 Hello everyone. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Raif DeRozzi and in this video I'm excited to interview our special guest Jeff Galvin to discuss the latest announcement of AGT's phase one clinical trial findings Jeff Galvin is the CEO and founder of American Gene Technologies He earned his BA degree in economics from Harvard in 1981 He has more than 30 years of business and entrepreneurial experience Including founder or executive positions at a variety of Silicon Valley startups Several of his companies were taken public and or sold to public companies Including one in the medical technology arena that was sold to Varian the leading maker of linear accelerators used in cancer therapy Following his startup experience. He retired to become an angel investor in real estate and high-tech He came out of retirement to found and fund AGT after meeting Roscoe Brady at NIH Mr. Jeff Galvin, so good to see you. How are you? I'm great Raif Thanks so much for having me on your program I still remember our great conversation on the HIV cure chronicles and it's wonderful to see you again You as well. Thank you so much for making the time to to talk with me I'm sure especially after your announcement that this is an incredibly busy time for you Yeah, it's always busy. I mean it's been 15 years of busy but I've been loving it and You know, I feel like very fulfilling journey That's working out. Well, not all you know interesting journeys actually Get you closer and closer to you know Some a goal line that you're very excited about but I've had that and yeah I'm really busy, but I I also feel like you know these conversations are so educational for me and so important that You know, it's worth being even busier So that's nice of you to say that but it's my pleasure to be here and let's you know Keep me in mind. You know in the future as well Absolutely, I'm sure the audience the viewers will be clamoring to have you back after this I actually just released a video basically summarizing your announcement a little over a week ago now Already has over 60,000 views. So I would say there's there's a lot of interest. Oh, cool. Well, great I'm anxious to tell you more about it. Like you probably have a sense for what people are wondering about and you know, I There's a lot of people that I consider stakeholders in AGT who aren't investors. They're not employees. They're you know, they're they're stakeholders because Our mission can impact them And I'm very interested in connecting with them and having a very honest and transparent dialogue because You know over time we really hope that that community will help us to you know to Take this along a very important part of its journey from us proving it out To us getting it to everybody that needs it and you know, that is something that requires a lot of public awareness Because there's a ton of inertia out there when it comes to HIV treatment and overcoming that will require that people who You know feel Strongly about moving forward in HIV treatment and to a cure Participate in some way and the best way to participate is to just be educated on exactly where we are You know what what we intend to do and to stay in touch. So 60,000 views Wow, that's fantastic Yeah, and you touched on something really key and that's community and I definitely want to dig into that with you in a little bit, but first I want to Start with the general talking about American gene technologies in the about us section. You mentioned Developing a gene therapy platform And I understand the analogy of Apple's iOS being like the platform and the iPhone third-party developers building on that and so I Apple is creating this platform for developers to build their own apps on and so you're like Apple and Hopefully other people who want to create cures will be like 30 third-party developers, but practically speaking Can you talk about what what the platform is? Sure Yeah, yeah so Let me step back a little bit and talk about the the goal of platforms in software, right and I'll get back to this but the idea being that if you look at DNA in your body It behaves a lot like software in an organic computer. So the cell is instructed by these ACT G's it's not zeros and ones, but it's very similar It's four symbols that depending on the order of those things means exact commands to Yourself and it makes exact gene products and it's very complicated after there because these gene products combine and and make you right, but In so much as that we can change you Genetically that we can go in and edit your DNA. We can have a tremendous impact on how your body operates and we can Correct things that are problems. We can Improve You know or give new features to cells. I mean there's so many things that we can do there, but From the day that I learned about viral vectors from Roscoe Brady what I Immediately believed was that this new way of making drugs to improve People's health is much more like software than it is like traditional biotech or pharma And what do I mean by that? Well, you know traditional biotech and pharma is about discovering something that works in your body And usually that's randomly discovered or randomly generated and tested and you know one in fifty thousand molecules Actually makes it into a phase three and why is that it's because it's the random nature of it And these drugs go all over your body and they have effect on every cell in your body And what you're always looking for is that you know that Goldy locks Situation where it does something positive, but doesn't do something so negative that the drugs useless, right? But when we're talking about changing your DNA The changes are so specific and we can target them to just the cells that we want to change We can make viruses that go to the right cells and we can make on-offs Which is on the drug itself that only turns on in the right place so what we've done is we've created sort of a deterministic development environment and It means that we can We can predict how these things will behave based on what we know about genetics and how your cell works and how your Your systems biology works how your immune system works how diseases move around your bodies all these different things, right? We can predict the behavior of these drugs and we can design things that are likely to work And if they don't work perfectly guess what we can do we can debug them All right, so this is why