105. Revisiting Animal Microbiome Health with BiomEdit’s Aaron Schacht – Fresh Commentary

[00:00:00] Karl:

[00:00:00] Erum: right. Iran. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the year. as we record this it's thanksgiving week. We're about to record our thanksgiving episode this is the grow everything podcast where we talk about the impact of biotech on everything what's going on iran?

[00:00:18] Erum: I don't know how this happened where we just leapfrogged into the future and it's already Thanksgiving 2024. How did this happen? I feel like yesterday it was just beginning of the year and here we are.we're busy, we have so much work that we want to complete because I know you and I also value the time with our friends and family.

[00:00:37] Erum: And so we have, Thanksgiving, Christmas coming up. So we're really trying to hack at all our work so we can shut off as much as possible. we can't completely do that, but yeah, I can't believe it's already here.

[00:00:48] Erum: Yeah, we've been beating the drum with our clients since, the end of September to let them know that, Q4 is always the most busy quarter and you have to be planning for 2025. We've been planning for 2025 all quarter. And now, we're in that final sprint.

[00:01:05] Karl: The last four weeks of the year are upon us. And, we've got some big activities planned for 2025, but if you haven't made your plans for 2025, you've got a month to do so. And if you need, some help or you want to brainstorm with someone, you should definitely let us know.

[00:01:21] Erum: Yeah, absolutely. We had a great strategy session the other day, so we really laid it all out in terms of all the exciting things that are happening between our work with our clients and then some conferences that we love to go to some new ones, perhaps some international travel, which, we're still debating on and, terms of SDG Lab, in terms of us as individuals having our own resolutions, which I'm sure we'll talk more about at the end of the year, but you're not commenting on the thing I have here in my hand.

[00:01:50] Erum: I know you can't see it. Listener.

[00:01:51] Karl: I see you're wearing your aura ring. Did you that? Was that your birthday present

[00:01:56] Erum: Yes. Yes. Now Imran bought it for me because I was just being too cheap. I was like, I don't want to sign up for a subscription service. no, it's too expensive because I really want the gold one. And I was

[00:02:07] Karl: Don't you have that whoop already?

[00:02:08] Erum: Oh, I lost that. I

[00:02:10] Karl: Oh, wow.

[00:02:10] Erum: a bad history with, different biometric, wearables, either break them or lose them.

[00:02:15] Erum: I'm hoping that this ordering, it is the smallest. of wearables that I've ever had. but it's been three days and it's great. I'm learning so much about my sleep anyway, this is not an ordering advertisement, so I'm going to wait till we get that green light from them, meaning money, green light, meaning green money.

[00:02:33] Erum: Then we'll make the advertisement, but it's cool. I like it.

[00:02:37] Karl: All right. Well, let's talk about some, quick developments before we get into today's episode and before we give thanks. So, I'll kick it off by just saying we had an interesting conversation with a friend of ours

[00:02:49] Karl: While at a networking event About the biotech hub in chile in puerto varas Puerto varas is in the so called lake district it's probably two hours, maybe three hours south of santiago By plane. And you're still not even down at the bottom of, Patagonia at the tip of South America.

[00:03:11] Karl: I think we may have mentioned this a few episodes ago or many episodes ago, because we've seen that this biotech center has been growing and we want to give a shout out to the people that are there, and I think we should try to get them on because I'm super interested in biotech development in places you don't normally think about, especially in a place.

[00:03:32] Karl: So, just wanted to mention it. They had a conference down there and they're promoting this. So super interesting.

[00:03:39] Erum: you said Lake district, sign me up. I don't know a lot of Lake districts in the world, but it sounds like it's a beautiful location. I know, Chile had a lot of, incentives and programs for startups, developing startup ecosystem. Maybe several years ago.

[00:03:55] Erum: So, there's founders that I knew. They're like, Oh, I'm going to Chile. I'm like, Oh, okay. I didn't know there was much going on down there. Not just biotech, but across the digital landscape. When it comes to innovation, they were drawing a lot of people to go down there. So,

[00:04:08] Karl: Well, what I've heard about the Lake District is it's always cold there. So.

[00:04:13] Erum: got to get your Patagonia gear.

[00:04:15] Karl: yeah, it might be one of those places that people are migrating to as climate change happens, but you had put some news from another part of the world on the list,

[00:04:24] Erum: Yes. One of my favorite parts of the world. so I have this India biotech WhatsApp group. So a lot of my information comes from them and they're just so passionate about what's going on Across the board. So from policy to innovation, to academia, to industry, to, citizen scientists, and they shared that the Indian government had laid out a policy to accelerate the transition to buy manufacturing by promoting AI and digitization with omics and, creating upstream biotechnology innovations.

[00:04:55] Erum: Transcribed Through bio AI hubs, bio fan, bio foundries, by manufacturing hubs. So it's really exciting. It's called the bio E3 policy. there's, obviously similarities between our bio made and some of the things happening here in the U S but ultimately this is about fostering high performance by manufacturing.

[00:05:18] Erum: So wanted to highlight that because, a lot of, biotech and biology, at least the way that we just talk about it is decentralized, is being able to have some global partnerships, a lot of scientists, a lot of great minds in India coming up with novel ways of doing things. part of, the Indian culture that I love is the idea of just Getting something working and then figuring out how to make it perfect.

[00:05:43] Erum: love that. She's like just getting it working. And then if you want to design it and have the Apple design and all the bells and whistles, you can figure that out later. But what is the process? to do it in a way that's cost effective, how do you do things with the limited resources you have and to be able to prove out that something works.

[00:06:00] Erum: So it's incredible. I just like the fact that they're, Making this bold statement, making this policy, putting it out there for, scientists, entrepreneurs, academics.

[00:06:10] Karl: so I think that fits perfectly with, our general interest in, biotech developments around the world, we've had people on the podcast from Chile, we've had people on the podcast, from India. we know people from South Africa. We know people from Uganda. We've been invited to the African, symbio conference.

[00:06:29] Karl: this is a technology that is being quickly developed, around the world that's strategic in the United States, I read a headline that the U. S. really needs to push this technology further forward because Russia is getting back in the game. We know that China has this as a priority in their five year plans.

[00:06:47] Karl: And one thing that's super interesting that I just read this morning is that there's more biotech startups than there have ever been. Our friend of the pod, he's been on the pod, Elliot Hirschberg, noted that we tend to underestimate the number of Biotech companies being started every year back in 2022, he was saying about 200 companies were being founded, and that was per year.

[00:07:11] Karl: And that was a number. He said he heard a lot, but recently he was looking at pitch book and noted that something like 200 biopharma Financings are happening every quarter. So that means there's 800 financings happening every year. and that's only on the biopharma side, it doesn't include all the biotechs.

[00:07:32] Karl: that are focused on food that are focused on industrials that are focused on other solutions where biotech makes sense. So there's a lot going on and we expect that that number is going to grow rapidly because this is a strategic, technology and it's very important to a lot of people and it is transforming the world.

[00:07:51] Karl: And that's why we are here doing grow everything.

[00:07:53] Erum: Yeah, that's really exciting. It's exciting because, there's a lot of, technologies and innovation that are coming online, think, to help enable a lot of these companies to spin up. So, being more confident to raise money because they have the tools, they have, the frameworks that companies previous have.

[00:08:12] Erum: Been successful using I'm not surprised, but I'm excited. on the biopharma side, we do have that world, which, we are trying to bridge the biopharma and the by industrials world. There's a lot of learnings, a lot of, information and, that could be shared across both because fundamentally, they're both trying to understand leverage and build with biology.

[00:08:32] Erum: but I'd like to see the startup numbers on the bio industrial side as well. I'm sure, that's also increasing just as much. but I am definitely thankful for that because it keeps us in business. we learn, I do expect some consolidation there.

[00:08:48] Erum: I really hope that there is I've seen some of these companies and one company builds something that's. That's really deep and focused, maybe on cellular interactions, and there's a lot of company that's building it on the gene interactions. if they just work together, they can have a much more powerful platform.

[00:09:05] Erum: maybe that's something, we can put into people's ears as they think about their companies and go to market strategies and, resource allocation and resource sharing. that would be fun. but anyway, really cool. It's Great. Elliot did that.

[00:09:17] Karl: All right. So we're heading into our Thanksgiving holiday. Iran, what are you thankful for?

[00:09:23] Erum: Thankful I'm alive. That's great. I'm a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson and he's been sharing statistics around how you come to be alive is the chances of you even being alive are so slim because of, the different combinations of DNA and the physics and, your parents having you and conceiving you and, taking you to term all of that.

[00:09:45] Erum: There's just so many statistics I wish I have the number I'll put in the show notes, but it's so slim. It's like, wow, the fact that you're alive and being able to experience life is so rare. So I'm thankful for that.

[00:09:58] Karl: Same here. Wow.

[00:10:01] Erum: Yeah, that's deep. So there you go. As you guys go into Thanksgiving or this probably, airing right after Thanksgiving, but it's still the holiday season. and then since I'm in this world, I have an amazing family. I'm really grateful for, and friends like you, Carl, it's been such a joy working with you, talking with you.

[00:10:17] Erum: our conversations are just a consistent podcast of interesting things. So I'm glad we started recording. Bits and parts of our conversation. So our friends who are listening can hear some of the, amazing, inspirational things that are going on in the world of biology and biotechnology and the understanding and insights that keep revealing themselves and helping us get to that next level of innovation and living on this planet.

[00:10:42] Erum: So I'm really grateful for that. what about you? what are you thankful for, Carl?

[00:10:46] Karl: there's so much, I'm happy to breathe, you thankful for my family and friends and, the incredible network of people that were part of in New York city, in the United States and just globally. I mean, I've probably said this before, on the podcast.

