I mean, I love how evolution, which is like this fundamental principle of life, can be applied so universally across different diseases because it's fundamental. It, like, it is the thing. That allows change to happen. And if you understand that, you understand those rules, you can develop therapies that just couldn't have before.
Today, an FX bio general partner, Omri Jewelry, is sitting down with Jacob Glenville, founder of Sentivax, and Nick Goldner, founder of Resistance Bio to go deep on platforms and biology. Here's our conversation on how an Evolu area approach can lead to better cancer therapies and universal vaccines, how to make key decisions as a scientist's founder, and their advice for fundraising and tech bio. Let's jump in. Pete like to say that what doesn't kill you make you stronger.
But in biology, we know that usually what doesn't kill you mutates and tries again. We see it all the time. It could be cancer that Pete resistance to medication, off the medication, and come back stronger every time. We can Pete it with bacteria that get resistance to antibiotics. And new virus strains that can elude immunity when we get vaccines. And so today, we have really amazing, guest. We have Jake and Nick, Each of them are dedicated to solve this hugely important problem.
Jake is working on viruses with his universal vaccine company, Sentivax, and Nick with his company resistant bio trying to tackle the cancer 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 satisfactory founder, Nick? Yeah. I'm a 4 season Pete. And, during that time, I lose about £30 in about 3 months.
I lose so much blood during that time that I actually have to stand up a few minutes before class is is over to keep from fainting so that I can actually make it to my next class. And so while I'm very publicly suffering, from what 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, secretly battling cancer.
And so, you know, we're both in this situation where 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 tough time. 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 of college, and basically everything shifts. I'm on this quadruple dose, my my therapy, and I have this in my arm from the surgery. And as I'm walking away from the hospital, I had just fired my because he was like, well, we'll just put you on more drug, and it clearly wasn'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 she says, well, I hope you got good news because I've got some pretty terrible news, like cancer relapse. And, you know, for her, the the the goal Right? Cause she's a single mother is to survive long enough 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 and get my PhD. She's, you know, on this new medication.
And while she's, you know, being killed by this cancer, she dedicates her life to kill cancer. And we would go back and forth, you know, talking, you know, about what I was studying on antibiotic resistance and what she was physically 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 see her son thrive. And, like, I it it was just an incredible thing.
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 to basically beat the best therapies that we had available, like cancer 1. And in biology, we often focus on this question, of, you know, what is the start? How does cancer exist? You know, where does cancer come from? But really, we need to be asking ourselves the second question, which is How does cancer survive our best attempts at trying to kill?
Because it can do things that we can't even possibly 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 ways that cancer can fight back so that we can develop therapies and diagnostics that help guide cancer decisions so that we can fight 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 talk about 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 of birth. And they kill more than than every generation and every war combined, and they'll they'll keep doing it. Because the cancer is the battle with That's an important one. We need to attract that too. This is a battle with without.
There's there's an opportunity with infectious disease to eliminate it. And I think that's what's drawn me to this. So when I sold my last company, the normal thing to do would be to go out onto a beach for 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 I founded Cinevax was that I had been building a technology to focus the immune system on the sites 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 little sites. And if you can just focus on them, you could have broad spectrum vaccines. And the reason that I felt like I couldn't leave is that the technology was working. And, you know, I I've gotten proud of what I did 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 I produce, the 78 antibody therapeutics, and the partners will will have its day, and then a smart people will come along and new drugs will come along, and that'll be the limit of my my period of influence in biotechnology. But with vaccines, I looked at what we were making, 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 a remarkable accomplishment to end the pathogen forever until the end of time. And then we stopped. We we it's ridiculous. It's like it's almost like space flight where we 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 than the seventies, particularly in this this biotechnology revolution that we're currently living in and surfing on, you know, the the pressure from a recent pandemic.
And So I had this technology, and I'm like, I can't walk away from this because this would be the single greatest achievement I could do in my lifetime to affect the largest number of people in my own generation and every generation that comes after because eliminating a pathogen is is it's it's it is unique in medicine that a vaccine can eliminate the disease.
And so that's the reason I found the company and drove my wife nuts and and went from out of the frying pan and into the fire because we had this opportunity to go create this broad spectrum vaccine technology and have that kind of lasting impact that I I just didn't think any Beller. Any other work I would do would be able to live up to that level of accomplishment. And so I felt that I had an obligation to do so. And so that's what that Cinevax does is we create universal vaccines. Amazing.
