 Hello Thank you all for being here. I'm super excited to share with you something that I think will be Extremely impactful to all of our lives and that is the acceleration of science through design First a little bit about me in my background So you know where I'm coming from so the cute little guy on the top right is tetrahymen of thermophila. I Studied tetrahymen of thermophila in my undergrad and tried to understand the mating type locus. I loved genetics Back in 1997 I knew that Being able to change the genetic code of life will be able to have incredible power But there was one big problem and that big problem was speed It took me three months to isolate the DNA for an experiment and of course experiment failed And so the the PI tells me oh go ahead and redo the experiment And so I redo the experiment and fails again and of course the PI looks at me and says well You got to do it again. I said okay. This doesn't make sense It was cutting-edge genomics at the time, but the tools just were so slow So I've went and found design and did a master's in industrial design and ended up at a place called IDO and at IDO I designed many different things and Created this product on the lower right which many of you guys may have used today Which is the beginning of the Samsung Galaxy curve? And so I understood design as a process and I always asked myself What else can design do and so from then I went at belt and built a Start-up around fitness with my wife and together We saw the impact and speed of being able to create ideas from scratch and get direct feedback Following that experience. I moved to the venture capital side and started an accelerator called Indie bio But really what I want to talk to you about today is humanity's looming crisis So on this on the screens that in front of you today You can see the world population through history. So if you look back all the way to Proto humans five million years ago You can see that the world population hasn't changed in Almost five million years Until about 200 years ago. There was a huge spike in the world population What caused this fight? Heroes like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister and the dawn of medicine Agriculture didn't create that spike in in population Agriculture was 10,000 years ago. You can see it didn't really move the needle not that much But medicine changed everything and so when you look out in the future in 2100 it is predicted that we're gonna have over 12 billion people on the planet 12 billion people competing for resources that are already limited This creates scarcity and Scarcity creates inequality and inequality creates unrest We're already seeing the beginnings of that at seven billion people on the planet So one of two things are gonna happen. We're gonna continue to have more and more people or We're gonna see the number of people decline through plague through war But biology is a technology that can eliminate and solve for scarcity Because for the first time we could actually reprogram life To do things more efficiently We can also use biology as a technology to heal us and we already do so not only will we be Living longer and having more people on the planet But with biology will be living better And Finally after 25 30 years, we're seeing that biology is accelerating faster than Moore's law So this is the price of gene sequencing and gene synthesis is actually not far behind this What that gives us is a toolkit that can accelerate the development of scientific tools Design is a process that I learned that actually can help us Create products faster and productize biology So that we actually impact the world and we're not just doing things for knowledge But doing things to change the way we see it So if we look at science Science is really just a process to understand nature and has a 10 to 20 year discovery cycle sometimes longer This is a diagram from Wikipedia that shows the Design or the process the scientific method and it's pretty simple. You have a hypothesis you test it you make predictions and You see how those predictions go and you will alter your theory based on what you see Pretty basic The design process is very similar. It just has a different goal The design process is there to solve human problems and it has a one week to one year discovery cycle But after salt after sharing design and explaining design to fortune 50 CEOs for 10 years I came down to this simple graph to explain what design process is you basically learn about something By talking to someone about their problems and then you make something and then you see how that actually worked and you repeat So really design and science are Two sides of the same coin and they actually just have different toolboxes and different goals But by bringing those together We're able to Accelerate the application of science to create transformational companies So that's the theory. I'd like to share a little bit of practice with you so We I started Indie bio three years ago and in that time we funded 68 companies Spanning the entire range from agriculture to cellular therapies to cancer and Some early results are the market cap of those 68 companies is over 500 million dollars now over a hundred million dollars have been raised by these companies from venture capitalists and Over 400 biotech jobs have been created with 70% of our graduates receiving funding and so We are simply doing that by applying design to biology And so I'd like to share four lessons actually that we got from Looking back in the last three years and and see how we were doing this the first one is going back to focusing on the problem and not your solution so mortesa of kidney Created a kidney an artificial kidney for humans that could be implanted like a portable dialysis machine inside your body now He was able to do this faster than anyone else because he's a materials engineer and All the people trying to create a kidney right now We're doing it from biology because they're all cell biologists So they were trying to grow by a kidney using stem cells He saw the problem very simply as a filtration problem And so applied the right technology to the problem and here you could see they're already in large animal studies and implanting it into a pig To you need to understand your customer by talking to