93. Houston, We Have a Protocol: NASA's Kate Rubins on Biotech in Space

[00:00:00] Karl: Dr. Kate Rubins, we are so pleased to have you on the Grow Everything podcast. We know you've been extremely busy. The first two times we talked to you, you were busy testing spacesuits. Hopefully it's okay that we can say that on this podcast, but, , we're so happy to have you here today. When are you going back to space?

[00:00:22] Kate: Oh, that's a big, important question. You should ask my boss about that one. I don't know, but I'm super thrilled to be here today. I'm really excited to do this podcast with you guys.

[00:00:32] Karl: And I think the way that we understand it is that you're on the Artemis mission. So does that actually mean you're going to the moon or is it you're on the list of potential moon astronauts?

[00:00:43] Kate: Yeah, so, we have a, list of people who are working as Artemis team members, and what that really means actually is that we're helping out with the development of the Artemis hardware, testing the hardware, working with our NASA programs that are designing all of this. so pretty much anybody is a potential candidate, anybody in the astronaut office is a potential candidate for these first Artemis missions.

[00:01:05] Kate: we've just named the Artemis 2 crew so far, and that's the crew that's going to go around the moon in an Apollo 8 mission. Style mission. , so super excited to get that crew name to include some of my really good friends, and a colleague of mine that I flew in space with on my last mission.

[00:01:21] Erum: Well, that's amazing. That's amazing. Kate. I'm so excited to talk to you. I have seen you speak. It's in by a beta last year and this past year. It's always mind blowing. It gets me very excited about space and the work that you're doing specifically around biology. For our audience, , we talk about space a lot, and I think a lot of that stems from my super interest in it.

[00:01:44] Erum: I always bring it up, , as like, okay, so you're making mushrooms. How about making mushrooms in space? But for us, we would help our audience understand how do the unique conditions of space affect biological processes, whether it's low Earth orbit. Whether it's the vacuum, whether it's the moon, I mean, give us a little bit of flavor of what's going on in space.

[00:02:07] Kate: Yeah, spaces, it's a really interesting environment because it's got all these things going on, like microgravity, , and radiation, distance from earth. And so this ends up affecting every living system. so it can influence the way that plants grow in space. It influences how bacteria replicate and what gene expression signals they give off.

[00:02:29] Kate: it influences. There's animal behavior. So for example, spiders, we sent spiders to space and they get really confused when they first get there and they actually can't really build their webs very well. The webs look all messed up for the first few days, but like any living organism, they adapt and they figure out how to do this in microgravity.

[00:02:48] Kate: And so really, some of the most pronounced human, Okay. changes we see are in human beings. , this is one of the most studied animals in space. And we see things, , where space and microgravity affect everything from the immune system. We see some immune system degradation to bone loss and muscle loss.

[00:03:04] Kate: We get cardiovascular changes. so our blood flow in our jugular vein actually can stay stagnant or even reverse in space. We don't have that same kind of. pulling down of all the fluid to the legs. And so we can see all kinds of medical problems because of that. We're starting to learn about some of these more.

[00:03:23] Kate: But really the amazing story about humans is got some problems in space, but we've never evolved to be in a space environment. And given all of that, we can still send people to space and their eyeballs don't explode and their human, bodily function. Tend to work. So there's a lot about the adaptability of living systems that we're learning in space.

[00:03:43] Kate: And that helps us understand a lot more fundamental questions about these systems when we can put them in this environment and then watch them change due to microgravity or radiation.

[00:03:52] Karl: Well, one of the things that I always picture is, astronauts doing a lot of exercise, on a bike or on a treadmill. And you say that your blood flow in your jugular reverses. How does that exercise impact

[00:04:06] Kate: Yeah. So exercise is one of the really important things for us. It's actually health promoting behavior. When we exercise, we do it 2. 5 hours a day and we have yeah, Resistance that we can work against. So it's like going to the gym and going to squat rack and putting a whole bunch of plates on a squat rack.

[00:04:21] Kate: We can work against resistance. And so this is one of our countermeasures that actually helps stimulate bone growth. So when we go into space, we have a breakdown of the bone, a really massive breakout bone. It's this use it or lose it philosophy. Same thing with the muscles. If you're just floating there, you don't actually really need your bones and muscles very much.

