 Thank you all. We're here with our next talk. Our next speaker is a science director at IndieBio, the world's largest biotech accelerator. She is a PhD in chemical biology and is passionate about using the intersection of biology, tech, and design to increasing human health spend. Now here to present her talk on the brave new world of bio-entrepreneurship, ladies and gentlemen, June Oxup. Thank you so much and thank you for the organizers for having me. So I'm going to talk about bio-entrepreneurship and of course when we think of entrepreneurship today, a lot of times we think of our Facebooks and Googles and Ubers and we think of tech entrepreneurship and we haven't seen a lot of biology startups coming out of kind of garage labs yet and a lot of that there's a bunch of reasons for that but let's take a look a little bit step back and take a look even in the tech sector in the last couple of years or decades. We've seen that it actually came out of academia with ARPA and a conglomerate of different academic labs and the first companies that came out were actually corporations. A lot of these companies were infrastructural companies, you know, your IBMs, your Cisco's that built up the hardware and the communication pipeline for that and then of course we started entering kind of the hacker space where code has started become open source, the technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper and that really drove people to start companies. You have your kids in a garage who are now coding and the software and hardware is so cheap that they can start making and testing their ideas and we actually do see this similar route in biotech entrepreneurship although even today the majority of what we see is heavily in academia still and of course we know all our big corporations, your big pharma companies, your Genentech's, your Pfizer's, those have been traditionally what we think of biotech and those usually come out of academic labs with lots and lots of money and lots of VC backing in order to even get started because biotechnology is so expensive but as we know in the last couple of years we also started seeing bio hackers so we have community labs like bio curious, counter culture labs and of course you know the interest of bio hacking is increasing and people are starting to think about how do we open source a lot of the methods that we've learned, how do we make equipment cheaper, how do we find reagents and things cheaper as well and that really kind of leveraged, leveraging on that we've started seeing entrepreneurship happening in biotechnology which is really exciting and we're still in very very early days. However there are some differences between biotech startup entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship is that in tech we had the microchip which with this one chip we were able to read, write code, we were able to copy, cut, paste, do all these different functions on this one chip and this chip of course with Moore's law over time has gone ridiculously cheap now that everyone has one in their pockets and that has not been the case for biotech. Biotech each little bit of function took many many years to put together so in 1950s we started to even figure out how to visualize DNA on a gel and then 1967 we learned how we can glue two pieces of DNA together and then how do we cut and then how do we start reading so it took over 50 years to get to where we are now where now we only just started with that basic set of instructions that we could have done that a microchip could do and this is definitely on the DNA level and from the DNA level we can start building on new functionalities and technologies. So the beauty of now is that we can start thinking of biology as a technology right, a lot of people have talked about using DNA kind, it's similar to code and mixing and matching that so that we can actually build technologies out of biology and instead of just thinking about medical devices and therapeutics biology can be a technology for all different sectors of society such as food and agriculture is a big one, consumer biotech, neurotech, biodata, industrial tech and then of course our medical devices and biopharma and the interesting thing is that there's so many more applications yet to be discovered and we're really excited to learn about what those could be. So there's some driving forces that cause biotechnology entrepreneurship to actually start in these last few decades or in the last few years. One of the forces is actually called the post-doc ellipse if you've heard of this, this is where basically there's not enough professorship positions and the grant money is very limited that PhDs who are well trained end up going for post-doc after post-doc and there seems to be no end to that. So this gives us a huge amount of talented people who don't know what to do with themselves and so it would be great if we can redirect their efforts into starting their own companies. There's faster science being done of course with Moore's law and all the technological innovations we now have bioinformatics we can sequence DNA, write DNA much much faster and then coupled with that is experiments are becoming cheaper. Equipment is becoming cheaper, reagents are more accessible, there are contract research organizations that you can send out your work such as cloud labs that you can do your work on. So that all really, all of these three factors is really driving why right now is a great opportunity to start a biotech company. And so that was the thesis on which IndieBio was founded on. We had a hypothesis about two and a half years ago to build an accelerator program to help train scientists and to entrepreneurs and teach them about how to start companies. And so