cc: Life Science Podcast

If you are a founder of a biotech or life science startup, you don’t want to miss this episode. If you’re not, you may still find it fascinating. I talked to Sal Buscemi about family offices and what kinds of assets they invest in. Until recently, I didn’t know what a family office was. These are people or families with at least 100 million dollars of investible assets. They represent a unique sou...

For a patient with sepsis (an infection in the blood), the chance of survival decreases by 7-10% every hour. It’s important to quickly identify what bacteria are present and which antibiotics might be effective. Typically, there are very few bacteria in the blood. Culturing bacteria from a sample can take 12-24 hours and then one needs to test for drug susceptibility. Speeding up this process woul...

Steve Harvey and his business partner managed to raise enough money to rent some lab space in Cambridge (UK) to get started on an idea they had for synthesizing template-free DNA. The Start They invited an investor to meet them at the lab where they sat on the garden furniture Steve brought with him because they had nothing else. TL;DR They got more money. Camena Bioscience was getting started. Th...

Science is pretty cool. We can send astronauts to the moon, watch tv on a phone that fits in our pocket or rid the world of smallpox. It makes problems go away so well, it’s as if they no longer exist. That can be a problem in itself. In this episode, I talked to Dr. Rodney Rohde (Doc R) about the role of science communication in public health. To get warmed up, we had a conversation about the sta...

What is the cost to an employer of chronic presenteeism, where a person is well enough to go to work but isn’t really productive? What is the dollar value to a patient of being married in terms of health outcomes? How do you figure that out? There are so many factors to consider. When we read that condition [fill in the blank] accounts for X dollars of lost productivity per year, I always wonder,...

Before becoming the CEO of Diaago, a distributor of labware for life science, Jackson Hyde spent some time managing a staffing agency, placing day labor with companies filling short-term needs. That gave him an appreciation of flexibility and an understanding of the diverse needs of employers but also employees. As the founder of Diaago, Jackson’s management approach emphasizes the importance of u...

I went to SLAS this spring to talk to old friends, meet some new ones and learn whatever I could. I met Maggie Vantangoli, the Director of Marketing at Araceli Biosciences in their booth where we chatted about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for high content analysis (HCA) in drug discovery and development. She was kind enough to join me on this podcast and fill in the (large) holes in my...

If you don’t know SAMPS, you’ve been missing out. It’s the only association for Sales And Marketing Professionals serving the Sciences. I’ve been a member since 2014 and it has been a huge boost for me in terms of networking with and learning from like-minded professionals in our business. Live events are back and the European meeting takes place right after ESHG, June 12 (cocktails and appetizers...

I’m a big fan of The Prof G Podcast. Scott Galloway is a thoughtful guy and I’ve learned a lot from him. One of his common phrases is “It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.” By that, he means, whether looking at ourselves or our business, it’s very helpful to get some outside advice. This definitely applies to companies pitching to investors. First of all, the story you tell is very...

According to their website, IQVIA holds over 60 petabytes (60 million gigabytes) of proprietary data used to provide insights and inform decisions across the healthcare industry. Think market dynamics around a disease, demographics and site selection for clinical trials or pricing for a new therapeutic. How does one pull the insights out of that mountain of data? Chris Steel was brought on board t...

David Enloe is an organizational culture architect. I found him on LinkedIn and had to find out what that was besides damn good personal branding. I’m always interested in company culture, its value, and how it’s established and sustained. He was hired as the CEO of Societal CDMO in the midst of the pandemic, coming on board without even an onsite visit, to work with people he had never met. His o...

Early in our education about science, we learn that to understand what is happening in a system, we can only change one variable at a time. That seems reasonable. By doing that, we can see which variables matter. It turns out that this is not only slow, but in biology, possibly incomplete. If there is a two-factor interaction (not uncommon) you will miss it. The good news is that it’s possible to...

“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Sell him the hook, line and rod and get a higher valuation.” - Unknown ;-) KromaTiD™ is in the business of helping researchers working on cell and gene therapies make sure, for example, that their CRISPR edits are going to the right places and not causing unwanted structural variations. Those cells ultimately go back into patients and safety is a top conce...