[00:11:01] Karl: We probably can point to a place on. The planet. And we probably know someone who's doing biotech there. not first degree, definitely second degree, like one degree of separation from that person. so being able to say that and know that there's a lot of people all over the world using these technologies to make the world a better place makes me super excited.

[00:11:22] Karl: And just seeing how, AI is being applied to biotech accelerating things, hearing that we've got more companies out there that we can even track. All of these things are just really good. So I'm thankful for all of that. And I'm thankful for my cat.

[00:11:38] Erum: Yes. Yes. Thankful for pets, cats, all the animals that are in this world. which actually is a good segue to our episode today.

[00:11:46] Karl: Let's do it.

[00:11:47] Erum: today we decided to do a replay of episode we had with Aaron Schacht of biome edit. The reason why we chose Biomedit, and I'll just do a quick overview of what they do, is that they are an innovation company that discovers, designs, and develops novel probiotics, microbiome derived bioactives, and engineered microbial medicines address unmeaned needs in animal health, ?

[00:12:13] Erum: So they are looking to create ? products for animal agriculture to help with food security and really looking at the potential of the microbiome. So we want to be able to make sure our turkeys are growing in a way that they're happy, that they are nice and juicy and delicious, sorry, sorry to my vegan friends, but all other livestock, So we're like, okay, What are some of the challenges, what goes into having a healthy animal agriculture and, what are some of the problems that biology and biotechnology can address when it comes to, our animals?

[00:12:45] Karl: have I told you my most recent Turkey story, Iram?

[00:12:49] Erum: No, what is it? What's going on?

[00:12:50] Karl: So, I was up at the cabin in the Adirondacks a couple of weeks ago. It was very cold. we're heading into winter, but it gets cold upstate very quickly. I sit in bed. Waking up and Chris was like come out here and I got to the living room and there is a flock of 25 turkeys Right in front of our place so I went out and I picture I grabbed my camera and took this crazy film of me chasing the turkeys as they ran through our collective yard and then they flew away so

[00:13:23] Erum: A, I need to watch this. B, send it to me. And C, I gotta figure out how to put it in our show notes.

[00:13:28] Karl: , okay. So we're talking about biome edit. We're going to have Aaron back on here , we told Aaron we were going to do this replay and he said oh let people know that we're continuing to make good progress they're expecting to have approval on their lead compounds sometime in 2026 And they're also making exciting progress with their Methane emission reduction efforts.

[00:13:50] Karl: So we know that they're also pushing to get some funding in 2025. And we hope that we can report on some very positive news from biome edit next year. Maybe we'll have Aaron back on. , I met him in person up at ferment in, , April. It was great to meet , IRL, because sometimes we just never get to interact with them, but I think with that, let's just let Aaron take it away.

[00:14:15] Erum: The challenge we have with biology is it's always been a discovery science, not a design science. If you think about engineering, it's a design biology. You discover nature knows all the secrets. We know none of them. We're constantly trying to unlock and reveal what's going on.

[00:14:34] Erum: Hey, Carl, how are you? Good, Iram. How about you? We're like in full autumn Halloween mode and the weather seems to be deciding whether it wants to get cold or warm or head straight into winter, but it's exciting. I love Halloween. It's my favorite holiday of the year. I don't usually dress up, but I'm excited to see that.

[00:14:54] Erum: Yeah, yeah. I love autumn. I don't love pumpkin spice, but I do get very excited, get pumpkins put around the house and just love pumpkin spice. Getting cozy and wearing sweaters and Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I have costumes for us this year. My son, who is two, he loves this character called Blippi.

[00:15:12] Erum: It's what all the little kids watch. Blippi has a hat and glasses suspenders I bought for him. He doesn't like wearing things. He doesn't like wearing hats and stuff, so he's not wearing it. And then there's like another cartoon called Bluey where there's a family of cartoon dogs. I'll be the mom, my husband will be the dad, and then he will be not Bluey because Bluey's an older kid.

[00:15:30] Erum: There's a younger kid called Bingo, which my son will be. So I'm very excited. As you mentioned, I saw one of your favorite bands, one of my favorite bands, I think a lot of people can understand because of our music on the podcast is a little bit synthwave, was Depeche Mode. I mean, Depeche Mode, my goodness.

[00:15:47] Erum: My goodness. Yeah, they've been around forever. They've been around as long as I have. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Honestly, like one of my best friends saw their first Los Angeles show on the Sunset Strip down the street from the famous Whiskey and Go Go and he saw their first show. I remember him talking about that.

[00:16:05] Erum: Their first ever concert he saw? First show in California or first show in Los Angeles probably. Yeah. Okay, I first saw them when I was in high school. So that was a while ago, over 20 years ago, and it was their college, which was before that. So And when I saw them, it was a 25 year anniversary tour. So that was like a while back, but I've seen them a few times since then.

[00:16:30] Erum: They performed at the Barclays center, which is within walking distance in our neighborhood. So that's really cool to see one of your favorite bands in your neighborhood. Depeche mode. They're the same yet. They're different. They have unique nuances that they added to their music. Synthwave is. having its own renaissance.

[00:16:46] Erum: There was like no new wave, but some synths back in the late 70s, early 80s, but it's coming back with some great music out there. I'm sorry, Ram, I have to interrupt you with that comment because I just think that techno rules the world and techno drives the music forward. But synthwave is retro, yes, but techno is the future.

[00:17:06] Erum: Yeah, it's like it's its own genre. Was it with you where there's this map of music? I think we were looking at this big map of all music genres, and it was like 10, 000 genres or something like that. And I wonder where techno falls and how close they are. And is that the wave under techno? Or is there another genre where they all fall under?

[00:17:23] Karl: Yeah. So it's interesting. And I could talk about this a lot since I do listen to a fair amount of music. Not all of it is electronic, but a lot of it is. There is a music genome project that does map out the different genres that way. And you can. Get a sense of what the genre sounds like. And we have to find this and drop it in the show notes.

[00:17:41] Karl: Cause it is pretty interesting. And I've always looked forward to seeing someone do the same thing for the tree of life so that you could see what the different organisms are, what they have in common and just being able to click on that. It's something I've thought about. I've been thinking about for a long time, because I think it'll make that more accessible to more people to be able to understand how everything is related genetically on the tree of life.

[00:18:02] Erum: Yeah, that would be something that we'll have to dig to see if anyone's working on that. And any listeners know of anyone creating a tree of life specific goes down to every single species of living organisms. That would be awesome to see something like that. That's very interactive and you can drill down and drill up as much as you want.

[00:18:17] Erum: But during the concert, though, I would say that there was an opening act. They were okay. They were actually a Brooklyn based band. And then there was about 20 some minutes between sets. And nothing was going on. That's a long time. 20, 000 people at the Barclays Center. And I'm like, could something happen here?

[00:18:34] Erum: This is like an educational moment. You have undivided attention of 20, 000 people. And I'm like, where is advertising? Where's the message? And I was like, ah, someone give me a microphone. It gave me a little anxiety. I was like, this is a missed opportunity, but there was just two minutes before Depeche Mode came on.

[00:18:51] Erum: They do a lot of charity, which it's so wonderful. The two charities that they're focusing on now is teenage cancer. So teenagers that are dealing with cancer and how to help them and charity water. They are a global international brand. Everyone knows Depeche Mode. So they really look to these international causes.

[00:19:09] Erum: And I think it's really wonderful what they're doing. They had a call to action, go to the depeche mode. com website, which we'll put on our show notes. I think that it was one of the best concerts, David Gahan, the lead singer. He's my spirit animal. So at the concert, everyone's ready to listen to electronic music.

[00:19:26] Erum: They were in the mind space. And when I went to that genetic underground rave at Zen by a beta, there was a lot of visuals. of cells moving around. And I mean, there wasn't a lot of education there, but there was a lot of thematic, biological, artistic experience. And there were people wearing these really cool black lab coats and they were dancing on stage.

[00:19:49] Erum: There's a performer. I think there's a place for education. There's edutainment, which okay, I think of Bill Nye. I think of Austin away a little bit, but then there's another level, which I don't know if I've really seen, but it's entrancing, like something where it's psychedelic. You go deep, going to consciousness.

[00:20:06] Erum: almost meditative, and I want to say artistic again because you can learn that way. You can learn through music, you can learn through different ways of expressing knowledge besides just what we've learned in a classroom. I feel like through the visuals, through the music, through people, through poetic text maybe flashing on the screen, there could have been something very memorable, which can then be educational too if you memorize it.

[00:20:29] Karl: And it reminds me of those daybreaker events, early morning raves that would end with yoga. And I thought that was going to turn into a trend. There was the Zumba trend there, which continues maybe not as much. I was under the impression that maybe like 10 years ago, you're going to start to have topics that would be much more fitness focused.

[00:20:48] Karl: And I thought that the daybreaker yoga trend is going to turn into that. What you're talking about is edutainment raves. Yes. Which I think is an interesting idea. And I really find it interesting too that there was like this 20 minute nothing on stage at Barclays Center. It seems like not just a missed opportunity, but maybe just something else is going on.

[00:21:07] Karl: Because that's a long wait between bands. Especially when we live in a three second economy, we're always like, I went to my phone and I'm like, why am I on my phone? I spent all this money to come here. I have a babysitter. My husband had gone to grab food. So he was like waiting in line. So I was sitting there by myself and I'm like, I'm just going to go into our word doc and write notes.

[00:21:27] Erum: Cause I just wanted to talk about this time. Time is so precious and you could do something so magnificent that could have value. I mean, it could be a commercial value. You could have had a call to action. Maybe you do something biological and be like, get Giga BuyWorks, you know, just like have some other companies sponsor it.

