Have you expressed that market?
And so I think those things come relativelynaturally to us.
There's unique aspects of because you'rebuilding into an existing market, but you're
gonna disrupt it in some ways.
There's gonna be differences and you need tohave a strategy in place I felt that we were
strong on areas of responding to the planbecause that's what we're naturally good.
You know, having gantt charts and every s oSOSs Morgan SOWs organized Like, I was in the
(37:46):
CRO space, so I know how to navigate itextremely well and and leverage it effectively
as opposed to what we do in house.
The interesting questions for me were Also, thequestions I had back to the VC groups.
I was like, you guys have seen a lot ofcompanies succeed and fail.
Like, I wanna know, what am I missing, or whathave you succeed?
What is what's that thing where you see it?
You know, I go sounds good.
Or if you see it, oh, that sounds like aproblem, because I've seen I've been to that
movie before Morgan things messed up.
(38:07):
And so I would I think I asked those questionsback a lot, And I took notes on the questions
people asked me.
In general, they were technical to, you know,what's your strategy for manufacturer?
And that's a that's a basic kicking the tiresquestion to make sure that you're in someone's
not coming in the room with an idea and no planto execute.
And so those were easy.
I think there were questions about how toevolve a team as you grow, As one example, I
(38:27):
would say over the last year, I've increasinglygot interested as we go forward.
Ultimately, I'm gonna get, like, a chief ofstaff or something.
I think as right now, the size It's Flint, butfor instance, the distributed bio as we got to
above about thirty people, that became veryimportant for me to have someone who basically
Pete act as a chief of staff internally to tokeep track of everything Those were questions
that were important.
I think some of the questions also were kind oflike, who you know and where that network was
(38:51):
and the realization that being able to to knoweverybody in this space, know them well and be
able to pick up a phone call just to respecttheir time so you don't waste time with a
meeting and also get their insights.
That's really powerful.
And now that's something I'm gonna be focusinga lot of my time on in the next few years is
growing outside of I have a great network inbiotechnology and the people building antibody
drugs.
I think what I wanna be focusing on over thenext few years is building just a dynamite
(39:12):
network among the global investors, and and andthe decision maker for vaccine licensing and
partnership deals in pharmaceutical companies.
So, I I got my I cut my teeth in the businessworld, when I was an office furniture salesman
for my dad.
He had an office furniture Morgan.
And, so, like, I would do Pete sales, like,during, like, the economic downturn of 2008,
(39:35):
2009, my job was to call businesses that hadjust laid off a whole bunch of people and get
them to buy office furniture, for the peoplethat no longer work there.
And so, like, for me, it was really trying tounderstand what was the problem that they
needed to solve for.
Right?
And for them, oftentimes the problem was, youknow, they had just, you know, laid off a whole
(39:58):
bunch of staff.
And so what they wanted to do was a refresh thecompany, right?
They were, they were gonna have to bring in newpeople once the economic downturn, you know,
you know, left, you know, came back.
And so they wanted an office that was going torepresent that new kind of fresher face.
And so even though they had let go a wholebunch of people and it was painful, this was an
opportunity for them to get rid of their oldstuff and, like, feel like the company was
(40:18):
still successful even though the numbers didn'tnecessarily say that.
And so that was how we were able to sell justlike tons of office furniture to these
companies and also increase our our, you know,inventory of used furniture because people
still wanted that.
And what what that really taught me was thatyou have to get the right message to the right
(40:39):
person.
And if you're not aligned on what theirobjectives are, and what their pain point is.
It's gonna be really difficult to sellsomething, right, Beller it's VCs or partners
or whoever, And so I I really took a lot ofthat experience, with me, to to to this, kind
of investment section.
(41:01):
And, one of the things that I learned both, atOffice furniture sales and with this is that
fundamentally it's about, you know, how wellyou show up and how well you execute on the
things that, you're asked of.
Right?
Like, you know, are you responsive?
Are you following up in a timely manner?
Because for most Flint intents and purposes,this is maybe, like, the 1st or second time
(41:21):
that you've ever interacted with these VCs, andthey're not gonna know you from, you know, the
tube of toothpaste.
They need to know what your trajectory is.
And if you can demonstrate that you're a fastmover, that you do the things that need to get
done, and that you can hear the investoreffectively so that you can answer those
questions.
That's really where I think the bestpartnerships come in.
(41:43):
And then also just making sure there's a goodfit with the investor that you're working with
and the investor, you know, like, and you,right?
Like, you have to make sure that thatpartnership is there.
There were a number of people that we couldhave taken money from that I think would have
been a bad Flint, with this economic downturn.
They would have wanted us to spend money, and Ithink Andre did a great job of guiding us on,
you know, understanding our products and reallypushing us towards revenue.
(42:07):
And so, like, you know, being confident in yourown business model and then identifying people
that really, you know, understand it, I think,is important.
That's very smart.
I wish I was as smart as you when I raisedmoney when I was a scientist founders, founder
back in 2011 because, you know, I looked back.
I had, I have a folder full Pete decks that Iused.
(42:27):
I think I counted them a 148 different versionof my peach deck.
And after I've been an investor for, like, aweek, I looked back my Pete deck and I say, oh
Morgan.
I'm so stupid.
I didn't know.
I didn't know how it was to think.
And I didn't say I and, like, I I talked I toldall the things they don't care about Like, now
that I'm investor and now I think it's soobvious to me.
(42:48):
And I try now to talking to founders to tellthem, like, the truth.
Like, you always get what you incentivize inthe end, you want to make money, especially
like, look, if your company is successful, wedid huge impact in the world, but we also made
a Pete ton of money which is that's the best ofboth worlds.
Right?
So and because of the power law of investingwhere most of the companies will not return any
(43:09):
anything and only a few will matter you needthat any each investment that you make will be
something that has a potential to return thethe fund.
And the question we ask are those?
Like, is it big enough?
Can it be big enough to develop fun?
You have defensible magic technology, and areyou the right people to execute on this,
defensible magic technology in this hugeMorgan?
To be turned off on.
So once you understand that, you know, how youtell the story is way easier.
(43:33):
In that regard, like, what what advice wouldyou give Beller platform founders, these
founders in tech buy or looking to raise,especially right now with this downturn.
So I guess the biggest thing for me is, youknow, we're we're we're both talking about
evolution Right?
And I think the point that you made, Omry, wasthat, as you go through these pitches, you have
to make adaptations and change.
And so I think really the thing that I wouldadvise, you know, these academic scientists and
(43:57):
founders who are really used to failure andseeing failure in their day to day, is to
recognize that's not a failure.
That's an opportunity to learn and grow.
And so use that feedback that you get from yourinvestors.
Use that feedback that you get from thedifferent interactions that you have, not as,
like, a criticism of you.
But as a opportunity to get stronger and betterand just really focus on, taking in as much
(44:21):
that feedback as possible.
And, sorting through it and then, you know,being the best version that you can be.
Yeah.
I think that's that's great advice.
I'd echo it.
I think, And then the prowess once told me,she's like, when you go into the pitches, she's
like, this is exactly what Omri said, and thatwas my experience too.
When I first went in, they were rough.
I revised those slides Pete.
And and because I was also I was culturallyadapting from, like, sales to biotechnology
(44:45):
research groups to VCs.
And, she's like, the the first ones are gonnastuck.
People are gonna give you advice.
And I think I'm quoting her as close as I canher.
She's like, no more will someone give you morehonest advice as of the moment when they
explain to you why they're not going to Andshe's like, it sounds difficult, but it's a
gift because they'll say, this is why your babyis ugly.
And what it you can take from that is you canlearn Okay.
(45:07):
What did I because I know my baby is beautiful.
What did I do to fail to communicate it?
And unless you refine and focus, he lets youunderstand how to change the model if
necessary.
Unless you move forward, if it's hard forpeople to hear that stuff, and I think, you
know, academics are trained not to likenegative feedback, but you gotta hear it
because it's it's good business.
You advise.
It's good pitching advice, and and you mightlearn something useful to let you focus your
(45:28):
your your company.
Find a way to get someone in the room to writeit down for you and then to spend some time to
review it.
I think that's helpful.
I also have some practical advice.
I think, like, I'm enamored by in an earlystartup, right, when it's getting started.
I think there's various stages where seedfunding can happen, but, like, right in the
first you know, year or a few 1st few months.