Amazing impact. And that was the next question, the impact, but it's pretty obvious that if you figure out that a conserved mechanism of resistance for cancer, you can make a big dent there. And then if you figure out the common, conserve areas of viruses and create vaccines against them and eliminate forever. You know, what a big impact. And by the way, I think both companies have some revenge to do prevention cancer and prevention COVID.
And and the eventual evolution, because when you think about it, that's exactly what we're doing. That's a bad side of evolution. Everything that, you know, grows fast and mutates. 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 way around it, which is pretty hard.
So we answered about the impact question, but, let me dig a little bit more about the platform itself. You know, within effects, we like to invest in in platform technologies. What make your call take a a platform technology? Yeah. So the biggest thing so I'm I'm a microbiologist by training. So I grew up, you know, studying bacteria figuring out for instance, purposes, when you think about resistance, we think about antibiotic resistance.
That's the canonical mechanism by which we see failure when it comes to therapies. What we were able to do is build a clinical model of resistance pre clinically. So we were able to take that resistance mechanism, create that environment, Pete it into the lab. We were able to identify the target of a, you know, $1,000,000,000 a year drug where, most of the information that was known was that it, you know, broadly targeted the outside of the, cell membrane.
We were actually able to figure out the specific, you know, phospholipid that they that that this thing was targeting because we were able to understand how the bacteria was going to change and modify itself. And so we took this evolutionary approach in my experience with Sonya and my my own, you know, disease, you know, was able to understand that resistance is a universal feature. It's not something that goes away, Morgan siloed to antibiotics or viruses.
This is really something that the yin and yang of life. Right? We get put into this really tough situation. And, fundamentally, what we're trying to do is figure out what are the different things, choices that can be made both, you know, from a person's perspective, but from a cellular perspective, how do I survive, you know, in this really tough environment? And what we realized was that we weren't looking at cancer in the environment that it was, you know, natively presented. Right?
We were basically taking calf serums like baby cow's blood and plastic and growing, like, human cancer cells in this, like, these petri dishes, 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 has cancer that's, like, bathed in cow's blood. Like, no person on earth has that. And so why would we expect to get a reasonable response of translatable bonds from that kind of experiment.
And so we went back and looked at all these different 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 cancer patients, 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 of cells, and we have to be able to account for all the heterogeneity and diversity that those different 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 this cancer, which is why, you know, we focused on understanding cancer resistance and cancer therapies from a genetic standpoint. We have a particular mutation. Things are are changing in this particular cancer.
This is the driver of the cancer. But oftentimes when you target that driver with BRAF, you know, targeted therapies or KRAS targeted therapies, the cancer basically adapts. They make modifications to that particular protein because that's not the thing with keeping it alive. It's the thing that started the cancer, but it's not thing that's keeping it alive. And so while we have all of these therapeutic modalities, 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 of these different proteins? Now the bottleneck is kind of shifted. It's no longer how do we create chemistry and therapies that go after a particular target. It's how do we go after multiple targets at once to fundamentally shut down all the potential options for a particular cancer.
And right now, there aren't technologies out there that enable you to see how the different, targets actually connect together, how they're gonna respond over the long haul. And that's what our, that's what our, rescue system fundamentally does. We're able to culture these cells, develop resistance, and understand that long term biological problem that they're going to solve for 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 to invest in platform technologies and what to make your call take a platform tech. So what makes our core tech, a platform tech is is pretty simple and straightforward. We and many others for 20 years have known what the problem is that when you make a vaccine, And look, I love vaccines.
They're the greatest medical advance in sanitation and fire in terms of the number of people protected, but they do a poor job against rapidly mutating pathogen which is why the initial waves of great success were against pathogens that don't mutate that quickly. So you could make a vaccine. And even though the pathogen, like the cancers, they're constantly evolving, but some evolve slower than others.
For the slower evolving pathogens, you vaccinate and the antibodies you produce mostly are gotten across the pathogen and and therefore you can knock it out. The problem is that we have a bunch of pathogens that evolve much faster. And they do it on purpose to escape our immune systems And it's a problem because it means what you're injected with is not the same thing as what you're infected with and the infection escapes.
And this is why we're stuck in this Beller ending cycle of having to make a new vaccine for flu twice a year. That's why we're updating the coronavirus vaccines and why they gave us all those crazy shots is because the truth is it wasn't it was increasingly different. The new virus from the original coronavirus strain, and so they were just boosting you over and over again to get what little antibodies you had left that were relevant to to to be as abundant as possible.