[00:04:39] Kate: So exercise sends a signal to your body. This is actually, this is. still important, you better go ahead and build some of that bone back up that you've just broken down. , so that's important for stimulating our physiological processes down the road. We might use something like lower body negative pressure to help draw some of that blood down into the lower body to help this issue that we're seeing, with the blood flow.

[00:05:02] Erum: That's incredible. That's incredible. so you are a molecular biologist by training and education and experience We would like to know, when you're in space or in International Space Station, or even your colleagues, what biotech tools are being developed to study and mediate any health effects or create new biological processes?

[00:05:25] Erum: does biology look like at the International Space Station?

[00:05:28] Kate: Yeah, that's a great question. It's something that I've been working on at NASA for the last 15 years. When I first got here, we had the space station. It's like we built the lab, and we had the lab benches, and we had some equipment. But our equipment tended to be these really large pieces of equipment, like a combustion furnace, or a glove box.

[00:05:46] Kate: We didn't have a lot of the molecular biology tools. And space that we want to use for these experiments. we've started doing things like building up, the ability to do PCR in space, ability to pipette in space was something that I worked really hard on when I first got here. the ability to have a rodent colony so that we can, do animal studies.

[00:06:07] Kate: plant facilities have existed for a long time, but we've been really upgrading those. And then we're looking at, , additionally, how are we going to be able to do these molecular biology experiments? So, it's not like a, an Earth lab bench where you just put things on your bench and you pipette, Everything floats. Fluids behave completely differently. so, in addition to the equipment, we've had to develop the processes to do these experiments in space. after building that basic lab, we're now pushing it further. in 2016, we did the first, DNA sequencing in space and followed that by RNA sequencing.

[00:06:37] Kate: we demonstrated CRISPR. We demonstrated that we could barcode and multiplex in the sequencing, and that we can actually sequence directly from a bacterial environmental sample. And so we've pushed all of these newer techniques, and the ability to do that in situ point of care, like right there in station.

[00:06:57] Kate: where we're going in the future are things that are modular. we can't we still don't have a lot of space inside the space station and we don't have a lot of power. We generate all of our power on solar arrays. So we can't really think of our lab equipment like something that you would have at a major university lab or a hospital.

[00:07:12] Kate: We've got unlimited bench space, all the power in the world and high speed internet connectivity. Those are all resources, and we're competing against all the other things on the space station that need those. And so the kind of things that work in space are also biotech tools that would work more in a remote environment.

[00:07:30] Kate: let's say you're doing field work in the Atacama Desert or something in Chile. those kinds of things where it's small, it's portable, it's ruggedizable, , maybe it doesn't have a huge power draw, it doesn't require constant internet connection, you can save the data and packetize it and send it home.

[00:07:46] Kate: That's where we're going. I'm really excited because the whole field's moving in that direction as well. We want more point of care devices. And those are the kinds of things that are good for space. , in addition, as we develop these things for space, there are things that I, I've seen in my missions that I think, gosh, this would be an incredible piece of equipment.

[00:08:05] Kate: I used to have a lab in Congo and central democratic, republican Congo stuff that you develop for space would work really well in these remote settings. So there's a really interesting synergy there.

[00:08:14] Karl: and just so our listeners know, Kate, you were the first person to ever do PCR in space. What was that like?

[00:08:21] Kate: Yeah, we did. So we did PCR and then we did DNA sequencing, in space. that was really cool. It definitely an experiment. we sent the hardware up to try to see if it would even work, so we didn't know if DNA sequencing was gonna work. Fluids behave differently, when bubbles get into your fluid in space.

[00:08:39] Kate: They don't go anywhere, There's no buoyancy driven convection. So the bubbles don't just automatically rise to the top and the fluid goes down to the bottom. the just sit there and they stay there. and if you shake them, sometimes they make themselves a whole bunch of smaller bubbles and they're just persistent.

[00:08:54] Kate: there's a lot of things that are pretty different when you take a standard piece of lab equipment up to space. So we said we're just gonna bring it up there and we're gonna try it, and we assume things would go terribly wrong, and it would be an interesting way of finding out. what we needed to work on, because of course things were going to go wrong.

[00:09:09] Kate: , I'm really happy to say that this was probably the first time in my life that an experiment worked the first time I did it. I mean, this is not how goes normally on the lab bench, right? So if you're going to have it work, have it work in space. so it actually worked really well. we were using a device that had microfluidics.

