cc: Life Science Podcast

Reduce. Refine. Replace. These are the three Rs of animal research. The intent is to reduce the number of animals used, refine methods to be efficient and humane and replace animals with other models where possible. This cc: Life Science episode is sponsored content, courtesy of MediLumine. I talked to Stephen Marchant, Founder and CEO of MediLumine about the importance of animal research, how ima...

AgBio, sustainability and DoE all come together in this episode. Tim Cuthbertson is the Chief Science Officer at VelociGro where they are using Design of Experiments to optimize plant growth media for vertical farming. I was curious to learn about the concept of vertical farming and how it can make an impact relative to the massive acreage involved in traditional agriculture. There are scenarios w...

Thomas Farb-Horch is the CEO of Thrive Bioscience. He has founded 18 companies. Seven of those turned out to be unicorns (sold at a valuation of >1 billion dollars). I was curious to know how he had identified so many opportunities correctly. BTW, Tom is not a scientist and has no advanced degrees in case you were thinking that was a requirement. He credits his success to being observant and inqui...

Susanna Harris is the Director of Community at Breakout Ventures . She is also the Founder of PhD Balance , a collaborative community empowering graduate students to build their personal and professional resilience and the 2023 recipient of the SAMPS Young Person of the Year Award. This episode is a little different. For the last couple of years, I have interviewed the winner of that SAMPS award o...

Kurt Mussina is the CEO of Paradigm Clinical Research. Their model involves dedicated sites chosen for access to their desired patient and physician populations to participate in clinical trials. Access to historically underrepresented populations for both patients and healthy volunteers is a key requirement. One can imagine it takes a lot of effort to figure that out from demographic data etc. Ku...

Up to this point, I have resisted doing any episodes around cannabis because 1. I’m a little old-school 2. I probably don’t know enough and 3. I want to avoid, in the words of my guest, “being painted with green paint” and tainting the brand. Separating emotions from logic, however, if there are cannabis components that could be effective therapies, it would be foolish to ignore them. There is alr...

This week, I talked to Dr. Michael Harman , an executive advisor, and consulting partner at Harmon Consulting about commercializing medical diagnostics, exploring various aspects from technology development to market trends and the integration of different scientific disciplines. I asked Michael about the process of transitioning laboratory technology into clinically viable products. He described...

When it comes to chemical reactions, if you can imagine it, somewhere out there a microbe is already doing it. This was something we used to say in graduate school. The challenge is finding that microbe among the billions that exist in environments all around us. Surehka Karudapuram is the VP, Commercial Operations at Isolation Bio where they are helping researchers solve that needle in a haystack...

Rochelle Prosser is the founder and president of Orchid Healthcare Solutions , the company she created to consolidate cancer treatment information and improve access to that information. We discussed the difficulties in navigating healthcare systems and the importance of having comprehensive, scientifically-driven resources for cancer patients and caregivers. Rochelle is a neurotrauma critical car...

Jeffrey Kiplinger is the co-founder and partner at Selling Science, a consulting firm dedicated to helping life science, contract research, and tools companies boost revenue by building and optimizing their scientific sales teams. He is also the author of the book " Expert to Entrepreneur. " Jeff shared his personal journey from obtaining a PhD in organic chemistry in the late '80s to his corporat...

Tom Pesnot is the Head of Medicinal Chemistry at Concept Life Sciences . I invited him to talk about AI and virtual screening in the drug discovery process. By way of review, Tom laid out the overall process of discovery. One needs to identify a target whose activity can be modulated in a way that is of course, relevant to the disease of interest. Most often we are trying to stop a protein from ca...

Note: For this episode, I asked ChatGPT to write a summary based on the transcript of our conversation. I enjoy doing these interviews and consider myself a decent writer. However, it takes a lot of time each week to write a summary that I find minimally satisfying and acceptable. You deserve better and I can put my efforts to better use elsewhere or upgrading the whole experience here. I did ligh...