And it's why we don't have, like, a working HIV vaccine 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 stuck in this never ending syssophistician cycle with, the flu and so forth. And then this beautiful thing happened about 20 years ago, people started saying, wait, Hold on a second.
Like, when we're looking some people, these lucky devils are hitting some genetic jackpot, and they're producing these broadly neutralizing 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 an Achilles heel. There's some spot they could mutate or the virus died.
And if you can get an antibody against it, you'd be protective. And second, it told you Pete could produce And as 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 make universal vaccines.
The problem is that the immune system is super complicated and diverse, and the tools were relatively primitive to go crack open the hood of this engine that wasn't working to try to fix it. I just kind of got lucky. I was at the right place at the right time where I started looking in immunology and computational systems immunology right when the arms race of the better, faster, cheaper genome sequencer had reached the point that it instead of in a warehouse, it fit on a bench top.
And I had started applying it to looking at the immune system of immunized animals and people try to figure out why we miss. And problem to make it simple is that there's huge numbers of ways antibodies can bind to a a spike protein, and most of those sites could bind to can mutate. And it's only a few sites that that don't.
And the odds are, like, a 100,000 or a 1,000,000 to 1 to hit the right site, which is why some people made them, and they published on it, but most people miss because the right answer is hidden in a notion of wrong answers. And so our technology platform, which the patent, the Jonas patent, and the series of patents that follow, or just solve that general problem is how do you focus the immune system on the conserve sites?
And the way we do it is taking an evolutionary snapshot of lots proteins, mixing them, and then diluting them so that only the shared site that hasn't mutated in a 100 years is at a high enough concentration by having small amounts of multiple proteins, only the shared site is abundant. And therefore, the entire immune system focuses on the shared site. This turns out to work amazingly well.
We've applied it to influenza, and that's the thing we're initiating manufacturing on with the help of an FX starting in January. We've applied it to, earlier to the coronaviruses and HIV. We've even applied it we ask ourselves, we don't think it's just viruses. We we think there's other pathogens we could tackle, like malaria, fungi, some bacteria, not everywhere. There's some pathogens like tuberculosis. It doesn't really mutate quickly to escape, but it's got other problems.
But there's, like, 18 pathogens we can think of right now that are really important. We even to test it, we went all the way out to snake venom, and we took snake venom from 14 species from all around the globe, and we mixed together a tiny amount of 14 different. And that produced ultra broad response. And that that really speaks to the breadth and the power of the platform. And and the other power of the platform is that it's tractable. You can build this thing.
Sometimes in synthetic biology, people come up with 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 to matter, or it's gonna be crazy expensive. Whereas our technology, the the power of it is that we have a lot of flexibility to bioengineer is what's gonna work right, and we can mass manufacture it on commoditized equipment globe, which means we can actually change change that globe.
You have to say that's the kind of the joy of investing in companies in the space, not just the joy of working with you guys, but just thinking about the impact, you know, when the thing would work, you know, get a revenge on COVID, one injection to for all to to squash all the mutation. But, you know, in in Jurassic Park, they said that life finds a way. So how can you be sure that nature and evolution 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 sure Nick's gonna answer this question as well because we actually work in very parallel worlds, which is cool. The 1st generation of vaccines that eradicated smallpox and bought got pretty close to eradicating a bunch of other pathogens. Those ones overcame. You know, those ones, all pathogens evolve. It's just those ones weren't evolving fast enough compared to the advantage of the vaccines that were offered.
The challenge with the ones that can still evolve to escape is that we need better focusing on more conserve sites. To focus on a conserve Pete, the same thing as to target a pathogen that evolves less quickly because that site evolves less quickly. And so all we need is to improve our pacing. Nature can be clever, but nature's lost to us before. We crush smallpox. We've crushed most of others. We can beat this. It's really just a racing game and putting a better engine under there.
That's gonna give us that advantage. The way to think about it with flu is that the sites that we're targeting haven't changed. One site has changed in thousands of years, and the other site we know hasn't changed in at least 200. And so those that gives you a sense of, oh, how the hell is it gonna change in the next 20 years.
And and I think it's gonna be tough to win against everyone in these pathogens, but I think we can start eradicating a new generation of 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 think that 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.
Yeah. I mean, so I think one of the things about evolution that, was really scary to me at the beginning was that there's so many possibilities that things could do so many different ways that a particular cell or an organism 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, you know, and applying a different approach.
And so when it comes to cancers, what we realized was that there are a lot of rules that these cancer play by, but we don't know what those rules are. And so it's gonna do something that it knows how to do because it either has the, machinery or infrastructure in place, or it's proliferating in such a way that it can sense, you know, when things are going wrong and make adjustments so that cell maintains that survivability.