[00:09:24] Kate: it didn't have a huge amount of complicated lasers to align. So we were already using, , a ruggedized, , small footprint device and that worked really well. So then we were able to expand to a bunch of different kinds of sequencing, different use cases. We worked a lot on the sample prep, , how we're going to do sample inputs.

[00:09:41] Kate: this really rough environmental sample where you have to, split open the bacteria and it's all gooky and you've got to clean it up. that was important that we demonstrated that it's not just these beautiful, pristine, pre prepared libraries that we could go all the way from our environmental sample.

[00:09:55] Kate: Through sequencing, and then even have onboard data analysis. So we had, , miniaturized supercomputer up there that we could use to, , do some computing, for , the database matching and then have a data package. And that all happened in space.

[00:10:09] Karl: Could you give us a hint as to, how biotech advances in space, maybe can contribute to what we know about humans here on earth.

[00:10:17] Kate: Yeah, I think we're learning a lot about what happens to the human body, when humans are in these interesting, stressful environments, and they're not environments that we can put people in on earth. for example, the low dose radiation that we're experiencing, is not profound enough to make huge, , genomic changes, but as we start sending people to the moon and to Mars, We're going to get a lot higher doses of radiation.

[00:10:42] Kate: And so we obviously want to protect our astronauts, but there's going to be some risk exposure. And so we can study that scientifically and try to understand more, what are the mutations that are happening at the genomic level? How could we do cancer prevention with some of this data?

[00:10:56] Kate: we're learning a lot of things about, bone loss and muscle loss, we have that in astronauts. And so what you lose in space in one month as like a healthy 40 year old is the same as an 80 year old osteoporotic woman would lose in a year. So we have these, uh, healthy subjects. The astronauts are always the test subjects as well.

[00:11:15] Kate: And we put them in this environment where they get sick. sudden onset osteoporosis, and then we bring them back to earth and we help them recover from that. And what we found when we did that was if you lose bone in space, you can recover it when you're back on earth. But when you recover, if you think of your bone as like a PVC pipe.

[00:11:31] Kate: , that the cortex of the bone is the PVC pipe, and then there's like a tensile web in the middle of the PVC pipe. If you lose bone, and you start to lose that web of connections, they're not going to grow back. What you'll grow back is bone. You'll make your PVC pipe bigger. You'll, grow bone around your cortex.

[00:11:47] Kate: one of The results of that study was how important it is to not lose bone in the first place and how much this resistive exercise that we are doing can actually prevent that bone loss. So you name the human system, , there are things that we're learning about it and where biotech comes in is the ability to make those measurements in real time in space.

[00:12:08] Kate: so things where we can look at an analyte in the blood is very important. We're interested in using the capability of doing sequencing to look at human gene expression. Expression in space. Maybe we want to see what happens to the microbiome as you're in this closed loop environment where water is recycled.

[00:12:24] Kate: We're on a very limited diet. The foods affected by radiation. I think it's really in the ability to analyze all of these strange things that are going on in the human system.

[00:12:34] Erum: Oh, yeah, that's incredible. I mean, something that we've been talking about a lot is a microbiome, whether it's human or environmental, and how that plays a key role here on earth, obviously too, on the international space station. I know you mentioned it a bit, when you spoke at symbiobeta, but can you tell us a bit more about how you see the role of synthetic biology.

[00:12:55] Erum: . Supporting different systems for space travel. So you mentioned waste recycling, food production. What are you excited about when it comes to bio and space?

[00:13:06] Kate: the whole entire topic,

[00:13:08] Erum: Yeah. Okay. Sorry. That was such a big question. Everything. so, yeah, we're actually working on a road map, for sent by a work with NASA right now. And that's going through some final reviews. And I think we're going to have that out. Hopefully early next year, we've broken that down into A few different segments. we're looking at things like, plants and nutrient production, waste recycling, SynBio for human health and disease, and spacecraft monitoring and environmental aspects of SynBio.

[00:13:39] Kate: And so you can imagine that you could have a whole lot of different SynBio applications for this trip to Mars. And so we're really thinking is, we're going to maybe do the test bed demonstrations on ISS. NASA Jet Propulsion Before it sunsets in 2030, but the application is really maybe for a long duration lunar colony or for a Mars voyage.

[00:13:59] Kate: It's going to take two and a half years to the red planet. so we know that we're going to have limited cargo. and basically what you launch with from earth is probably all the molecules that you're going to have. You may have supply depots along the way. so that changed as our perspective on.