[00:21:43] Erum: And maybe we talk about all of these companies or we have the founders and CEOs on our podcast that we're making amazing products. So maybe it could be something where it's like, here's the future society set and here's C 16s like so far. But something where it's. Not just sales either. So that's something native to the experience.

[00:22:00] Erum: So you don't get like a commercial. And what does that experience? Well, we were in a concert listening to electronic music and take the essence of Depeche Mode and then wrap it up into some type of edutainment experience. My biggest worry with that is that it just ends up becoming another venue for corporate capitalism.

[00:22:17] Karl: Well, that whole venue is. Ticketmaster. Well, and I had a different experience because I went to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, with my sister and my niece who are visiting. I, again, got to see that wonderful AI generated Red Feek Anadol. So we got to see that again. But then on the top floor of MoMA, they were doing an Ed Ruscha.

[00:22:36] Karl: I know it's spelled Ruschka. I always had it wrong. My wife corrected me. Ed Ruscha. Retrospective. And he is an artist that came up and became popular doing pop art. And he had a retrospective that kind of showed how his work has evolved over time, which I thought was really interesting. He had some kind of Barbara Kruger type of paintings with big text on them.

[00:22:55] Karl: The two things that stood out for me were these huge canvases of a standard oil station at different angles, very pop art, red and white, yellow and blue on these huge canvases. And then there was one campus that had a quote from J. G. Ballard, which is one of my favorite authors. So that one immediately stood out for me.

[00:23:14] Karl: But it's a very different experience to go to MoMA and to absorb art quietly as it's in front of you. And then downstairs on the third floor, they had a exhibit called Emerging Ecology, which is really about the intersection between architecture and the environment and the start of the environmental movement, which I thought was also very good.

[00:23:36] Karl: So definitely worth checking out. If you're in New York city and you want to go to MoMA, hit me up. I'm a member and I'm always happy to go. It's nice to go during the week when it's not as crowded. We actually met up with some friends who live in Finland and they asked us if we were going to go to Splash, which is a big startup event that happens in Finland.

[00:23:53] Karl: It may be in November, but it might even be in January. Well, I'm not planning on going. If someone in the audience is planning on going, let us know. I'm super interested. So let's get into some news before we get into the podcast. One of the things that our listeners may not know, but there's been a lot of uncertainty in the biotech industry around funding, but there's still interesting developments that are going on.

[00:24:13] Karl: Ram, you pointed one out to me that Alejandra had pointed out to me like a week before. Tell me why you were excited about it. Yeah, it came across my desk. So the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, famous name, I'm sure everyone knows who that person is. They just put 250 million to create a New York biohub, which would be delivered over 10 years.

[00:24:35] Erum: They actually have two others. There's one in SF and one in Chicago. So they have these biohubs and it sounds like a lot of it's going to be for helping with different therapies. and different modalities. I know you know a little bit more about what they're focusing on in terms of the technology and the specific biotech that they're going to be researching and funding.

[00:24:53] Karl: I don't know all the details, but the thing that does stand out for me is given that it's Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, formerly known as SpaceBot, But which is a huge digital company has a huge AI component. What stood out for me in the news when I first read about it was they were going to be focusing on developing digital models of cells, which is something that I think we've probably mentioned over time, but we don't really know what goes on inside a cell, like the machinery.

[00:25:19] Karl: There's so many events happening simultaneously. If you went on YouTube and you watched a video of DNA being synthesized, you'd be surprised inside a cell, how quickly DNA is replicated or translated into proteins, this stuff all happens simultaneously. So a cell it's a living machine and we still don't have digital models of these living machines.

[00:25:39] Karl: So having a digital powerhouse, like meta apply their AI to cells and to develop these models, I think is going to really be helpful in advancing a lot I know that with the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, it doesn't really focus on healthcare applications, but I think that the kinds of discoveries that come from that will have a big impact on a lot of areas of biotechnology and the ability to grow everything.

[00:26:03] Karl: This ability to model things digitally before you actually create the cells in vivo will save a lot of time and a lot of effort. I'm excited about this. Yeah. And you can also obviously learn about what's going on in the cell and try to get ahead of anything. Just. to model it out and say, okay, this is not going to work.

[00:26:19] Erum: Not even going to try going down this route. But we actually met a company and I don't know if we can talk about this in too much detail, but it was one of the earlier creators of Oculus before Meta purchased the Oculus. He started another company where they're looking to model the cell. And we have something that we know that works there.

[00:26:35] Erum: I wonder if they're working together or are these two things happening separately? Because it'd be so wild to wear a VR headset. And the fantastic voyage, which is what Priscilla Chen mentioned, one of the proposals that she received from someone from Yale, the proposal, she said, read like the fantastic voyage.

[00:26:52] Erum: Could you imagine wearing like a headset and just seeing what's going on in the cell? You can see it via simulation, but we also have talked to people that are looking to do real time imaging of cells. on the molecular level, which is insane. But could you imagine being able to see what's going on in real time at that level, that microscopic nanoscopic level is just blowing my mind thinking about it.

[00:27:17] Erum: And I could see why people that have built tech companies want to be able to spearhead this, because I'm sure there's going to be so much more that comes out of this fundamental research. We need to be able to model not just single cells but entire organisms if we're going to be engineering them. It's one of the rate limiting steps in biology today is being able to create lots of iterations of cells and to see whether or not a product is being produced and at what rate that product is being produced.

[00:27:45] Karl: Now imagine that you're trying to create a more complex organism. How much more computing power do you need to be able to model that out before you actually build it in the lab? So I'm very excited for this. To me, this is just like another demonstration that despite the kind of uncertainty that has been happening in biotech, I mean uncertainty in the economy in general, there is money that continues to be spent and invested.

[00:28:10] Karl: I was going to just highlight a couple of examples of that. Just so that people know where some money has gone. So in the last couple weeks, like digital health, unrelated, kind of related or peripherally related to what we talk about and grow everything Headway, which is a mental health startup, just raised $125 million.

[00:28:27] Karl: Our forensic Ginkgo by signed a deal with Pfizer that's potentially worth 330 million.

[00:28:39] Karl: RNA vaccines against COVID 19 have proven to be very effective and kind of opened up applications for RNA. A crazy deal that I just read about was this deal that Merck signed with the Japanese drug maker, Daiichi Sankyo, for three drugs that are in the clinical phase, that deal is worth potentially 22 billion, which is huge, just like an astounding amount of money.

[00:29:01] Karl: And Daiichi Sankyo is going to get almost 5 billion paid up front. That's just one of those deals where you just kind of go, wow, That's a lot of money. Those drugs must be very valuable. What drugs do they find so valuable? These are for antibody drug conjugates, which is something I suspect you're going to be hearing a lot about.

[00:29:19] Karl: What that means is they're basically taking an antibody, which is something that already exists in the human body to help our immune system fight anything that doesn't belong in our body. Antibodies exist. Creating antibodies as medicines is a huge space, but creating conjugates where you take an antibody engineer the protein, it's actually would be called a fusion protein, so that the antibody is either more powerful or is more targeted is a huge and growing space.

[00:29:45] Karl: So I can see that being able to do that at scale and having drugs that are already in the clinic is potentially worth 22 billion dollars. Well, the thing is, it's the antibody drug, but the treatment is to help with various solid cancer tumors. So cancer is a very huge issue. Cancer kills, but having a treatment to reduce the damage and for people to go into remission is huge.

[00:30:10] Erum: People pay a lot of money for that or health plans. Yeah. And I'm reading from the article, Merck did this deal to diversify their oncology pipeline Burke is the makers of the immunotherapy Keytruda, which in the first half of 2023 wrapped up 12. 5 billion in sales. So that just shows how valuable these drugs are and kind of speaks to something we talked about here on Grow Everything that you, in biotech, you can create extreme value with very small volumes of product.

[00:30:42] Karl: I wrote about this on Twitter because there's been this ongoing debate in terms of why has it been so hard for non bio pharma to be successful. We're seeing successes, but it's slower. And part of it is that when it comes to, say, commodity chemicals or even in the beauty and personal care space, many of these things have to be priced very competitively and the infrastructure is being built out.

[00:31:04] Karl: People are still building the plane as they fly it. Personal care and beauty is not an urgent, absolute need than a life saving cancer drug. I'm not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a beauty cream versus a drug that could save my life. Let's do one more deal and then we'll enter the pod.

[00:31:21] Karl: So our friends at Aclid, which is a biosecurity company that's based here in New York, announced that they had signed a seed capital deal. They had an oversubscribed seed funding. And Aclid focuses on developing software that will automate the security aspects of the system. of ordering dna or rna or genes what that means is more people are able to produce dna these days than ever and desktop dna synthesizers are becoming readily available they're going to become very widespread but with that kind of distributed ability there is the ability for abuse people can crank dangerous viruses and there are rules in place there are regulations for this and at least one of those companies that's focused on automating that So congratulations to Kevin, the CEO of Aclid.

[00:32:06] Karl: The last thing I want to mention before we get into the pod is that our friends at Persephone, we had Stephanie Culler here on the podcast a couple of months ago, Persephone is focused on the human microbiome. They also announced a deal, which I think we should get into next time with a big grocery store chain, but they and Ginkgo Bioworks released an anaerobic engineering toolkit.

[00:32:28] Karl: So basically what that means is a toolkit that makes it easier to work with cells that do not live with oxygen. Anaerobic cells like those that live in our gut. There's not a lot of oxygen there. I think that kind of toolkit will make it easier for a lot of people to engineer or work with the microbiome of different animals.

