[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Welcome to the latest episode of the Few and Far between podcast. I'm your host, Chris O'Brien. What does the future hold for human health and aging? And will it be affordable for everyday people in a world where 6 in 10Americans suffer from a chronic disease? Today's guest has a very explicit goal to increase the average human lifespan with a little help from man's best friend. Dan Oliver is the CEO and co founder of Rejuvenate Bio, a company focused on unlocking the power of gene expression and epigenetic reprogramming to address chronic age related diseases, including heart disease and kidney failure. Dan and his friend and co founder, Noah Davidson, an alumnus of Harvard's Church Lab, have taken a unique pathway to helping humans live longer, healthier lives by focusing first on improving the health of dogs and other companion animals. This venture has proved to be robust, lucrative, and flush with relevant data to apply to parallel human clinical trials. On today's episode, Dan takes us back to the start of his career. From aerospace engineering to building better wheelchairs, to turning a conversation with Noah into a mission for turning back the epigenetic clocks for humans and animals. We'll also zoom in on building the right corporate structure for your product and discuss the benefits of systemic and tissue based gene platforms, including the surprising cost of some genetic treatments. And we'll highlight the robust opportunities to be found in the animal health industry and also some fantastic advice for selecting and working with a co founder. This is a fascinating episode and I hope you enjoyed Dan's story as much as I did. Okay, let's start the podcast.
Dan Oliver, I have been looking forward to this conversation. Conversation. Welcome to Few and Far Between.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: So I want to start with the origin story, if we can. So you and Noah, your scientific co founder and partner, you guys have known each other for a long time. So how did all this come together?
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah, Noah and I are friends from undergrad, so I met Noah over 20 years ago. So I've actually known Noah longer than I haven't now.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: So, you know, kind of craziness. Neither of us were biology majors in undergrad. I think both interested in novel technology. Noah was an applied physics. Ended up going into grad school and actually getting a PhD in synthetic biology. I was actually initially interested in like nano machines, but got convinced that like cell and gene therapies were, you know, kind of an actual nanomachine that was working now.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: That's very cool.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: I, on the other hand, had really no idea what I wanted to do. I actually ended up working as an aerospace engineer coming out, but also launched a nonprofit company around creating better wheelchairs for people in developing countries that I ran in my spare time and really fell in love with. The challenge, and it certainly is a challenge of trying to translate scientific and engineering innovations from that kind of idea stage into products and companies that can actually make a difference in people's lives. And, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to kind of bring those two things together. Eventually went back to school, got an MBA from Harvard Business School to try to do that, and then was lucky enough to be awarded a Blavatnik Fellowship, launched a technology out of the engineering school, and then was recruited in by Noah kind of informally to start thinking about how we could commercialize his technology. He had subsequently gone and joined the Church Lab as a postdoc interested in aging and cellular reprogramming. So that's really the genes genesis of.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Rejuvenate Bio, a theme of our podcast. We have a number of Church Lab alumni who've been on here. Okay, so when he first approaches you, are you already out of business school? Are you still. When you guys first sit down and he says, hey, I think I might have something here. Where are you in your journey?
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, Noah and I are very good friends. So, like, when I came to business school, I slept on his couch for the first week. So, I mean, Noah and I talked probably at least several times a week. Probably saw each other multiple times a week. It's not atypical for us to have conversations with Noah would come up with some crazy scientific idea, and then we would discuss if there was an actual business there or something like that. It just, I guess, kind of happened that his crazy research he was doing in the Church Lab had some real legs. Yeah.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Was the actual thing. Yeah, right, right.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. At that time, no, I was out of business school probably a year or so. Year two into working on the startup, I had launched a novel 3D printing technology, and I was kind of informally helping him, you know, think about the things he would have to put together, questions you'd have to answer to make sure there were legs there to make some sort of commercial entity around his research.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: So, Dan, given your background in undergrad and in business school, you didn't consider going and, like, working for a hedge fund or joining some big company? I mean, come on, what was all that about?
[00:04:43] Speaker A: I did work for a big company, so I worked for a major aerospace company.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Earlier, I was not like, a huge Fan of it. It struck me that like no matter what I did, it didn't really make any impact and I wasn't necessarily working on stuff that I thought was the most meaningful. So I don't know, I think I'm super privileged. Look, I can go and work on things that I think really make a difference, make plenty of money to support me and my family. Most people aren't necessarily in that situation, but I do think there's plenty of people that are in my situations that unfortunately do make choices that I don't necessarily agree with. But for me it always made more sense to work on something that was interesting and impactful.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense. So one interesting thing about your story is you've experienced both trying to develop things in a nonprofit and a for profit context. Will you talk a little bit about how first of all, what the differences are there? And I really like the way you talk and think about company structure, following capital needs and that kind of thing.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think, you know, these decisions get made super early on in a company's formation. Yes, right. Your corporate structure and what you select, you pick it effectively, I think it really boils down to is where do you think the funding for the company is going to come from? Ideally, it really has very little to do with what you think the company will do, but more who you think will invest, fund or whatever with it and what those people that are going to be giving you the money to launch it, you know, like putting their money into it.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: So how do you think about then the right way to get started? Do you think of it as a default or do you think that really people should be thinking NonProfit for Profit, LLC, C Corp, et cetera, that that makes a big difference in what they're building or based on what they're building.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Yeah, look, I think a lot is based upon what type of funding, what amount of funding you need to launch, whatever you're doing. Fortunately or unfortunately, semi unfortunately for these kind of science based startups, often you need quite a bit of funding to de risk the technology, actually build a product which are two different things, and then be ready to have it come out commercially. And so that leads you down the road of having to access capital sources, primarily things like venture capital and strategic funding. Almost all of these types of capital want to invest or give money to a C corp. And so you're led down that road, you know, to compare and contrast that. With the wheelchair company, we were primarily envisioning people donating money or very specific grant agencies That I think probably would have been okay with the C Corp, maybe not, but absolutely were okay with like a 501C3 nonprofit. And so really there, I do think one interesting thing coming out of all of that though is like, you absolutely can do good inside of a C Corp and you absolutely can waste money and not necessarily get things done in a 501c3 nonprofit. Like, you know, the downstream of what you actually accomplish is very much more driven by the kind of conglomerate or syndicate of people that you have involved, which absolutely include the people that have put money into it, and then also the vision you're selling and moving forward there.