them Yes, scientists can talk to customers and and scientists have customers when they're building a company So when you go out to a company or when you go out to talk to your customers X stem makes these Stem cells and they make them much cheaper than than anyone else And so when they went and talked to scientists and asked if they needed the The stem cells that they were creating they learned something that was horrifying to them They learned that price doesn't matter That no one cares if it's cheaper or not they're not they're paying it The scientists aren't paying for themselves are paying out of grants and the grants were written to include the cost but what they did learn was What mattered to the scientists was the number of donors and that didn't have a solution and because they were cheaper They found that they were able to get the most amount of donors Then any of their competitors and therefore took a foothold in the marketplace and that they went from almost a dead company because of their initial as their initial Assumption to a company that's now a very viable Three you want product does directed discovery and this is a really important one You want to start going from the bench into your product right away You want to find out where all the demons are in your product? process so Estrona was building a early detection kit for pathogens in the food supply chain and So they were getting the sensitivity of their test in the lab down getting the sensitivity of the test in a lab down and Every week I tell them what you know you build a prototype you got to get on to the line You have to swab the side of a beef You know or you know swab Let us to see how someone would actually use it So they actually made this prototype that you see with scotch tape and everything and found out immediately is at the that the foam tip that they used to pick up the the bacteria was actually Really hard to let go of the bacteria when they put it back into the tube So little things like that that became the product development crux actually for this product. It wasn't the actual detection of the RNA It was picking up cells and letting them go and if they had waited much longer They would never found that out and so as a start-up you're racing time Because you don't have that much money and so you need to find out all these things as fast as possible And finally one of our huge Learnings is you need to figure out how to deliver the right value to the right player as fast as possible a Good example of that is mental health. They're using AI to connect cancer patients with cancer clinical trials and So one of the issues is who's gonna pay for this You would think that the cancer patient does but they don't cancer patients don't pay for anything Insurance covers everything, but they don't cover this test Doctors aren't gonna pay for it because they don't offer the service and they want they'll do it in their head Anyway, that's just an extra cost for them that they don't get back Hospitals won't do it either so here's an incredibly valuable service that could change people's lives, but is Not going to be a biz viable business and therefore not gonna actually survive Until they figured out they're putting actual genotypic information and phenotyping information into the same place And when you do that it becomes incredibly valuable for pharma because they could stratify clinical trials much better And they'll pay a lot of money for that. And so the business model ended up being taking sell having the service free for patients and doctors and then selling the data back out to pharma And so Using design to accelerate science and the speed of science getting faster and the cost getting lower has led to an explosion of new life science verticals and These are gonna create huge opportunities for us the next 10 20 years And I'd like to share a couple of those with you that we're thinking about a lot at Indie bio so the first one is really 3d printing human organs and really looking at regenerative medicine as a new way of treating Different diseases diseases over the organs. So one of our heroes Melanie You'll hear from in a little bit She has figured out how to 3d print micro vasculature and has already Demonstrated this by printing a lymph node as well as some micro vasculature. This is a breakthrough in For medicine and for where we're going There will be a time when you don't have to go in and get on a wait list for an organ But you could actually get your own cells built into an organ for you Another one is The food supply chain will be completely disrupted when we talk about 12 billion people left on the on the planet 15 billion Moving forward. How are we gonna feed all of those people the food supply chain currently is a massive drag on our Climate change as well. It's one of the major contributors to climate change So how do we redesign the entire food supply chain using biology to solve those problems? We have companies like Memphis Meats gel tour and others that are removing animals completely from the supply chain and growing these Proteins in reactors rather than the old technology of cows and chickens Next we'll have diagnostics 2.0 and that is the incredible amount of data genomics data Epigenetic data that will really be able to be mined with increasing computing power And new paradigms of AI and machine learning and that's gonna allow us to really understand how genes are working together How epigenetics are working and how evolution is making us who we are And that's gonna give us unprecedented unprecedented control over what we and how we are and Actually where we will end up within 50 years Is that this place that I like to call Homo concilio and that means designed Concilio is Latin for designed So we will start designing humanity Through gene therapy. We will start with gene therapy. We will fix cancers we will fix point mutations but it is an Engineering problem at that point to get to a place where we could augment ourselves Become stronger faster smarter all of those things and that's gonna be a very interesting next step So I'd like to thank you all for listening and be part of the scientific revolution if you're a scientist or a designer Please think about how we could solve for this planet of of more people than ever. Thank you very much