[00:32:47] Karl: Speaking of other animals, so this is the perfect transition into our podcast. There is a lot of work that happens in animal health and a lot of work in human health that translates to animal health or animal health translates to human health. What a lot of people don't realize is that animals are great models.

[00:33:02] Karl: I know there's a lot of issues, potential ethical issues with using animals as models for medicines. I think a lot of that stuff has been worked out, but it is something to always be aware of. Animal health is a neglected opportunity. Just think about how many of us have pets, how much we spend on our pets, think of all the livestock that is good for food, chicken, pigs, and cows.

[00:33:22] Karl: And then there's horses. People keep horses for pleasure. All of these animals need to be kept healthy. These are all mammals. We humans are mammals. So animal health is one of those areas that requires significant investment and it doesn't get enough investment. So today we're going to be talking to Aaron Schacht of Biome Edit, which is a microbiome company that is focused on animals, microbiomes, again, of chickens, pigs, cows.

[00:33:47] Karl: And I'm excited to have Aaron talk. I think Aaron will talk about this lack of investment in animal health, what the opportunities are for crossing over from animal health to human health, They'll give us an update on what is going on in this company. So with that, unless you have something else, Iram, let's get the interview started.

[00:34:03] Erum: Do it.

[00:34:08] Karl: Alright, Aaron Schacht, welcome to the Grow Everything podcast. Iram and I are super excited to have you here today. Thank you, really excited to be here. Why don't we kick it off and before we get into Biomedit and what you're doing there, could you give us some insight into how you ended up in the life sciences industry and how you became an entrepreneur?

[00:34:27] Karl: Sure. Sure, great. I've been in the life sciences industry for about 33 years now. So when I graduated from university of Illinois with a degree in organic chemistry, I joined the life sciences industry at Eli Lillian company here in Indianapolis, where I've lived since then, and I was a discovery research chemist, and so I got to learn about what it means to try to make molecule that could become a drug in an industry at a major company that had plenty to offer.

[00:34:50] Aaron: It's very interesting. I thought I'd be in industry for a couple of years. I really came to get a job so I could pay off my school debt and thought I'd go. back to get a PhD or a medical degree or an MBA. I knew, I thought I might do education beyond just a bachelor's degree. But what I learned at Lilly is there were so many opportunities to just follow what was interesting to me within the company.

[00:35:11] Aaron: And that's essentially what I did. So for the next 25 years at Lilly, I worked at various different parts of R& D and Lilly, Learning all aspects of it for a decade. I led R and D strategy and portfolio management. So it was all around, what does it take to make bets and win in life sciences is what I learned and practiced.

[00:35:28] Aaron: And then I moved into an area that was focused on external innovation and thinking about how do you bring ideas from outside in, and I learned about. Venture funded companies and small companies in that way. And then really my career at Lilly culminated with the opportunity to move to Alanko Animal Health.

[00:35:42] Aaron: Alanko was still a divisional Lilly at the time, focusing on the animal health aspect of pharmaceuticals. And I was brought over to lead R& D there. I was part of the team that took the company public, separated it from Lilly, stood it up on its own as a standalone company, and I led R& D and business development and regulatory affairs for six years, from 2015 to 2021.

[00:36:02] Aaron: Throughout the course of my career, I just accumulated this understanding and appreciation for what it takes to innovate novel products in life science in animal health. There was really a dearth of what I thought was going to be venture capital investing, entrepreneurial based companies. And so I knew that it was time to enter that next chapter of my career.

[00:36:19] Aaron: I wanted to do something entrepreneurial and animal health, just because the opportunity to apply technology, life science, biotechnology, animal health was really. Underrepresented over time, and it was ripe for an opportunity for someone like me with that experience to become an entrepreneur. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[00:36:36] Erum: I too come from the world of pharma, so I understand. Although I was more in the lab, I wasn't necessarily on the business side of things, but thank you so much for sharing your story. It does seem like you do have the perfect experience. To have started Biome Edit, which is a company that focuses on animal health innovation through the microbiome, which we love talking about here at Grow Everything, but you also leverage synthetic biology.

[00:36:59] Erum: So first, what drives you to focus on animal health, but based on your experience guess, but what is that passion that keeps you going? Because you're an entrepreneur, things are hard, but what is it? What's your drive? Yeah, I think the observation that I made is there's really a convergence between the opportunity that biotechnology can have and the need in animal health.

[00:37:16] Aaron: And there are fundamental problems in animal health that if you think about it, there are older technologies that are the standards. So antibiotics for use in pathogen control, which we know has with it challenges. Livestock production is an economic game. How do we get the economics of livestock production better?

[00:37:31] Aaron: Can we get better products through the use of biotechnology than what they're used to using? And that way they have better tools to control. performance and health of livestock. On the pet side, we've seen this dramatic increase in pet ownership. We've seen the technologies that are established really focus on keeping the animal alive, not dying an early death due to infection or a parasite.

[00:37:51] Aaron: So animals are living longer. Like humans are living longer. They're actually moving indoors from outdoors. So they're living more of a lifestyle that looks like humans. So the opportunity to address and deal with chronic disease is now present and in front of us. I look at the animal health technology base and recognize that it's something like 20 to 30 years behind the leading edge of technology applications in human health, and it just seems like there's a perfect opportunity to provide some sort of translational application.

[00:38:17] Aaron: But at the same time, when it comes to the microbiome, I think we're at the early days of really understanding things and this is where animal health becomes very interesting because we can study the microbiome in the gut of a chicken or a pig or a cow where the genetics are very consistent and the food they eat is very consistent.

[00:38:35] Aaron: So all of the variability you might observe is largely attributable to the microbiome. If you compare that to human medicine, human diets are variable. Genetics are variable. Lifestyles are variable. And as we understand, the microbiota in humans is highly variable as well. So it's harder to make those connections about what's important.

[00:38:53] Aaron: So really animal health becomes a learning laboratory for those applications in the microbiome that I hope yield novel insights that actually can leverage and advance what's going on on the human side as well. I'm super glad you said that, Aaron, because first of all, I think it's interesting that you say that animal health is 20 or 30 years behind human health, but I always think that if you're innovating on the animal health side, the applications to human health should be relatively close and you could use the examples for, I don't know, moving drugs into the clinic.

[00:39:23] Karl: Is that actually the case or am I mistaken in thinking that way? Yeah, I think what's happened relative, because the human medicine enterprise is such a massive enterprise, both the stakes are really high, as well as the rewards for entrepreneurs are really high, and the regulatory system has adapted to optimize what it means to develop a human drug.

[00:39:41] Aaron: And we use animal models as a way of de risking the technology or the safety of the technology, as opposed to natural animal diseases. Realistically, when you go study something in a dog on the human side, you're not really positioning that product as an opportunity to treat a dog disease because you're not using the dog for anything other than a model of a human disease.

[00:40:02] Aaron: I do think there is an opportunity for, as we think about, let's go after a dog disease that translates well to a human disease, you could get information about both. I think historically what we've seen is a lot of repurposing from the human side into animal health. The neat thing about that is you start with a lot of, let's say, safety data in a dog.

[00:40:19] Aaron: So therefore, you know, the product's going to be safe in a dog. Now, can we demonstrate efficacy and even the regulatory apparatus, let's just say here in the U S the Cedar and CBER, which are the human divisions versus CBM, which is the animal health division, there's not a lot of crosstalk between them.

[00:40:34] Aaron: So it's up to the industry players to figure out how to translate and make those translations and present that in the context of advancing a product. Aaron mentioned CDER, CBER, and CVM. These are all departments of the FDA. CDER, or C D E R, stands for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. This department ensures the safety and effectiveness of medications, both prescription and over the counter.

[00:41:02] Erum: Their scope extends beyond just medicine. They also regulate products like fluoride in toothpaste and sunscreens. CBER, on the other hand, is a Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. They are tasked with overseeing biological products such as vaccines and gene therapies. CBER makes sure that these are safe, effective, and available for public use.

[00:41:23] Erum: They also provide information to help people use these products safely. CVM is a center for veterinary medicine. They ensure that animal medications are safe and effective while also guaranteeing that food from treated animals like meat and milk is safe for human consumption. Their work also extends to monitoring animal food safety and educating the public on animal health.

[00:41:47] Aaron: But I do think we're entering an era where de risking groups of concept for a drug hitting a target can be done in animals on the way to an animal health drug and can open up the possibility of a better starting point on the human health side. And I think we'll see more of that. It'd be ideal if for every time we tested an animal, we were doing it for a reason other than just de risking a human application.

[00:42:10] Aaron: It'd be good if we were finding and creating some benefit for an animal downstream from that as well. And right now you're mainly focusing on the microbiome and you're leveraging synthetic biology. Could you explain some of the core principles and the technologies that drive your company's work? Yeah, our whole platform approach actually began life in Elanco when I was leading R& D in Elanco.

[00:42:31] Aaron: And we took a strategic position that said we were going to innovate alternatives to antibiotics. That's where things really started. Elanco is a big company when it comes to selling antibiotics. As feed ingredients and even injectable antibiotics, we wanted to address the issue of antimicrobial resistance and provide the applications of technology that could replace antibiotics as needed.

[00:42:49] Aaron: If we think about where antibiotics come from, they're often secondary metabolites from some microorganism. We find it in the ground, we test it in an agri plate, it inhibits some organism. And all of a sudden we say, what's that chemical and how do we make that chemical at scale and then use it as an antibiotic?

[00:43:03] Aaron: So the biological activity of the antibiotic is resident within the microbiome. That's the first observation we made. So we really need to study the microbiome to learn more about how those organisms produce these metabolites and how they have a positive effect and how do they avoid the concern around resistance because it's really when you produce chemicals at scale and expose large populations to them that you worry about resistance.