I think it's so much like software, but then you say all right What's the next what's the important thing to do? Well if you want to make a big contribution to software What you'd want to do is you'd want to Bring efficiency to software development and how do we do that? We do it with platforms Ios is a great example in the iPhone, right? You want to do something that has tremendous value to people you can write an app on the iPhone and you don't have to reinvent Cellular and GPS and bitmap graphics and you know all that stuff right surface mount technology I mean there's all these components that are just you take for granted are in your cell phone, right and And you write on top of that and what you're writing is a new creative element that brings out value in the world By leveraging a lot of this these standard functions that just exist on your behalf all right, but back up a little bit there was a another platform called MS-DOS Right very rudimentary compared to Ios and the iPhone, but still valuable Right because it handled a lot of the basic elements that were in every application that every developer wanted to write for a PC and And that is what our platform is all about What are the things that are common across many different drug applications, right? Well first of all getting therapeutic levels of expression, right? So you have to know how to actually put a gene in and get it to express at levels where it makes a difference That's non-trivial, but we've solved that problem. That's part of our platform then you have to figure out How do I make it only turn on in the correct cells? Well, that's also part of our platform We have all sorts of elements that we can just give you where okay You don't have to reinvent all that and then how do you do it safely? Well, we've done dealt with a whole bunch of safe stuff. Well, that's the three basic legs of the stool But then we've innovated a lot of things in terms of constructs that have specific value in chronic viral infection Monogenic disease immuno oncology. So these are all elements you could pull together and add a little bit of creativity to and make a whole new application that we never even thought about possibly And and so we are like ms. DOS for your body now And we can reduce the cost of somebody developing an app for your body By 90 we can reduce the time by 90 we can reduce the risk by 99. What does that mean? Well, gee At those levels almost anybody can be a drug developer We can make a cottage industry out of making new drugs in 10 000 diseases that are likely to become addressable by gene and cell therapy and by Making this platform and allowing anybody to use it for free and only asking for some Percentage of their profit on the back end, right? Well, what we'd be doing is we'd be helping to create an explosion Of new applications that were done at very low amounts of money at very low risk So if they failed it didn't break the bank and if they succeeded they could actually be brought out And that's the goal of the platform. So this is the purpose of it You sort of understand some of the common elements that i'm talking about It's very complicated when you get down to that level just like the iphone is really complicated when you get down to that level as well But you do understand that The app developer doesn't need to know everything that's going on in the iphone in order to make something that's valuable to you And our app developers will be able to cure diseases without understanding a lot of the stuff that's under the hood of our platform and that is not just the the sort of the mechanics of it or You know sort of the the component architecture of it But it gives you an understanding of the purpose of it as well It's all about creating efficiency in this industry so that we can maximize the benefit for the patient Wow, that's really incredible. Um Uh, it's it's a lot to kind of wrap your head around it. It feels like The evolution the next natural step of medicine Um, and it sounds like you're creating standardization processes and procedures So that nobody has to reinvent the wheel I mean Yeah, the possibilities kind of are endless at that point That's what I believe and and I think that it was intuitive to me coming out of the computer and software industry that this is what I was seeing But I don't think it was intuitive to people that have been in pharmaceuticals for years Because it wasn't consistent with the normal models of creating value in that industry And so I think we have actually innovated the the idea of a pharmaceutical model And I don't think it's popular right now because if you look at most of the money out there It's being made in drugs that were developed in the old way of doing things But the new way of doing things is a natural disruption To the old way of doing things. It's sort of like, you know, if you were still using Vacuum tubes in computers instead of using integrated circuits, right? When something comes along it can actually change the entire Business model development model and and especially the range of possibilities of what we can do, right? So this disruption that I think Will happen in pharmaceuticals to the benefit of everybody on earth Is that a new technology is now becoming practical that completely changes the economics and the whole process of bringing out new things for the patient And it is very similar to the when the pc disrupted the mainframe computer market Right that the It took a little while for the public and the industry to recognize How the industry was how the entire market was moving how the entire You know sort of technology was moving and what the impact could be There'll be winners, you know, there were winners and losers in that situation like IBM's still around But you probably have never heard of burrows computers the second largest computer company on earth when the pc came out Now gone, right? Because they weren't able to kind of retool themselves for the new world And so they became like a dinosaur, right in an environment where that had changed and they weren't really Evolved for survival So I think we're going to see that sort of level of disruption But think about the benefits now to everybody, right in the computer industry What happened was That the total value that is being created In software and computers Is you know orders of magnitude bigger Than during the mainframe days And it has spread out to