There's, like, safe instruments for friend andfamily I find very effective.
(45:50):
I think my impression is that many startupgroups that I meet with.
I think they they spend money stupidly earlyon, and I just I'd have someone in the room as
cheap and, like, make them with power.
Because I think it's it's so easy to watchpeople do a series of choices where they're
willing to spend stupid amount of money earlyand then they're whining that they ran out of
it.
Also, be willing to take sacrifice It's like, II I find this frequently where people are like,
(46:12):
oh, Jake, I wanna work with you, but I can'ttake less than this amount of salary when I'm
creating a startup.
And I'm just like, honestly, I don't think youhave the risk profile for start Like, you want
the big reward, but you don't want the risk.
Like, I'm I'm gonna warn you this is gonna beharder than you think.
It's gonna take longer than you think, andyou're gonna have to be dedicated to it.
And so it's the personality you should be youbelieve in what you're building and you're
gonna bring something new, you should bewilling to take sacrifices to achieve it
(46:33):
because there's a reward that's happening atthe end.
And that's honestly gonna align you to get youout of bed every day if you're if that's the
kind of thing that motivates you.
So those are the advice I'd have.
I also just have friends of mine that havestartups.
I I I met a lot of them.
I see varied groups.
Some of which smell like victory to me, andsome of them might feel like they're really
gonna struggle.
And and one area is I think if it's onlyacademics, it's quite possible you have a group
(46:55):
with a very large set of blind spots and youmight not not have anybody with reasonable
business sense, in which case, get somebody inthere who can do that because otherwise you're
gonna all happily burn the company to theground overspending and not being focused.
And so those are, I think, are the the the keythings to be able to do early on.
And and the last thing is, you know, connect upto the network and get funded because it's
(47:15):
gonna tap you into a network, and that networkalso is going to identify blind spots for you,
help you polish them, and help you what you'reworking on.
It's gonna force you to even get there to beable to do that with your company.
I think those things are all gonna help you,drive to that point where you you have you have
something beautiful and you're you're you'resending it up the ramp.
I I think just one last thing to that, don'tdon't involve your PI and your startup company.
(47:40):
If you're a Pete student or a postdoc, likegraduate, get out of the lab, then do your
thing.
Make sure that there's a really cleanseparation, it can cause a lot of problems that
you don't necessarily need to worry about.
You're both building really exciting companies.
Let's talk about the future.
Right?
If you could look into the future, what do youhope your platform accomplished?
(48:01):
So I don't know exactly where humanity's going,but I know at some Flint, it's gonna be without
pathogens.
And this is something that we don't even haveto demonstrate this generation.
They did it in the seventies.
We are in a golden age, and so a lot of thatwork could be done right now with our hands.
We're not I don't think my work right now isgonna solve every path Some of them are really
tough and really difficult, but I think if wecould eradicate a few of them in my lifetime
(48:24):
and, you know, I'm greedy, so I wanna go afteras many as possible.
That is a lasting legacy that will benefitevery generation of humanity until there is no
more humans left, whatever that ultimate latemay be.
And so I think that is a worthy worthyexercise.
Like, I I grew up in a little Morgan Village inGuatemala, and I I watched as I returned, Pete
(48:45):
traveling to the states that over year afteryear, the new generations of kids were like a
foot taller than their parents.
And what what happened was they started handingout deworming medicine in the school.
It turns out giving deworming medicine causedpeople to massively change their height
compared to all the generations.
Like, by the time I was 10, my brother and Icould look across the entire market and we
could see each other because we were tallerthan everyone in Santiago.
It was not genetic.
(49:06):
It was driven by chronic, pathogen.
In fact, infection malnutrition.
And giving that medicine wasn't just they gottaller.
It means they could focus better in school.
They could be more productive in their Currier.
It led to, like, more healthy lives and lettingpeople spend less time on medicine and fixing
broken Beller and more time on doing whathumans are fundamentally man magnificent at,
which is creating new and wonderful things.
(49:27):
And so I think that's the future that I see isthat these pathogens don't need to exist
anymore.
We already managed to kill 1.
We can kill again.
And if we wipe them out, it's a it's a serviceto every generation that happens afterwards.
And and I and the future at some point is goingto be a key feature without humanity of without
pathogens, and we should, we should work to getthere.
So that's what I see.
I mean, I, I'm looking forward to that.
(49:48):
I mean, frankly, the, the reason why cancer isgonna become a more problematic thing to treat
is because, you know, antibiotic resistance andvaccine resistance is gonna become more and
more problematic, and it's actually gonna startaffecting you know, cancer therapies.
Pete mean, the reason why cancer is a problemis because like you said, like, we actually
have medications that allow people to livelonger and healthier lives.
(50:09):
So for me, you know, it's gonna be pay peopleliving long enough to get cancer, right, you
know, because we are all alive because we'vegotten these, you know, deworming medications
or these, you know, rat, you know, gettingkilled by the flu.
And so for me, it's really taking cancer andthe fear of what that death sentence looks like
when you hear the words cancer, and reallyturning it into something, you know, treatable
(50:34):
chronic.
You know, it's it's no different than Crohn'sdisease or, you know, I antibiotic and fiction
from, you know, years past.
It's something that's treatable.
It's known, and it's not going to, do thatdeath sentence that it was before.
Yeah.
And your work is permanently necessary because,you know, cancer bubbles from within.
It's gonna be with us for as long as humanityexists.
(50:54):
And so the work you do in this generation isgonna give that lasting value transforming how
we interact with cancer for every generationthat follows.
So I look forward to living in your futureworld as well.
Yeah.
Look, this is a great place to end.
It's really inspiring working with you.
And, again, this is the fun part of investingin what we call this intersection biology
technology where if you are successful, You'regoing to make a lot of money, but also, you
(51:18):
know, a huge impact and lasting impact on thehealth of people.
So Again, pleasure working with you.
Exciting to work with you and exciting to seehow the world looks with with everything that
you're doing.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having us on.
If you liked this episode, be sure to sharewith friends or founders who may like these
insights.
Also, be sure to subscribe to the InFX podcaston the platform of your choice.
(51:41):
And thanks for listening to the InFX podcast.
I mean, I love how evolution, which is likethis fundamental principle of life, can be
applied so universally across differentdiseases because it's fundamental.
It, like, it is the thing.
That allows change to happen.
And if you understand that, you understandthose rules, you can develop therapies that
just couldn't have before.
(00:33):
Today, an FX bio general partner, Omri Jewelry,is sitting down with Jacob Glenville, founder
of Sentivax, and Nick Goldner, founder ofResistance Bio to go deep on platforms and
biology.
Here's our conversation on how an Evolu areaapproach can lead to better cancer therapies
and universal vaccines, how to make keydecisions as a scientist's founder, and their
advice for fundraising and tech bio.
(00:54):
Let's jump in.
Pete like to say that what doesn't kill youmake you stronger.
But in biology, we know that usually whatdoesn't kill you mutates and tries again.
We see it all the time.
It could be cancer that Pete resistance tomedication, off the medication, and come back
(01:15):
stronger every time.
We can Pete it with bacteria that getresistance to antibiotics.
And new virus strains that can elude immunitywhen we get vaccines.
And so today, we have really amazing, guest.
We have Jake and Nick, Each of them arededicated to solve this hugely important
problem.
Jake is working on viruses with his universalvaccine company, Sentivax, and Nick with his
(01:39):
company resistant bio trying to tackle thecancer resistant problem.
So when can Nick and Jake?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Great to see you.
Okay.
Let's start with a quick, the quick background.
Like, how did you became a satisfactoryfounder, Nick?
Yeah.
I'm a 4 season Pete.
And, during that time, I lose about £30 inabout 3 months.
I lose so much blood during that time that Iactually have to stand up a few minutes before
(02:02):
class is is over to keep from fainting so thatI can actually make it to my next class.
And so while I'm very publicly suffering, fromwhat will be later diagnosed as Crohn's disease
very good family friend of ours, Sonya, this,single mother.
She's a war refugee.
She's the scientist all around badass, secretlybattling cancer.
(02:22):
And so, you know, we're both in this situationwhere the people who are supposed to be able to
help us, our doctors are just at a loss.
They're floundering.
Right?
They don't know what to do.
And so she helps me through this really toughtime.
And after months of searching for an answer,we're both put on therapies that send us in
permission.
And for the first time in a really long time,we both have hope again.