And what we found was that the problem isn't that there are too many resistance mechanisms. It's that we just haven't learned enough about all the different evolutionary pathways that a particular cancer can take. And so once you start to figure out these rules, and really apply pressure to these different cancers with the different therapies that we've developed as well as novel ones. What we're able to do is come together with this kind of atlas of resistance.
What are the, you know, multiple universes with which that this cancer can adapt and how do these different, adaptations interact with each other? Because we're we're basically gone from the day where, you know, we can go after single particular proteins in the cancer space. We have to go after a multiplex you know, a multi targeted approach. Because if we're not going after multiple different sites, we're allowing back doors for cancers to escape through.
And so eventually, we'll get to a point where life won't find a way, but we still have to understand the rules and the the, the the different, you know, techniques that these cancers have, to survive. Now let's switch gears and talk about the dark side, the business mode Right? So both of you have your bio platform and you monetize it in a different way. Right?
So resistance, Beller our pharma companies while during that time, get a lot of data that will allow you to develop your own drugs, while if Sentipac is actually developing your own vaccines all the way. Right? So can you expand your business approaches and how your platform allow you to try different models? Yeah. Our, you know, our approach is pretty straightforward. We are producing a broad spectrum vaccine for influenza.
We're initiating manufacturer, and we're gonna start phase 1 clinical trials. After that, we're gonna work on phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials. And there's non dilutive potential funding from government agencies to potentially support because pandemic preparedness and seasonal protection from influenza is a big deal that governments care about.
So we it's not a guarantee, but we fit right in a in a place where even before the pandemic, governments knew that there have been 5 pandemics of the last century in influenza alone and more are coming. So that's a straightforward model for us, and and 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 is that they there are veterinary applications for some of our vaccines.
And, for example, pigs also get influenza, and it's a $180,000,000 per year Morgan. No. I don't wanna turn into a veterinary, vaccine producing company. My focus is on humans, but, I think that first off, they're actually echoing next Flint, there's a real danger in bioscience where people sometimes produce these very artificial models, and then they convince them. So they go through this ridiculous model that they've set up to prove success, and then they Pete shock later when their drug fails.
And it's tautological, and the best way to defend yourself by that is to not work on the easy and obvious model, like a mouse all the time. 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 a mouse. Like, you have nobody's gonna buy that. Nobody cares about versus pigs. A farmer loves that pigs. Your vaccine better work. They they get the same kind of flus we do.
It's a $180,000,000 market, and that's helpful to us. So what we do is we are aiming to license that vaccine out to veterinary groups. That's an earlier source of revenue for us. It's also just great, a great opportunity to establish and get our our our broad spectrum vaccine technology out and commercialized in a mass way. And as I mentioned earlier, pigs are the major source of new pandemics.
So they get infected with human viruses, pig viruses, 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 is one 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 animal model? It might be a little more expensive, but it's much more relevant.
There's a market for it, and you're making sure you build a drug that And I think that that's a hidden and invaluable part of making sure that you 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's important for, people in the infectious diseases, to to really understand how interconnected these web reservoirs are.
And so often when you look at a lot of these companies, they're so focused on just, like, the patient They're not looking at the broader problem, and I love this evolutionary approach. Focus on the problem at the source and also take care of it and the patient. That's not something that you typically see. Cool. And, Nick, so what can you tell us about resistance, biode, business model, and how do you apply the the platform approach to to work on different components?
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, but there's really not a market for bacteria antibiotics just don't work really well. But there are 100100 of different types of cancers. Just like there are, you know, all these different books. It's one of the biggest categories of disease.
And each cancer has multiple different subtypes that you have to understand. And so to me, cancer was the biggest subset of disease that had a, that had evolutionary games that we could learn in stand without having to worry about, like, outside reservoirs of, like, resistance coming in, like, you know, cows for antibiotic resistance, you know, bringing that into the community, most patients who have cancer aren't gonna give their cancer to somebody else.
And so we can actually look at these evolutionary trajectories and pathways in a given patient, knowing that they're not gonna be spreading different James, from patient to patient, we could really focus on what does cancer in non small cell lung cancer do? And how does it, and how does it evolve?
And so what we realized was that there's just so many cancer types out there, and there are so many targets, that it was almost it it was a, it was a selfish decision to only bring this kind of platform internally because it has so many applicabilities to all the different compounds that are out there.
