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And welcome back George Noriri, doctor Tim Harris with us as we talk about biotechnology. Tim, we talked a little bit about cancer. Is there any other affliction or disease that you think biotechnology can tackle.
Yeah, there's a lot of interest in tackling autoimmune diseases like hum got arthritis and must and multiple and uh multiples crosis and lupus.
They're on all.
The big companies agendas. They're on the bithech companies agendas as well, and it's not surprising. They afflict a large number of people. And some of the medicines that have been made so far and work in some people, but they don't work in everybody, and we need to look at those patients who do not do well on the current drugs and find some new ones, and biotech will definitely help that process.
Is artificial intelligence fueling some of this as well?
Yeah? I think so.
I mean, it's an oft used word, and I think people kind of overhype artificial intelligence a little bit. It's really large scale data analytics, and it's only as good as the data you analyze and when you're analyzing data on let's say, libraries of chemicals, they are completely clear that you know what they are, and you can scan the data and ask questions about those molecules and how
they find to different proteins. But if you're thinking about biological systems, like what the effect of different things are in different animals, then that's a very different story because animals are biologically heterogeneous, and so you get a lot of rather noisy data, and being able to use artificial intelligence to examine that rather noisy data is not as
straightforward as some people think. So the idea that artificial intelligence will not only discover your drug for you, but it will also develop your drug for you is probably not true.
Yet it may never be.
True because drug discovery and drug development is an experimental science. You have to do experiments in cells and experiments in animals to get to an answer that makes sense.
Are there any other ethical questions that need to be considered with biotech?
And I think there's obviously.
I mean, in the old days, it was regulated. When recomminant DNA started, it was regulated by the people doing the work. They held a meeting at Asilomar in nineteen seventy five where major players in recomminant DNA technology, you all got together talked about what they thought the risks were and came up with a set of guidelines which actually showed were used by both here in America and in the UK and elsewhere as guidelines for doing recominant
DNA research. I think that same kind of view, or same kind of way of looking at the risks associated with new technologies should be evaluated. There are obviously physical risks as well as ethical questions, and those ethical questions can be answered by good discussion between people who are expert in those areas.
Tell me about the title of your book, Tim In Pursuit of Unicorns. As we mentioned, they are mythical beings, but you never know what could be developed in a laboratory.
Well, there was nothing to do with that. It was to do with the fact that biotech companies worth over a billion dollars were referred to or other tech companies as well as biotech companies were referred to as unicorns. And so I thought, after writing a book about the history of the development of not only the technology but also the companies that were set up to use the technology to make.
A new drugs to help patients with.
There.
I thought that there.
Was an aspiration, unspoken aspiration actually to be a billion dollar company. So in Pursuit of Unicorns was a play on that. And some of the companies that were started and had valuations of multiple billions of dollars disappeared because the technology didn't work or the products didn't work. And so the mythical nature of the Unicorn company is also a fact, like the myth of unicorns themselves. So it was really a play on the word unicorn and the mythology associated with them.
And actually it enabled.
Us to use the Dutch tapestries that hang in the cloisters in Northern Manhattan as the cover.
Art for the book.
And I've always said, always was told never judge a book by its cover. The cover is fabulous, and I hope that the book is as fabulous as the cover.
Good for you. We're growing some organs right now in a laboratory. How extensive is that going to get? With biotech?
It's a important technology for helping to understand how tissues work in three dimensions.
It's all very well having cells.
In a dish, but as you know, they're.
In two dimensions they're not really folding up or looking like a heart or looking like a kidney, and being able to use induce stem cell technology to make organs of different kinds with different differentiated.
Cells in those organs.
It's going to be a very helpful tool for testing the molecules that we want to use in patients before we actually get to treating patients. Having human organized if you want to call them that in dishes is a very useful technology to go along with mice and rats and other animals that are used to test these molecules that we want to use in patients with these different diseases.
How far will that kind of technology go, the ability to grow organs.
I think well, I mean there's a regenerative medicine piece to that as well, which is it would be very helpful to be able to grow different organs so that you could from some of patient's own cells we create an organ that was misfunctioning like a kidney. And that's quite a long way away, but that is something that people are clearly interested in doing, as well.
As having it as a test.
System for testing drugs of different kinds.
Tim and your care, what would you say is the most exciting thing you've gone through?
Well, I have been.
Fortunately, I've been in a situation where I've been on this journey for fifty years. What is the most exciting
thing were? I can tell you one of the most exciting and kind of anxiety inducing was being a thirty something year old scientist at the one of the biggest patent battles trials in London where the Welcome Genetech TPA trial went on and I was called up into the dock to be an expert witness, and going through the whole process of swearing on the Bible to tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth was not only pretty exciting but kind of anxiety inducing.
And when the patent barristers quiz you.
Over your technology and what you did in order to identify whether it was novel or not not, which is obviously important as part of a patent case, and they seem to come across as knowing more about it than you did when you had been spending three years of your life doing it and they've been spending about three months of their life learning the technology so that they could ask you awkward questions WHI was some kind of interesting and exciting in the same way because in that room,
that courtroom, there were four Nobel Prize winners and at least two other people who subsequently received Nobel Prizes. So it was pretty or inspiring for someone who was in their early thirties.