[00:14:16] Kate: waste and our recycling and this closed loop aspect. We have a lot of closed loop systems on ISS. our water is 98 percent closed loop at this point, but we're pretty wasteful with things like our carbon molecules our hydrogen molecules. so we capture CO2 from the atmosphere and then we turn around and we dump that overboard into the vacuum.

[00:14:37] Kate: So when we're talking about going to Mars, I always say that every molecule It's all important. And we need to think of a job and a recycling path for every single molecule. So, carbon capture becomes incredibly important. And what can we use that carbon for? we want to be able to, for example, capture the nitrogen out of urine, make some kind of fertilizer, and then use that to grow our plants.

[00:14:59] Kate: we could use things like solid waste and disinfect that. And use the cellulose in that as a substrate for some 3D printing or additive manufacturing. So a lot of these are like, I say this, it's just so easy, right? we're talking 10, 15 year technologies, but that lines up well with our timeline for Mars.

[00:15:20] Kate: so we're really interested in what the research is that's going on right now out in the community, because people are working on all of these problems on Earth as well. I carbon capture, bionutrient production, environmental sensing, waste recycling, and repurpose. All of those are Really heavy hitter earth problems.

[00:15:38] Kate: And so there's a lot of people in the community working on that. Our job is to take those things and figure out how do we make that small enough? , how do we get it down into a single site in a spacecraft? How do we make power and the mass and the volume really low? But it's an extreme edge case.

[00:15:54] Kate: So I like it in that it pushes the engineering forward. If you have this problem where the only carbon you have is the carbon you launched with, unless we happen to find a whole bunch of it on Mars, then you really have to think very, very carefully about the waste chain. So on the ISS right now, we have cargo vehicles come up We put a whole bunch of trash in them, and then we send them to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, and that's 7, 000 pounds of cargo every three months. We're not going to have that on the way to Mars. We're not going to get resupply like that, and we are certainly not throwing stuff away. And so eventually the goal is going to be everything in the spacecraft gets reused, and so it's built for this purpose with that in mind.

[00:16:32] Kate: So maybe our food packaging is something that we can then break down and use that material in additive manufacturing. We've got to think about what our waste chain is doing and how that's producing a useful product for us end to end.

[00:16:45] Karl: I can see that also being really useful for the circularization of the economy in general, and that is something that we've talked about a bunch on the podcast. So you mentioned Mars, which is looming large post getting up to the moon after Artemis, as the Mars rover is cruising around the planet, it's always questions about, is there any life there?

[00:17:06] Karl: Is there any water? what do you think the likelihood of us finding anything that is alive either on Mars or any of the other celestial bodies in our solar system?

[00:17:15] Kate: we think that the conditions were there. so there is the possibility of having life on Mars. I think it's a really important question to answer. Was life on Mars something that helped seeded life on Earth?

[00:17:25] Kate: Did we all get seeded from the same thing? Is this something that arose naturally, in the abiotic conditions, in our early solar system? I think we need to go look. I'm just going to be completely uncommitted in my answer about whether or not I think we're going to find it because I think it's too hard right now.

[00:17:42] Kate: We don't have enough information. So there's some penalizing, Conditions we need water. and we definitely have evidence of that. I think overall in terms of finding life in the universe, either going to be really common, and not too hard to find, or it's going to be incredibly uncommon.

[00:17:57] Kate: I think even if it is common, we get a little answer centric and thinking that from our little small corner of the galaxy not even a blink in the history of the universe that we're going to run into that life. obviously the universe is vast.

[00:18:10] Kate: what I think people sometimes get lost on is the time scale. what's the likelihood that life develops? It's going to have to be real common for it to have developed, in our few hundred thousand years of existing on this planet out of 14 billion years. these are deep philosophical questions that you want to, , talk about after work with a cold beverage.

[00:18:29] Kate: I won't stake a claim in any of these. I just think it's, super interesting. I'm glad we're going. I think it's really important to do these kinds of experiments and exploration. and it's just awesome to think about that we might be able to answer some of those in my lifetime.

[00:18:43] Erum: I'm reading your friend's book, Chris Mason's book, the next 500 years engineering life to reach new worlds. And it's been incredible. I have 75 percent done. but yeah, you talked about for example, forward contamination, if the Rover had any microbes on it and It's on Mars and, finds microbial life, is that really from, is it Martian life or was it from Earth? it's a whole debate, especially, When it comes to extremophiles. but the book I thought was super interesting when it talks about engineering humans for going into outer space. So my question for you is, would you get engineered if it's safe and effective?