Now fast forward, it's my sophomore year ofcollege, and basically everything shifts.
(02:46):
I'm on this quadruple dose, my my therapy, andI have this in my arm from the surgery.
And as I'm walking away from the hospital, Ihad just fired my because he was like, well,
we'll just put you on more drug, and it clearlywasn't working.
And so, like, I needed new options.
I get this call from signing.
She says, hey.
How are you doing?
And I said, I just got the hospital, and shesays, well, I hope you got good news because
I've got some pretty terrible news, like cancerrelapse.
(03:08):
And, you know, for her, the the the goal Right?
Cause she's a single mother is to survive longenough for her son to, you know, get through
college, get a job, and so that he can thrive.
And so during this time, you know, I I go andget my PhD.
She's, you know, on this new medication.
And while she's, you know, being killed by thiscancer, she dedicates her life to kill cancer.
(03:29):
And we would go back and forth, you know,talking, you know, about what I was studying on
antibiotic resistance and what she wasphysically experiencing home as a cancer
patient.
And with the advances of modern medicine, this,like, just tough as nails woman, like, actually
does it.
You know, she beats cancer long enough, to seeher son thrive.
And, like, I it it was just an incrediblething.
(03:49):
And so in the winter of 21, Sonya passed away,she died of cancer during the height of a COVID
pandemic, because the cancer found a way tobasically beat the best therapies that we had
available, like cancer 1.
And in biology, we often focus on thisquestion, of, you know, what is the start?
How does cancer exist?
You know, where does cancer come from?
(04:09):
But really, we need to be asking ourselves thesecond question, which is How does cancer
survive our best attempts at trying to kill?
Because it can do things that we can't evenpossibly imagine, and that's what resistance
bio does.
That's what we're here to do.
We're here to figure out all the different waysthat cancer can fight back so that we can
develop therapies and diagnostics that helpguide cancer decisions so that we can fight
(04:34):
cancer and let patients win.
No.
You're pressing on the story.
I actually didn't know it, so amazing.
Thank you.
My, my own well, my uncle had polio.
My grandfather died of tuberculosis.
And, I mean, the reality is with Pete talkabout humanity being its own worst enemy and
it's nonsense.
Right?
It's pathogens than our most ancient enemies.
They affect Beller one of us within months ofbirth.
(04:55):
And they kill more than than every generationand every war combined, and they'll they'll
keep doing it.
Because the cancer is the battle with That's animportant one.
We need to attract that too.
This is a battle with without.
There's there's an opportunity with infectiousdisease to eliminate it.
And I think that's what's drawn me to this.
So when I sold my last company, the normalthing to do would be to go out onto a beach for
(05:18):
a couple years.
And I definitely had people tell me that, like,oh, goof off.
Right?
And and the reason I didn't, and the reason Ifounded Cinevax was that I had been building a
technology to focus the immune system on thesites of viruses that can't mutate the the
Achilles heel.
And they all have them.
And we've only really been aware of this for,like, the last 20 years, but flu and
coronaviruses, HIV, they have these littlesites.
(05:40):
And if you can just focus on them, you couldhave broad spectrum vaccines.
And the reason that I felt like I couldn'tleave is that the technology was working.
And, you know, I I've gotten proud of what Idid at Distributed Bio.
I'm proud of that company, but if I look at,like, the legacy of my work, It's like maybe
over 20 years, 25 years that the drugs that Iproduce, the 78 antibody therapeutics, and the
(06:00):
partners will will have its day, and then asmart people will come along and new drugs will
come along, and that'll be the limit of my myperiod of influence in biotechnology.
But with vaccines, I looked at what we weremaking, and I realized, you know, smallpox was
on the face of the pharaohs.
You know, it killed ancient kings.
And yet in 1980, we eradicated That's like aremarkable accomplishment to end the pathogen
(06:21):
forever until the end of time.
And then we stopped.
We we it's ridiculous.
It's like it's almost like space flight wherewe were able to get to the moon and then we cut
it out for 40 years.
And I have to think that we can do better thanthe seventies, particularly in this this
biotechnology revolution that we're currentlyliving in and surfing on, you know, the the
pressure from a recent pandemic.
And So I had this technology, and I'm like, Ican't walk away from this because this would be
(06:44):
the single greatest achievement I could do inmy lifetime to affect the largest number of
people in my own generation and everygeneration that comes after because eliminating
a pathogen is is it's it's it is unique inmedicine that a vaccine can eliminate the
disease.
And so that's the reason I found the companyand drove my wife nuts and and went from out of
the frying pan and into the fire because we hadthis opportunity to go create this broad
(07:05):
spectrum vaccine technology and have that kindof lasting impact that I I just didn't think
any Beller.
Any other work I would do would be able to liveup to that level of accomplishment.
And so I felt that I had an obligation to doso.
And so that's what that Cinevax does is wecreate universal vaccines.
Amazing.
Amazing impact.
And that was the next question, the impact, butit's pretty obvious that if you figure out that
a conserved mechanism of resistance for cancer,you can make a big dent there.
(07:29):
And then if you figure out the common, conserveareas of viruses and create vaccines against
them and eliminate forever.
You know, what a big impact.
And by the way, I think both companies havesome revenge to do prevention cancer and
prevention COVID.
And and the eventual evolution, because whenyou think about it, that's exactly what we're
(07:49):
doing.
That's a bad side of evolution.
Everything that, you know, grows fast andmutates.
There is always genetic changes.
And, especially if you're trying to kill it,you create a lot of genetic, evolutionary
pressure to survive and also survive thrive.
So we need to actually figure out the wayaround it, which is pretty hard.
So we answered about the impact question, but,let me dig a little bit more about the platform
(08:13):
itself.
You know, within effects, we like to invest inin platform technologies.
What make your call take a a platformtechnology?
Yeah.
So the biggest thing so I'm I'm amicrobiologist by training.
So I grew up, you know, studying bacteriafiguring out for instance, purposes, when you
think about resistance, we think aboutantibiotic resistance.
That's the canonical mechanism by which we seefailure when it comes to therapies.
(08:35):
What we were able to do is build a clinicalmodel of resistance pre clinically.
So we were able to take that resistancemechanism, create that environment, Pete it
into the lab.
We were able to identify the target of a, youknow, $1,000,000,000 a year drug where, most of
the information that was known was that it, youknow, broadly targeted the outside of the, cell
membrane.
We were actually able to figure out thespecific, you know, phospholipid that they that
(08:58):
that this thing was targeting because we wereable to understand how the bacteria was going
to change and modify itself.
And so we took this evolutionary approach in myexperience with Sonya and my my own, you know,
disease, you know, was able to understand thatresistance is a universal feature.
It's not something that goes away, Morgansiloed to antibiotics or viruses.
This is really something that the yin and yangof life.
(09:20):
Right?
We get put into this really tough situation.
And, fundamentally, what we're trying to do isfigure out what are the different things,
choices that can be made both, you know, from aperson's perspective, but from a cellular
perspective, how do I survive, you know, inthis really tough environment?
And what we realized was that we weren'tlooking at cancer in the environment that it
was, you know, natively presented.
Right?
(09:40):
We were basically taking calf serums like babycow's blood and plastic and growing, like,
human cancer cells in this, like, these petridishes, and we're like, why doesn't our cancer
drugs work?
Like, what's what's wrong with us?
Like, you know, it's like, well, nobody hascancer that's, like, bathed in cow's blood.
Like, no person on earth has that.
And so why would we expect to get a reasonableresponse of translatable bonds from that kind
(10:04):
of experiment.
And so we went back and looked at all thesedifferent assumptions, and we said, how can we
make a system that's as close to human,environment as how can we create something that
takes into account the entirety of a cancerpatients, you know, treatment?
They don't stop getting treatment after 7 days,but we develop drugs in the 7 day time You
know, they have billions of cells, millions ofcells, and we have to be able to account for
(10:26):
all the heterogeneity and diversity that thosedifferent cells can have in terms of which, you
know, paths that they choose.
But because we're not thinking of this as,like, a diverse, you know, you know, organism
that's separate from, you know, our our bodies,we're thinking of it as just this homogeneous
cancerous blob.
We're losing out on all of the the nuance.
That's important to actually understand thiscancer, which is why, you know, we focused on
(10:48):
understanding cancer resistance and cancertherapies from a genetic standpoint.
