 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Exciting. The three o'clock rock. This is Think Tech Tech Talks. I'm Jay Fidel, one of our favorite programs. And a couple of our favorite people because they're heroes. Okay. This is Elliott Parks. He's the CEO of Hawaii Biotech, David Clements. He's the what? Product Development Officer. Director of Vaccine Research. This is the same thing. And they have news. They have news. This is really important what's happening. A little bit of background, you know, we've had, we have a trouble developing a pharma industry. We've been trying for 20 years to develop a pharma industry here as well as other, you know, tech type, science type industries that make money. And, you know, finally there's a bright light. And we're going to talk about that right now, right here today. This is so fabulous. Okay. We're going to talk about Zika. Okay. This is a big revelation. How do we get to this place? Where are we now? We have a Hawaii company developing a vaccine that will be useful worldwide. And we're here on Think Tech talking about it. What happened? Well, about 30 years ago, Hawaii Biotech was started by four faculty members from UH. And they did a variety of things. One of the things they wanted to do in the beginning was to develop a dengue vaccine, which is very complex because there are four different types of dengue seratim. And so they had to build a vaccine that could protect against any and all of the four. And the positive outcome from that, a couple of things came out of that. One is they developed a platform that we use to this day. We've perfected it to make vaccines without viruses. So they're not infectious. So they're very safe. So this is a research tool? Well, it was a research tool. Okay. We developed, we ended up taking the dengue vaccine into the clinic and then selling that to Merck. And we still have all the rights to the vaccine platform and we've made a variety of other vaccines. The West Nile vaccine we've taken into the clinic. The other vaccines have not yet been in the clinic, but we look forward to that. So if I get dengue, I could call Merck and get him a drug that you guys developed to help me with dengue. Well, it's a vaccine. Merck's still developing the vaccine. Okay. And indeed, last week they announced a collaboration with folks in Brazil to advance that development. We had a bit of a dengue outbreak here a couple of years ago, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It wasn't in play though. It wasn't to the stage where it could be useful at that time. No, the vaccine wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. Now a vaccine, my recollection, nothing about this, my recollection is the vaccine prevents you from getting the disease in the first place. Precisely. It's not a cure. It's a prevention. You have to take the vaccine before you get sick, before you're exposed. How does it work in dengue? Well, all vaccines work by educating your immune response. We have a natural immune response. And as we age, we come across more and more things that are foreign to us, and our body recognizes that and learns to reject that. So you need help as you get older? Well. You need more help because your body reacts? Well, as you're older, something like influenza, as you're older, you've been exposed every year to a new flu, so you build up immunity. Okay. But we also should get the flu vaccine every year. And so, yes, older people have much broader immunity to flu, for instance, influenza than younger people do. We're educating the immune response. And a vaccine just speeds that up. Okay, enter Zika. Zika, really awful disease. And we saw it in Brazil. We saw it in other places in the world. We saw mothers with great problems and pregnant women, great problems. So you started working on that using, I suppose, some things you learned in dengue? Well, David was quite pivotal to that. I got a phone call from a collaborator saying, you know, Zika's coming up. Can you do anything? And so I talked to David the next Monday. And we looked into the genome because the sequencing, you know, a lot about these viruses. You don't know which ones are going to erupt, but you certainly know about them in the background. And David put together, David and the team put together a vaccine, which was one of the first vaccines that the FDA ever saw. Okay, so unpacking that a little bit, David. So you get the genome of the virus in advance. So you're working on lots of viruses, lots of genomes. Correct. And then when the time comes that you're going to seek out the Zika virus, you're ready because you have the genome. Okay, so taking what Elliot's already said, you know, we worked on dengue. We worked on West Nile. And then Zika comes along. They're all in the same family. They're all Flaviviruses. Knowing the sequences, we can sort of, as we like to say, plug and play. We take the specific sequence for the Zika virus, then we take that and we plug it into our system. So as already mentioned, we have the platform in place. You know, we've done a lot of this work before. So it's just a matter of taking the right pieces and putting them together. And also Elliot alluded to that we went to the FDA with this and we were able to do that in roughly one year time, which compared to what we've done in the past was very quick. So that's one of the benefits we have learning from all the previous efforts that we've put together that we can now much more quickly take things forward and we've established a relationship with the FDA so that hopefully we can move things into the clinic and ultimately into products quicker. Well, this is very exciting. So maybe we need more on what the platform, the vaccine platform is. Because now you know the genome of the virus you want to catch. And you want to provide a vaccine. The vaccine would be what? With