[00:19:23] Erum: And what would you like to be engineered for?

[00:19:27] Kate: Well, I think that safe and effective bar is going to take so long that I'm not really worried about this, overlapping with my career. I think it's maybe our kids or grandkids that would be engineered. And of course, there's a lot of ethical questions that come up surrounding that.

[00:19:43] Kate: So I think the first question is, are we going to be able to do safe and effective human engineering? when would we be able to do that? , If you think about, do you have a requirement for humans to be engineered to be able to do the job of astronaut that starts making me, morally go Ooh, like the idea of space exploration and that, it's done in a democratic way and it's open, to people to do.

[00:20:08] Kate: so I think I would have a hard time with saying, Hey, we were going to require our astronauts to be engineered to, resist radiation this or that. , but I think that's a very high level decision making that would come from our policy makers. , if it was voluntary and it was safe and I decided to become engineered, I would definitely pick radiation resistance.

[00:20:28] Karl: Yeah, I think I would too. So looking ahead, how do you see the integration between space research and biotech, maybe shaping industries here on earth? are there any exciting developments that you're anticipating?

[00:20:41] Kate: Yeah, I think number one, I'd really like space research and biotech to be more integrated. I try to go give talks at conferences, but oftentimes the biotech sector or the academic molecular biologists don't think about space. is just not something that's at the top of their mind. , but it should be because when you're talking about Closed loop cycles, , small point of care devices, low power, things that would be useful in really rural remote locations.

[00:21:08] Kate: There is a bit of synergy there for space. And I would like to see those 2 communities, , become more entwined. And so, maybe we need to have a conference about this for, remote researchers. Or people that are looking at working in developing countries and space researchers, , and people that are interested in this, closed loop recycling and bring all those folks together.

[00:21:28] Kate: , but I do think the things that I'm really excited about, our systems where it can do a lot of the analysis that you give it a sample and you get the data out of the back end if you're going to do sequencing, you swap the sample and they've got to extract it, Then you've got to prep the library.

[00:21:42] Kate: Then you've got to put it into the sequencer. So these are very manual steps and they're done separately. there's these great robots that are giant, That can do this for the big pharma and biotech companies. But in terms of having small point of care devices that go, swab all the way to sequence, we don't have a lot of that.

[00:21:57] Kate: So I'm interested, in synergies there. And I think that's one of these things that. if we build it, we're going to find amazing use cases for it. So people may not be thinking that there's a big market for it right now, but things like the nanopore sequencer, right? Once you have a sequencer that you can put in your pocket and has low, , mass requirements and doesn't have to have a lot of this fancy recalibration, People are using sequencing in places that you would not expect.

[00:22:20] Kate: so I think if extend that to the sample processing as well, , number one, this makes this a lot easier where you don't have to have a technician or a specialist. So you could go into, rural area in the remote corner of the world and you can train local folks on how to collect samples and run the sequencer and you don't need to worry about having a technician from this company fly in to fix it.

[00:22:41] Kate: so I think that Really, this modularization, and this idea that nothing is wasted. And we need to really think a lot more about all the consumables. If you're doing an experiment in a molecular biology lab, look at your trash can by the end of the day, , look at all this stuff that we throw away.

[00:22:57] Kate: so how can we make these experiments not only end to end? but less wasteful or have their product, their output be a designated input for something else. I think there's a lot of great work that the space community is really motivated to figure this out for a Mars mission. , and I think our community on Earth, both from a sustainability perspective, but also from a novel material.

[00:23:19] Kate: Materials and if you're forced to recycle all your molecules, you think about different and creative ways of doing something. So I think it's a forcing function for innovation as well. in our biotech community on earth.

[00:23:29] Erum: That's incredible. Okay. We have one more minute. I'm gonna ask you one more question. So, besides Earth, what's your favorite celestial body and why? I know it's a hard one.

[00:23:43] Kate: I'm drinking the NASA Kool Aid right now. And I've really got to say the moon. we are going back to the moon. this program is real. it's exciting. The hardware we've launched rockets, we're getting ready to send humans around the moon for the first time in 50 years, they're going to go farther from this planet than any other human being has been, so just the fact that, we're alive and that we're going to witness a moon landing in our lifetime, and this is a different kind of moon landing.