We really wanted to make sure that we were partnering with companies So they understood all the land mines that were in front of their compact, right, because, like, everybody has to walk across this field, to go from discovery all the way through to an NDA approval. And post marketing, you know, adoption. And this landline, you know, this this this field of landlines that's there, these experiments to try to, like, reveal where these land mines are.
We can only Pete, like, a step or 2 in a a head. And so what our system allows is for somebody who's at the preclinical stages, I have a molecule, I have a particular Morgan, we can basically reveal to them the entire landmine field, going from the beginning to the end. We could tell them does your molecule even have a path through. Right?
And so we like to partner with companies on really understanding not only what is the target that they're going after, but how does that cancer respond to that therapy over time so that we can better hone in the patient population 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 and dropping bombs during the Pacific, you know, World War 2, and the planes that would come back that had all the bullet holes those those were the areas of the plane that you didn't need to reinforce because those were non lethal areas. Every part of the plane that didn't have a bullet hole, that was the part that if it got hit, it would break apart.
And so we can also start to identify these evolutionarily conserved spots within the particular target protein, not just from an evolution standpoint, but from a perturbation standpoint, many of these proteins have never been perturbed, and so there hasn't been an evolutionary pressure to change. And so this allows us to actually figure out what are all the different ways that we can go after this particular protein now that there's a way to go after and target that in a non natural way.
And so this allows us to understand this new kind of panacea of evolutionary changes that happen only as a result of us developing therapies as a community to target these cancer types. Like, we're we're literally creating an evolutionary field that exists before these therapies Pete, existed. I actually use that exact same analogy when we think about our work. Your stuff is really cool. So it seems like you you have the ability to go.
You could provide an advice on creating combination therapies pretty effectively because you can basically do the intersection of 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 to provide 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 that we're running into is a lot of patients are treated with chemotherapy up front because they don't know that targeted therapy could be effective. And so what happens is we have these chemotherapies. You get given to these patients. They lose their hair. They lose that, that self dignity. I mean, these are, these are the quotes from Pete that I've talked to.
And more importantly, what happens to the cancer 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 has this recombined genome that's so much more complicated, so much more difficult to Pete. And now this patient, because they've given them chemotherapy as the very first therapy. This patient is now on a trajectory of poor outcomes.
Whereas if they just took the time to figure out what is this cancer doing, what is the cancer like going to do in the future? We can actually start to put the right patients on the right therapies up front so that we can guide the tumor to a state of susceptibility rather 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 the problem, that is so complex.
Yeah. I love how you create a theater where the cancer is actually you know, doing the experiment for you. It actually shows you all the different ways you can mutate out of the drug. 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 so that you can beat them. I mean, that's that's the it's the same approach. Really empathize with the cancer.
Figure out what it wants to do and then use that as the means of killing it. The gateway is all the way down. It's similar to what we do with the the viruses is like I love the viruses that have been around for a while, like flu and HIV because they'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't have as much luxury. It's like coronavirus is newer.
So we have enough variants to pick, or, but we've actually built a mammalian displace where we have a synthetic library of 100 of 1,000,000 of novel RPDs. And we so we searched through that to be able to better explore a space where nature hasn't given us the freebie of huge numbers of sequences. So it sounds analogous to what you're doing in some ways. That's very cool.
I mean, I love how evolution, which is like this fundamental principle of life, can be applied so universally across different diseases because it's fundamental. It, like, it is the thing that allows change to happen. Right? And if you understand that, you understand those rules, you can develop therapies that just couldn't have existed before. And, I'm really excited to see what the world looks like. With these new vaccines and, you know, with these new cancer therapies.
Yeah. The the reason why, both of you are in this podcast together And that's a great segway for the next question because, you know, you all you all have amazing platform companies, and platform companies means that you can do a lot of 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 business side.
But then the one of the major pain points for all our companies is deciding what to do first because you can do so many things and you don't have enough money to do everything that you wanna do. So the main question is like, how do you decide what to tackle first? Like, you know, how do you choose? So I choose in the same way that cancers in our body chooses who takes over and the virus is chewed. And that is you you have them Beller it out and then may the fittest one win.
And So what I do is I ask myself what are the various applications that we could work on, and you know that each one that you work on is an opportunity cost to work on a different one. And so you rank them and you make a decision of what'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 black book behind me.
And I write them down in that book, and I ignore it for a couple of weeks, and I come back and continuously review. And over decades of doing that, what is percolated to the top are the things that I think of all the things in there. These are the coolest. These are the most Morgan, and these are the things that have the biggest impact. And therefore, nothing else deserves to climb up above that in the ladder.