Because most of us have likely had a Covid test done in the last few years, you might think that getting diagnostics to market is a straightforward proposition. But you’d be wrong. The reason is that even if you have a clinically proven test, there are no guarantees that someone will pay for that test. Further, there is no standard by which diagnostics are evaluated that leads to reimbursement. Ha...

Just as scientists are curious about the “how” of the world, Lee Jay Lowenstein was curious about the “why”. That led to his becoming an ordained Orthodox rabbi. He was also a high school teacher and principal before spending some time in a non-profit as a fundraiser. At that point, he must have had some sales skills, but wanted something more. With no real background in life science other than st...

Imagine a capsule whizzing by some 200 miles overhead. It’s just big enough to hold a medium size dog (curled up and sleeping) but there is no life onboard. Instead, there is an automated laboratory designed for manufacturing pharmaceuticals. That is the vision of Varda Space Industries. Do they really envision a future where drugs are manufactured in space at scale? Yes. I talked to Mark Herbert,...

My first reaction when I heard that George Church wanted to bring back the wooly mammoth was, “Uh, why don’t we stop trashing the environment and save the species we have left?” Later on, I learned that I may have missed the point. It turns out that as engineers of the environment, wooly mammoths might enhance the carbon storage capacity of the tundra and help us all chill out a bit (slow climate...

Growing primary cells in 2D on plastic surfaces is not a good representation of the 3D environment of the body, regardless of your purpose. Cells grown in a dish eventually run out of room. They need to be disrupted and seeded onto new plates at a lower density. Then they run out of time. They just get tired and stop dividing. TBH, some days, I feel the same way. If these challenges can be overcom...

When will we get to a place of reliable protein biomarkers as predictors or indicators of disease? Ole Vorm is a founder and director at Evosep, producing separation products between the patient sample and a mass spectrometer. What is the state of those analyses and what are the obstacles yet to be overcome? The first obstacle in terms of the proteome itself is that in any sample - urine, blood et...

Cole Yancey was unsatisfied being a bench scientist. So much so, he asked the freezer repair guy about how to get out of the lab. “Maybe I can do what you’re doing.” The freezer guy was not helpful. It reminds me of a scene from Top Gun . 1st Lesson in Networking Cole started chatting up sales reps who came by the lab. One took him under his wing and soon Cole was having lots of conversations with...

It turns out, you can do quite a lot. Jud Schneider is the CTO of Nashville Biosciences . I reached out to him to talk about their collaboration with Amgen and Illumina to sequence 35,000 African-American genomes. How is that possible? Nash Bio (owned by Vanderbilt University Medical Center) has about three and a half million de-identified health records. About 10% of those have consented DNA tied...

David Nathan wrote a children’s book in the carpool line at his kids’ school. ChatGPT delivered the text and he used Midjourney to illustrate the main character. Generative AI applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney are dominating conversations in the marketing world recently. The last episode of cc: Life Science covered possible uses and concerns around Chat GPT which generates text responses to...

ChatGPT has become the AI that is impossible to ignore. As I wrote in my first post a little more than a year ago, I would be neither a cheerleader nor a detractor, but rather a curious observer. So here we are. My main concern with respect to many technologies is the dilution of our humanity. In response to all the posts I was seeing where people were asking ChatGPT to create content, I wrote on...

Have you been considering creating a podcast for your company? You may be wondering about gear, recording and editing software, structuring interviews etc… Long-time listeners will recognize my buddy David Shifrin . He and I started podcasting at about the same time and have shared our discoveries and methods with each other as they evolve over time. He currently works as the Senior Manager for Co...

Mark Fortner , Founder and CEO of Aspen Biosciences joined to explain the concept of FAIR data. The idea around FAIR data is to ensure that data is available and labeled consistently to allow people AND machines to correctly interpret, for example, what the label on a column of data means. The benefit for all is to enable more effective data sharing in collaborations or over time from one study to...