So I said, have you had any disappointments in the field.
Oh?
Yeah, I mean piles of disappointments. It goes with the territory. You know, when you're starting new companies with new technology, sometimes it doesn't work. You think it's going to work, but when you've done some key experiments, you realize that actually it's not going to work, and so you have to shut the doors on the company. I've done that
at least twice. And that is a that is they say, you know that that's character building when you have to close down a company that you started and you give the you know, you give the reagents that you brought to the company across the road because you've got nowhere else to put them and you don't want to throw them away. I don't think it was particularly character building.
I found it rather disappointing actually, And in the end you bounce back and you find new technology and you start over, you have to have a you have to have some impatience to try to get some more useful.
Things for the patients.
And it's for most people in the industry, it's all driven by wanting to make things that help people who are worse off than they are. It's not driven by the money that they're going to make. It's driven by money that you can collect in order to get investments in your company. But it's not driven by money you can make. That kind of comes as an add on if you're successful. It comes from wanting to do things to help other people.
Are there any ethical considerations here?
I think there are.
As I said, you know, some of the technology is there have been thoughts about modifying human embryos.
By using some of the gene editing.
Technology, but that is banned. You're not allowed to do that, and for very good reason. And when you're thinking about modifying humans, what would you modify anyway? Would you modify their height, or would you modify their intelligence, or would you modify what they look like? And beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't think you know what you want to change anyway. You don't know what to change in order to change beauty.
At the moment, it's such.
A combination of different genes and different gene functions that you wouldn't know how to do that anyway. So I think it's just as well that that kind of technology is not being used.
For that tim How much more do we know today than we did twenty five years ago, and what has created that knowledge?
It's almost exponential, the amount of knowledge that we have now compared to what we used to have and the number of you only if you look at the number of scientific journals that publish different papers, there's been an enormous expansion in the number of journals and the number of papers that are published in those journals. And it's to do again with access to capital. It's different kind of capital because it's capital in the form of grants
that the academics can apply for. They're very competitive. Only six to ten percent of the grants that are applied for get funded. But that's enough to push the technology forward. And that's that's fortunate because we rely on the academic community to be the hotbed for innovation.
It's exciting, though, isn't it.
Well, you couldn't have a more exciting thing to do. So when if there any kids listening to this and they're thinking about what they want to do for a career, starting your own company and trying to get it to work, and moving forward to all the different issues you have
to deal with us. Nothing more satisfying at the end of the day when you go home at ten o'clock at night probably than to sit there and think, well, actually, we achieve something today, and we will achieve something tomorrow, and so I'm going to get up and go to work. And on a Sunday night, you want to be thinking, oh, it's Monday tomorrow, I.
Can go to work. Not Monday tomorrow, I have to go to work. You don't want to think like that.
Unfortunately, most of my working life I've been in a situation where good, it's Monday, I can go to work.
It seems like people as they get older develop Allheimer's disease, dementia, Parkinson's disease. Are we ever going to have biotechnology tackle those things?
They are tackling them now. There are a number of drugs that are actually have been marketed recently by different companies which are looking at removing some of the proteins that are responsible for Alzheimer's disease, and there are similar activities in Parkinson's disease. So they are certainly diseases which are high on the agenda of many companies to try to find better products to treat those diseases, which are highly debilitating for patients and hugely expensive for the community.
How would you grade the United States and its efforts with biotech?
Number one, for sure, for a variety of reasons. One access to capital, two centersive accedence from an academic.
Point of view, and just scale.
And.
I guess experience. There's a lot of biotech experience and experience in innovolation, and that's true in the tech sector as well as the biotech.
Sector for that matter.
But we shouldn't be complacent because other countries are catching up.
First.
When I was a student and would read the literature, I guess one in probably five hundred papers would come from the Far East. Now it's probably one in three or one in two.
Papers that I read come from the Far East.
That is great in one way because it just increases the amount of knowledge, But that's kind of concerning in another way, because I think America needs to keep its lead in innovation and I.
Come from the UK, so I want the UK to do.
The same thing and invest in science and innovation.
And you have to work to do that.
You have to explain to the politicians that science is driving an awful lot of good for the economy as well as for the patients with the diseases that are costing sort sort of money to manage.
Did you ever see the movie Tim Jurassic Park.
I've seen every Jurassic Park movie. The first one was probably the best and the most inter That is, Michael Crichton pushed the boundaries. I mean, you couldn't do what he suggested, but it was close to what you could do, and the fact that it was.
Close to what you could do made it more believable and.
Made for a pretty good film.
Actually, we will we ever get there, and I don't.
Think we will.
In fact, there are lots of ideas about how you can manipulate what minism so that you can recreate dinosaurs, but I don't think that's going to happen, And I mean, I'm not sure that people are really that interested in doing that. I've got a jeep at home, and I've got some and I've got a Jurassic Park sticker on the side of the jeep and my mirror has these creatures are closer than you think, or whatever it was. Whatever the quote was, so I'm I like to think about Jurassic Falcon.
It was a pretty glassy movie.
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