everybody on earth practically, right? We all have cell phones now. We all have You know personal computers and even in in, you know, sub-Saharan Africa people are carrying smartphones That the value went up so high and the cost came down so low because of this revolution In computers You're going to see the same thing happen in pharmaceuticals And and this is a great thing for everybody and remember, you know If this becomes, you know, it's a 1.5 trillion dollar drug industry right now if it becomes 20 trillion dollars Isn't that good even for all of our competitors? For the whole pharma industry Right, there's more opportunity now And it's that opportunity is there because of the power of gene and cell therapy We're at the beginning of it. We're at the MS-DOS stage, but we're working to make the iPhone for your body Well, I don't want to rabbit the hole too much here, but uh, I'm sure that People are going to wonder since this is top of mind for a lot of people is um, is AI Will that will that or does that help amplify? Will it help accelerate the work that you are doing already? So eventually yes right now, you know, really just around the peripheral, you know the periphery of it We use AI because we have a marketing department and it can help them to you know create Materials then they edit them and and you know, I remember I come out of the computer industry So I I personally believe that AI is a little bit overhyped Uh, and you know the fear factor is way overhyped I think it's kind of it does seem a little bubble issues at the moment. Yeah, exactly. And and so I think that You know ultimately all technologies merge, right? You know one of the reasons that gene and cell therapy is moving so fast is because we already have the computer Revolution to rely on right? I'm having a video call with you Which would have been really tough 20 years ago, right? And now it's easy and so we can do business much more efficiently Well, guess what computers also work back in our lab and they analyze our experiments and they read Data straight off of the equipment and we have robotics that help us to run experiments more accurately and faster And so we're just like a revolution on top of a revolution on top of a revolution So, you know, we're already getting the benefit of a lot of Computer technology now big data and data mining and AI of course Ultimately will unlock a lot of additional opportunities, but there's so much low-hanging fruit right now We don't need AI to help point us at something that's worth doing So that's why we're not using it a lot in terms of determining our You know what directions will go or what we'll develop but one day. Yes Okay You recently made an announcement about the efficacy and safety results of the agt 103 t phase one clinical trial I'm curious By the way, for those of you who haven't seen the video yet. I'll put a card up here so you can Get a little more info about the announcement And I also have a link in the description that that leads you straight to jeff's Live announcement that's now hosted on youtube, but I really want to know What was the energy like inside the walls of agt? How did you feel? What was the reaction of everyone involved like the scientists researchers even the participants in the trial There was a lot of excitement in the room I think that This was a celebration of how far we've come And I think that the you know the major milestones that happened recently were a almost you know like Until the FDA gives the thumbs up you don't know But I would say that our phase one was about as close to perfect as you can get 100 safety signal. We had zero serious adverse events We had no adverse events that could be tracked back to the drug at all And we got blood markers of efficacy that showed us theoretically that the the cells were working. So, you know the Everybody was excited about that result The next result was that we rolled into an analytic treatment interruption where we took people that had a small quantity of our Supercells in their body. We took them off their antiretrovirals and we saw tremendous level of efficacy Uh, you know with respect to the the the the number of cells that were left in there When we did that experiment and so, you know This is scientifically very Exciting and confidence building that we have line of sight on creating a reliable one and done functional cure for hiv Which is I think what everybody's dreaming about now I always need to be very careful because people are listening to this and they're like, okay great I'll have it next year. No, you won't have it next year There's still a lot of work to be done. You know a few years out would be a realistic sort of, you know Aspiration to have in mind that's sort of an everything goes well Uh scenario, but everything in the past has been going well The fact that we got that level of efficacy is mind-blowing and I think it impressed a lot of scientists and a lot of Virologists and and physicians that are really familiar with hiv We know what we need to do next and that is to roll into a phase two So we were announcing that we're rolling into a phase two We're going to propose that to the fda this summer and then finally I think this is really, you know Signals our level of commitment and our level of belief in an hiv cure and that is that we're spinning out at immune You can see the logo right here as a separate company focused only on hiv And specifically on hiv cure now. We think we can do even more than hiv cure Over time we may be able to enable vaccines So we may be able to find ways to prevent hiv spread in addition to curing people that have become That have hiv in their body that are living with hiv right the The the plan is that we're going to have a group of scientists Finance people marketing And we are going to raise separate money that will only go into hiv cure that company will live and die Based on its ability to do something for this community Okay, and that is a level of commitment that this project deserves Based on the data and and that to me was the most exciting part of the announcement So okay, so how do people feel about it? well the You know everybody came up to me afterwards, you know, there were people there that were living with hiv or knew that People that were living with hiv and there is You know great reason for hope that we can put this in the rear view mirror this whole Epidemic of hiv You know we