Note: For this episode, because we are discussing the narrative capabilities of AI, I asked ChatGPT to write a summary based on the transcript of our conversation. I enjoy doing these interviews and consider myself a decent writer. However, it takes a lot of time each week to write a summary that I find minimally satisfying and acceptable. You deserve better and I can put my efforts to better use...

All of us in the life sciences are in the business of making the world healthier. The instruments and reagents we sell and the technologies and therapies that result save lives. A scientist (after a lot of research) will look at a disease or problem and say, “I think I can find a way to fix that.” Can we, as an industry, look at trade shows like a scientist would, and ask, “How can we do this bett...

Barry Goldman , founder and CSO of Pluton Biosciences introduces the concept of microbial cover crops as a new and innovative approach to improving soil health and sustainable agriculture. A plant cover crop e.g. alfalfa, is typically grown in the off-season and plowed back into the field to enrich the soil before the actual crop is planted. Barry and his team set out to see whether some bacteria...

I traveled to Disneyland Orange County for AACC ADLM back in July to connect with a few folks and walk the floors of the exhibit hall. I was on my way out when Derek Hamre from Launchworks CDMO stood up at his table and got my attention with the best elevator pitch I have ever heard. And that landed him a spot on my podcast. I’ll share what it was at the end of this post.* Imagine this scenario. Y...

Dr. Antonio Tito is the Founder and CEO of rEthix in Houston, Texas. rEthix is the world’s first Liaison Research Organization (LRO) facilitating clinical trials in Mexico and Latin America. A search of clinicaltrials.gov shows that several large pharma companies are currently running trials in Mexico. rEthix is leveraging the ICH (International Council for Harmonisation) guidelines to run these t...

Jamie Gier is the Chief Marketing Officer at Dexcare , responsible for establishing the company as a category leader in modernizing the way consumers discover, access, and choose their healthcare services – from digital search to booking an appointment. We enjoyed a wide-ranging discussion about marketing beginning with selling high-value products with long sales cycles and multiple decision maker...

Julie Garlikov is Chief Commercial officer at Sherlock Biosciences where they are developing over-the-counter diagnostics to put answers in the hands of consumers and empower them to make better health decisions. Sherlock is developing two platforms - a disposable test and a reusable reader for home diagnostics. You can listen to the podcast for some details on the science. Let’s focus here on VOC...

Cheri Walker and her colleagues started Rhinostics in the middle of the pandemic in response to the massive increase in testing volume required to keep faculty and students at Harvard safe from Covid. That’s a story in itself. The principals never met in person for the first nine months! We had all of our calls virtually. It was all done telephonically, I mean in Zoom. I basically started the comp...

Hiring people is difficult, expensive and risky. It’s a skill in itself for which most of us get very little practice. I talked to Ken Schmitt about how hiring has changed and a few things to think about when filling a role on your team. Fun fact: Ken got his first job at a staffing agency by answering an ad in a newspaper! Ken’s agency specializes in placing marketing and salespeople. I asked him...

A new antimicrobial cured mice infected with bacteria deemed nearly “untreatable” in humans — and resistance to the drug was virtually undetectable. The World Health Organization has identified antimicrobial resistance as a major threat to global health. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics only increases over time. The problem is made worse by the fact that the incentives to discover and develop n...

I enjoyed this conversation with Adrian Rubstein , founder of Ax3.bio , as he opened my eyes to different approaches to valuing startups. Make sure you listen to the full episode. I promise you will learn something valuable. Adrian inspired me to do some research on my own. So any errors in this description are mine. (A little knowledge is a dangerous thing). But let’s try anyway… Most biotech com...

It will come as no surprise that I have talked to a number of people in marketing and sales recently. (That’s literally half of my job.) Sometimes, those conversations all seem to point in the same direction. This month is one of those times. The theme that has arisen spontaneously is how potential customers become customers. And the assumptions we make around that. The assumptions are that: * Pot...

I’m not a healthcare expert by any stretch except as an occasional recipient of care that I’m generally happy with. As an observer, however, our system, in the US at least, looks fractured. Many people don’t have access to care. At the same time, significant innovations are racing along, but many physicians are likely too overwhelmed to incorporate new technologies like genomic testing. It probabl...