[00:43:24] Aaron: So somehow if you operate within sort of the biological milieu, you might be able to avoid that. So we started with an effort to go create reference libraries. of samples that we would collect from animals at various different stages, healthy state, diseased or dysbiotic state, treated state, and return to health, and observe what's the ecophysiology, what's the microbial signature that we can observe across those states, and does it point us in the direction of microorganisms that are important?

[00:43:49] Aaron: That led us to then leverage that approach to coming up with microbial consortia. It could be feed ingredients that could basically help the animal perform better, maintain a healthy state, resist pathogens better. Sometimes we might identify a molecule that one of those organisms make that plays some functional role in gut health, like an enzyme that degrades some factor that causes inflammation, and we can make a product like that.

[00:44:11] Aaron: But ultimately we made an observation that says these microorganisms that we're discovering in the guts of these animals, they're there for a reason. They play some functional role. They have a beneficial impact and we could engineer them to do something else too. Really, that's where the future of the company is focused and that is engineering bacteria to not only play this probiotic support role, but then have some molecule that has some sort of effect or efficacy that we are targeting.

[00:44:34] Aaron: Maybe it's an antibody that neutralizes toxins from a pathogen. Maybe it's a therapeutic molecule that plays some role in metabolism. So our idea is that becomes a little bit of a design studio relative to how we can think about engineering products now based on bacterial delivery. Wow. That's a lot to unpack, but I think one of the interesting things that it makes me think about is there is this.

[00:44:56] Karl: I'll say trend, or it's very widespread. Like you said, there's a lot of antibiotics given to animals in their feed, which is unsustainable. It causes a lot of problems. Could also cause a lot of issues for humans. And you guys are addressing that unmet need in a sustainable and environmentally responsible way.

[00:45:14] Karl: But based on the sustainability goals, what kind of impacts do you think what you guys are doing will have on the animal agriculture industry? I think we think about three different areas where we think our technology can have an impact in agriculture, addressing sustainability concerns. I started first with antibiotics.

[00:45:30] Aaron: So if we can engineer biological products that actually don't necessarily try to kill a pathogen, but in essence ameliorate the disease causing effects of the pathogen. We think that's a practical approach to reducing the concern around AMR. And we can prevent disease that way, as opposed to try to treat it or control it through chemicals, which we know potentially lead to resistance and can accumulate in the environment, which can cause other challenges.

[00:45:55] Erum: Aaron mentioned AMR. AMR stands for antimicrobial resistance and its ability of microorganisms like bacteria, viruses, and fungi to resist the effects of antimicrobial drugs that were once effective against them. This resistance can make infections harder to treat, leading to increased medical costs, prolonged hospital stays, and a higher risk of death.

[00:46:17] Erum: AMR is a growing public health concern, as it limits the effectiveness of many treatments, potentially turning once manageable infections into life threatening conditions. The second space and we have a program in our pipeline focused on this is food safety. There are pathogens that are concerns for being in the food.

[00:46:36] Aaron: So we're very familiar with salmonella, for example, and how meat can be tainted with salmonella and it can make the consumer of that meat a human sick. There's another organism called campylobacter, which is equally challenging, but there aren't good solutions for us. So we're targeting a non antibiotic solution, the campylobacter, to address the food safety concern.

[00:46:53] Aaron: The third is methadone emission reduction. We know the science is teaching us that if you take three components of what happens in the rumen, the feed, the The genetics of the cow and the microbiome and look at them, microbiome probably has the greatest contribution to what happens in methane emission.

[00:47:08] Aaron: And it's because there are microorganisms called methanogens present, and they do a really good job of taking the hydrogen that gets produced in fermentation and converting it into methane. We believe that we can tackle that through modulating the microbiome and or engineering bacteria to express molecules that inhibit methanogen activity.

[00:47:25] Aaron: We look at those three fields in livestock production, AMR reduction, food safety risk reduction, and methane emission reduction as actually the focus areas for us, the opportunity for us to not only create great products that help livestock producers do their job, but actually address the attendant risk associated with animal agriculture.

[00:47:42] Erum: Wow, yeah, it's definitely something that's necessary. Ultimately, it sounds like creating a gas axe for cows, so they don't necessarily express that gas. But that's very interesting. But it sounds like so complex. I mean, we had Stephanie Collar of Persephone Bioscience on here talking about the human microbiome.

[00:48:00] Erum: And one of the things she had mentioned is a documentary called the invisible extinction, where there's a lot of microbes that are missing, not like in a human microbiome, but also the animal microbiome. And as you Talked about animals moving indoors. Have you noticed in your studies that a lot of animals are missing key bacteria and is reintroducing them a solution to help with their diseases or anything that's affecting them?

[00:48:24] Aaron: I think the idea of getting the function of the microbiome, right. Is the way to think about it. There are different kinds of organisms that can play the same role. So we look at it more, and I think we're at the early stages of learning what that's all about. But if you can create a microbiome functionality, if you have the right consortia of bugs that play these complimentary roles to support in essence, what the host needs to accomplish, we're dependent on these microbes.

[00:48:45] Aaron: We cannot live with a sterile gut, for example. I don't think that's sustainable. We've co evolved with these bugs. And so they play certain roles for us and we play certain roles for them. It's a symbiosis. So I think the way I look at, and I understand the concern around certain bugs disappear, the question I would ask is, have other bugs appeared that play that role?

[00:49:03] Aaron: And we just haven't figured that out yet. So I think the microbiome is a little more resilient than that. At the same time, the basic concept of, let's have enough of the right functionality present to maintain the right homeostasis. for a healthy gut. That's a concept we want to get right, but there may be many paths to doing that.

[00:49:19] Aaron: The diversity we see across people who have similar health states says that you can actually be healthy in different ways when it comes to how you enumerate what's in the microbiome. So I think the key is we're going to learn more over time about how to relate not just composition of microbiome, but function of what's present in the microbiome to health.

[00:49:36] Karl: I'm wondering, Aaron, if you could elaborate on some of the challenges you guys have encountered as you drive innovation in the animal health space using the microbiome. Yeah, great question. So, I think as a drug developer, I often have this experience that you're going to have a study that reads out and you're going to have an effect size with a p value, and it's going to be a clear picture of a drug effect.

[00:49:57] Aaron: For bacterial based or microbiome based. solutions. It's not that simple. It's not that easy. A lot of times you could actually overfeed a bacteria and you could stress the animal and you could lose an effect of the positive effect of what they're doing. Because in essence, if you have too much bacteria present, the immune system's got to respond.

[00:50:12] Aaron: So this idea that you can super dose these things, I think it's going to get rationalized. There's some companies out there that think just giving billions and billions of colony forming units of a good microbe is the way to go. But I also think there's a practical limit. Biology has limits. That's the one thing we know is the dynamical system and there are limits and you discover them by testing.

[00:50:28] Aaron: So I think there's a lot of variability inherent in studying things like animal performance or gut health. One of the challenges we have is how to design studies in a way that we actually pick up that signal and minimize the noise and operate in a zone where the effects can be observed in a meaningful way that allows you to then go register a product with certain claims or establish a safety profile that's acceptable for a product that maybe doesn't have claims and is generally recognized as a safe product.

[00:50:54] Aaron: It's just working in what is a highly variable study space. Even though earlier I said, there's some variability that's reduced based on how animal agriculture, for example, is accomplished. So it's really just making sense of what is a biological effect in a setting where there's lots of different actors.

[00:51:09] Erum: Yeah. Thanks for that. One of the things that we were reading about when we were understanding your company was the idea of microbial atlases and how are they used to develop a products and how does it set your company apart in the animal health field? As I indicated earlier, we were sort of born inside a LANCO, and one of the things we set about to do was to build, in essence, a knowledge base that could become a discovery resource.

[00:51:32] Aaron: And so we termed the coin Microbial Atlas. The neat thing about working at a large animal health company is you're always running studies in animals. I challenge my team to ask a question, is it worthwhile in any study we run to collect, in essence, either fecal samples or intestinal content samples? Now on the livestock side, in almost every case, it made sense to collect samples because in essence, you were looking for the relationship between a microbiome and the animal's performance, for example, or disease.

[00:51:56] Aaron: response. So we set about really a very dedicated journey of getting as many samples as we could across many species as we could across many study settings as we could. And each study that yielded samples became its own unique atlas, so to speak. Well, what did we do with the samples? We would isolate the bacteria that were present.

[00:52:14] Aaron: culture them, and then analyze them. And we built a high throughput culturomics platform that allowed us to do this, where we could take single organisms, grow them up under certain conditions, and then analyze them for what is the genome sequence, what is the metabolome, what is the transcriptome, and start to collect the data set that says, this is the biology of that microbe in that context.

[00:52:33] Aaron: So that's the microbial atlas, if you think about it. And then we could look at all of the microbes present in that context as well, and ask questions about metagenome activity in that setting. What we built is today a library of over 10, 000 samples coming from 7, 500 animals with various layers of that data analysis, that omic analysis as well, followed by the data analysis that we could, and it allows us to actually start with this massive database and then down select for microbes that we think might be important.

[00:53:02] Karl: You said 7, 500 animals, but what chickens, cows, horses, what are they? Yeah, chickens, pigs, cows, fish, salmon, cats, and dogs. So no horses? No horses. No wild animals? Well, we never run studies on wild animals. We can go get samples like that and start to explore. And that's an interesting thing. They obviously get into probably a different concept of the microbiome, because these are not in production settings.

[00:53:25] Aaron: They're just, you know, naturally living and you might actually pick up cues about what a real healthy microbiome is for someone that forages in natural food sources compared to somebody who is part of a feed production system where the diet is very well controlled and the environment's curated in a serious way.

