Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Jason Downey, welcome to it's Tectastic. It is so lovely to have you here. Thank you. So for the first time, we're having somebody from outside of the IT space. Since we're not talking about AI today, we're talking about biotech, and this is a subject that I actually have a a weirdly, a lot of passion about, but very little knowledge.
But when I was doing the Big Brother's program, my little, he eventually went down the path of getting his PhD, and he's doing biological engineering today after it, he has PhD at University of Chicago. And it was always fascinating to me to hear him talk about what they're doing because it sounds like the potential solution to so many of the world's problems. And, Jason, I know that you guys are focused on solving some of those problems.
So tell me about what you do, how you got into it, and what drove you into the space. Yeah. No. I love to. So so in terms of of I got into it. Actually, a similar suit to, your friend, began my career as a scientist back in the early 2000. So I, I worked at companies that actually manufactured nucleic acid based products. Back then, of course, no therapeutics, but the science surrounding them, which is extremely exciting.
And, interestingly, because we talk a lot about mRNA and the mRNA or therapeutics, RNA based therapeutics have actually been around for, for almost that entire time. I think the first one's launched in the late 2000. The challenge, of course, is that these therapeutics, are very transient. So when you try to actually apply them, they'll break down very quickly.
So the deliberate mechanisms just weren't there back then, but the idea of the flexibility of it was And so fast forward a few years, I've gone through the genomic industry, worked for Illumina to next genomics with Bioscience, and I really wanted to get back to my roots in, in RNA biochemistry. And, and, TriLink's always kind of been in my radar, and Tri Lake is the pre M and Nucleic acid product company. So they've been doing it for, I think, longer than I have.
So, they have kind of a synthetic nucleotide business. And then my half of it is more on the mRNA side where you're actually making mRNA. So that that's kind of the history of me So the the MRNA side of it, and what you're doing today, you said that it's transient, and I imagine that has something to do with capping the the the ends of the of the molecule. Is that correct? It it's actually deeper in the biology.
So if you think about that, what's kind of what that's called the, what I call it, central dogma biology, it's DNA, which is extremely stable and for information to stores. And then you have RNA, which is kind of a, say, transports information. It it's a you transcribe information. So it's not the DNA, and the RNA molecule is actually inherently stable. And then you have protein, which is what's made by the code of the RNA.
So the importance of RNA and its flexibility is that it it's a very active molecule, which is great. It has some enzymatic properties. It can be translated into protein. But the other thing that's important is that it destroyed relatively quickly compared to other components of a cell because you don't want that signal spinning around because it could disrupt other mechanisms within itself.
So really bad if you don't know how to deliver it and work with it, but if you solve that issue, suddenly you have one of the most versatile tool for various therapeutics that could exist. Does that make sense? It does. It does. And so there's, I mean, when we're talking about MRNA, you're talking about that transport of the information so that it can be turned into proteins and then that cells can use that to do whatever mechanism you're trying to exactly get to do.
So when we talk about this as a technology, the use cases for it are pretty much everything within health. Very much could be. So, we're, of course, it's previously talking about an endogenous RNA, but when you're talking about M and A therapeutics, it it does So it's something being made and lapsed. But when you think about the various diseases and huge amounts, so we'll start with the simplest in which it's a vaccine.
In order to get someone vaccinated with an immune response, you need to be able to introduce some sort of antigens to train your immune system to recognize the virus or whatever you're trying to get the immune system to go after. Historically, that's been done with, either viral vectors or viruses that have been weakened. There are a number of ways we could do it. Mhmm. But they weren't really targeted, and the immune system didn't respond to this well.
With mRNA, you can actually design an RNA strand that codes foreign antigen. And with newer technology that we have today, including kinda like plain theft technology, plus advancements in in vitro transcription, which is how you make the mRNA. And the other important part, the lipid nano particles for delivery, we now have a system that can deliver that directly into cells. And so you're putting in something that's all recognizes and can do something with.
And so it produces the antigen, which is just one part of the virus so your body can recognize it when you get infected. And that that's that's how a vaccine with MRNA would work. Fascinating. So a lot of things that were thought, impossible to create a vaccine for with this technology all of a sudden become possible.
If if you think about even beyond just vaccines, just the druggable genome, which is kind of a a term issue sometimes, when I take druggable, they're referring to, like, small molecules and maybe even antibody therapies. It's it's much more limited than you would think.