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Okay, great. So, okay, let's move on to rejuvenate. Tell us the core idea, kind of what is the sort of overall mission of the company and tell us a little bit about the technology, please.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Our explicit goal is to increase healthspan and extend lifespan. We do that utilizing two different platform technologies. Both utilize gene therapy. The first platform technology takes genes that have been shown to increase overall lifespan in transgenic animal models, meaning an upregulation or downregulation of this gene made the animal live longer. And typically these things happen from birth. Noah kind of came up with the word of therapizing. These interventions basically take that knowledge. We take that gene, put it into a particular type of virus called adeno associated virus. This is the primary type of virus that leads in vivo gene therapy. So gene therapies, they're actually injecting them into the patient and then that gene therapy basically delivers that gene to cells, and then those cells have that DNA that encodes for a particular protein and start creating that protein. In our case, we took those 65 different genes that have been shown to increase overall lifespan and boiled them down to the ones that quote unquote fit gene therapy that mean it actually literally the gene itself fit inside of an adeno associated virus or aav. But it also meant that the gene encoded for a protein that was secreted. Like, why is that important? Because gene therapy right now does not infect every single cell in the body. When you administer it to a patient, it only gets a subset of a particular type of tissue, typically. And so what we wanted to do was of recapitulate a transgenic modification, which means that that modification was in every single cell of those animals bodies, but do that in a gene therapy. And so what we do is our gene therapy primarily infects liver tissue. We get a decent chunk of liver tissue, but not every single liver cell. We drop the DNA in there. And then the liver becomes a therapeutic biofactory. It's creating these secreted proteins, they're secreting the bloodstream. And so effectively, because they're in the bloodstream, the blood brings it everywhere. And we can have a systemic effect even though gene therapy isn't infecting every single cell.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's super cool.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: Yeah. The down effect of doing all this, and I'm sorry for my soliloquy here.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: No, it's great, Is that it can.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Treat multiple chronic age related conditions. So Seminole paper that launches out of the church lab showed that a single gene therapy could treat a model of heart failure, a model of kidney failure, induced diabetes and obesity in mice. And a similar type therapy also is able to tackle osteoarthritis as well. And so that's the first platform really goes after that. The second platform briefly builds off of this idea. Instead of trying to tackle particular genes that affect aging, we literally try to change the expression level of almost every single gene in your body. This is called epigenetic reprogramming. And the idea is if you could mimic what genes are being turned on and off in the frequency and ratios they were when you were younger and healthier, you could basically reprogram somebody, trick their body almost to thinking it's younger, but in some sense more operating as if it was younger. This is partial epigenetic reprogramming is kind of the technical nomenclature there. The way you do that is like a little technical, but effectively you're delivering transcription factors that affect methylation. Methylation affects what genes are being turned on and off. And you can actually basically in some sense reverse age. And we actually showed this.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: So not just neutralize, but actually reverse age.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So we took really old mice into a 70 or 80 year old human, gave them the epigenetic reprogramming gene therapy actually under inducible control, pulsed it on for a week, turned it off for a week, and we saw a doubling of the remaining lifespan and an increase in the number of their health span metrics. And so the cool part about this is almost all aging research has been done where you're building up benefit or preventing damage.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: You know, this is akin to like everybody knows that they should exercise more, exercise more frequently, they know that they should eat better, and they probably shouldn't smoke or drink. Right. And those are absolutely fall in. Those categories are build up benefit, prevent damage. Epigenetic reprogramming really is looking at age reversal where you can take a damaged or dysregulated Patient or system and re regulate in a sense that actually provides tangible near term benefit even no matter what had been done previously. That's the promise of it.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: So of the two platforms, platform number two, the epigenetic reprogramming, is that sort of the holy grail or help us scale how you think about the two?
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Well, look, I think age reversal is what everybody's actually looking to do. You know, you don't want to just extend overall lifespan, negative health outcomes. Nobody really wants to be like a 90 year old for another 90 years with the typical quality of life of a 90 year old. And so I think what everybody's really interested in doing is kind of extending that positive high quality of life time period that typically lands in somewhere, you know, in the 20s to 50s range or something like that, and longer for some people as well. And I don't want to disparage, 60 year olds have certainly seen ones that are very high quality of life.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Yeah, my father in law was running a lot of marathons in his late 60s and into his mid-70s. So yeah, there are, there are unusual people.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Well, my dad is turning, my dad is turning 70 next year and still surfs like every day. So. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. We all want to be doing that, but for another 30 years is kind of what you're saying.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Right, but I guess the point is we don't want it to be notable.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah, great. Okay.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: You know, and so if you are actually reversing things and effectively uploading a new genetic code, almost a new program, and kind of creating maintenance in this biological system, you can just hopefully indefinitely extend this, you know, high quality period of life for people. This is, I think an important point with our therapy. It actually gets induced, so it pulses on for a period of time and then it comes off. And so that really kind of helps reset it. And if you kind of think of going up a mountain towards aging, we basically bring it back down and then allow it to kind of come back up and bring it back down and you kind of hang in this normal or healthy range hopefully for the rest of your life. Now I want to be clear here, we got a lot of work to do to get to something like that, but absolutely that is the goal and I think that is the stated promise and the accepted promise by a number of people in the scientific community of these types of technologies.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: That's really exciting. Just back on platform number one, I think you said there were 65 relevant genes that have been isolated and then you have to narrow that down to be genes that are small enough to be, to fit the delivery platform and various other things. How many of those genes are you using today? Are there more that you think you can use or have you kind of narrowed it down to the ones that work?