could start to Chip away at it and we could even dream of a day where we've wiped it off the earth like polio Right or or some of the other viruses that we have actually completely overcome There's reason to have hope And even faith that this Is along the continued trajectory of adam you'd so they were very excited The scientists obviously excited because they can read the data And and the doctors came up and and and they were you know They I was surprised at the level of energy amongst our clinical collaborators Uh for this because they treat these people every day. So they're keenly aware of of how Good people would feel to go from Taking antiretrovirals for the rest of their life To never thinking about hiv again, and they know that's the goal of this and they could also see yeah There's reason for hope that we can get there with this project And so I was really impressed with the level of excitement even from physicians because you know naturally they Are uh, you know, they apply medicine. So they're not the types of people who Generally are thinking ahead scientists are more theoretical But I think that we have finally, you know, sort of posted data That pretty much anybody can understand And you know so long as people that are listening to this don't overestimate how quickly we can get it through the regulatory path And out through commercialization Okay, then uh, you know, I think that they're getting the right message if they feel like yeah, there's there's a Legitimate cause for celebration and excitement And hope for the future Yeah, and I thought you made a really good point A really really good point in your announcement Because a lot of folks, you know, they they say well I feel like every year or several years there's some kind of Breakthrough announcement and it kind of fizzles out or it doesn't really go anywhere and kind of a little bit cynical about the notion but To say that you're at a point where you have Institutional investor interest Implies in of itself that there is There's an exit point in the not too distant future for them as investors to be able to get return on their money. And so um, I think I think there's a little bit of like um uncomfortability with the idea of money and profit when it comes to something like hiv But the fact of the matter is that's it's an enormous incentive And it's an enormous indicator of the progress that you you guys have really made that Investors are looking at thing going. Whoa. There's a there's a viable product here Yeah, I think I'm glad you brought that up and I'm glad that you sort of caught that You know in the announcement Yeah, look Wall Street has only one interest in this and that is that they think it's at the point where it could make them money And that's not a negative thing. Remember that, you know, there is a place for capitalism and profitability to create a sustainable You know sort of Let's say a sustainable initiative, right Because you cannot expect people to just keep donating their money to this forever on the hopes that it will turn into something At some point you're going to need big money to Commercialize this across the planet To finish out all the regulatory part, you know, there's a phase two that we need to do. There may be a phase three You know, these things are not cheap And so To be able to engage that um, you know, sort of that funding source could be Greatly enabling and accelerating to the mission that is actually core to why we're doing this, right? It's the 38 million people that can Be benefited By having this thing out there Well, when you get to that point what it says is that this is understandable across that whole spectrum From people that just want it because they want to do some good in the world to people that You know want it because they can do well off of it And if you have all those things working for you, uh, that's a big deal So I thought it was a you know, very important that we were actually getting a level of traction on wall street that we have never seen before And what it said to me is that the data actually is understandable enough and far enough along that now They're willing to engage with it and that is another sign of of great progress Yeah, I saw a number of viewers actually during the live chat Asking if there's a way that they can Get involved as an investor Is that something that's limited to accredited investors or is that available to more people? Yeah, the the current because we're a private company the current rules that we Raise money under say that we can only talk to people that are accredited investors And you can just look that up online if you want to figure out if you're an accredited investor Um, but we're not allowed to do solicitations and stuff like that because you know, it's to protect the public Right, you know, like people are out there all the time, you know, not in the drug industry, hopefully but you know selling Uh selling things Um, and people are putting their money into it and they're in some cases Not really educated well enough to make those decisions and yet, you know in a lot of industries Um looking at you crypto. Yeah, there you go, right And so in the drug industry, you know, we have the FDA and in the public Markets industry we have the sec and they're just basically trying to protect the public against snake oil salesmen So, yeah, so there is that restriction, but you know someday we hope to Take adam younford into the public market where then anybody could invest in it You just call up your broker or get on, you know your your website and you you should be able to buy shares anywhere in the world Um, but you know, that's not something that we have made any specific announcements about Okay, and I did have um someone ask specifically why the poppy for your logo so The history of this was that we we didn't want to look like every other website out there Which is like all blue like all drug companies are blue And one of the colors that I love is that orange that that sort of burnt orange of the california poppy But it turned out the california poppy is actually red So you'll see that our symbol ended up being sort of the red and the orange And it turned out that the california poppy means remembrance for those we've lost And we thought that's perfectly appropriate. You know like 40 million people have died From you know from the consequences of hiv Or died with hiv. Let's say many of them