We have a particular mutation.
Things are are changing in this particularcancer.
This is the driver of the cancer.
But oftentimes when you target that driver withBRAF, you know, targeted therapies or KRAS
targeted therapies, the cancer basicallyadapts.
They make modifications to that particularprotein because that's not the thing with
keeping it alive.
(11:09):
It's the thing that started the cancer, butit's not thing that's keeping it alive.
And so while we have all of these therapeuticmodalities, whether it's antibody, small
molecules, CAR T therapies, bi specifics.
That was essentially the the bottleneck.
How do we create molecules that target all ofthese different proteins?
Now the bottleneck is kind of shifted.
It's no longer how do we create chemistry andtherapies that go after a particular target.
(11:30):
It's how do we go after multiple targets atonce to fundamentally shut down all the
potential options for a particular cancer.
And right now, there aren't technologies outthere that enable you to see how the different,
targets actually connect together, how they'regonna respond over the long haul.
And that's what our, that's what our, rescuesystem fundamentally does.
We're able to culture these cells, developresistance, and understand that long term
(11:53):
biological problem that they're going to solvefor and then develop therapies that
specifically prevent that from happening.
Amazing.
James?
The question was platform.
The question was so in NFS Bio, we like toinvest in platform technologies and what to
make your call take a platform tech.
So what makes our core tech, a platform tech isis pretty simple and straightforward.
(12:14):
We and many others for 20 years have known whatthe problem is that when you make a vaccine,
And look, I love vaccines.
They're the greatest medical advance insanitation and fire in terms of the number of
people protected, but they do a poor jobagainst rapidly mutating pathogen which is why
the initial waves of great success were againstpathogens that don't mutate that quickly.
So you could make a vaccine.
(12:35):
And even though the pathogen, like the cancers,they're constantly evolving, but some evolve
slower than others.
For the slower evolving pathogens, youvaccinate and the antibodies you produce mostly
are gotten across the pathogen and andtherefore you can knock it out.
The problem is that we have a bunch ofpathogens that evolve much faster.
And they do it on purpose to escape our immunesystems And it's a problem because it means
(12:55):
what you're injected with is not the same thingas what you're infected with and the infection
escapes.
And this is why we're stuck in this Bellerending cycle of having to make a new vaccine
for flu twice a year.
That's why we're updating the coronavirusvaccines and why they gave us all those crazy
shots is because the truth is it wasn't it wasincreasingly different.
The new virus from the original coronavirusstrain, and so they were just boosting you over
(13:16):
and over again to get what little antibodiesyou had left that were relevant to to to be as
abundant as possible.
And it's why we don't have, like, a working HIVvaccine yet.
So that was sort of the problem.
Morgan long time, people were just, you know,tearing their hair and saying, oh, it's
hopeless.
You can never around this, we'll just be stuckin this never ending syssophistician cycle
with, the flu and so forth.
And then this beautiful thing happened about 20years ago, people started saying, wait, Hold on
(13:39):
a second.
Like, when we're looking some people, theselucky devils are hitting some genetic jackpot,
and they're producing these broadlyneutralizing antibodies that we're binding
conserve sites on the virus they're, therefore,neutralizing all of them of a class of, like,
influenza or all of HIV.
And that was, like, sexy for 2 reasons.
One is that told you that the virus has had anAchilles heel.
There's some spot they could mutate or thevirus died.
And if you can get an antibody against it,you'd be protective.
(14:01):
And second, it told you Pete could produce Andas soon as we found that out, then the question
was like, well, wait a second.
Why aren't our vaccines always doing that?
If it's always there, why do we always miss?
And that created the arms race to try to makeuniversal vaccines.
The problem is that the immune system is supercomplicated and diverse, and the tools were
relatively primitive to go crack open the hoodof this engine that wasn't working to try to
(14:21):
fix it.
I just kind of got lucky.
I was at the right place at the right timewhere I started looking in immunology and
computational systems immunology right when thearms race of the better, faster, cheaper genome
sequencer had reached the point that it insteadof in a warehouse, it fit on a bench top.
And I had started applying it to looking at theimmune system of immunized animals and people
try to figure out why we miss.
(14:41):
And problem to make it simple is that there'shuge numbers of ways antibodies can bind to a a
spike protein, and most of those sites couldbind to can mutate.
And it's only a few sites that that don't.
And the odds are, like, a 100,000 or a1,000,000 to 1 to hit the right site, which is
why some people made them, and they publishedon it, but most people miss because the right
answer is hidden in a notion of wrong answers.
And so our technology platform, which thepatent, the Jonas patent, and the series of
(15:05):
patents that follow, or just solve that generalproblem is how do you focus the immune system
on the conserve sites?
And the way we do it is taking an evolutionarysnapshot of lots proteins, mixing them, and
then diluting them so that only the shared sitethat hasn't mutated in a 100 years is at a high
enough concentration by having small amounts ofmultiple proteins, only the shared site is
abundant.
(15:25):
And therefore, the entire immune system focuseson the shared site.
This turns out to work amazingly well.
We've applied it to influenza, and that's thething we're initiating manufacturing on with
the help of an FX starting in January.
We've applied it to, earlier to thecoronaviruses and HIV.
We've even applied it we ask ourselves, wedon't think it's just viruses.
We we think there's other pathogens we couldtackle, like malaria, fungi, some bacteria, not
(15:48):
everywhere.
There's some pathogens like tuberculosis.
It doesn't really mutate quickly to escape, butit's got other problems.
But there's, like, 18 pathogens we can think ofright now that are really important.
We even to test it, we went all the way out tosnake venom, and we took snake venom from 14
species from all around the globe, and we mixedtogether a tiny amount of 14 different.
And that produced ultra broad response.
And that that really speaks to the breadth andthe power of the platform.
(16:10):
And and the other power of the platform is thatit's tractable.
You can build this thing.
Sometimes in synthetic biology, people come upwith some cool thing, but you're you're never
gonna construct it.
It's never gonna be stable in a syringe.
You're never gonna manufacture enough for it tomatter, or it's gonna be crazy expensive.
Whereas our technology, the the power of it isthat we have a lot of flexibility to
bioengineer is what's gonna work right, and wecan mass manufacture it on commoditized
(16:30):
equipment globe, which means we can actuallychange change that globe.
You have to say that's the kind of the joy ofinvesting in companies in the space, not just
the joy of working with you guys, but justthinking about the impact, you know, when the
thing would work, you know, get a revenge onCOVID, one injection to for all to to squash
all the mutation.
But, you know, in in Jurassic Park, they saidthat life finds a way.
(16:51):
So how can you be sure that nature andevolution won't find a way through your
approach too?
Right, Jake?
Sure.
So, I'll answer it and then I I'm I'm I'm sureNick's gonna answer this question as well
because we actually work in very parallelworlds, which is cool.
The 1st generation of vaccines that eradicatedsmallpox and bought got pretty close to
eradicating a bunch of other pathogens.
(17:11):
Those ones overcame.
You know, those ones, all pathogens evolve.
It's just those ones weren't evolving fastenough compared to the advantage of the
vaccines that were offered.
The challenge with the ones that can stillevolve to escape is that we need better
focusing on more conserve sites.
To focus on a conserve Pete, the same thing asto target a pathogen that evolves less quickly
because that site evolves less quickly.
And so all we need is to improve our pacing.
(17:35):
Nature can be clever, but nature's lost to usbefore.
We crush smallpox.
We've crushed most of others.
We can beat this.
It's really just a racing game and putting abetter engine under there.
That's gonna give us that advantage.
The way to think about it with flu is that thesites that we're targeting haven't changed.
One site has changed in thousands of years, andthe other site we know hasn't changed in at
least 200.
And so those that gives you a sense of, oh, howthe hell is it gonna change in the next 20
(17:58):
years.
And and I think it's gonna be tough to winagainst everyone in these pathogens, but I
think we can start eradicating a new generationof pathogens in our lifetimes, and that will
benefit people a 1000 years from now.
Amazing.
And, you know, it's it's always fun to thinkthat we can't we can't be clever, you know,
small human nature.
So Yeah.
It is awesome mutants.
Smash the mutants.
Smash the mutants.
(18:19):
Yeah.
I mean, so I think one of the things aboutevolution that, was really scary to me at the
beginning was that there's so manypossibilities that things could do so many
different ways that a particular cell or anorganism could solve a particular problem.