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Yeah, great question. When we boiled the 65 down to the relevant ones, it really came out with three primary genes that fit that profile. And these were FGF21, Anti TGF beta1 and Alpha Clofil. And so those are the primary ones we work with. We have programs both in human health and animal health utilizing all three of those genes in different combinations and as individuals.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Fantastic. Okay, so you have this, this incredibly interesting technology. You have promising very exciting results in animals. So the obvious thing to then do is push towards human clinical trials. You guys didn't do that. You went down a different path. So tell us a little bit about, you know, trying to operationalize these technologies in dogs and other animals.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Yeah, so look, we talk about doing the things in parallel. We absolutely, from the very beginning, were interested in aging. A real problem in the aging field is the cycle times for what you're measuring often are, can be decades long, depending on what patient set you're in. And for instance, in humans, it's like a decade to get into humans and then multiple decades to see if you're.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: Having an intervention, if it's actually working.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's an untenable cycle to really prove, like, long term aging questions. And so from the very beginning, we thought it was intriguing to create these types of therapeutics, not only for humans, which we always were planning on doing and did from day one, but also were there an animal that was representative humans, but could give us data points sooner and could, you know, create a business sooner? And we basically found creating therapeutics for companion animals, pets, absolutely fits that bill. And so our first gene therapy, we have an analog that's going to humans, that's treating a rare type of cardiomyopathy, but generally should be beneficial for cardiometabolic conditions. We have a version of it that's very similar, although you couldn't use the animal version in humans or vice versa. We have an analog of it in animal health that will be treating the leading type of heart failure in dogs called mitral valve disease first, and then hoping, expanding out to other prevalent indications there as well. And so the cool part about all of this is like, we can validate long term aging questions in dogs who live about an order of magnitude less time than a human, but it's a robust market. We Signed six partnerships in animal health already, five last year. I think we'll have three more this year. And it's also had to discipline us on a number of things with manufacturing cost of goods sold and things like this to help push gene therapy and these type technologies to the scale they really need to go to. Because if you're really treating aging, that's not like a thousand people, right? You're talking about millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, possibly billions that you're, you're looking to get this therapy to eventually, hopefully.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: So that brings us to one of the surprising things, one of the many surprising things, I guess in your story, my naive assumption was that you know, the cost to deliver a gene therapy, you know, that it was just going to stay expensive, tens of thousands of dollars or something like that. Obviously that's not true. So tell me where you've gotten to, what that journey has looked like, you know, of getting to scale on pricing and do you think you guys are at kind of, you know, the end of the price curve or do you think there's even more, more room to go?
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So look, I mean everybody's seen the headlines. You know, gene therapy is being sold for 1 million, 2 million even. I've seen 3 million dollar price points. Yes, I think it's really important to note those are price points, those aren't the manufacturing costs.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Yeah, very good point.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: Even when you unpack that and you look, the initial manufacturing cost for gene therapy was quite expensive. You know, some of those first products literally could be costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars to make per dose. You know, again, one time dose, which is great, but a couple hundred K. But look, the manufacturing technologies are kind of crazy that they first utilized and they made sense at the time as proof of concepts. But I don't know if anybody knows what a roller bottle is, but like take like the biggest mason jar you've ever seen, throw a bunch of human cells in it with DNA, roll it around in an incubator and then take that out and pull your virus out of it. That is how a number of the initial gene therapies were made and I think are continuing to be made. Now we're talking about they've gotten into 2000 liter, possibly 5000 liter bioreactor scale and the costs have dramatically dropped from there. Now look, there are other technologies that we're working with that have even taken it further. So kind of our highlight, our headline here is our animal health product is actually our manufacturing cost of goods sold are Below a hundred dollars per dose.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's bananas.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: So you're talking about going from a million dollar price point to manufacturing costs below $100 per dose. But I think the relevant thing too is like look, this has been bought into by, in my opinion, very conservative industry who takes their time and absolutely knows that for novel therapeutics there has to be a manu manufacturing case to be made to be able to make it. Because in the animal health world there is no really third party insurance. It's a minuscule part of the market. People are paying out of pocket for their animals and things like that.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: So do you think that's where cost for gene therapies goes ultimately? That it does get down for routinely producing under $100 a dose is an achievable sort of goal for the industry.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: I think there's still a lot of things that could be done that could have pretty large changes. And so yeah, I do think it's possible. You know, look, we've made some decisions about our gene therapies that really helps us on curve that aren't just the manufacturing cost. And so we work with a manufacturer, usually Advanced Therapeutics and their TESSA system that has increased our yields dramatically from typical triple transfection. You know, typically the way virus is made, not unlike beer or something, you know, large bioreactor human cells, three pieces of DNA get dropped in there and basically the cells make the virus. You then have to purify it. That's the whole process. TESSA is interesting. It basically ensures all three key pieces of genetic material get into all the cells by utilizing helper viruses and things like that.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: But there's a number of things to do. There's like reagents you can add to that that can add two or three axon yields. There are engineered cell lines that are more receptive to the viruses or a higher producing of the downstream virus you're looking for and things like that. And there's like, there's cool companies that are working on that and doing that type of work already. So absolutely, I think there's still headroom. And so yeah, I'm very, I'm very bullish. I think gene therap bad rep that it's not scalable, that it's like going to, you know, cripple our medical system. If you actually look at it like the underlying manufacturing cost of it. Don't support that thesis. If we continue to only focus on very specific rare diseases, I do think there could be a situation where you are just too many like million Dollar price point things there. But look, if you go into things like generalized heart failure, obesity or metabolic, you know, syndrome, you're treating so many patients that if the manufacturing cost is this low, you can still have a robust margin and you're making up, you know, your kind of overall revenue because you're selling it to so many patients.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Yeah, you're making it up on volume.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: So that's absolutely the kind of the world we envision going forward.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: That's really cool. So, okay, coming back to the question about animal health. So I think you guys believe animal health is a business on its own. It's not just a stepping stone to human health Fair. And if so like, first of all, how do you talk about that with investors and others who are interested in the company? Do you get a. Well, aren't you getting distracted? Yeah. Isn't this a distraction on the way to the ultimate goal? Talk a little bit about that, if you would.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: Well, I mean, biotech is crazy, right?