from AIDS in the early days Now they're dying of old age fortunately, but they lived their life with hiv And and so we just love the the you know the callback to those folks Um, and so it's sort of hope and remembrance And I think that sort of describes where we are right now awesome And you mentioned you'll be releasing your findings later this summer. Is there a date for that? So I don't have a date certain we're writing an article right now and what the the Article is about is the immunological data that we saw so how the immune system was reacting In our participants bodies And how was affecting their viral load? And that is sort of the core data that came out of the treatment interruption study that really got All the scientists so excited and it has me so excited Is that you know, we saw something completely uncharacteristic of taking people off their antiretrovirals Normally what you see is that their cd4 count goes down because hiv as it comes out of the viral reservoir It attacks the t cells so their cd4 counts come down And they don't get any immune reaction, which is shown by the cd8s and the b cells What we saw was the opposite the the cd4s survived So they stayed stable and the cd8s went up. Well, that is the way the body reacts When it's doing a An effective immune response against a virus Well, we also saw in the viral loads that there was an effect Those two things together Will be the the core of this article And I'm hoping that once we write it You know, we'll just find a journal That's interested in in printing it and so You know what we're trying to do is not release too much so that there'll still be you know A journal will be able to release some really exciting scientific information and when would that happen, you know, I think Once you figure third quarter of this year That you know, hopefully it'll be published, but we hope to finish that article You know by september Everyone will have access to that to be able to read it Oh when we put it out there, we'll try to pay in the journal to get make it public I don't know how expensive that is because depending on which journal you're in You know the the cost may be really high But you can see some of the articles that we put out before What we've always done is we paid extra to the publisher so that anybody can see the article online And there's a you know, you look up american gene technologies in agt 103 dash t And if you put the word frontiers in there, you'll see our article on the phase one and There's an article in molecular therapy that anybody can see about our preclinical data, but these are you know sort of Milestone points along the way in the data the preclinical data Sort of hints at that we should see clinical data Then the phase one shows a lot of really interesting stuff in the clinic and our next article should be even more exciting Where we reveal the you know the underlying Immunological factors that are consistent with our theory that make us believe that we're on track for a cure Well, that's so great that you're paying When you can to be able to make that available to the public because a lot of times it's so It's uh disappointing that the the general public doesn't have access to that kind of data and that it's kind of Closed off within the community Yeah, that's often you know a big problem is being able to um create that bridge between medicine and science and community and Therefore out of that hopefully create some sort of trust as well, which I think is is vital Well, you know one of our one of the things that has been important to me is to try to be a Both credible and trustworthy steward of a very important humanistic endeavor Right, you know like I came out of retirement because I thought gene and cell therapy could do a lot for my fellow human beings and you know, so I think that we're seeing a lot of evidence that that is the case even at other companies. There's 27 Uh something like 27 or 30 approved gene and cell therapy products that are nothing short of miracles They're carrying cancers blindness crippling diseases I mean, this is the power of gene and cell therapy and now we have something that improves hiv t cells that may Make people that are living with hiv permanently immune to hiv. They can't even get it back, right? Never need any other treatment Okay, so this is what it's all about now Of course Everybody out there is a stakeholder in this Right gene and cell therapy belongs to all of us. It was It was revealed by nature and science And sure there's a lot of companies out there that are leveraging it to try to create sustainable models of getting solutions out To patients and I think that this is going to bring great efficiencies as I mentioned to the pharmaceutical industry and great value to the public So I think being transparent And embracing all the people that are part of this revolution even as just consumers Is very important in the same way that I remember that when we were out there Promoting the graphic user interface You know, we were selling out into an industry that and a public that didn't understand the value of it Didn't understand that this was all about them that apple had a better way of them interacting with computers That everybody would eventually adopt Because you know, there's a inertia in the industry. Well, you know, it's the open minds of the public who look at it Realistically and go, oh, wait a minute. There's something in this for me. So I will engage with it even though You know the the the uh status quo or the common wisdom is oh, you know This this isn't the way that drugs are done or you know Or it'll never sell. I mean I hear this stuff all the time Really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah Look, there's gonna be it's normal skepticism, right? You know disruption is always met by a lot of skepticism And and and I think that's just natural, you know, people love progress But they're resistant to change Because change disrupts their lives Progress sounds great, but it comes with change Right And and so it's hard sometimes To believe in something new and so we have to prove it but And this is why I try not to get too far ahead of my skis with everybody that I'm talking to and over promise because I think we are proving it. I think the industry is proving it. I think that agt and adam you are proving it And I think that the public's gradually, you know coming over to this and I think