I mean, like, we're doing that right now with,you know, the thousands and thousands of people
studying cancer.
We're looking at it in a different way, youknow, and applying a different approach.
(18:41):
And so when it comes to cancers, what werealized was that there are a lot of rules that
these cancer play by, but we don't know whatthose rules are.
And so it's gonna do something that it knowshow to do because it either has the, machinery
or infrastructure in place, or it'sproliferating in such a way that it can sense,
(19:02):
you know, when things are going wrong and makeadjustments so that cell maintains that
survivability.
And what we found was that the problem isn'tthat there are too many resistance mechanisms.
It's that we just haven't learned enough aboutall the different evolutionary pathways that a
particular cancer can take.
And so once you start to figure out theserules, and really apply pressure to these
different cancers with the different therapiesthat we've developed as well as novel ones.
(19:23):
What we're able to do is come together withthis kind of atlas of resistance.
What are the, you know, multiple universes withwhich that this cancer can adapt and how do
these different, adaptations interact with eachother?
Because we're we're basically gone from the daywhere, you know, we can go after single
particular proteins in the cancer space.
We have to go after a multiplex you know, amulti targeted approach.
(19:45):
Because if we're not going after multipledifferent sites, we're allowing back doors for
cancers to escape through.
And so eventually, we'll get to a point wherelife won't find a way, but we still have to
understand the rules and the the, the thedifferent, you know, techniques that these
cancers have, to survive.
Now let's switch gears and talk about the darkside, the business mode Right?
(20:08):
So both of you have your bio platform and youmonetize it in a different way.
Right?
So resistance, Beller our pharma companieswhile during that time, get a lot of data that
will allow you to develop your own drugs, whileif Sentipac is actually developing your own
vaccines all the way.
Right?
So can you expand your business approaches andhow your platform allow you to try different
(20:30):
models?
Yeah.
Our, you know, our approach is prettystraightforward.
We are producing a broad spectrum vaccine forinfluenza.
We're initiating manufacturer, and we're gonnastart phase 1 clinical trials.
After that, we're gonna work on phase 2 andphase 3 clinical trials.
And there's non dilutive potential funding fromgovernment agencies to potentially support
because pandemic preparedness and seasonalprotection from influenza is a big deal that
(20:55):
governments care about.
So we it's not a guarantee, but we fit right ina in a place where even before the pandemic,
governments knew that there have been 5pandemics of the last century in influenza
alone and more are coming.
So that's a straightforward model for us, andand we're following the same model, the same
playbook for coronavirus and HIV, line them up,produce them, knock them through.
Along the way, another part of our model isthat they there are veterinary applications for
(21:18):
some of our vaccines.
And, for example, pigs also get influenza, andit's a $180,000,000 per year Morgan.
No.
I don't wanna turn into a veterinary, vaccineproducing company.
My focus is on humans, but, I think that firstoff, they're actually echoing next Flint,
there's a real danger in bioscience wherepeople sometimes produce these very artificial
models, and then they convince them.
So they go through this ridiculous model thatthey've set up to prove success, and then they
(21:41):
Pete shock later when their drug fails.
And it's tautological, and the best way todefend yourself by that is to not work on the
easy and obvious model, like a mouse all thetime.
Miles are a terrible model for flu.
They don't really get flu.
You have to engineer them.
People have come to wrong conclusions for mice.
And also, like, you make the best vaccine for amouse.
Like, you have nobody's gonna buy that.
Nobody cares about versus pigs.
A farmer loves that pigs.
(22:02):
Your vaccine better work.
They they get the same kind of flus we do.
It's a $180,000,000 market, and that's helpfulto us.
So what we do is we are aiming to license thatvaccine out to veterinary groups.
That's an earlier source of revenue for us.
It's also just great, a great opportunity toestablish and get our our our broad spectrum
vaccine technology out and commercialized in amass way.
(22:22):
And as I mentioned earlier, pigs are the majorsource of new pandemics.
So they get infected with human viruses, pigviruses, and bird viruses, and they shuffle
them up on these mega James.
And that's how new pandemic pop out.
And so being able to have vaccinated pigs isone step closer to pushing influenza out of the
human experience.
And so that that's our market.
You can't always do that for every virus.
But anytime I can, I always use the animalmodel?
(22:44):
It might be a little more expensive, but it'smuch more relevant.
There's a market for it, and you're making sureyou build a drug that And I think that that's a
hidden and invaluable part of making sure thatyou you don't waste time on tricking yourself
through an artificial model.
And and so that's that's our business model.
I I actually really love that.
I mean, I think one of the things that'simportant for, people in the infectious
diseases, to to really understand howinterconnected these web reservoirs are.
(23:08):
And so often when you look at a lot of thesecompanies, they're so focused on just, like,
the patient They're not looking at the broaderproblem, and I love this evolutionary approach.
Focus on the problem at the source and alsotake care of it and the patient.
That's not something that you typically see.
Cool.
And, Nick, so what can you tell us aboutresistance, biode, business model, and how do
you apply the the platform approach to to workon different components?
(23:33):
I was listening to, like, Jeff Bezos.
And when he was doing his, like, Amazon, like,what made Amazon Amazon?
And why did he focus on books initially?
And so initially, I focused on bacteria, butthere's really not a market for bacteria
antibiotics just don't work really well.
But there are 100100 of different types ofcancers.
Just like there are, you know, all thesedifferent books.
It's one of the biggest categories of disease.
(23:53):
And each cancer has multiple different subtypesthat you have to understand.
And so to me, cancer was the biggest subset ofdisease that had a, that had evolutionary games
that we could learn in stand without having toworry about, like, outside reservoirs of, like,
resistance coming in, like, you know, cows forantibiotic resistance, you know, bringing that
(24:17):
into the community, most patients who havecancer aren't gonna give their cancer to
somebody else.
And so we can actually look at theseevolutionary trajectories and pathways in a
given patient, knowing that they're not gonnabe spreading different James, from patient to
patient, we could really focus on what doescancer in non small cell lung cancer do?
And how does it, and how does it evolve?
(24:39):
And so what we realized was that there's justso many cancer types out there, and there are
so many targets, that it was almost it it wasa, it was a selfish decision to only bring this
kind of platform internally because it has somany applicabilities to all the different
compounds that are out there.
We really wanted to make sure that we werepartnering with companies So they understood
(25:00):
all the land mines that were in front of theircompact, right, because, like, everybody has to
walk across this field, to go from discoveryall the way through to an NDA approval.
And post marketing, you know, adoption.
And this landline, you know, this this thisfield of landlines that's there, these
experiments to try to, like, reveal where theseland mines are.
We can only Pete, like, a step or 2 in a ahead.
And so what our system allows is for somebodywho's at the preclinical stages, I have a
(25:24):
molecule, I have a particular Morgan, we canbasically reveal to them the entire landmine
field, going from the beginning to the end.
We could tell them does your molecule even havea path through.
Right?
And so we like to partner with companies onreally understanding not only what is the
target that they're going after, but how doesthat cancer respond to that therapy over time
(25:44):
so that we can better hone in the patientpopulation as well as start to identify
combination therapies Flint.
And kind of getting to your point too, Jacob,about, like, this evolutionary conservation.
What we noticed is just much like, you know,those airplanes that airplane design the
Beller.
Right?
Basically,
like, you
know, you had the airplane bomber going in anddropping bombs during the Pacific, you know,
(26:04):
World War 2, and the planes that would comeback that had all the bullet holes those those
were the areas of the plane that you didn'tneed to reinforce because those were non lethal
areas.
Every part of the plane that didn't have abullet hole, that was the part that if it got
hit, it would break apart.
And so we can also start to identify theseevolutionarily conserved spots within the
particular target protein, not just from anevolution standpoint, but from a perturbation
(26:27):
standpoint, many of these proteins have neverbeen perturbed, and so there hasn't been an
evolutionary pressure to change.
And so this allows us to actually figure outwhat are all the different ways that we can go
after this particular protein now that there'sa way to go after and target that in a non
natural way.
And so this allows us to understand this newkind of panacea of evolutionary changes that
(26:49):
happen only as a result of us developingtherapies as a community to target these cancer
types.
Like, we're we're literally creating anevolutionary field that exists before these
therapies Pete, existed.
I actually use that exact same analogy when wethink about our work.
Your stuff is really cool.
So it seems like you you have the ability togo.