[00:53:40] Aaron: So yeah, that's an area of opportunity that we don't have any experience with, but could be an interesting source of diversity. One more thing about that, because we talked to Ben Novak of Revive and Restore and one of the stats we keep coming back to is that of all the mammals on earth, it's 64 percent humans.

[00:53:55] Erum: 34 percent livestock and just 4 percent wild mammals. So there's a lot of biodiversity and reintroduction and cloning endangered species, but understanding their microbiome would be very fascinating. And as an entrepreneur, you need to stay focused, but the area of opportunities that the academic environment picks that up and we can pick up some cues from them.

[00:54:14] Aaron: That's probably the place where that makes the most sense to create knowledge. Our job is to take that knowledge and create products out of it. Yeah, it's interesting because the first time you mentioned performance a couple minutes ago, I understand performance across livestock, but my mind went to racehorses and I started thinking, Huh, what does microbiome enhancing bacteria look like to increase the performance of a racehorse or a race dog?

[00:54:38] Karl: But clearly you're not doing that. But you basically have three kinds of products, probiotics, bioactive compounds, and engineered microbial medicines. Can you provide examples of what those look like in the real world or maybe a scenario where someone out in the field would want to use those? That's question number one.

[00:54:54] Karl: And then question number two, how are they on the market? How far are you from being on the market if they're not? That's great. I'll use biometa pipeline examples for each. A probiotic consortia is what we all come to know in humans when you go and buy a line or culturelle. That's just a collection of microorganisms that somebody has done some science around and says these things play a certain role and if you have more of them, if you have a relative abundance higher of each of these species, you'll have a healthier gut or it'll contribute to something that you want to maintain a healthy gut.

[00:55:23] Aaron: condition around. What we've done is we've taken, for example, our Atlas in chickens and pigs, and we've said, let's go identify in healthy chickens and both naturally healthy, but those who have been treated with something and have returned to health, the microorganisms that are present in those chickens.

[00:55:39] Aaron: But let's limit it to the field of bacillus strains. Why bacillus strains? One, there's a lot of manufacturing capacity at scale that you can access. Two, bacillus are natural spore formers. And what is a spore forming bacteria? Why is that relevant in animal health? Well, they're naturally heat resistant.

[00:55:54] Aaron: They can endure conditions. And when you think about creating an animal feed ingredient, very often animal feed is formulated as a pellet that gets extruded under heated conditions. And therefore, if we can create a product that can actually survive in the feed pelleting process, it'll be one that's readily adopted by the animal production industry.

[00:56:12] Aaron: So we said, let's target bacillus for the qualities of a bacillus species. We also know that they are bacteria that protect against other pathogens and they potentially provide, let's call it metabolite, that improve gut integrity. So we looked at all of our bacillus species that we had curated in our library, over 1, 000 of them, 1, 100 of them, and we started down selecting for other criteria.

[00:56:35] Aaron: No antimicrobial resistance genes, no toxin genes, any of the bad things that you don't want in one of these bugs, and we got down to a handful of a dozen or so. We started looking at combinations of those dozens, and we ended up selecting a combination of three, two that originated from chicken, one that originated from pig, and And then we've been studying that product combination in poultry production setting and swine production setting, addressing the concern around pathogen protection and gut health.

[00:57:00] Aaron: That's one of our first products, and that product should launch in the U. S. here early next year, assuming everything goes according to plan. And it'll launch in a partnership that we signed with Nutreco, which is a major feed additive company that likely will be The idea of this technology being part of their repertoire for what they offer livestock producers.

[00:57:15] Aaron: That's a probiotic consortium product. If you look at my bioactive metabolite, for example, years ago, we discovered an enzyme that microbes produce. That is an alkaline phosphatase enzyme that breaks down something called LPS. LPS is lipopolysaccharide. It makes up the cell wall of gram negative pathogens, which are typically the pathogens that cause disease.

[00:57:35] Aaron: And very often, an animal can suffer, let's say, a subclinical infection of a gram negative pathogen, and it won't really suffer disease, but the residue of that bug being present remains in the gut of the animal, and that's an inflammatory ingredient. When we feed this enzyme, we break that ingredient down, reduce gut inflammation, restore gut health, and the animal feeds better.

[00:57:55] Aaron: So that's the second product of ours that'll be a feed ingredient. In terms of an engineered bacteria, our leading product in the pipeline in this category is, through our ATLAS analysis, we discovered a couple of microbes that are well adapted to the poultry gut, Lactobacillus species. And we've engineered them to express single chain antibodies against toxin caused by a pathogen, Clostridium perfidians, which causes a disease called necrotic enteritis, which is both a mortality causing as well as performance hindering disease if it outbreaks in a poultry production setting.

[00:58:26] Aaron: So here we are. In essence, we actually identified these toxins. We injected them into llamas. The llamas create single chain antibodies as a function of their immune system. We screen the antibodies for their effect to bind and neutralize these toxins, and then we take and create a gene of that sequence of that antibody and put it into a bacteria that then expresses that antibody constitutively, and then we feed that bacteria to a chicken so they have this antibody factory in their gut functioning from day one.

[00:58:53] Aaron: Therefore, if you think about immune response, there's always a lag, and it always requires energy to create your own antibodies. Well, we install a little factory that creates antibodies and then the bird doesn't have to spend its time with an immune response and using energy. All their energy is devoted to growth, and we control the disease through this bacteria that is a living medicine, basically neutralizing these toxins from this pathogen.

[00:59:14] Karl: I have two quick questions. Number one, why llamas? And then two, I'm curious what the regulatory pathway looks like for these products. Yeah. So why llamas and any camelid species, the way in which their immune system functions is their immune system produces single chain antibodies. And why is single chain antibody important in engineering bacteria?

[00:59:33] Aaron: Think about a human antibody. It's multiple different proteins that get expressed on separate genes that then form an antibody. And we don't think we can engineer a bacteria to do all of that orchestration the way a human cell can, but it's really good at expressing a single protein. And so we wanted a protein that folds into an antibody.

[00:59:50] Aaron: That's just a single chain that allows us to configure a simple gene to install. So llamas are a good source of single chain antibodies, and we want single chain antibodies, given our approach from a regulatory standpoint, these will be live. Biological therapeutics. In our case, this first product I'm speaking of will go through the USDA U.

[01:00:07] Aaron: S. Department of Agriculture, where they regulate biologic product that have some impact on immune function of the animal. When we approached the USDA with our technology and said, are you the right body to regulate this? They said, yes, they're typically regulating things like antibodies or vaccines. This isn't sort of neither nor.

[01:00:24] Aaron: But has the essence of both. So it's actually a new category of products for the USDA. They don't quite have a name for it yet. And we're the first one in front of them with a product like this. So you guys are doing development. You've got products that are close to being on the market, but what's been the response from the growers and the people in the livestock industry?

[01:00:42] Aaron: Our first two products, the enzyme and the bacillus consortium, those look like products they're used to and understanding. I think what we brought is probably a little higher quality science than maybe the garden variety of those products that has been there. There are feed enzymes that play a certain role, and they're often used to break down nutrients and make the food more digestible.

[01:01:01] Aaron: We're dealing with an inflammatory condition, so we've got to pivot them into a conversation that says, No, we're improving the health. I think to the extent that you can give them the data that says, Hey, I can get an ROI on the use of this product in my production system. They're very enthusiastic and they get more excited about the science when the economics are right.

[01:01:20] Aaron: What does that look like? Well, these products have to basically give them like a three X ROI for every penny they spend on a feed ingredient. They need an improvement that says it's worth paying for. three times that in the production of the livestock. So as long as you're dealing with them on that basis, I think it's a very facile discussion and they are willing to experiment and adopt.

[01:01:39] Aaron: And with products that are grass, you can move into production settings like that, or you can simulate those in the clinical side and then generate that data and get them excited about it. For a product that's regulated by a USDA or an FDA, you can't get into a production setting. At the same scale or in a real world type experience, unless you have some sort of authorization from them to do so, we don't have that for these products.

[01:02:01] Aaron: So in essence, we have to lead with the scientific story and then share the data associated with how this product does to reduce mortality or reduce lesions, for example, in the chicken's gut, and then get them excited about drawing those conclusions about how this is going to help them actually more chickens make it into the food chain for every egg I hatch.

[01:02:19] Aaron: If I can reduce mortality by 50%, let's say I've got 20 percent mortality in my flock, and now I only have 10%, that's more chickens I can sell. So ultimately it does come back to something like a productivity benefit that has an economic impact for them in their bottom line. Now, if you move into therapeutics on the pet side, it's a very different story.

[01:02:36] Aaron: Nobody's eating cats and dogs, or at least not routinely, where we sell these products. So now you're dealing with disease claims and helping a pet owner feel like they've done all they could to address the health concern of their pet. We've been talking about livestock quite regularly on this podcast, but in the context of cultivated meats and how that industry is trying to become an industry, I guess.

[01:02:56] Erum: And on the flip side, because there's actually not enough money being poured into that space compared to the livestock agriculture of today, because they've received billions and billions of subsidies. So Ideally, they do have the money to pay you. But my question is actually, ideally, this is, we'll be saving the lives and saving money from a lot of the livestock farms.

[01:03:16] Erum: And we have talked to, I don't know if you know Vishal but they have an insurance model that they've wrapped around protecting a lot of their crops, using a microbe, using bacillus. to tag food and so they can have a DNA readout if there is any food recall. Two questions here is what is your business model and have you explored insurance models because it seems like it'd be a good opportunity.

[01:03:38] Aaron: Yeah, it's a great question. Our business model is ultimately we're a product innovator. Ideally, if you think about the ecosystem, the innovation ecosystem, animal health, it's not as mature as you have on the human side. We have some big players who can't innovate enough products fast enough to grow at the rates that they like to.