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Yes, it is.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: We've raised something like $12 million in SBIR funds as of like three years ago. People kind of asked us why we even applied for grants. Right. And why would you go into markets that had more near term revenue and things like this? We absolutely got asked those questions. I'll tell you, we don't get them asked as much anymore. I believe you with the funding environment. So yeah, so look, I mean, every company I think has, has this challenge who's trying to do something truly novel or something that hasn't been repeated a bunch of times. And there is absolutely a dynamic in the venture market where they are selling a story to their limited partners, the people that are funding them, that there's a class of type of companies, a profile that they're looking for and that they're the best at identifying them and that there is an investable case there. If you truly come up with something that they haven't thought of yet, you're kind of ahead of the game. There has, there are specific animal health VCs we've raised from one of the best, Digitalis Ventures, who kind of crosses both animal health and human health. So that's awesome. But yeah, you got to kind of tell the story. At the moment we're in a really unique position because all of our animal health programs have basically matured to the point where they're strategic partnership ready. We've signed those partnerships and they're now fully funded. So when we go out to talk to investors, even if they don't want to put money towards Animal health, they're not allowed to buy their LPs or they don't want to. Like the case we're making is, look, you're putting a dollar in. It's getting magnified by the fact that we're utilizing the same technology we're developing for humans in animal health. And here, here's the contract, here's the milestone payments, here's the royalties that we'll be receiving as we move forward. So that's made it quite a bit easier.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I can imagine there's a fair number of human biotech CEOs right now. Not that the CEOs are human, but the targets are human. Who would listen to this with a certain amount of envy right now given the funding? Environment. Environment, Yeah.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: I mean, like look, how can you build a gene therapy company that basically has like commercial revenue in like under three years? You know, it's like that's just not possible. Right. And as that acquisition and IPO market becomes more frothy and difficult to count on, then companies like at our stage are forced to look for revenue opportunities earlier on and there's just, there's not a huge amount of ways of doing that. So no, we're super excited about animal health. Like I, I do think one interesting question, Chris, like, and I know you're interested in this, like why have, why haven't people done this before? Like why not do that? And I think there's a real paradigm shift when people are working with genetic technologies is traditionally there was kind of a rule of thumb that you go into the middle amount of animals you possibly can with your small molecule therapeutic because the results in those particular species aren't necessarily representative of what's going to happen in humans. So people were terribly worried about risking their huge multi billion dollar human franchise on what would be a much, you know, much smaller market. Yes, dogs, you know, it's not worth it. And but now that we're utilizing things like gene therapy, I'm putting the dog specific version of the gene into gene therapy, doing it and then I'm putting the human specific gene therapy. So I'm not worried about these kind of cross contaminations. I also know that these proteins are there and active in both species. And then also in our context of aging, all those transgenic animal experiments we utilize as kind of our source material in some sense are really great safety stuff studies. They're basically multi year long. My safety studies that prove what we're doing is generally safe and safe in a systemic context, which is like you just don't typically have with the novel small molecule therapeutics. So we just kind of come to the table with a very different set of things we know and things we don't know than that. And so it's made this much more, much more viable. But I'm hoping we trod this path and then multiple other people are able to do it. Because look, I love animals. It would be great to have novel therapeutics out there. There's already like really awesome monoclonal antibody therapeutics that have been really uptaken by the animal health market. You know, another animal health gene therapy company actually got bought by a major animal health pharmaceutical player. And obviously we're excited to get our products out the door to there.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: I think one other thing, just the. I think you said that when you were first telling this story to folks before this is all proven, you could look at like you get a total addressable market question from folks, but you had some analyzers you could point to in animal health that were already good sized businesses. Is that right? There were, there were some drugs in market, Small Molecule that were pretty interesting already.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Oh man. I mean, like, look, I. Most people don't spend any time looking at this. And to be honest, I was an animal health person before I started. But you know, for instance, Zoetis is the Pfizer animal health arm that was spun out into its own company. That's an $80 billion market cap.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's good size.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: So like, I don't think people really understand these are legitly large companies. Now people might go, oh, is that all livestock? Because like the livestock industry, if you look at their revenues, it's about half and half. So half companion animals, like pets, like half livestock. But the growth and the high margin products are primarily on the companion animal side because people absolutely have these relationships with their animals that are akin to having a child and they're thinking like that and working like that. So no, I mean, Zoetis has multiple products that sell over a billion dollars per year. You know, like these are huge selling therapeutics, if you are going after the right indications with therapeutics that work. And so absolutely out there. And look, there's Zonus is one example. There's a number of really large animal health companies out there. We also have signed a partnership with Fibro Animal Health that has really amazing products as well, as well as a Taiwanese animal health company called Protect Animal Health as well that's doing really awesome work too. So no super robust industry, just not one that the traditional biotech communities thought much about. And probably rightfully so, but. But I hope more people go check it and make sure that. Make sure that there may be something there that they could go operate with.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Consider this model. Right? You guys are a paradigm breaker on a few different levels.
Hi, this is Chris O'Brien, host of Few and Far between conversations from the frontline of drug development. We'll be right back with this episode in a moment. I personally want to thank you all for listening to our podcast. Now in our fifth season. It continues to be an amazing opportunity to speak with some of the top thought leaders in the drug development industry. If you're enjoying this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps people discover the pod. And don't forget to subscribe to Few and Far between so that you never miss an episode. One last request, know someone with a great story you'd like to hear me interview. Reach out to
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Okay, we've talked about animal health in part because I'm a dog owner and I'm fascinated by this path that you guys have taken. But let's get back to humans. I am also a human and I do care about human health. So what do you think the timeline looks like? And I know we're in the land of speculation, but when would you hope to be either in clinical trials in humans and or, you know, have an approved treatment? What's. Are we talking a few years? Are we talking decades? Like what, what do you think it looks like?