that's what the basis of what we do and we have four, we do a four month startup accelerator program. It comes with 250k in funding which we take equity in and we have a fully equipped biotech lab. And this is one of the most important parts because in biotech if you don't have a lab often times you don't have the resources to start your company so then it becomes a chicken and egg thing because everyone wants you to have a prototype but you can't build your prototype until you have some money to start your lab. So this really helps by using a shared lab to have these companies work through and develop their initial prototypes. Our program also has over 200 mentors and we're located in downtown San Francisco so at the heart of Silicon Valley and that is following a lot of the tech entrepreneurs and the tech VCs we're kind of redirecting a lot of those efforts into biotech. So I mentioned kind of the different segments that we've invested in and that we're very excited about. I'm going to go through some of the companies that we've done in these different categories. So one of the probably most noted ones is called Memphis Meats. This meatball here is actually made from stem cells. So this company has done this for pork, beef, chicken and duck so far and so this movement is called cellular agriculture or clean meat because not only is it a humanitarian thing or animal rights thing or we're not slaughtering animals and moving away from factory farming but also it's clean because there's no antibiotics, there's no contamination in our food. So while currently it is still very, very expensive to do this in the lab over the next few years we should see this being relatively similar to what you would buy from a restaurant. So that's very exciting for meat and potentially vegetarians. Another really interesting area in the food sector is actually breaking down foods to their molecular level. So this company, Ava Winery, was started by two guys who went to Napa and saw a really, really expensive bottle of wine and said to themselves we're never going to be rich enough to drink that wine. It's like, but wait a second, wine is just a bunch of molecules. So why can't we recreate that wine? So that's exactly what they do. They take wines, they throw it in a mass spectrometer and analyze the different components and their concentrations and now they're putting them back in their correct compositions, right? So now this is like pennies on the dime and they can make essentially whatever varietal or whatever wine you would want. And the fascinating thing about this is we're now looking at food from not just the, you know, the food itself but we're looking at it on the molecular level and that when we change small, the molecules we can have different properties. We can, you know, in the case of wine we can eliminate sulfides so that you don't have hangovers as much. So this has a lot of promise in the future of developing new types of foods that we can work with. Going into consumer biotech this leather here is made from mushrooms. Mycelium actually create this collagenous fiber and you can grow them into sheets and it's really nice because you can also grow patterns so you can't grow cow with different kinds of patterns but you can do this with the mushrooms. This particular mushroom and this, that particular company MicroWorks has made feels amazing just like real leather and they've shown that with a full cow's hide piece of leather which normally takes two years to grow because you have to feed the cow and the cow has to grow up. They can make that in two weeks. So think of the fraction of the cost and the environmental impact that that saves for having these kind of new leather products available. In Neurotech one of the companies that's kind of far out there but extremely interesting is Neurocomputation. This company, Hanukku, has a chip where they embed the neurons in different formations so that the connectivity can essentially, you can do computation on that. So this company is going ahead and hopefully in the next few years making the first brain, the first bio brain computer. From a data side this company called Catalog is storing archival data, digital data into DNA. And why would you do this? Well for one DNA is actually a million times more dense than flash drives which is the currently most dense form of storage and of course when you're talking about archival you, right now it's done with magnetic tapes and they're in large facilities that have to be cooled and actually every 20 years you'll have to recopy the magnetic tapes because they go bad. Well with DNA if you freeze it and dry it down we know that we can store it for pretty much infinitely. There's actually a case where there was a 60,000 year old mammoth that was uncovered and they uncovered the DNA from that. So it's very likely that we can store the DNA for a long, long time. And the lastly DNA can be copied very, very easily with a well-known technique called polymerase chain reaction. So within two hours you can essentially copy your entire petabytes of data over. So this is very exciting for the future of storage. Another company in the kind of bio data space is called Scaled. So you can imagine an entire laboratory worth of work done in a microfluid chip. And this chip houses 80,000 different experiments running at the same time. It uses different combinations of molecules to test the different conditions. And what you can use this for is for stem cell differentiation. Stem cells differentiate at a very specific condition and by using the screen this company has actually shown that they can make a kidney organoid. So basically a small set of cells, actually 27 different types of cells as a kidney and using this technology. So