[01:03:53] Aaron: And we have a lot of technology that can be applied. So my vision, my dream is that we actually grow an ecosystem of life science, innovation, biotechnology, innovation, and animal health that can actually create a robust venture capital return environment. It's important to note there's not a single fund that exists that is dedicated for investing in animal health.

[01:04:11] Aaron: Every fund that invests in animal health only invests in human biotech or ag tech of some other kind, or now we're seeing a lot more impact funds start to look at animal health, but nobody exists for the purpose of investing in innovation in animal health. So if I'm very successful and make some money on Biomedit, I'll go launch the first fund to do this because I think there's just an uncontested opportunity.

[01:04:31] Aaron: I think your question around, how do you create and capture value around the use of these products outside of the product itself, and that's what an insurance thing does, the way we're thinking about that is, and methane, I think, allows us to think about this in more concrete ways, because there is the emergence of this field around carbon markets, where in essence, if I can demonstrate that I reduced carbon output in my business.

[01:04:51] Aaron: Can I monetize that reduction to somebody who wants to meet a goal of reducing carbon impact for their business, but doesn't have the means of reducing it any other way than buying a carbon credit? So one of the things we'll be exploring in our methane emission reduction program is how do we bring alongside the basic understanding what would be the potential for the carbon reduction credit that the use of our product would generate?

[01:05:15] Aaron: And we're skating to a puck that market isn't viable and vital yet, but it probably becomes viable and vital over the time of the development program. We'll look at that. So that's good. That's a neat starting point. And we're encouraged if you then say, okay, well, I've got these two other problems I'm working on food safety.

[01:05:33] Aaron: And AMR, well, what if I get credits for those as well? And is there a way to tokenize those and monetize those tokens? So we'll be looking at that aspect, not quite the same as insurance, but a different twist on how do you monetize the impact value of your product, as opposed to just the economic value of your product, and how do you think about that at the earliest stages of development of that product?

[01:05:54] Aaron: That's something we'll take on. Yeah, it would seem like Europe would be a little bit more interested in the carbon markets because they are leading the way there. I don't really know much about what's happening in the U. S. I don't know if U. S. livestock agriculture is even considering participating in that.

[01:06:09] Aaron: Yeah, there's a fair bit of evidence, Erum, for interest here. So companies like Tyson and the others, I think they have ESG goals and part of what they have to figure out is how do they meet their ESG goals. And this is something they could do right within their own industry setting. I think the best story around carbon credits is you got carbon, the carbon industry, coal, oil, et cetera.

[01:06:27] Aaron: They're never going to be carbon neutral. But they could be great consumers of carbon credits produced in other industries. So I do think there will be a marketplace for this, where at the aggregate, we can reduce the footprint, but the way in which that gets credited or monetized is part of an emerging field that we don't know anything about.

[01:06:43] Aaron: But I do think there's a lot of interest in the U. S. The way we're thinking about, we want to do this as an and, not an or. So think about methane. I want to take the hydrogen that builds up in a rumen, because of fermentation, that methanogens typically take on and then convert to methane, and I want to redirect that hydrogen to short chain fatty acid production that ends up in protein.

[01:07:04] Aaron: So I can reduce methane at the same time as building up meat or milk production and do it in a healthy, sustainable way, get a carbon reduction, but get a meat increase or a milk increase all in a safe and sustainable and biologically relevant way. Yeah, that is amazing. I mean, that was mind blowing.

[01:07:20] Karl: That's what I love about the conversations we have with people. We've never would have thought that you could use biotech to create a insurance product, but also the way you're approaching it, I think is fascinating. Now, I know that you're also A member of various biotech organization boards and how do you balance what you do at biomedit with that and the other?

[01:07:41] Karl: Entrepreneurs that you're working with yeah It's been a great honor and privilege to be on the board of a couple small animal health companies at various different stages As well as some what I would say our industry enabling organization agronovus Indiana is focused on the ag bioscience economy in indiana And I've been involved in that for, it'll be close to a decade now.

[01:08:00] Aaron: I've played the top leadership role in the executive board there for a couple of years. And it's all about recognizing the assets the state of Indiana has and growing that economy as best we can. Another institution here in Indiana, Indiana Biosciences Research Institute, is really an organization that sprung up trying to bridge the, what is often a divide between academia and industry.

[01:08:20] Aaron: And doing so, With institutions in Indiana, we've got Eli Lowland Company, Major Pharmaceutical Company, Roche Diagnostics, Cook Biopharma. So there are some big institutions that are completely focused on bioscience and some great academic institutions like Purdue and Notre Dame and IU where there's just not enough crosstalk and collaboration and what I would call entrepreneurial activity between them.

[01:08:40] Aaron: And that's what IVRI is focused on. So I think if you integrate across my outside board experiences, I'm all about. Helping in essence, this entrepreneurial ecosystem grow in ways where we can observe what's limiting that growth at a company level, it's all around the strategy for realizing the full potential of the technology that they have through partnership or exit or whatever.

[01:09:01] Aaron: And for these institutions I support, it's all about connecting, making the connections that reinforce the function of the ecosystem and give people confidence that starting a company, let's say in Indiana might be a good idea. We'll learn a lot about how to manage a board. I mean, I've taken the lessons from being on board.

[01:09:16] Aaron: As to how I think about as a CEO, I think one of the main jobs of a CEO is to manage your stakeholders, and the board is the primary mechanism for doing that. Board function is really critical for a company's success, and so that allows me to have good ideas. I see best practice, and I see some worst practice, and I navigate effectively, hopefully, between them.

[01:09:34] Erum: Yeah, yeah. You can definitely do knowledge sharing across all these companies to make them more efficient. You're positioned to really lead this whole industry. And your approach is just very admirable. Being able to come from industry, start a company and help these other companies rise up along with you, which is.

[01:09:49] Erum: An amazing, amazing feat. And so congratulations to you. Oh, thanks a lot. It was a great chapter of my career to be in. Excellent. Excellent. But as CEO, this is your bread and butter. This is what's putting food on your table right now. I'm sure you have other financial things going on, but what is the future of Biomedit?

[01:10:05] Erum: We talked about livestock. Of course, that's where the money's coming from, right? That's where the big bucks are. You're talking about pet health too. What's the broader landscape for animal health and welfare? What's the future for Biomedit? Yeah, for Biometa, obviously we want to demonstrate that the platform can yield valuable product in a way, and then through either partnering arrangements or an exit, someone buys us, says we need that platform as part of us, or going on and figuring out how to make this a company that sustains, maybe we commercialize our own product.

[01:10:31] Aaron: We're in that phase where I'll begin in earnest raising our next round of capital. And we're actually debating exactly how to position the company because we have. Different alternatives like that. And the market condition is teaching us something about what has worked and not worked over the last couple of years, because I think good fundraising outcomes have been a little more scarce in 22 and 23 than they were in 21.

[01:10:52] Aaron: So I'm taking all of that in and trying to best. I think if you ask me the question, let's say you were successful to raise the Series B, what would be the exit strategy coming out of the Series B? Because of the fact that we've partnered the first two products that really are reasonably good products, but focused in a niche like livestock feed additives, the real value of the company is going to be in the engineered bacteria platform.

[01:11:15] Aaron: We won't have commercial footprint at scale at that point. So the best thing to exit would be to sell this to somebody else and let them finish what we started. Use the platform to continually innovate inside a large corporation, but then be able to commercialize the products, hopefully to a really good outcome.

[01:11:31] Aaron: But if you said to me, you're going to raise money beyond that, well, then I'd think about the prospects of becoming our own commercial entity and seeing how great a company we can establish in this space. I think about the future of animal health. Obviously the mission of animal health is very noble in the sense that putting food on the table and preserving the health of these precious companions.

[01:11:49] Aaron: We have cats and dogs, but I think about animal health more as a way to learn about how to affect other challenges on the planet or in the human condition. I think about the microbiome and the role it might play in helping us understand what healthy aging looks like. I'd love to see Biomedit at some point enter into exploring how does modulations of microbiome impact aging and how do we use animals to learn that because animals age faster than humans to unlock secrets that might be translatable to human health in that regard.

[01:12:19] Aaron: That's sort of high in the sky further out there, but I do think the potential of what we're learning can be extrapolated to that someday. Wow. And what do you think the future of biotech is in the next 3, 5, 10 years? Yeah, I think we're in a renaissance. And I think we're in the post genomic period. And actually, if we can catch the understanding of the microbiome up to the understanding we have of the genome and the integration of those two, I think it really unlock a lot.

[01:12:43] Aaron: Then you incorporate what we're learning around artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI and the ability to actually design biology on a screen before you ever run a wet lab experiment. I just think the rate at which we learn and can come up with solutions is going to increase significantly in the next decade.

[01:13:01] Aaron: That points back to, that's why I think something like aging is now addressable with the convergence of genomics, a microbiome, and AI machine learning. It is the frontier that frankly, I think all of us that are getting up there and start to think about we have fewer years left on this planet than we've already lived.

[01:13:18] Aaron: You personally start to think about how do I stay vital longer? How do I protect the loved one from an untimely death? How do I help the human condition maximize the application of the wisdom that gets accumulated over time? But the body slows down and therefore that person can't be as active. I just think about all the unlocked potential of very wise people now having a much more healthy sort of golden years and be able to contribute.

[01:13:41] Aaron: So I just think you multiply all those effects. I just think we're in a period where we can sit here today and stress over all the challenges and problems in society and our planet, but I look at all the potential to address them now, and I'm encouraged and excited. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the use of AI because you are collecting so much data, not only across different animals, but all of their microbiomes.