And and that forces you, first off, to pick your your greatest works to work on, and it gives you a sense of, okay. I I know that I could do that, but if you juggle more than too many balls, you're gonna start dropping them. And and so that's basically the strategy is a merit based dominance of, of the most valuable target areas. And The other principle is there should be, a network 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's the worst case scenario. If you're working on 3 things that are all actually same thing in their Flint and learning from one thing empowers the other. And you have, tools that they're all gonna flow through, then what you have as a pipeline and your invite in for any any any optimization on any step of that pipeline will benefit all of the programs. And that that's that's that's where you're surfing.
That's where you really wanna be on top of that wave. And so that's that's our tactic. Think that last piece that I listened to my my lab team was just like, Jake, no more. And so then, that also is the feedback point. Yeah. I think I think for us, we So we didn't think what we initially offered was cool enough. And so, like, for us, like, we, we developed this this box. We drove resistance to it.
Created the cell population, identified a combination of drugs, drove resistance to that, then identified a triple combination that prevented the cancer from, like, actually evolving or escaping. So we spent a whole bunch of time building this thing because we thought that anything less than that wasn't going to be sufficient for our pharma partners And then we started talking to our pharma partners.
They were like, wait, wait, wait, you can create 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 to create stable resistant cell line with novel 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 our customers told us This is what we want. This is where your technology fits in, and all of the stuff that we wanna do later on, it 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 that part. And I think if I had, like, a superpower, it would be clarity. Like, how could I tell the story to my team and to our investors and to our stakeholders in the simplest, most impactful way possible. And if I could do that, like, everything else wouldn't matter. Right? Like, I could hire the right operations people. I could hire the right scientists.
Because I could tell a compelling and convincing story. And that's really what I focus on in my day to day 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 I stopped after half the meeting. 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, impostor syndrome. And then, like, when you had people, like, telling us that, like, hey, you actually have something that's not, like, correct, but it's like, where's money? It was like that retraining of that academic mind. Right? Like, it's, you know, it's, it was difficult.
And so I I think that's the thing that I would also recommend, like, scientific founders is really take all of the learning that you got in grad school, especially the negative stuff around the culture, that stuff and really ask yourself, how does that, help or hinder me 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 seed round benefits, you know, we love to be able to lead those rounds. I guess I'll start with Jake because we just announced today about your 10,000,000 that around. But what did you learn during the fundraising process? And what question did investor ask you the most? Sure. So first off, thanks in effects. Woo hoo, Some of the things I'm gonna say are unique because of the I was I would spare to say this was a unique funding cycle in this last year.
But I I came into it kinda unique because in my my last company distributed bio, I never fundraise for it. It was profitable from the We took a $1,000,000 loan at one point from a group called Broad Oak, but otherwise it was always profitable. And so it was like a professional at doing business pitches for partnerships. And we did 78 antibody discovery and optimization 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 you wanna do something really big, that's not gonna cut it. I can build a service business like that, and I can get to a certain level. But to change the world, it's not That's not gonna work. And so to get into clinic and to really escalate, you need partners. And it's it's not just the money.
It's also that you guys have, like, global network and you have expertise, and you've watched a bunch of companies go through this process successfully. And all of those things are critical to go to the next step. So my experiences were, I would say initially a little rocky. I was, like, getting ready to do it, and I was realizing the culture is a little different, right, because the the type of things that you care 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 structure of a data room and the structure of pitch deck. And the structure of the kind and the the pacing of, various activities to basically 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 format that people are used to reviewing to try to to be respectful to the time of the person reviewing it. If it looks weird, it's gonna be harder for them 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, I don't know, they all kinda sense to me, honestly.
Like, I I learned to do business really from my father running a restaurant in a hotel in Guatemala, and it's like, this business translates 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 to acute and how are you gonna handle it when things go wrong? And I think though and and is it gonna make money?
Have you priced everything successfully? Have you expressed that market? And so I think those things come relatively naturally to us. There's unique aspects of because you're building into an existing market, but you're gonna disrupt it in some ways. There's gonna be differences and you need to have a strategy in place I felt that we were strong on areas of responding to the plan because that's what we're naturally good.
You know, having gantt charts and every s o SOSs Morgan SOWs organized Like, I was in the CRO space, so I know how to navigate it extremely well and and leverage it effectively as opposed to what we do in house. The interesting questions for me were Also, the questions I had back to the VC groups. I was like, you guys have seen a lot of companies succeed and fail. Like, I wanna know, what am I missing, or what have 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 a problem, because I've seen I've been to that movie before Morgan things messed up. And so I would I think I asked those questions back 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 tires question to make sure that you're in someone's not coming in the room with an idea and no plan to execute.