the kidney of course can then eventually be made potentially into full kidneys but can also be used for drug development, drug screening, et cetera. Going on to industrial biotech, we have a company called Yuba Biologics which is reclaiming cold mining and gold mining water. So obviously the runoff from these processes is very toxic. There's high amounts of sulfide in it and they've found a cocktail of microbes that can purify the water and put it back into the lake. And medical devices, this one is called Nox Medical and it's a spirometer for measuring your breathing for kids with asthma. So the idea is the kid would blow into this every single day and you would be able to see the changes in their lung capacity. And this way you can actually predict when a asthma attack might happen days before it happens so that the parents can help medicate the kid. And then last but not least I want to mention we have a lot of pharmaceutical, biopharma companies, a lot of them in cancer. This particular one actually works with snake venom. If you guys don't know how anti-venoms are currently done you actually have people going and milking a snake and then they take the snake venom, inject it into a horse and then they, they lie off lies, they dry up that horse serum. So if you got bit by a snake, you get rushed to the hospital, you hope that that hospital has that venom, you hope that you remember which snake bit you because it's very specific and then if they had that anti-venom they inject horse serum into you. So this is a very kind of archaic practice. Horse by horse, there's no QC there. So it can vary. And also you are injected with a whole bunch of horse blood. So oftentimes people have anaphylactic shock to the horse blood itself. And of course this is, this is an area where you know kind of the developing world hasn't paid a lot of attention to because we don't have that many snakes. But of course in Southeast Asia and Africa that's, it's a huge problem. Lots and lots of people have to cut off limbs because of the snake venoms starting to eat away at their limbs. So what this company is doing is using more pharmacological advancements in the development of antibodies to address this issue. And so one thing they did is they mapped out, well what are all these different kinds of snakes, snake venom, anti-venoms or the molecules in an region and they have a cocktail solution so that you have 99% coverage of a snake bite. So it like 99% of different species will be covered in this one shot. And furthermore this shot instead of rushing to a hospital, you can actually bring the shot with you. So you can imagine if you were going to Southeast Asia, you're gonna go into the jungles, you can bring the shot with you and if you accidentally get bitten by a snake then you can inject yourself immediately and stop the progression of that degradation of your limbs. So how do you get involved in bio-entrepreneurship if you're thinking about starting a startup in the future or you're just early in thinking and dabbling in the space? Some suggestions is engage in communities. Obviously this biohacking village is an amazing community. DEF CON is an amazing community. There are a lot of biohacker spaces around the country and around the world now that you can engage in. And furthermore you should engage with scientists and talk to people in the particular fields that you're interested in, see what their pain points are, see what kind of novel ideas come out of that. Definitely find a co-founder. Sometimes in software you can get along with just being your own co-founder. But in biotech you definitely cannot because usually we advise that you have one scientific and technical lead and one business person. There's just way too much to do that you definitely need some co-founders to help you in the process. And in general with the maker ethos, tinker, make, try, I don't advise trying things on yourself but do try and on other experiments, other organisms first in an ethical manner. And then don't be afraid of failure of course. Biology is an extra level of difficulty where sometimes nature doesn't allow things. So things will fail definitely but keep persisting and that's why PhD programs are like seven years now. So if you continue to progress and learn from mistakes and try and pivot there will be ways to make a successful startup. And then if you are thinking about venture funding which not all companies have to be venture funded, some of the things to consider is that you do need some kind of technical insight that gives you an unfair advantage. So often this is called the IP. Oftentimes you don't have to start off with an IP in order to apply for venture funding but you have to at least have a roadmap to how you would gain IP. How do you make that insight and that IP into a product? Obviously science by itself is not a product so you have to figure out what the product is, who is going to use it, who would actually buy it. And then furthermore how do you turn that product into a sustainable business whether that be you're selling a razor blade model or you have one product that follows with multiple other products later. So figuring out that dynamic and how you would grow your business. And then lastly with venture capital we always think of how it has to have a big impact on the world. So how would your business potentially touch a billion people in the world? And that's ultimately what we really want to do is we think that biotechnology is so impactful. It is one of the technologies that can scale relatively easily because it is grown. And so we want to make an impact in the world. So if you have any questions I can take them now but you should check out our website and I'm happy to answer any questions.