[01:14:02] Erum: And I assume that you're using it. Is that kind of core to the platform? We have a computational team that I think is really amazing in what they're able to do and what they're able to teach us on a couple levels. One is modeling a complex ecosystem like a microbiome is not easy to do. So we have expertise in that.

[01:14:18] Aaron: How do you translate this structure function relationship? If I've got a microbiota that consists of all these organisms and all these relative abundances, how do I understand exactly what that means? The second thing is we design biomolecules to engineer into bacteria. How do we best design them? Let's say I take one of these llama produced antibodies, but I want to tweak it for some reason.

[01:14:38] Aaron: How do I use generative AI to come up with a novel structure? What's very interesting is we see a lot of engineering on the human side for proteins, where things like unnatural amino acids are introduced as a means of either stabilizing the protein or creating an attachment point for some long chain fatty acid to make it longer acting.

[01:14:56] Aaron: Well, we can't do that in bacteria. So how do we design using the natural amino acid template novel structures that have interesting properties? And we're using generative AI to do protein design that way. How do we engineer the bug so that it produces more and expresses more? Which protein or transcription factors could we optimize using AI so that we get a higher expression level or a better growth?

[01:15:16] Aaron: So a lot of different opportunities. And this connects to our relationship with Ginkgo Bioworks as well. They've got a large code base. As you know, they're moving into how to teach AI DNA. We expect a lot to come from that, but at the same time, we're doing interesting and clever things ourselves. So there's an interesting place for us to learn together in that regard.

[01:15:33] Aaron: Wow. Oh my God. I have so many questions now, but I know we're at the hour. So fascinating. And I love talking about the microbiome and we have been talking about it in the context of humans. Now that we got your perspective on animals, I think we'll need to bring a soil microbiome person and what's going on in our environment.

[01:15:49] Karl: Aaron, we covered a lot in this hour. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you think we should have? Gosh, no, I think your point about the different kingdoms and how they converge. So, animal kingdom, bacterial kingdom, we're really integrating our understanding of the biological basis of life. In a way that we haven't before.

[01:16:07] Aaron: And I think that's really exciting to be focused on very discreet targets and go after products like that. I'm just in awe of the era we're entering where that's now going to be possible. And I think it opens up so many different possibilities. The challenge we have with biology is it's always been a discovery science.

[01:16:22] Aaron: Not a design science. If you think about engineering, it's a design. Biology, you discover. Nature knows all the secrets. We know none of them. We're constantly trying to unlock and reveal what's going on. We're getting closer and better. AI is going to be a big contributor to doing that, but I think we just need probably ultimately industry strategies for integrating that knowledge as well.

[01:16:42] Aaron: Not just what works, but also what doesn't work so that we make the most efficient use of this explosion of knowledge again, what you guys do with your podcast really helps see the essence of all of the things that could come together to create in essence where we're headed with biology, but it's exciting.

[01:16:57] Aaron: And this is a chemist talking by the way. So it's an exciting time to be an innovator and an entrepreneur in life science. We're in a Renaissance and we don't quite fully understand exactly the order of magnitude. But we ranged in everything from aging to planet health, to food production, to fixing a dog, you know, upset belly in one conversation here.

[01:17:16] Aaron: And it's pretty exciting. Well, thank you so much today, Aaron, for coming on Grow Everything and for having this conversation with us. We'd love to track your progress and have you come on again sometime in the future. Great. I'd love to, and thanks for your interest in the area and the opportunity to be with you both.

[01:17:32] Aaron: Exciting time to be here. Thank you so much.

[01:17:38] Karl: All right. So, Iram, what did you think of that interview? I loved it. It's so fascinating to me to learn more about the microbiome in general, whether they're in animals or humans or in the soil. Microbes are all around this earth and they're doing fascinating things. And for Aaron to have a company where they just focus on animal microbiome and see what insights they can get.

[01:17:58] Erum: they gather, what tools that they're creating. He mentioned the platform and how the microbiome influences not only the health of these animals, but one of the things that I really, really, really wanted to ask him, but we were at time, we're over time, is I wonder how the microbiome influences the flavor of the animal.

[01:18:15] Erum: So if there are certain microbes in the gut, of a cow? Does it influence the flavor of it? Versus those cows that don't have those microbes in their gut. How does the microbiome of Wagyu differ from the microbiome of a Holstein cow? So it's very interesting to pull that thread from a biome, just pull that thread through, and to be able to understand how it influences a lot of different types of parameter tastes.

[01:18:42] Erum: texture, besides the health, growth, there's a lot there. And next time we talk to Aaron, whether it's on this pod or when we talk to him at another time, that's the first question I'm going to ask him. I think that's fascinating because I didn't really think that much about the taste parameter because I mean, that is why 70 percent of the animals on the planet are grown as livestock.

[01:19:02] Karl: Taste is very important. Unfortunately, I probably have said it on the pod before, when you taste chicken, generally it doesn't have much of a flavor and we're just growing it as a protein and a lot of that is affected by what they're feeding those chickens. But as I said in the intro, what I found fascinating was Aaron's take on the fact that this kind of research into the microbiome of animals and just agricultural research in general, the funding is very small.

[01:19:27] Karl: And we've been doing a deep dive in the cultivated meat space. It's one of those areas that despite how important food is, it just doesn't get the kind of funding that it should. The government doesn't really fund it yet. Most of the government funding in agriculture goes to subsidies. We talked about this with Paul Shapiro, the subsidies are going to legacy livestock, agriculture, soybeans, corn, cows, pigs.

[01:19:51] Karl: But not really to the cutting edge research that we need. And then it's going to become increasingly important as we move into a world very seriously affected by climate change. So it's an area for research. We recently published a little bit on LinkedIn just saying, this is an area where we need more money.

[01:20:08] Karl: And so I think it's a place that's ripe for investment. And then the other question that you got into too, Iram, is. How could the tools that are being developed for these animals be used for human microbiome research? And I think that's something we need to talk to Aaron a bit more about. And it's something we can talk to Stephanie Culler about because these tools are very important.

[01:20:26] Karl: And the microbiome is incredibly complex. You're talking about thousands of different organisms that live in our gut. They interact with each other. They are helping digest food. And it's a very complicated space that really the research is very new. It's probably less than 20 years old. Yeah, and then there's another company that came out of the Merck Digital Sciences Studio.

[01:20:47] Erum: They went through the cohort this year, and they're looking at how the microbiome affects drug interactions. Because you're ingesting a drug, it's not automatically absorbing everywhere. It's going to have interactions with the microbes in your gut first. And then what does that do? How does it transform that drug?

[01:21:03] Erum: Does it lose its efficacy? Does it enhance it? And I thought that was a very cool company to be able to look at that. I feel bad that the name's escaping me. But I will find out the name and I'll put it in the show notes, but maybe we should do like a microbiome episode where we have the panel discussion.

[01:21:19] Erum: And wouldn't it be cool if some type of discovery or collaboration just came out of that conversation. I loved when Aaron was saying that he loves talking to people like us. Because we're looking at things on a higher level across multiple different industries. We ask questions that they don't get a chance to really think about because they're really focused on delivering on a product to their customer.

[01:21:40] Erum: They don't have this big research and development arm. They are just really focused. So we come in and ask these bizarre questions that make them think about new ideas or think of products in a different way, having Aaron, having Stephanie, a Persephone and some of these other new companies, um, They're focusing on the microbiome.

[01:21:57] Erum: Oh, and of course, our friends from Cultivarium, we had Neely on the podcast talking about domesticating different microbes and using them for many different applications, but you have to create that fundamental research. So yes, some government funding would be great because venture capital funding is a bit trickier when you're thinking of deep research, because how do you commercialize that very quickly when a lot of research needs a lot of time?

[01:22:21] Erum: And doesn't necessarily have an application at the end because you don't want to really do that because you might not see all of the outcomes of that research, if you're just trying to gun for one product versus trying to create a platform. That's why I called the barium. So cool. Cause the founders are amazing.

[01:22:34] Erum: Okay. But also because they're funded in a very different way. They're a focused research organization and their only mandate is. to uncover research, create a platform for domesticating microbes, making it easier to work with non mammal organisms. What people don't realize is that funding research drives technology and technology drives the economy.

[01:22:54] Karl: So the United States after World War II had been spending up to 5 percent of its GDP investing in basic research. Now it's about 1%. And there are people who are constantly trying to cut that funding down to zero and to eliminate it altogether without realizing the things that we take for granted, things like the internet and computer chips and many medicines, they all have their base in basic research.

[01:23:19] Karl: So we need. Basic research, it is a driver of the economy. And for what it's worth, the Chinese borrowed that model from the United States, and they do invest 5 percent of their GDP in basic research. So there's a lot to be said for investing in basic research. I'm a big believer in it, and I think we need more of it.

[01:23:35] Karl: And then how do you translate that into businesses? That's a different story that we can get into all the time. So Iran, is there anything else you want to add? Because otherwise I'm going to say that's the pod. No, that is a pod. Don't forget to check out the show notes. For all of the augmented information that we talk about.

[01:23:51] Erum: Also, please send us a question. We have our grow everything hotline. We've been getting some interesting questions and thoughts and specific questions that goes to our guests. We love that. So if you have any questions or comments, please give us a shout out. And if you like what we're doing and want to contribute, want to have a voice.

[01:24:09] Erum: Something that you want to bring up on our podcast, please check out our Patreon page for those that want to be VIPs of the grow everything podcast. That's our opportunity to do so. We really, really, really would appreciate your support and your participation in the conversation to grow everything. All right.

[01:24:25] Karl: That's the pod. Talk to you later.