You could provide an advice on creatingcombination therapies pretty effectively
(27:11):
because you can basically do the intersectionof the 2 fields and understand how to maximize
restriction points.
Do you also look at staging?
Because it also seems like you might be able toprovide guidance of a molecule on what age is
most appropriate for a cancerous progression.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think one of the biggest things thatwe're running into is a lot of patients are
treated with chemotherapy up front because theydon't know that targeted therapy could be
effective.
And so what happens is we have thesechemotherapies.
(27:33):
You get given to these patients.
They lose their hair.
They lose that, that self dignity.
I mean, these are, these are the quotes fromPete that I've talked to.
And more importantly, what happens to thecancer is you've created, an an event where
you've basically told the cancer to, like,break apart all of its DNA and the stuff that
dies bright the stuff that survives now hasthis recombined genome that's so much more
(27:53):
complicated, so much more difficult to Pete.
And now this patient, because they've giventhem chemotherapy as the very first therapy.
This patient is now on a trajectory of pooroutcomes.
Whereas if they just took the time to figureout what is this cancer doing, what is the
cancer like going to do in the future?
We can actually start to put the right patientson the right therapies up front so that we can
(28:15):
guide the tumor to a state of susceptibilityrather than a state of, you know, there's no
there's no solution.
We can't we've we've screwed up too much.
And so this is a way for us to simplify theproblem, that is so complex.
Yeah.
I love how you create a theater where thecancer is actually you know, doing the
experiment for you.
It actually shows you all the different waysyou can mutate out of the drug.
(28:38):
Yeah.
It's it's kind of like ENDers James, right?
Like, let the bugs tell us, you know, like,love the bugs, you know, like, figure out
exactly all the things that it's gonna do sothat you can beat them.
I mean, that's that's the it's the sameapproach.
Really empathize with the cancer.
Figure out what it wants to do and then usethat as the means of killing it.
The gateway is all the way down.
It's similar to what we do with the the virusesis like I love the viruses that have been
(29:02):
around for a while, like flu and HIV becausethey've given me these massive databases and
sequences, and it does the same thing.
It immediately tells me they can serve sites.
It lets me pick and for the ones that I don'thave as much luxury.
It's like coronavirus is newer.
So we have enough variants to pick, or, butwe've actually built a mammalian displace where
we have a synthetic library of 100 of 1,000,000of novel RPDs.
(29:23):
And we so we searched through that to be ableto better explore a space where nature hasn't
given us the freebie of huge numbers ofsequences.
So it sounds analogous to what you're doing insome ways.
That's very cool.
I mean, I love how evolution, which is likethis fundamental principle of life, can be
applied so universally across differentdiseases because it's fundamental.
It, like, it is the thing that allows change tohappen.
(29:44):
Right?
And if you understand that, you understandthose rules, you can develop therapies that
just couldn't have existed before.
And, I'm really excited to see what the worldlooks like.
With these new vaccines and, you know, withthese new cancer therapies.
Yeah.
The the reason why, both of you are in thispodcast together And that's a great segway for
the next question because, you know, you allyou all have amazing platform companies, and
(30:08):
platform companies means that you can do a lotof things as part of the beauty of the company.
You you have many indication you can go after,and and you can publish some of them.
It opens up a lot of doors, on the businessside.
But then the one of the major pain points forall our companies is deciding what to do first
because you can do so many things and you don'thave enough money to do everything that you
wanna do.
(30:29):
So the main question is like, how do you decidewhat to tackle first?
Like, you know, how do you choose?
So I choose in the same way that cancers in ourbody chooses who takes over and the virus is
chewed.
And that is you you have them Beller it out andthen may the fittest one win.
And So what I do is I ask myself what are thevarious applications that we could work on, and
(30:50):
you know that each one that you work on is anopportunity cost to work on a different one.
And so you rank them and you make a decision ofwhat's the coolest thing you could possibly
work on.
I've done this my whole life.
I like coming up with new ideas.
What I typically do, I have a series of blackbook behind me.
And I write them down in that book, and Iignore it for a couple of weeks, and I come
back and continuously review.
And over decades of doing that, what ispercolated to the top are the things that I
(31:12):
think of all the things in there.
These are the coolest.
These are the most Morgan, and these are thethings that have the biggest impact.
And therefore, nothing else deserves to climbup above that in the ladder.
And and that forces you, first off, to pickyour your greatest works to work on, and it
gives you a sense of, okay.
I I know that I could do that, but if youjuggle more than too many balls, you're gonna
start dropping them.
And and so that's basically the strategy is amerit based dominance of, of the most valuable
(31:37):
target areas.
And The other principle is there should be, anetwork of relatedness.
If you're working on more more than one thing,there should be active synergy between the
things.
So the empowering one empowers the other.
If you're working on 3 disparate things, that'sthe worst case scenario.
If you're working on 3 things that are allactually same thing in their Flint and learning
from one thing empowers the other.
(31:57):
And you have, tools that they're all gonna flowthrough, then what you have as a pipeline and
your invite in for any any any optimization onany step of that pipeline will benefit all of
the programs.
And that that's that's that's where you'resurfing.
That's where you really wanna be on top of thatwave.
And so that's that's our tactic.
Think that last piece that I listened to my mylab team was just like, Jake, no more.
And so then, that also is the feedback point.
(32:20):
Yeah.
I think I think for us, we So we didn't thinkwhat we initially offered was cool enough.
And so, like, for us, like, we, we developedthis this box.
We drove resistance to it.
Created the cell population, identified acombination of drugs, drove resistance to that,
then identified a triple combination thatprevented the cancer from, like, actually
evolving or escaping.
So we spent a whole bunch of time building thisthing because we thought that anything less
(32:43):
than that wasn't going to be sufficient for ourpharma partners And then we started talking to
our pharma partners.
They were like, wait, wait, wait, you cancreate a cancer resistant cell line, and it's,
like, accurate.
We were like, yeah.
Yeah.
But, like, That's not the cool part.
The cool part is that we can make combinations,and then we've done it.
Like, that's a great part.
They're like, no,
no, no, I don't
give a I don't care about that part.
I care about the fact that you were able tocreate stable resistant cell line with novel
(33:07):
compounds and existing ones, and it was, like,relevant to the patients.
I'm like, yeah.
Yeah.
But, like, that's that's easy for us.
Like, that's not the exciting thing.
It's like, all this other stuff.
It's like, no.
We had to listen to our customers, and ourcustomers told us This is what we want.
This is where your technology fits in, and allof the stuff that we wanna do later on, it
(33:27):
still fits into the process.
We had to figure out where are we gonna sell,this technology first.
And once we found that kind of access point,that was where we were able to then develop
those technologies and really focus on thatpart.
And I think if I had, like, a superpower, itwould be clarity.
Like, how could I tell the story to my team andto our investors and to our stakeholders in the
simplest, most impactful way possible.
(33:49):
And if I could do that, like, everything elsewouldn't matter.
Right?
Like, I could hire the right operations people.
I could hire the right scientists.
Because I could tell a compelling andconvincing story.
And that's really what I focus on in my day today is how do I simplify my message, to be that
person?
It's so fun.
It reminds me of first ball meeting where I I Istopped after half the meeting.
(34:09):
I I I told you something to the point of, like,some companies are telling you to shut up and
take our money.
Yeah.
And it's very possible.
Why why aren't you taking their money?
Beller, we weren't really sure
if it
was gonna be good enough.
You know, it's like all that, like, impostorsyndrome.
And then, like, when you had people, like,telling us that, like, hey, you actually have
something that's not, like, correct, but it'slike, where's money?
(34:31):
It was like that retraining of that academicmind.
Right?
Like, it's, you know, it's, it was difficult.
And so I I think that's the thing that I wouldalso recommend, like, scientific founders is
really take all of the learning that you got ingrad school, especially the negative stuff
around the culture, that stuff and really askyourself, how does that, help or hinder me
(34:51):
moving forward?
And what about this, this environment?
Can I create in, in my company?
That's gonna actually make the company better.
Cool.
So, again, moving to another gear.
So both of you have recently raised your seedround benefits, you know, we love to be able to
lead those rounds.
I guess I'll start with Jake because we justannounced today about your 10,000,000 that
(35:14):
around.
But what did you learn during the fundraisingprocess?
And what question did investor ask you themost?
Sure.
So first off, thanks in effects.