But if you can actually engineer a sequence that would cause the cell to produce what you need, whether it's replacing a protein, altering a gene, producing antigen against some sort of pathogen, all of those things are possible with mRNA. So can you cure aging? I'm pretty sure I've got some customers working on that. The it's deep science that I can go to if you want. I'd be curious about that.
And because I I think you're talking about effectively a technology that allows secure all of all known disease. I can't even think of one you would be the one that I would ask. Like, two two really good ones, and it's a genetic editing, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell disease. So sickle cell disease, they use a viral vector genome editing technique.
But there are customers out there right now that are actually using mRNA and encoding the editing technology in the mRNA and using that to deliver which so far has been, pretty effective. And so I know there's work being done on cyclical disease, and a number of companies working on on cystic fibrosis. Can actually reverse the disease state. And all of these people, like, for those years that disease existed, they just, you know, with a nightmare. So it's, it's a huge potential.
Internal diseases. I mean, at MS, we don't exactly know the cause of yet. So potentially, we don't know the cure a way to cure it either, but it does sound like the technology that allows us to cure cancer, potentially aging most infectious diseases. I mean, it's a Cancer is a good one. So, if you think about most solid tumors, many of them there's a a protein on the cell called PD L1 that a T cell would recognize itself. So cancers take advantage of that, and they produce that.
If you could get a T cell out of the body and generic to it no longer produces PD-one, which is is the interacting protein, then that T cell is free to engage the cancer. And so there's a number of therapeutics actually trying to do that using MRNA. It's one of those, you know, I I'm heavily involved in the AI space, and there's a lot of hype around that today. And, interestingly, the mRNA space isn't isn't, completely absorbed with AI either.
If you think about how you're building these molecules Yeah. There's a lot of of engineering that occurs in terms of optimizing sequences to make it more effective therapeutic. And AI is one of those methodologies that's being used. I would think that the big problem there though is, like, testing reproducibility. Like, you could simulate a lot in the computer without getting necessarily a strong signal this works. Just like this might be a good direction.
Yeah. And then you have to test the biologic Yeah. So is there a way of scaling that up? I mean, how is it done biologically at scale if you're getting out 1000 new ideas every day? That was one of the other challenges, historically that that the face faces scalability of the technology. But these days, I mean, even within our own lab, making a 100 or a 1000 different mRNA targets really isn't that challenging, and we can make them very scales.
You can imagine, like, like, nothing about thousands of targets, but how quickly kind of the the code vaccines have matured and evolved, it's the same technology, but changing the sequence targets a different variant of the virus. And they can literally, like, get the sequence, ask for the reagent, and have a therapy on the market a few months later. That's how scalable it is. And we're talking about potentially billions That's absolutely amazing.
And there's no, and we'll it's it's not like you've got a lab full of puppies and monkeys that you have to test it on. I will say this. Unfortunately, regulatory bodies still feel the need to have those mechanisms in place, but I'm happy to say that that with MRN, the chance that some sort of toxic event or, or killing them was extremely low.
It's become, it's more humane technology because of that too, because the even, like, testing the, when we, when we innovate new technologies, for instance, our latest one is is a Clincap M6. I'm really designed to increase the potency of the drugs. So the cap actually, prevents decapping, so the yarny molecule lasts longer. The way that we tested that to demonstrate its potential is we actually, attached it to a lusive race gene, like a firefly, so that it lights up within an organism.
And we injected that into a mouse tail, a living mouse, and we're able to image it. And none of the mice died. They were they were all fine afterwards. That's just amazing to me. I mean, so many of the things that you're talking about, it's the future is now kind of stuff. It's technology that we've all seen in sci fi movies at some point in the us thinking that, like, hypothetically could happen to probably not my lifetime, but you're saying that we're on the cusp of it today.
And in some cases, we're actually able to deliver on those promises today. Yeah. It's it's dark track level stuff. Be perfectly honest. Kinda huge trucky. Same. I don't think you go into technology unless you are. And I I imagine your fields very similar. Like, you you have to believe in that optimistic view of the future, and so much of us are informed by things like Star Trek, that BTLbn, close wants and needs society.