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Yeah, as you know, we have two platforms. The first platform, we have an FGF21 based gene therapy where we've actually produced like best in class pre clinical data for an initial application in human health called arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. We're like 12 to 18 months from getting an IND there. And so, you know, I guess a few years. Decades. Few years. You should. Years, Yep. For epigenetic reprogramming, you know, there's still some work to be done. I think the interesting challenge slash opportunity we have with all of our therapies is we generally come to the table with knowledge that they're broadly beneficial. And then our challenge, at least in the US Market, in most western markets, is what particular indication do we go after first to be able to test in humans, prove that they're generally safe, efficacious, and then how do we kind of lily pad out there into more prevalent indications from there? And so we're in the process of identifying that first application for epigenetic reprogramming. Have some ideas, have some initial data, but we'll be pushing that forward and then, you know, doing the typical process where, you know, proof of concept, IND labeling, IND and then clinical trials with that as well.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So is this the right way to think about it then? I understand. I mean, our system is really not designed for approving a longevity drug. I think what you're saying is we would pick an initial indication where we think we've got a robust, robust signal where we think we can have a big impact. Would you expect that it would have a broader set of positive consequences or is that am I over? Am I getting over my skis?
[00:29:24] Speaker A: No, you're spot on. Look like there's kind of multiple problems with like a quote unquote longevity therapeutic or age versal therapeutic or health care increasing therapeutic. Technically you are able to just have a mortality endpoint. So technically the FDA would allow you to do that. There's actually a long term metformin trial going on right now that's doing explicitly that, but it's more of an academic exercise than like a particular company doing it. The second problem is just the cycle time like we talked about.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: You know, you're literally really doing a population study. Like doesn't make sense in the context of a company to be running something that's going to take two decades, you know, know. And so there's still a technical challenge and an acceptance by regulatory agency. I think they're both still out there on like near term biomarkers that would you just explicitly, you know, go after this. You can envision something, I don't know if people have heard of like epigenetic clocks, but this is kind of like a time to death metric instead of a chronological age metric. And so, oh, I've extended your time to death. FDA approves it, then you go for it. We're not there yet in my opinion, both on the technical repeatability of the epigenetic clocks, but also the regulatory agency accepting that as a, as a biomarker there. And so from our perspective, the way to then, you know, circumvent this is to utilize these broad based therapies. And if they're truly doing what you're saying they're doing, they should absolutely be efficacious in particular contexts. And so we've always thought about taking broad based therapies, applying to specific indications, but also utilizing those initial patients where we're doing a very good job job of solving their particular issue. But Also looking at what secondary metrics would lead us to believe that we could then go into much more broad based populations with chronic disease. And so, you know, in human health, you absolutely. Typically we're starting with a rare genetic disease called erythromogenic cardiomyopathy. These patients are really interesting. They unfortunately have a mutation that causes the kind of the proteins that keep their cardiac cells together to break down now. And so they get two major problems. They eventually go into congestive heart failure because they build up damage. You can imagine stressing your heart over and over again as it's bumping. You don't have all the connective proteins in places is, you know, detrimental. But they also get arrhythmias because you can't conduct that signal across the heart in the kind of uniform manner you need. And so they developed two different issues there. Our FGF 21 based gene therapy in animal models has shown really robust ability to help with both of those issues. But these patients kind of have fibrotic involvement with their heart failure as well as this kind of arrhythmic electrophysiology component. And then they also can have a number of metabolic issues because they're one of the few patient populations where the doctor actually tells them not to exercise. And so in that patient population, we absolutely can look at all those things. And we're hoping to create this kind of class of therapeutics where I think there's already an example of this, like GLP1 ones, where there are absolutely pathways that we can deliver to people that help with a huge amount of different issues. Yeah.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: I was wondering if GLP1s are the right analogy to think about here because, I mean, you know, starts out as a treatment for diabetes, expands into weight loss, and now it's hard to keep up with the number of potential impacts that we're hearing about. It feels like something new breaks every few weeks. That was not intentional. Right. I mean, that was a diabetes medicine that had a crazy range of potential applications. But is that the right way for us to think about sort of your strategy in a way that you enter on viable treatment for one particular condition and then it expands from there?
[00:32:46] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Look, and I think the GLP1 people probably would have told you that they knew it was efficacious across cardiometabolic, some of like the neurological and behavior modifying aspects. I don't know if they would have fully understood those, but. Fully understood those. But absolutely, there's a class of these therapeutics. And look, we're not even talking about combinations yet.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: I think everybody thinks that aging and these questions are multifactorial. You're absolutely going to be coming up with therapeutics either in our hands or in other people's hands that are multifactorial and helping multiple different systems at once. I mean, I know at least anecdotally, you know, I've had age relatives, like, I just remember my grandma when she was getting into ill health, like, they would solve, quote, unquote, one issue, but then like three or four would jump up probably, generally because she was just not a robust system to deal with the issues that were coming up because of her age. But also, look, there was a huge amount of effects for some of the things that we're giving her as well. And so I think it really goes back to our mindset, which is really like, increase the quality and health of the patient. And then the downstream effect should be these diseases, you know, are addressed in more context. And if you start that way, upstream, you end up filtering down into multiple different indications, which is how our healthcare system is set up. But generally, what everybody really wants wants is for their family members and for themselves to be healthier. I think that's really exciting. Part about all this is these anti aging, age reversal, longevity, health span therapeutics, whatever you want to classify. You know, in some sense, what you could classify them is like, generally increasing the health of these patients is what everybody wants.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: It's really exciting. What you guys are doing is fascinating. I asked you the question about path to the clinic, path to sort of human trials, and then out the other side with platform one. But what do you think about the sort of broader epigenetic solutions that you're thinking about in Platform 2? What is the time frame likely? I'm sure this a little. This is speculation, but what's the range?