And so those were easy. I think there were questions about how to evolve a team as you grow, As one example, I would say over the last year, I've increasingly got interested as we go forward. Ultimately, I'm gonna get, like, a chief of staff or something.
I think as right now, the size It's Flint, but for instance, the distributed bio as we got to above about thirty people, that became very important for me to have someone who basically Pete act as a chief of staff internally to to keep track of everything Those were questions that were important.
I think some of the questions also were kind of like, who you know and where that network was and the realization that being able to to know everybody in this space, know them well and be able to pick up a phone call just to respect their 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 focusing a lot of my time on in the next few years is growing outside of I have a great network in biotechnology and the people building antibody drugs. I think what I wanna be focusing on over the next few years is building just a dynamite network among the global investors, and and and the decision maker for vaccine licensing and partnership deals in pharmaceutical companies.
So, I I got my I cut my teeth in the business world, 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, 2009, my job was to call businesses that had just laid off a whole bunch of people and get them to buy office furniture, for the people that no longer work there. And so, like, for me, it was really trying to understand what was the problem that they needed to solve for.
Right? And for them, oftentimes the problem was, you know, they had just, you know, laid off a whole bunch of staff. And so what they wanted to do was a refresh the company, right? They were, they were gonna have to bring in new people once the economic downturn, you know, you know, left, you know, came back. And so they wanted an office that was going to represent that new kind of fresher face.
And so even though they had let go a whole bunch of people and it was painful, this was an opportunity for them to get rid of their old stuff and, like, feel like the company was still successful even though the numbers didn't necessarily say that. And so that was how we were able to sell just like 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 that you have to get the right message to the right person. And if you're not aligned on what their objectives are, and what their pain point is. It's gonna be really difficult to sell something, right, Beller it's VCs or partners or whoever, And so I I really took a lot of that experience, with me, to to to this, kind of investment section.
And, one of the things that I learned both, at Office furniture sales and with this is that fundamentally it's about, you know, how well you 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 that you've ever interacted with these VCs, and they'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 fast mover, that you do the things that need to get done, and that you can hear the investor effectively so that you can answer those questions. That's really where I think the best partnerships come in. And then also just making sure there's a good fit with the investor that you're working with and the investor, you know, like, and you, right? Like, you have to make sure that that partnership is there.
There were a number of people that we could have 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 I think Andre did a great job of guiding us on, you know, understanding our products and really pushing us towards revenue. And so, like, you know, being confident in your own 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 raised money 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 I used. I think I counted them a 148 different version of my peach deck. And after I've been an investor for, like, a week, 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 told all the things they don't care about Like, now that I'm investor and now I think it's so obvious to me. And I try now to talking to founders to tell them, like, the truth. Like, you always get what you incentivize in the end, you want to make money, especially like, look, if your company is successful, we did huge impact in the world, but we also made a Pete ton of money which is that's the best of both worlds. Right?
So and because of the power law of investing where most of the companies will not return any anything and only a few will matter you need that any each investment that you make will be something that has a potential to return the the 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 are you the right people to execute on this, defensible magic technology in this huge Morgan? To be turned off on.
So once you understand that, you know, how you tell the story is way easier. In that regard, like, what what advice would you 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, you know, we're we're we're both talking about evolution Right? And I think the point that you made, Omry, was that, as you go through these pitches, you have to make adaptations and change.
And so I think really the thing that I would advise, you know, these academic scientists and founders who are really used to failure and seeing 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 your investors. Use that feedback that you get from the different interactions that you have, not as, like, a criticism of you.
But as a opportunity to get stronger and better and just really focus on, taking in as much 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 that was my experience too. When I first went in, they were rough. I revised those slides Pete.
And and because I was also I was culturally adapting from, like, sales to biotechnology research groups to VCs. And, she's like, the the first ones are gonna stuck. People are gonna give you advice. And I think I'm quoting her as close as I can her. She's like, no more will someone give you more honest advice as of the moment when they explain to you why they're not going to And she's like, it sounds difficult, but it's a gift because they'll say, this is why your baby is ugly.
And what it you can take from that is you can learn Okay. 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 you understand how to change the model if necessary. Unless you move forward, if it's hard for people to hear that stuff, and I think, you know, academics are trained not to like negative feedback, but you gotta hear it because it's it's good business. You advise.