Yeah. Actually, going to to your aging comment earlier, one of the things that causes aging is to break down telomeres at the end of chromosomes. That's one of the areas that I I know a few people are working on is actually developing mRNA therapeutics that can enhance repairing the telomeres, which inherently would cause cells to be able to last longer. So reversing aging. Yeah. I've always been curious about that one. I mean, I I conceptually, I understand what you're saying.
I understand how that would that would cause the problem. But there there's a reason that cells die at the rate that they do. And I also know that, like, in the development of, like, your organs and stuff like that, it's signaling from the cells around it to kind of give it the identity of what you are in comparison to the cells around you.
And I, I, is it simply that if we keep cells alive longer and healthier that they don't need it to self destruct and that, like, solves the problem of, like, I don't know, liver failure or something like that that's coming along with aging. That's one part of it. Yeah. That's one part of the second is cellular replication. So about making a, like, a copy on Xerox, you keep making a copy of a copy of a copy, eventually, the copy breaks down. Your, your chromosomes aren't any different.
They're they're more resilient than a copy, but the reality is is that the more times a cell device, the more times you make it, things begin to break down. Cells become unviable. Sometimes that leads to things like cancer, but that is a the eminent way that we age. If you can prevent the breakdown of those chromosomes and allow the cells to replicate in a healthy state, you were and that would be going to reverse aging. Totally makes sense.
And that that's that's, again, back to the star trek side if I live in the future kind of stuff. What's the Yep. I mean, when we're talking about these things, we're talking about a technology that's advancing very, very rapidly. And there's a lot of promise there. But what's the next 5 years look like? What what are the big, like, if you were to predict 5 things that you'll come out in the next 5 years, what might those be? So for TriLink, we're constantly examining new ways.
And there's kind of 3 axes that customers and people working with MRNE look at, what is the safety profile, which, a lot of great improvements have been made there. You might remember that the recent, think of the, the Nobel Prize in chemistry or medicine, remember which, for the N1 pseudo methyuridine that was actually a component to mRNA technology because it helps, the cells respond better to it. It's less toxic. And that was recently announced, but we're always looking to innovation.
How can we attack safety, how can we attack, scalability? And the other one that I think is probably most important where everyone's focusing right now on the therapeutic durability. So as I mentioned, mRNA is very transient, but in many cases, you actually want to extend that life out a bit before it's cleared to keep the therapy going. So, like, M6, that the new cap analog we have, that was one of the primary that it does. So there's an entire other genre, which is called self amplifying mRNA.
There was a, COVID vaccine released, I believe, in Japan that uses self amplifying RNA. So the RNA basically has the capability of replicating itself, not indefinitely, but replicating itself. And then, of course, more mRNA's, more protein is created. So you get a longer lasting therapeutic. So going back to, like, the sickle cell anemia case, like, you can only inject so much of into the body. It has to go to every cell within the body to have.
It's, like, impact like, change the DNA in an appropriate way. So in the case of most people, that means you're gonna have many, many doses of it because you're not possibly gonna saturate their entire body with that. Is the idea there that with this type of technology, it, like, it replicates just enough to be able to do that in one dose. Is that the benefit? I'm I'm just trying to understand Yeah. Yeah. No. That that's you're you're getting the benefit perfectly right.
So so the idea is if you can reduce the dose and still get the therapy benefits, the safety profile will always improve. That makes sense. I mean, that's it's such a complicated world too. I, I I like I said, I know very, very little of my friend who's been involved in it. He tells me things. And to me, it always sounds like magic. And I'm sure what I do sounds like magic to him as well, but not the same level.
And it's come complicated in ways that, like, binary on a computer could never be that complicated. There's only 2 options. Yes or no. Whereas with everything that you do, everything that's happening within the, like, the and RNA, like, one protein being produced independent of everything else, will have one impact within a certain type of cell. But if another type of protein is present, I think I'm paraphrasing this correctly or saying this correctly.
It can actually change how the other protein behaves within the cell. Yeah. I mean, you're you're you're getting it directly directionally correct. Is that you're you're introducing something mononated foods to protein that can direct biology in a direction away from disease state? So the sickle cell being a good example. You don't have to correct every single cell.
You just need to in that specific instance, what they've done is they've they're using technology to reactivate fetal hemoglobin Okay. Which usually goes dormant after you reach maturity, because the sickle cell disease exists on the adult hemoglobin. So by reacting fetal hemoglobin, the patients are relieved of the symptoms. Cystic fibrosis, this is more challenging because in that case, you can't just inject it into the blood. It has to go to the cells in the lung.