[00:24:11] Kate: So. Apollo went to a lot of these equatorial regions, where it was lit the whole time and, facing Earth, for calm reasons and it's, a little easier to land there. we're going to go to the pole. We're going to go to the south pole of the moon because that's where we found water ice. , and so this was actually only, a recent discovery in the early 2000s.

[00:24:29] Kate: We used to think the moon was bone dry. and then we sent, , a couple of satellites and then we crashed one satellite of the moon, and we flew the other satellite through the plume and we were able to discover the signature of water. So the big question is how is that water distributed?

[00:24:43] Kate: Is it molecular water and like it's just tiny little molecules and a whole bunch of regolith and moon dirt? Or is it big chunks of ice? Because that makes a big difference. how easy is it to collect that water? And once we have that water, we may not have a lot of it. So again, these things like closed loop recycling are going to be really important.

[00:25:01] Kate: But once you have water, you can do all kinds of things. Number one, you can keep humans alive. We're really hard to keep alive. You need water to do that. Number two, you can split the water and make oxygen. You can split the water and you can make rocket fuel. a lot of rocket fuel is just hydrogen and oxygen.

[00:25:16] Kate: The discovery of water allows us to think about having a permanent base on the moon. The reason that we want to go to the South Pole, in addition to water, is the geology. so there's craters on the moon that have never seen a beam of sunlight because they're so deep. They've been excavated, and the shadow is too deep.

[00:25:34] Kate: The sunlight can't penetrate it. And so these are some of the coldest places that we have access to. Okay, this Some of these get down to 40 kelvin. , we've not sent humans to 40 kelvin before. So it's a great engineering challenge. but what we can find because these, never see sunlight is that volatiles are condensed in there and they're not, evaporating.

[00:25:54] Kate: what this gives you, if you think about the moon, it's like a collection depot. It's like the Rosetta Stone. Down for the solar system. So, Moon and Earth existed four plus billion years. , but the Earth has vegetation and life and continents that keep moving around and tectonic plates.

[00:26:10] Kate: And we subsume a lot of the really interesting geology. So these rocks aren't available to us anymore in this really old time scale. The moon doesn't have, this air and, it doesn't have plates moving around. so things are frozen there in a way that you can actually look at a geologic and a molecular level and see what happened in our solar system, from 4 billion years ago to 1 billion years ago.

[00:26:34] Kate: So we get things like solar wind, depositing particles in there. We get little bits of asteroids, , that go there. We've got a lot of questions about how our solar system formed. , and the ability to answer those is found in the geologic processes of the moon. And so this is where I take my departure from becoming a hardcore molecular biologist to being such a geologic fan.

[00:26:54] Kate: , but I think it's really interesting in terms of thinking about what we're going to do there and how biology is going to help us. It's going to help us a lot. I think with the ability to live on the moon. To go study this geology, , and my favorite experiment that's not funded by NASA or, in any official plan there is I want to go to the moon and do a negative control.

[00:27:14] Kate: I want to do a map of all the biology that we bring with us. So this is an answer to your earlier question about what Chris was talking about in his book. , we're going to bring life with us. We need to be very careful on Mars, we're going to have to sample life with completely sterile rovers and probably nowhere near the humans.

[00:27:31] Kate: But what if as we went out on these spacewalks and left the lunar lander, took samples, , and started to sequence the samples and look for, probably organisms aren't going to be alive for very long, but we can look their molecular signatures, their RNA and their DNA. And we can see the persistence.

[00:27:46] Kate: So we're going to do like us. It's a spatial temporal map of the lunar surface as the humans are just out there walking around, and we build ourselves a signature of when dirty humans and their dirty equipment go to another planetary body. know that there's no life on the moon, so everything we find, we know that we brought there.

[00:28:03] Kate: , so yeah, definitely nothing that NASA's actually proved, but I'm going to keep talking about it, and maybe somebody will think it's a really good idea someday.

[00:28:10] Erum: that's so cool. Well, we'll advocate for it too. So we'll sign the petition.

[00:28:15] Karl: All right. Well, this has been amazing, Kate. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. We hope we can get you on again to have a longer conversation, but we really appreciate that you were able to come on. , thank you so much.

[00:28:27] Kate: Yeah, absolutely. It's been so great to talk to you both.

[00:28:30] Erum: Absolutely. We'll see you soon again. Hopefully we'll see what's in Biobeta again.

[00:28:34] Kate: Yes. Right.

[00:28:37] Erum: Awesome.

[00:28:38] Kate: Thank you.