Woo hoo, Some of the things I'm gonna say areunique because of the I was I would spare to
say this was a unique funding cycle in thislast year.
But I I came into it kinda unique because in mymy last company distributed bio, I never
(35:34):
fundraise for it.
It was profitable from the We took a $1,000,000loan at one point from a group called Broad
Oak, but otherwise it was always profitable.
And so it was like a professional at doingbusiness pitches for partnerships.
And we did 78 antibody discovery andoptimization campaigns, but I never did venture
pitching.
So I and I I built up that business and look,that works, and out of it, but the truth is if
(35:55):
you wanna do something really big, that's notgonna cut it.
I can build a service business like that, and Ican get to a certain level.
But to change the world, it's not That's notgonna work.
And so to get into clinic and to reallyescalate, you need partners.
And it's it's not just the money.
It's also that you guys have, like, globalnetwork and you have expertise, and you've
watched a bunch of companies go through thisprocess successfully.
And all of those things are critical to go tothe next step.
(36:17):
So my experiences were, I would say initially alittle rocky.
I was, like, getting ready to do it, and I wasrealizing the culture is a little different,
right, because the the type of things that youcare about in a are gonna be different.
And the other one was I learned pretty quickly,but there was a boot up phase of being like,
okay.
There's certain expectations of the structureof a data room and the structure of pitch deck.
And the structure of the kind and the thepacing of, various activities to basically
(36:39):
prove that you have your ship together.
And and and to make digestible.
It's not just enough that it's in there.
It needs to be kind of in a cultural formatthat people are used to reviewing to try to to
be respectful to the time of the personreviewing it.
If it looks weird, it's gonna be harder forthem to look So I think that was a little bit
of my my early boot up phase.
And then, the kinds of questions they ask, Idon't know, they all kinda sense to me,
(37:00):
honestly.
Like, I I learned to do business really from myfather running a restaurant in a hotel in
Guatemala, and it's like, this businesstranslates everywhere.
You have basic things.
It's like, okay.
Can you build it?
Can you get people to show up to buy it?
Do you have the right group of Pete?
And are they doing the right things?
And and, you know, are you gonna be able toacute and how are you gonna handle it when
things go wrong?
And I think though and and is it gonna makemoney?
(37:22):
Have you priced everything successfully?
Have you expressed that market?
And so I think those things come relativelynaturally to us.
There's unique aspects of because you'rebuilding into an existing market, but you're
gonna disrupt it in some ways.
There's gonna be differences and you need tohave a strategy in place I felt that we were
strong on areas of responding to the planbecause that's what we're naturally good.
You know, having gantt charts and every s oSOSs Morgan SOWs organized Like, I was in the
(37:46):
CRO space, so I know how to navigate itextremely well and and leverage it effectively
as opposed to what we do in house.
The interesting questions for me were Also, thequestions I had back to the VC groups.
I was like, you guys have seen a lot ofcompanies succeed and fail.
Like, I wanna know, what am I missing, or whathave you succeed?
What is what's that thing where you see it?
You know, I go sounds good.
Or if you see it, oh, that sounds like aproblem, because I've seen I've been to that
movie before Morgan things messed up.
(38:07):
And so I would I think I asked those questionsback a lot, And I took notes on the questions
people asked me.
In general, they were technical to, you know,what's your strategy for manufacturer?
And that's a that's a basic kicking the tiresquestion to make sure that you're in someone's
not coming in the room with an idea and no planto execute.
And so those were easy.
I think there were questions about how toevolve a team as you grow, As one example, I
(38:27):
would say over the last year, I've increasinglygot interested as we go forward.
Ultimately, I'm gonna get, like, a chief ofstaff or something.
I think as right now, the size It's Flint, butfor instance, the distributed bio as we got to
above about thirty people, that became veryimportant for me to have someone who basically
Pete act as a chief of staff internally to tokeep track of everything Those were questions
that were important.
I think some of the questions also were kind oflike, who you know and where that network was
(38:51):
and the realization that being able to to knoweverybody in this space, know them well and be
able to pick up a phone call just to respecttheir time so you don't waste time with a
meeting and also get their insights.
That's really powerful.
And now that's something I'm gonna be focusinga lot of my time on in the next few years is
growing outside of I have a great network inbiotechnology and the people building antibody
drugs.
I think what I wanna be focusing on over thenext few years is building just a dynamite
(39:12):
network among the global investors, and and andthe decision maker for vaccine licensing and
partnership deals in pharmaceutical companies.
So, I I got my I cut my teeth in the businessworld, when I was an office furniture salesman
for my dad.
He had an office furniture Morgan.
And, so, like, I would do Pete sales, like,during, like, the economic downturn of 2008,
(39:35):
2009, my job was to call businesses that hadjust laid off a whole bunch of people and get
them to buy office furniture, for the peoplethat no longer work there.
And so, like, for me, it was really trying tounderstand what was the problem that they
needed to solve for.
Right?
And for them, oftentimes the problem was, youknow, they had just, you know, laid off a whole
(39:58):
bunch of staff.
And so what they wanted to do was a refresh thecompany, right?
They were, they were gonna have to bring in newpeople once the economic downturn, you know,
you know, left, you know, came back.
And so they wanted an office that was going torepresent that new kind of fresher face.
And so even though they had let go a wholebunch of people and it was painful, this was an
opportunity for them to get rid of their oldstuff and, like, feel like the company was
(40:18):
still successful even though the numbers didn'tnecessarily say that.
And so that was how we were able to sell justlike tons of office furniture to these
companies and also increase our our, you know,inventory of used furniture because people
still wanted that.
And what what that really taught me was thatyou have to get the right message to the right
(40:39):
person.
And if you're not aligned on what theirobjectives are, and what their pain point is.
It's gonna be really difficult to sellsomething, right, Beller it's VCs or partners
or whoever, And so I I really took a lot ofthat experience, with me, to to to this, kind
of investment section.
(41:01):
And, one of the things that I learned both, atOffice furniture sales and with this is that
fundamentally it's about, you know, how wellyou show up and how well you execute on the
things that, you're asked of.
Right?
Like, you know, are you responsive?
Are you following up in a timely manner?
Because for most Flint intents and purposes,this is maybe, like, the 1st or second time
(41:21):
that you've ever interacted with these VCs, andthey're not gonna know you from, you know, the
tube of toothpaste.
They need to know what your trajectory is.
And if you can demonstrate that you're a fastmover, that you do the things that need to get
done, and that you can hear the investoreffectively so that you can answer those
questions.
That's really where I think the bestpartnerships come in.
(41:43):
And then also just making sure there's a goodfit with the investor that you're working with
and the investor, you know, like, and you,right?
Like, you have to make sure that thatpartnership is there.
There were a number of people that we couldhave taken money from that I think would have
been a bad Flint, with this economic downturn.
They would have wanted us to spend money, and Ithink Andre did a great job of guiding us on,
you know, understanding our products and reallypushing us towards revenue.
(42:07):
And so, like, you know, being confident in yourown business model and then identifying people
that really, you know, understand it, I think,is important.
That's very smart.
I wish I was as smart as you when I raisedmoney when I was a scientist founders, founder
back in 2011 because, you know, I looked back.
I had, I have a folder full Pete decks that Iused.
(42:27):
I think I counted them a 148 different versionof my peach deck.
And after I've been an investor for, like, aweek, I looked back my Pete deck and I say, oh
Morgan.
I'm so stupid.
I didn't know.
I didn't know how it was to think.
And I didn't say I and, like, I I talked I toldall the things they don't care about Like, now
that I'm investor and now I think it's soobvious to me.
(42:48):
And I try now to talking to founders to tellthem, like, the truth.
Like, you always get what you incentivize inthe end, you want to make money, especially
like, look, if your company is successful, wedid huge impact in the world, but we also made
a Pete ton of money which is that's the best ofboth worlds.
Right?
So and because of the power law of investingwhere most of the companies will not return any
(43:09):
anything and only a few will matter you needthat any each investment that you make will be
something that has a potential to return thethe fund.
And the question we ask are those?
Like, is it big enough?
Can it be big enough to develop fun?
You have defensible magic technology, and areyou the right people to execute on this,
defensible magic technology in this hugeMorgan?
To be turned off on.
So once you understand that, you know, how youtell the story is way easier.