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think we're probably something like five years from the clinic, you know, to be realistic on that. I also think epigenetic reprogramming is interesting because I think some of the big key questions out there are, I think the goal would be to create something systemic. The current therapies that are being developed are all tissue specific. And that's mostly a question of how you deliver it and whether the same factors delivering that tissue really work the same in all tissue contexts. And so for a systemic therapeutic, which would really lead us to this, you know, generally increasing the health of patients across their entire body, I think the big open questions is like, what tissues are the most important to rejuvenate? How many of the cells inside of those tissues. Do you really need to get. How many different tissues do we need to get to have a systemic effect? I. I don't personally think, if I had to guess, I don't think it's going to be every single tissue. I think if you get probably a large amount of like key tissues, the other ones will fall in line based upon signaling factors and things like that, that kind of cross these different systems and things like that. So, you know, definitely a lot of work to be done. We're taking absolutely a tissue specific approach. We have a neuronal version of our therapy as well as a muscle version of our therapy that we're developing currently. And you can imagine kind of if successful in both those areas, that's like two kind of key systems that you've ticked off that you've rejuvenated and then it's like, what do you need to layer on top? The cool part is, is same kind of calculus supplies. When we go into these patients, if you go into a patient with like, you know, some particular type of muscle disease and you rejuvenate that muscle tissue, you could look at secondary metrics and all of these other systems in these patients to start to understand and you know what, we're seeing benefits here, but we're not there. And so maybe we need to go there with our next therapy to move towards a more systemic, fully age, reversed or rejuvenated patient system.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Dan, what year did you guys found.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: The company we spun out of the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School or Harvard generally in 2018.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: The amount of progress you guys have made is extraordinary in a relatively short amount of time on the scale of breakthrough medicines. Will you talk a little bit about your relationship with NOAA and how you guys divide and conquer, how you built the company culture, how you've gotten here? What are your areas of advice? And I'm thinking about an audience member who might be starting a company or interested in starting a company. What are some things people can learn from the path you guys have taken?
[00:37:02] Speaker A: I think one of the key things Noah and I did was just be like really upfront and direct with what each of us wanted from the very beginning. We have an anecdote that we think back on where my wife went to college up in Vermont. She had friends up there, so Noah and I would often go up with her to visit these. These were kind of our little mini vacation. Go for a weekend, and one time on the way back, it's like about a three, three and A half hour drive from Boston to Burlington, Vermont. We spent almost the entire time like laying out basically everything you could think of about the company. And like, look, not all those things actually ended up coming true, but like, that kind of honesty and upfrontness, like serves you quite well. The other thing I would say to people that are looking to launch a company, you absolutely need a partner. I think I'm really, I'm very skeptical of people who are just like doing it by themselves.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: I can do it all. Yeah, right, right.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not a question that you're not good enough in each. I think some people think like, look, I'm a brilliant scientist, I can do the business stuff, I'm smart enough. I think that's probably true. The problem is you have so much work, you need high quality people in like each one of those facets. And so the thing I would also suggest with people people is try to start companies with people you respect, have shared values with, but have very different skill sets. Yeah. From Noah and I typically pretty easy even from day one to decide if it was like a Noah job or a Dan job.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: You know, because different skill sets on that front. The only. The other thing I'll say to just, you know, finish this off is like one key thing on culture that we always did and we've continued to do as the company has grown is if there is a key decision that may be in like the Dan venue, the business side, or in the Noah venue, it is on the person whose venue it is to explain it in a way that the other person can understand and basically be able to ask key questions to challenge your thinking. I love seeing from that is it really makes you distill what very well may be a very complicated problem in your head with like a bunch of different contingencies. But typically these types of questions or answers really come from like very key points, you know, and if you follow that, are able to communicate to that someone that may be more of a layperson in that field.
[00:39:15] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: It really has disciplined you to do that thinking there. And that served us quite well.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: One of my least favorite expressions is dumbing something down. Because the truth is that what we really want is for people to get down to the essential issue. And if you really understand it, you should be able to explain it in something that approaches plain English and another intelligent person should be able to understand it. And if you can't do that, then maybe you haven't thought it through or maybe you don't understand the problem very well. So that's a great example of that.
[00:39:41] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, like, if you're, like, if you're describing whether a baseball is going to be a home run or not off the bat, like the bat speed and how the bat contacted the ball probably accounts for like 95%.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Of whether it'll go over the fence. Like the humidity in the air, the particular wind direction. Absolutely.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: Will affect number of pigeons flying through, bird out there.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Randy Johnson fish coming in here or something. But, you know, so it's like most of these decisions, like there's two or three things that account for almost 90, 95% of the probabilistic outcome. And are you going to be right every single time doing that? No. But like, generally, if you can distill it down to that, then you're leaving off a dozen other factors that, that are not as important and you're making sure you got the key ones that are lining up correctly.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: Yeah. By the way, I think sometimes experts struggle to only focus on the 95, you know, 90, 95% predictive values and want to think comprehensively and cover all that stuff. So explaining it to a layperson requires you to get down to essentialism and really focus on the stuff that matters. Decide what matters. So I like that a lot. So, okay, there are a few lessons there.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: What I've also seen is you may not know. You may not know what the key factors are.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: And so as an expert, you may be aware of a dozen or two dozen things that could affect this, but your job really is to understand which ones are key. And so that dumbing down process or distilling down really is not necessarily taking complexity out. It's actually hard work of understanding what is actually affecting it. And those are not always obvious from the get.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:10] Speaker A: What's.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: What is truly relevant.