that that will create that You know massive revolution in healthcare That I've been dreaming about And so yes, of course, you know going back to your original comment is that we just try to be as transparent as we can be without hurting the mission Yeah, and you mentioned the word skepticism and that's you Kind of took the words right out of my mouth and what I was going to ask you about folks who in general are potentially skeptical of private companies or government organizations When it comes to gene therapy vaccines Other other newer medical treatments. What what message would you want to convey to those folks? well So what I would say is when you look at adam you just remember that Nobody can benefit from adam you including, you know, the capitalists the investors the vcs wall street Our employees or whatever Unless we do something because we got nothing Right. We're not selling a drug like gilliad can keep selling their drug forever $15 billion or $16 billion a year of you know, 99% gross margins They got no complaints if the cure never comes along, you know, it it isn't going to hurt gilliad right, but for us It's a whole different story like everybody's incentives are aligned in the ad immune mission And so I think that's something that you know doesn't have a lot of of mystery to it Right Every again the transparency You know is Is conducive To understanding that when you lift up the coverage you see exactly what you expect to see Here a bunch of people who are really hopeful that we can get all the way to a cure and if we do Yeah, you know the employees will do well the investors will do well But it's like do we really care about that if they're giving value to the patients? No What we do care about is that they can't Make a boatload of money without giving value to the patients and that's why you can look at us and go We're your partners in something you care about And and you're our partners in something we care about that's why we you know, again it goes back to engagement It's like we're all in this together We can't win if you don't win if you're out there listening and and you're a person living with hiv that you know, we can't win as a company Even as a for-profit company if we can convert into that even as a public company Unless we solve a problem for that group of people Yeah, I always try to stress to people through my videos when I talk that incentives are so important and they're underappreciated So often we take the negative perspective and that's to Push more enforcement laws regulations control restrictions When an incentive Could could solve all of the those things for you and encourage growth and creativity so Yeah, absolutely. You know, I couldn't agree more and you know, I you know, that's been my Challenge and my 3d chess game that I've had to play on you know, one of the six boards that I have to play it The CEO of this company is to figure out how to make sure that all the people I engage with that We do have the same incentive so everybody's working in the same direction Because I think that there's a huge amount of desire for this I think there's a huge amount of technology that suggests is possible I think we have a huge amount of momentum So if we keep bringing people in who want to see that endpoint This thing will be like a snowball rolling downhill And you know that will maximize the chances of getting there And yeah incentives is what it's all about now, you know, I think sometimes you do need regulation as well Because you know like you said you mentioned this earlier you keep seeing that oh Somebody cured a mouse in in jerusalem, right? You know like they eradicated all the hiv in their body And and and I get this from all my investors like oh, they're ahead of you They already wiped out, you know, they sterilized a mouse, you know of hiv and I'm like, you know the h in hiv stands for human Okay, so You know, it doesn't move around a mouse's body the same way it moves around a human's body It's a completely different problem So yes, you will get people that can find ways to Create excitement and create profits off of these things and that's why sometimes regulation is important and also You know honest scientific evaluation and figuring out who can you trust Amongst the scientific community to tell you what's real and what's not real and what's the real distance between what you just heard And something that would do something for you Or for somebody that you love, right? That's the the key there. So sometimes i'm like, you know the FDA everybody complains about them, but i'm like They are really important In terms of making sure that over enthusiastic It wouldn't even necessarily have to be that somebody meant to Do something dangerous or didn't care. No, it could just be that it's so easy to fall in love with your baby It's so nice to have a second set of eyes It will sit down and look at the safety aspect of this And revalidate What you believe that yes, it is worth doing this experiment It is safe to put this into people And so, you know, but that's a regulation and a lot of people complain about it But uh, you know, and I sure I think I can be trusted, right? But so does everybody that's the whole point You know, it's like that second set of eyes is really valuable to make sure that people don't accidentally Get sold or treated with something that could be dangerous Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a balance like you said and And it doesn't mean that anyone has the ill intent either like you said, I agree 100 percent I think most people are good Quite frankly, you know, even though I've seen a lot of bad in the world I really believe that if you know good people come together uh, and will be You know citizens of everything right Think things through Fact-fined use their logic use their gut That um, the world will continue to move in good directions And I I certainly think that's true about this industry and And I I just think that there's a good, you know, really bright future ahead Well, I think that speaks to your character. I had a um, I had a conversation actually a few days ago With a journalist. I won't I won't say his name. I'm not gonna out you. Don't worry And we had we just had this private conversation and we we ended up talking about you and and agt and we're just like gosh Jeff seems like just exudes like heart and and charisma and just humility and Someone who's