Otherwise, it has no benefit at all. Change that gene every other cell in the body, but it does nothing. So one of the advancements that people are looking towards is actually still in this liver mechanism side. Can you actually direct it to the specific cellular targets that you're looking for? With the vaccines you injected in your shoulder, most of the processing is actually done in your But if you wanna cure cystic fibrosis, we need that process thing to be done in the lung.
Does that make sense? I but the what what it just fascinates me about this is just the amount of compute power you'd have to be able to have to be able to go through all the possible interactions and all the variables that are involved in it because it's so complex. It's never yes or no. Yeah. No. It is very and and and multi component. So you have, the the RNA sequence itself. You have the targets you're looking to go after.
You have the lipid nanoparticle, which there are a 1000 plus ways to make a lipid nanoparticle. And each time they find a new way that actually improves how the therapeutic is taken. All of these things have to then be brought together for the single drug them. I'm imagining the labs, right, where where you're where you're doing this, and then the amount of, like I said, compute because you're gonna have to simulate it many, many times in many different scenarios.
And the number of variables involved is just astronomically large. So when you said that there's of use of AI. It totally makes sense. Like, you absolutely have to have it. How do you get good signal out of the noise though? Like, how do you find something that you're like, that is a good target? That is a good direction of going. Walk me through, like, the beginning process to, like, getting to the point where we're saying, okay. That's worth testing.
The vaccine is example is probably gonna be the easiest one to kind of, like, wrap your head around, rather than gene editing or something along those lines, which get much more complex. So so with the vaccine, you've got the viral sequence. And so if you remember back to, to be onset of COVID, the labs and companies that actually developed the vaccines never actually had the virus in their lab. They never needed it. It just needed a genomic sequence.
Once they had sequence, then they can use computing tool to break down the various proteins, determine what they are, and then figure out which ones are more highly conserved because you want a very highly conserved antigen. Otherwise, the virus will mutate and and therapeutic use list.
So a lot of the computing power goes into choosing that antigen, and then you move from the antigen to the RNA sequence, and now you wanna create an RNA sequence that is gonna be most efficient possible to get into the cell and be translated. So every step of that, and I mean, you can narrow down using AI or some sort of computing power. And then you have your targets that you can manufacture and then test those in animal studies and then in in human trials.
Okay. I I know it's a sign as well as, like, a business. So there's this ordered sequence in which these things go, and it's been broken down into a very efficient set of steps. But I imagine bringing anything to market is a very labor intensive and therefore a very expensive process. Like, like, any drug therapeutic? Yes. Yeah. It is.
I mean, it it if all the same guidelines that any other drug would have to, but it also carries that bleeding edge technology component where regulatory bodies are having to adapt real time to how to think about it. So you using, for since the COVID vaccine, for a company to produce a new COVID vaccine for a new variant, all they need to do is change the sequence and manufacture. And then FDA has the FDA or the regulatory has to look at that and say, okay.
Is this the same drug stub to date, the answer's in yes. But as we diversify the application, and thinking specifically on on, genome editing, the ways you can do it and the things you can target and the way you can manipulate I'll be curious to see how how regular bird values adapt that. And we'll see that within the next one to 5 years. Pretty incredibly fast in that world.
And we're we're actually very, very short on time, Jason, and I wanted to give you a chance to, like, direct people towards website or, like, find out more if they wanted to learn more, and final thoughts. Yeah. So so in terms of learning more information, visiting meravide.com or trilink.com are gonna be two places to get a lot of good information about mRNA Technologies and just what meravide does as a whole. Fantastic.
And then in terms of kind of final thoughts, I mean, I've obviously had a lot of excitement for for this therapeutic modality. I get to work with these customers on a regular basis. Every day, I I have a new thought experiment that I do in thinking through the technology that they have, how is the plug how we can help them. So it's it's pretty exciting every day. That's the best place to be working in the best time. Jason, an absolute pleasure having you on.
Thank you so much for being on the show. You were a fantastic guest. And, when we do a longer form episode in the future, I'd love to have you back on to talk through specifics fantastic. It was great. Thanks for having me. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. Wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Thank you for listening. If you are new here and enjoyed the content, please subscribe.
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