[00:41:12] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:41:12] Speaker B: Yep. I like that a lot. So, okay, so we had a few lessons there. One is clearly rent a house and Vermont. Vermont or something like that, if you're a founder in Cambridge. I like that too. About having a long, detailed conversation about lots of stuff. I imagine even between two guys who knew each other really well, some stuff must have emerged in some of those conversations. Like, oh, I hadn't thought of that, or I had a different view on this and it gave you guys opportunities to get onto the same page about those things. So that's thing number one that I'm taking is not obviously Vermont, but to have long and detailed conversations about what you want to be build and why, what kind of company it wanted to Be, et cetera, early in the process to avoid misunderstandings and stuff like that as you go along. And then I love this rule of whoever's domain it is needs to be able to explain it to the person whose domain it is not. And that requires enough mutual respect to say, I believe this person can understand this. So that's also probably not a bad place to start when you're building a partnership. And I guess your third one was do build a partnership. Find someone who has a complementary shared values but a complimentary skill set. I think all of those are great. Dan, you want to add any. Are there other factors that have been important, you think, in the progress you guys have made?
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Well, just like one thought, like, I'm interested in doing things that are not typical. And so you're going to be building companies or working on products or working on technical solutions that don't really have a blueprint. And so the idea that you're going to be perfect every time or you don't need to grow and get better is just really flawed. And so I think almost the most important part of being able to have those conversations with your co founder or your team generally is you build. Build is like everyone at the company and everybody associated with the effort needs to constantly be getting better because the team we are today is not going to be good enough to conquer everything we need to do going forward. The only way in my mind to be able to do that in this context is to have someone who's deep in the weeds with you, be able to critique you and point out things that you need to be doing better or need to look into. Really difficult to do that with somebody that you like, don't respect.
[00:43:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: That doesn't treat you well, that doesn't have shared values and isn't willing to have like an in depth conversation or treat you with the care and kindness that's needed to have these types of things. It's almost like a selection criteria that you could have that conversation with that person that they would be able to do that. Not even necessarily the topics you cover, I guess is what I would say.
[00:43:32] Speaker B: Yeah, the sort of potential for that. I almost think you want to spend as much time thinking about the person you'd partner with as about the idea that you guys are going to pursue when you're starting a business.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: I really love that our wives joke that like really? Dan and Noah are married.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: Yeah. You guys are the other woman in each other's marriages. Yeah, I love, I love that. Okay, one question then in closing Rejuvenate is a big swing. It's a moonshot. Right. It's not a easy one. You're not trying to hit a single here. When you guys were first conceptualizing this, you talked to different ideas. Noah would come over and you guys would chat about things. Did you ever consider aiming for something smaller and what would the trade offs may be in taking a big swing versus taking a smaller going for something that looked more incremental?
[00:44:12] Speaker A: I am always. I'm kind of the practical. I mean Noah would tell you this if he's on the call too. Noah's the visionary, he's the brains behind the operation. I'm like the practical how we actually do it. And so I think opportunities where there is this kind of moonshot goal and possibility, yes. Are really intriguing, particularly when they have a roadmap that has wins along the way. And so I'm particularly attracted to opportunities that have incredible upside but have wins that you could go. And so I actually think a number of our things, I won't call them singles or doubles or whatever, but like there's very tractable problems that we could utilize these therapies for. And we understood from day one that were robust markets. So like literally like the first thing I did when we investigated, like does it make sense to go into pence? I'm like, what is the largest type of heart failure in John? Dogs. Like what are they used for? I mean I didn't know any of this stuff. And so like really understanding and disciplining yourself to know as much about the challenge you're going after and like each subsequent challenge as you know about the solution you're bringing, I think is something that's typically very difficult and highly missing from these kind of science based startups because people have spent their entire lives working on the solution and have spent almost no time looking at the challenges. Challenge. And so that is a key thing here, understanding those series of challenges you're doing and whether your solution you bring the table really works. But I do think there are multiple opportunities that still exist out there where you can have a moonshot, where we're going to reverse age. But you know, who would have thought that would start with we're treating the leading type of heart failure and dogs. Right. But you have to go look at where the technology.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: Yeah, and a committed partnership and milestone payments, all that boring small sounding stuff that actually enables you to aim for this bigger target. I think that's really cool. I guess I would summarize that as you're saying in Some cases. And maybe this is a thing to look for. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can take a big swing, but you can do it in ways where there are meaningful accomplishments along the way that can generate revenue, can bring investors along, bring regulators along, et cetera, create this community. Is that a fair summary of that?
[00:46:15] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think you see it in multiple contexts. Like if you look at Space X, their explosive mission is to get to Mars. Really what they've done thus far is launch Starlink satellites, payloads for the government. Right. So, like, is that not a success that they've done those aspects, you know, because they haven't gotten to Mars yet. I think their investors are happy. You know, they haven't reached their mission or vision yet, but they've made steps along the way. And I also think back to like. Like iRobot, I think, is an interesting case. And they've had their ups or downs, but absolutely, you know, like, very successful robotics company.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: If you look at the Roomba colin angle, the CEO had this really interesting presentation I saw at MassChallenge where each subsystem basically was based upon tech development they had done for different partnerships, both like government and corporate partnerships. And they had basically learned how to make all those subsystems. And from day one, he said what everybody told them they wanted was, I think the Jetsons made is called Rosie.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: Yes, Rosie.
[00:47:13] Speaker A: I remember Rosie wanted, you know, a cleaning robot. And it just took them a long time to have the technical capability to actually deliver Rosie. But when they finally did, because of all these pieces they put together, it was there. And so, like, maybe one of those partnerships didn't yield commercial success, but it absolutely was a key part of what they did going forward, provided capital to the company and then on move forward. So, you know, look, I think these things often have kind of winding paths. And again, that's why you have to continue to grow because you don't have all the capabilities when you start to be able to get these things done, both personally and an organization.
[00:47:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think if you ask someone to invest in the future vision immediately, you can understand why people are going to. They're going to encounter a lot of skepticism. So I think this is a really neat combination of a big swing with a way to make it more palatable, maybe for investors along. Dan, I could keep going, but I want to be mindful of your time. How can people learn more about Rejuvenate and sort of follow along on the journey?