It's good pitching advice, and and you might learn something useful to let you focus your your your company. Find a way to get someone in the room to write it 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 early startup, right, when it's getting started. I think there's various stages where seed funding can happen, but, like, right in the first you know, year or a few 1st few months.
There's, like, safe instruments for friend and family I find very effective. I think my impression is that many startup groups that I meet with. I think they they spend money stupidly early on, 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 watch people do a series of choices where they're willing to spend stupid amount of money early and then they're whining that they ran out of it.
Also, be willing to take sacrifice It's like, I I I find this frequently where people are like, oh, Jake, I wanna work with you, but I can't take less than this amount of salary when I'm creating a startup. And I'm just like, honestly, I don't think you have 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 be harder than you think. It's gonna take longer than you think, and you're gonna have to be dedicated to it.
And so it's the personality you should be you believe in what you're building and you're gonna bring something new, you should be willing to take sacrifices to achieve it because there's a reward that's happening at the end. And that's honestly gonna align you to get you out 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 have startups. I I I met a lot of them. I see varied groups.
Some of which smell like victory to me, and some of them might feel like they're really gonna struggle. And and one area is I think if it's only academics, it's quite possible you have a group with a very large set of blind spots and you might not not have anybody with reasonable business sense, in which case, get somebody in there who can do that because otherwise you're gonna all happily burn the company to the ground overspending and not being focused.
And so those are, I think, are the the the key things to be able to do early on. And and the last thing is, you know, connect up to the network and get funded because it's gonna tap you into a network, and that network also is going to identify blind spots for you, help you polish them, and help you what you're working on. It's gonna force you to even get there to be able 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're sending it up the ramp. I I think just one last thing to that, don't don't involve your PI and your startup company. If you're a Pete student or a postdoc, like graduate, get out of the lab, then do your thing. Make sure that there's a really clean separation, 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 you hope your platform accomplished? 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 have to demonstrate this generation. They did it in the seventies. We are in a golden age, and so a lot of that work could be done right now with our hands.
We're not I don't think my work right now is gonna solve every path Some of them are really tough and really difficult, but I think if we could eradicate a few of them in my lifetime and, you know, I'm greedy, so I wanna go after as many as possible. That is a lasting legacy that will benefit every generation of humanity until there is no more humans left, whatever that ultimate late may be. And so I think that is a worthy worthy exercise.
Like, I I grew up in a little Morgan Village in Guatemala, and I I watched as I returned, Pete traveling to the states that over year after year, the new generations of kids were like a foot taller than their parents. And what what happened was they started handing out deworming medicine in the school. It turns out giving deworming medicine caused people to massively change their height compared to all the generations.
Like, by the time I was 10, my brother and I could look across the entire market and we could see each other because we were taller than everyone in Santiago. It was not genetic. It was driven by chronic, pathogen. In fact, infection malnutrition. And giving that medicine wasn't just they got taller. It means they could focus better in school. They could be more productive in their Currier.
It led to, like, more healthy lives and letting people spend less time on medicine and fixing broken Beller and more time on doing what humans are fundamentally man magnificent at, which is creating new and wonderful things. And so I think that's the future that I see is that 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 service to every generation that happens afterwards.
And and I and the future at some point is going to be a key feature without humanity of without pathogens, and we should, we should work to get there. So that's what I see. I mean, I, I'm looking forward to that. I mean, frankly, the, the reason why cancer is gonna become a more problematic thing to treat is because, you know, antibiotic resistance and vaccine resistance is gonna become more and more problematic, and it's actually gonna start affecting you know, cancer therapies.
Pete mean, the reason why cancer is a problem is because like you said, like, we actually have medications that allow people to live longer and healthier lives. So for me, you know, it's gonna be pay people living long enough to get cancer, right, you know, because we are all alive because we've gotten these, you know, deworming medications or these, you know, rat, you know, getting killed by the flu.
And so for me, it's really taking cancer and the fear of what that death sentence looks like when you hear the words cancer, and really turning it into something, you know, treatable chronic. You know, it's it's no different than Crohn's disease 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 that death 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 humanity exists. And so the work you do in this generation is gonna give that lasting value transforming how we interact with cancer for every generation that follows. So I look forward to living in your future world 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 investing in what we call this intersection biology technology where if you are successful, You're going to make a lot of money, but also, you know, a huge impact and lasting impact on the health of people. So Again, pleasure working with you. Exciting to work with you and exciting to see how the world looks with with everything that you're doing. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us on.
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