really authentic and genuine and truly cares and it's like we were both just like wowed by that And I'm like and I'm just waiting for him to like unzip his Fake persona and then this the evil, you know what your stereotype that what you think of comes out But it's like I don't believe that that's there and so um, we just kind of had a laugh about that But that's the impression that I get from a lot of folks when they hear you speak or see you is just how Genuine you you seem to be well Thank you so much and thank you to the mystery person you were talking to also Look, I'm trying my best To be a good person But on top of that I feel like I've been given this Unbelievable opportunity by just being the right person in the right place at the right time, you know Think about like I just happened to meet Roscoe Brady Well, you know at the point that he was retiring and and they were going to throw away all this great research and I recognized the value of it and then The idea that I could even survive over this time period is sort of a miracle So, you know, I know I'm working hard, but I also feel really lucky to Be working on something that I think is so personally fulfilling to me that you know that um What is the You know, what is the value of a life? Right, because I have to think about like what's the value of my life. Why why? You know, what what is my purpose, right? and you know I I just you know, I'm so glad that you see You know sort of my desire to be do good and And my desire to just be transparent and honest and to shepherd this mission In in a good way to to try to get it there, right? But also on the other side, you know, I'm just feeling lucky to have this opportunity to do what I'm doing Because you know, this was not a given you don't just you know one day wake up and go Oh, you know, let's cure hiv and you get on something like this No, you have to see a brass ring and grab it and then you you know Have to see a whole series of brass rings after that and and grab them and you know Sure, we make our own luck because the you know luck favors the mind that is prepared In other words like if you work hard and you're smart You're going to be more likely to recognize opportunities and grab them But the opportunities still have to be there So I don't care how smart or how hard I work Some part of this is just you know, meeting the right people at the right time And engaging the right people at the right time and and I think that the best way to engage other humans Is to just you know, be open and honest and forthright with them Talk about what it is that you want to do and what you see and and the people that That that fall in love with that will join you And that's that's the history of agt So anyway, long tome on on that for just something that you said that was very nice So, well, no, uh I I have I have a lot more questions, but in the interest of time, I know we're coming up on it on the hour I don't want to dive too deeply, but you seem like a font of wisdom and I would love maybe another time to kind of Explore who Jeff Galvin is and where you come from and and and all that if you're open to it Absolutely any time Uh, I gotta say, you know This is another really enjoyable conversation That I've had with you the when you came on the hiv cure chronicles It was at the very beginning of that show and that's turned out to be amazing the people that I have had a chance to meet Through that you were the first example of that. Well, actually right before you was marcus conan Of course, I knew him really well already. He's amazing, but then you came on and I was like wow, you know I I just saw so many cool themes in that and it really does boil down to Us as as people right and you know where the You know, I gotta say that I just I love the human way. I love humans. I think they're Amazing sometimes they can be dangerous Right, you know, not every human being is good or has your interest in mind or is in a situation where they can even be You know benevolent or positive or whatever. So sometimes people are just in bad situations and you can't count on them but Yeah, what makes us tick is fascinating to me and you know, I I have met people like you Who I think have just had amazing lives with incredible lessons and and like you said wisdom that comes out of that That we can share and yeah, I'm always up for a conversation about that sort of stuff It's the the you know besides carrying HIV. That's one of my biggest hobbies is people Okay, awesome. Yeah, love it Okay, I do have a A couple questions from viewers Let's see Here's one. Have you and the team looked at inflammatory markers to determine how significant was the residual inflammation post ati So we didn't in this study, but we're planning to in the next Inflammation markers can be hard to measure but we're looking for an assay that would be appropriate in the phase two And think about the phase two is sort of like an expanded phase one because we're not really changing the drug We're trying to change the administration protocol But what we're looking for is data Like every angle that we think is worthwhile on this and inflammatory markers are one of them Okay, thank you um someone asked With a potential cure such as agt103t if there was one hiv reservoir missed does that mean the reinfection cycle starts again? That's the beauty of our approach It's not a sterilizing cure. We're not counting on wiping out the entire viral reservoir even though we think it's possible What we're doing is we're creating an immune system that can fight the virus In the same way that you fight all chronic viral infections your body's full of them The difference is is that the your chronic viral infections of cmv epstein bar human papilloma virus Hepatitis b hepatitis a you know herpes You have so many things in your body that your immune system just stays on top of and you have zero consequences for life You're not taking drugs every day for herpes. Are you of course not right? Although almost all of us have herpes Gee, how does that work? Well your immune system can handle it right And herpes is unusual because it doesn't go into the bloodstream like a lot of viruses do but in this case hiv presents in the bloodstream So it's in a perfect place for your t-cells to handle it before it turns into a symptom And the symptom of hiv takes so long to get it could take five years Right. Yeah, so your immune system has