[00:48:03] Speaker A: Yeah, look, check our website out rejuvenatebio.com, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm actually like I'm pretty responsive on LinkedIn and more than happy to talk to people. We're super excited about this. We also attend a bunch of conferences, things like that, and we view this as kind of an ecosystem where lots of different ideas need to go. We're absolutely reliant on other people's technologies too to make this all work. So more than happy to try to help people out. I also, I'm like a nucleate mentor and try to help new startups. So if you do have something you're trying to start, like, please feel free to reach out to me. That's something I'm personally passionate about helping. So any of those avenues, if you'd like to connect, more than happy to do it in those content.
[00:48:37] Speaker B: Dan Oliver, thanks so much for coming on Few and Far between today. This was truly a blast.
[00:48:41] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks for having me. Great time.
Okay.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: Welcome producer Adam. Wow, that was a fascinating conversation.
[00:48:50] Speaker C: Really, so many important and insightful comments from Dan in that episode. I want to start with just something that came to me. The Church Lab seems to be the incubator think tank of choice for lots of our podcast guests. Why do you think labs like this pave the way for biotech innovators?
[00:49:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Certainly there are other labs spinning off large numbers of companies, but I think the Church Lab, George Church, seems to attract lots of entrepreneurial people who want to take a big swing. And there seems to be a shared view there that the way in which you develop an idea is by spinning out a company. So yeah, I think this is the fourth spin out from the Church Lab that we've seen. I think that's fantastic. And folks who get to go and pursue graduate work or postgraduate studies at a lab where they have where this pathway for from academia into industry is well trod, have a bunch of advantages, I think out of the gates with starting companies.
[00:49:42] Speaker C: So Chris, a lot of our recent guests have talked a little bit about culture and starting their company. In your opinion, is a nonprofit or a for profit the best option and how do you make that decision?
[00:49:55] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I think Dan is really compelling on this that you should start by thinking about what purpose the company structure serves. It's mostly about capital access, the way in which you're gonna access the funds you need to build out the entity. And so he had the example of the wheelchair thing, which is gonna be funded largely by donations and they're a nonprofit structure. It's hard to encourage donations in a for profit structure. So that made a lot of sense for Rejuvenate. They need to raise a lot of money and they thought they had a viable path. It seems they do, to persuade investors that this can be, can generate a return for them. So in that case, that's what makes the most sense. But really thinking carefully about what you're trying to solve for, I think is the way you, you know, form follows function.
[00:50:35] Speaker C: Understood. So let's talk about what I think was the highlight of what Dan was talking about is this price point of $100 a dose, which is phenomenal in this industry. What are your thoughts on that? And also just the general concept of pricing and costing at biotech.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: Well, I certainly agree. I think it's an eye popping number. I think most of us assume that gene therapies are going to be much, much more expensive than that to produce, much more finicky. Dan talked about sort of designing for scale and I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, sometimes the path to getting price down is about thinking carefully about how you want to build the thing. I think that's what these guys have done here. And in some ways working in animal health probably created the discipline, you know, forced the discipline that they needed to get to this kind of price point. Because people are willing to spend tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for genetic treatments, for gene therapy, treatments for humans. Probably as much as people love their dogs, that's probably not an achievable goal there. So knocking the price down like this and then translating that learning into gene therapies for humans, super exciting to go along with that.
[00:51:40] Speaker C: I know you are an owner of multiple dogs and a CEO, so in your view, do you feel the animal health industry is going to become the new industry as a stepping stone for human clinical trials?
[00:51:51] Speaker B: I don't think so. It's a smaller industry for one thing. And the peculiar nature of the way gene therapies are developed, which Dan talked about at some length, make it particularly well suited for this. I do think it's an interesting space. What's exciting here is the way in which they've been able to generate or create money generating programs in animal health that enable them to fund and support their human clinical trials. I think that's really, really cool. And there's definitely stuff to be learned from from there. I'm sure we're going to continue to see investment in animal health. We care a lot about our pets and we also care about livestock and other animals in the world. But I think human health is probably going to be where most folks focus.
[00:52:26] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, I agree with you, but I love the concept of the parallel clinical trials and one trial informing another. It is definitely a great strategy for creating a long term company.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it's also the kind of thing that is obvious only in hindsight. My guess is, as I said in the podcast, if you approach some investors and said, hey, we're going to do all of these things, people would say, you know, you're not focused enough. You know, we're worried that you're going to have problems in animal health that'll then hurt credibility when you get to human health, et cetera. And obviously these guys are proving any naysayers wrong.
[00:52:57] Speaker C: It's true. Definitely true. Lastly, let's talk about this long drive that Dan and Noah took to Vermont that became the genesis of their idea and their company. Is this type of unstructured brainstorming making a comeback?
[00:53:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I loved that. I think there's a couple of things to take away from that. The first is, is about spending time with somebody. You're going to work very closely with a co founder. You're really going to be in the trenches together. And so the idea that you would make that decision lightly after spending a few hours or even a couple of days with a person really is kind of crazy. It is like a marriage. It's a long term commitment that you're trying to build. So spending the time to get to know each other and really understand each other's strengths, weaknesses and goals and objectives is super important. So I liked that a lot. And then yeah, I think having spent time in unstructured thinking. Unstructured thinking sometimes gets a bad reputation. We like to be practical, we like to move quickly to decisions. But the way that really creative, out of the box solutions develop, I think is often in discursive conversations where people are kind of bouncing all over the place, rather than in linear, carefully thought through narrow aperture conversations. I think you'll want to broaden the aperture if you're going to try and think big.
[00:54:04] Speaker C: I completely agree with that. I'm a big fan of brainstorming and thinking out of the box. So I think trip for Remember Vermont is definitely in order.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: Hear, hear. Okay, thanks Adam.
Thank you for listening to the latest episode of Few and Far Between Conversations from the Front Lines of Drug Development. Our podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts and other streaming services. Please take a moment and leave us. A user review and rating today. It really helps people discover the podcast and we read all the comments. Those comments help us make Few and Far between better and better. Also, be sure to subscribe to Few and Far between so you don't miss a single episode. Got an idea for a future episode? Email us at fewand far between rossi.com or contact us on our website at bio rossi.com I'm your host, Chris O'Brien. See you next time.