(43:33):
In that regard, like, what what advice wouldyou give Beller platform founders, these
founders in tech buy or looking to raise,especially right now with this downturn.
So I guess the biggest thing for me is, youknow, we're we're we're both talking about
evolution Right?
And I think the point that you made, Omry, wasthat, as you go through these pitches, you have
to make adaptations and change.
And so I think really the thing that I wouldadvise, you know, these academic scientists and
(43:57):
founders who are really used to failure andseeing failure in their day to day, is to
recognize that's not a failure.
That's an opportunity to learn and grow.
And so use that feedback that you get from yourinvestors.
Use that feedback that you get from thedifferent interactions that you have, not as,
like, a criticism of you.
But as a opportunity to get stronger and betterand just really focus on, taking in as much
(44:21):
that feedback as possible.
And, sorting through it and then, you know,being the best version that you can be.
Yeah.
I think that's that's great advice.
I'd echo it.
I think, And then the prowess once told me,she's like, when you go into the pitches, she's
like, this is exactly what Omri said, and thatwas my experience too.
When I first went in, they were rough.
I revised those slides Pete.
And and because I was also I was culturallyadapting from, like, sales to biotechnology
(44:45):
research groups to VCs.
And, she's like, the the first ones are gonnastuck.
People are gonna give you advice.
And I think I'm quoting her as close as I canher.
She's like, no more will someone give you morehonest advice as of the moment when they
explain to you why they're not going to Andshe's like, it sounds difficult, but it's a
gift because they'll say, this is why your babyis ugly.
And what it you can take from that is you canlearn Okay.
(45:07):
What did I because I know my baby is beautiful.
What did I do to fail to communicate it?
And unless you refine and focus, he lets youunderstand how to change the model if
necessary.
Unless you move forward, if it's hard forpeople to hear that stuff, and I think, you
know, academics are trained not to likenegative feedback, but you gotta hear it
because it's it's good business.
You advise.
It's good pitching advice, and and you mightlearn something useful to let you focus your
(45:28):
your your company.
Find a way to get someone in the room to writeit down for you and then to spend some time to
review it.
I think that's helpful.
I also have some practical advice.
I think, like, I'm enamored by in an earlystartup, right, when it's getting started.
I think there's various stages where seedfunding can happen, but, like, right in the
first you know, year or a few 1st few months.
There's, like, safe instruments for friend andfamily I find very effective.
(45:50):
I think my impression is that many startupgroups that I meet with.
I think they they spend money stupidly earlyon, and I just I'd have someone in the room as
cheap and, like, make them with power.
Because I think it's it's so easy to watchpeople do a series of choices where they're
willing to spend stupid amount of money earlyand then they're whining that they ran out of
it.
Also, be willing to take sacrifice It's like, II I find this frequently where people are like,
(46:12):
oh, Jake, I wanna work with you, but I can'ttake less than this amount of salary when I'm
creating a startup.
And I'm just like, honestly, I don't think youhave the risk profile for start Like, you want
the big reward, but you don't want the risk.
Like, I'm I'm gonna warn you this is gonna beharder than you think.
It's gonna take longer than you think, andyou're gonna have to be dedicated to it.
And so it's the personality you should be youbelieve in what you're building and you're
gonna bring something new, you should bewilling to take sacrifices to achieve it
(46:33):
because there's a reward that's happening atthe end.
And that's honestly gonna align you to get youout of bed every day if you're if that's the
kind of thing that motivates you.
So those are the advice I'd have.
I also just have friends of mine that havestartups.
I I I met a lot of them.
I see varied groups.
Some of which smell like victory to me, andsome of them might feel like they're really
gonna struggle.
And and one area is I think if it's onlyacademics, it's quite possible you have a group
(46:55):
with a very large set of blind spots and youmight not not have anybody with reasonable
business sense, in which case, get somebody inthere who can do that because otherwise you're
gonna all happily burn the company to theground overspending and not being focused.
And so those are, I think, are the the the keythings to be able to do early on.
And and the last thing is, you know, connect upto the network and get funded because it's
(47:15):
gonna tap you into a network, and that networkalso is going to identify blind spots for you,
help you polish them, and help you what you'reworking on.
It's gonna force you to even get there to beable to do that with your company.
I think those things are all gonna help you,drive to that point where you you have you have
something beautiful and you're you're you'resending it up the ramp.
I I think just one last thing to that, don'tdon't involve your PI and your startup company.
(47:40):
If you're a Pete student or a postdoc, likegraduate, get out of the lab, then do your
thing.
Make sure that there's a really cleanseparation, it can cause a lot of problems that
you don't necessarily need to worry about.
You're both building really exciting companies.
Let's talk about the future.
Right?
If you could look into the future, what do youhope your platform accomplished?
(48:01):
So I don't know exactly where humanity's going,but I know at some Flint, it's gonna be without
pathogens.
And this is something that we don't even haveto demonstrate this generation.
They did it in the seventies.
We are in a golden age, and so a lot of thatwork could be done right now with our hands.
We're not I don't think my work right now isgonna solve every path Some of them are really
tough and really difficult, but I think if wecould eradicate a few of them in my lifetime
(48:24):
and, you know, I'm greedy, so I wanna go afteras many as possible.
That is a lasting legacy that will benefitevery generation of humanity until there is no
more humans left, whatever that ultimate latemay be.
And so I think that is a worthy worthyexercise.
Like, I I grew up in a little Morgan Village inGuatemala, and I I watched as I returned, Pete
(48:45):
traveling to the states that over year afteryear, the new generations of kids were like a
foot taller than their parents.
And what what happened was they started handingout deworming medicine in the school.
It turns out giving deworming medicine causedpeople to massively change their height
compared to all the generations.
Like, by the time I was 10, my brother and Icould look across the entire market and we
could see each other because we were tallerthan everyone in Santiago.
It was not genetic.
(49:06):
It was driven by chronic, pathogen.
In fact, infection malnutrition.
And giving that medicine wasn't just they gottaller.
It means they could focus better in school.
They could be more productive in their Currier.
It led to, like, more healthy lives and lettingpeople spend less time on medicine and fixing
broken Beller and more time on doing whathumans are fundamentally man magnificent at,
which is creating new and wonderful things.
(49:27):
And so I think that's the future that I see isthat these pathogens don't need to exist
anymore.
We already managed to kill 1.
We can kill again.
And if we wipe them out, it's a it's a serviceto every generation that happens afterwards.
And and I and the future at some point is goingto be a key feature without humanity of without
pathogens, and we should, we should work to getthere.
So that's what I see.
I mean, I, I'm looking forward to that.
(49:48):
I mean, frankly, the, the reason why cancer isgonna become a more problematic thing to treat
is because, you know, antibiotic resistance andvaccine resistance is gonna become more and
more problematic, and it's actually gonna startaffecting you know, cancer therapies.
Pete mean, the reason why cancer is a problemis because like you said, like, we actually
have medications that allow people to livelonger and healthier lives.
(50:09):
So for me, you know, it's gonna be pay peopleliving long enough to get cancer, right, you
know, because we are all alive because we'vegotten these, you know, deworming medications
or these, you know, rat, you know, gettingkilled by the flu.
And so for me, it's really taking cancer andthe fear of what that death sentence looks like
when you hear the words cancer, and reallyturning it into something, you know, treatable
(50:34):
chronic.
You know, it's it's no different than Crohn'sdisease or, you know, I antibiotic and fiction
from, you know, years past.
It's something that's treatable.
It's known, and it's not going to, do thatdeath sentence that it was before.
Yeah.
And your work is permanently necessary because,you know, cancer bubbles from within.
It's gonna be with us for as long as humanityexists.
(50:54):
And so the work you do in this generation isgonna give that lasting value transforming how
we interact with cancer for every generationthat follows.
So I look forward to living in your futureworld as well.
Yeah.
Look, this is a great place to end.
It's really inspiring working with you.
And, again, this is the fun part of investingin what we call this intersection biology
technology where if you are successful, You'regoing to make a lot of money, but also, you
(51:18):
know, a huge impact and lasting impact on thehealth of people.
So Again, pleasure working with you.
Exciting to work with you and exciting to seehow the world looks with with everything that
you're doing.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having us on.
If you liked this episode, be sure to sharewith friends or founders who may like these
insights.
Also, be sure to subscribe to the InFX podcaston the platform of your choice.
(51:41):
And thanks for listening to the InFX podcast.
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