tons of time to react Okay, so No, it doesn't matter In the way that we're approaching it It doesn't matter if you still have a small amount of virus in your body or viral reservoir If it starts creating virons, the t-cells should see it They should react and they should even attack that cell that's creating the virons and kill it So that's what the cda cells do Now there are a lot of other ones out there where they are saying they're going to do a sterilizing cure And and I have my doubts about that because what you're what the person who who wrote this question is pointing out is that It is true that if there's something there's not anything left in your body that will continue to fight it Right that it only takes one Lately infected cell in your body to reconstitute the entire hiv Invention Okay, so I think it's unrealistic to believe that we can cut out every copy of hiv using You know some sort of You know crisper technology or something like that I think we could reduce the amount of antiretrovirals by reducing the viral reservoir in any way that You know we can find to do that That's another measurement that we plan to take in the in the phase two. We're going to see if we can find a reliable Marker for viral reservoir so we can see how are we? You know changing the viral reservoir with our treatment. There's every reason to believe that we are You know reducing it Theoretically we should be reducing it But you know in science you don't you don't know it till you show it you got to demonstrate it in a repeatable Assay that somebody else can run Before you can claim it So that's something i'm very curious about and we're we're looking for an assay that will cover that as well But no viral reservoir is something that we think you can live with So long as it has zero consequences and zero consequences means that the virus never gets high enough for you to infect anybody You cannot develop AIDS And you can't even recontract it because what's a little more hiv in your body if you you already have the system for fighting it Yeah There is the concern of chronic inflammation Things like that going on in the body with reservoirs, but even if we have a decrease in reservoir That would should it should theoretically reduce chronic inflammation And yes, what you're telling me is something that I have also heard from scientists is that The consequences of the current treatment regimes or regimens. Sorry Are that you have the the toxicities of the chemo therapeutic, right? So there's going to be Long-term exposure even to these mild chemical agents can have liver kidney heart Consequences even extra cancers and we don't we have a hard time separating that from the chronic inflammation of the virus itself Right So yes, you do have viral reservoir They are producing virons. They're not infecting new cells But reducing that viral reservoir could have a very beneficial effect on chronic inflammation which could Not only give people sort of better quality of life if we could get rid of that But it could also You know make the entire long-term consequences of of treating hiv much less Profound right you could reduce those long-term side effects of the treatment regimes Regimen, sorry There you go. You caught me. I'm not that's how you can tell I'm not actually a physician I just play one on tv every once in a while. I dropped the wrong word Why defer to you still we're on our list Um, is there anything any last comment or something you'd like to share or say before we wrap up? No, just look thank you and everybody in your audience for your interest in Agt and at immune and you know, please keep an eye on us You know If you see something good talk about it If you have questions put them up on the website, you know, we we answer questions We have a knowledge base. We're we're really trying to engage with with everybody that cares about You know what we care about And what we care about is trying to find A better solution For hiv than currently exists and hopefully that is a functional cure one and done never think about hiv again Um, and you know, so we will continue to swing for the fences And and and believe it or not just the public knowing about this Is enabling and accelerating to that mission And where can folks go if they want to follow you and or agt at immune's work? Well, uh, first thing is go to adam mune.com and that is specifically now for hiv Go to aid, you know american gene dot com if you're interested in some some of the other aspects of the platform um, and then of course, i'm on linkedin and Um, uh, we're on facebook and you can find us all over the place. Yeah, just go in on our website You know, you'll find all of the connections to social media and I really do recommend that people hook up I would say particularly with our facebook group that seemed to be really active You know, it seems sort of old school to be on facebook Like why isn't it our tick tock that's blowing up? I don't know. Uh, I don't even know if we have tick tock Uh, but you know, the point is is like connect any place that's convenient for you and we try to just Put out a constant stream of information Out there you're going to find that sometimes it's repetitive because things happen slowly but people sometimes You know miss something that we put up there. So we put it up multiple times So don't you know don't feel bad if you see something more than once Uh, but you know watch the the steady forward march of this And just go to our websites and you can find all our social media links And and maybe we can supply them even in the the comments of this uh video And yeah, I'll make sure to have all those links including the facebook group in the description box below the video for you guys cool Everyone at home, please comment below your thoughts questions I'm happy to do follow-up as well and do let me know if you'd love to have jeff galvin on On the channel at some point to continue this conversation, which i'm sure that's going to happen regardless Thanks so much for watching everyone jeff. Thank you so much for being so gracious and with your time and energy Um, everyone be sure to like this video subscribe if you haven't already hit that bell So you get a notification every time a new video comes out It's happening a lot more frequently lady lately. So be ready Um and share this video with as many as many people as you can who might find this valuable until next time. Cheers