dead virus? So no, in our case, so there's traditional vaccines. So you have the traditional vaccines, which are generally what they call killed vaccines. So you grow a virus, for example, you treat it with some chemical so that it won't be infectious, but it still has some structure to it. And that's your typical vaccine. There's other live attenuated vaccines where you somehow are there coming with a vaccine that's still alive but not enough to make you sick so that that serves as a vaccine. I want to be really careful about that. Yes, you need to be. In both cases, you need to be very careful. And it requires extra work to ensure the safety of those. The way that Hawaii Biotech goes about it is we use recombinant DNA methods and we can produce specific proteins from the virus. And we do that in a manner which allows us to purify those. So only a purified specific protein goes in the vaccine. So it's very safe, non-infectious. And that's how we do our vaccine. So it's just simply protein. We have to use some adjuvants to help boost the immune response. But in the combination of adjuvant and the proteins, that's what... What's an adjuvant? An adjuvant is a molecule that helps to stimulate the immune system. So it ramps up your immune cells so that when you present it with this protein from the virus, it has an appropriate response so that you have antibodies that will protect you from the disease once it comes along. How do you know how much adjuvant to put into the vaccine? Something you have to test for. Many of the adjuvants have been around for a while, so some of those are known. If you use some of the newer adjuvants, you have to do some studies. And I guess you could say titrate or use different amounts until you find the right amount that gives you the optimal response. It's pretty exciting. So you're ready to go. What starts you off on this? Obviously, there's a need for it, but somebody knocks on your door and says, what do you say, guys, we need a Zika vaccine. Who is that knocking on your door? Well, we try to stay ahead of the curve, so to speak. And so if we hear there's something happening in Brazil or something happening in Caribbean, that's a real stimulus for us. So you're starting it yourself. It's an entrepreneurial idea. Because you know there are problems around the world. There are people who are getting sick. There are vaccines. So let's wake up on Monday morning and do the vaccine. And then you find that you're ready because you have the genome ready. You have the platform ready. It's like a really good story. And now you can manufacture it. So now you have it. You have the adjuvant. You have the dead or the proteins. Protein. What do you do now? You've got to test it. What are the trials that everybody talks about? Well, to get to the trials, you have to go talk to the FDA first. So you go to the FDA and you present your package of how your vaccine works and what's in it because that's what they want to know. They want to make sure you're not putting anything in it into humans that would not be safe. So you have to go through that process. And then you start your clinical trials. So there's a process that you go through to prove first that it's safe and it doesn't cause any harm. Then after that you start asking questions of does it really work? So two stages to that. And then the third stage is you go back to safety. You expand the process and you do more so that you ensure that it's safe before the FDA will sign off on it. And you get people to participate in the trials. Correct. And that means here? Typically... We've done clinical trials here. We did our first clinical trial with our first clinical drug, a vaccine, here in Honolulu. But there are only a million and a half people in all states. So you really need a larger population. So how many people participate in the trials? By the time you get finished with the FDA protocol, how many people? A couple thousand. A couple thousand. And it's not so easy to find a couple thousand in Hawaii. Right. And in our case, people who are naive to the disease. We have a lot of people who have been in Southern Asia and other places that may have been exposed in the first place. And you don't want them in the trial. I mean, you say naive, you mean they never had it. Right. I mean, in the final stages of clinical studies, it's fine to have those people. But initially, you don't want that complicating factor. Right. Simple, logical... So the FDA can clearly interpret the results. The FDA is watching you all the while on this sort of thing. Now, what do you get into the patent phase? I mean, somewhere along the line, you want to protect your work. I mean, this is not cheap. Now, we're writing a grant. And David and I just were talking today about having to get a patent in place before we... a patent filing in place before we submit the grant. Ah, okay. So you want to cover the patent, submit the grant. But you're already in touch with the FDA. Right. Well, they're two separate events. The FDA is one thing. Patent means a whole different process. What my question is, can you trust the FDA not to reveal your technology? Well, if we have a patent in place, we're not very concerned. Yeah. Your patent should be in place before you're even talking to the FDA. Before we're disclosed to anyone. Although this might be a good place to point out, we have close collaborations with UH, especially the folks in tropical medicine. And we collaborate with them on a routine basis, and we share patents. Yeah, let's talk about that. MAPSUM actually helps you out. In what way? Because you have your own laboratory. We help each other out. Okay. Well, for instance, on an Ebola vaccine, we have a patent on a way to make an Ebola vaccine, and we license that to UH, and they're doing the Ebola work on it. You're working on an Ebola? Oh, indeed. Vaccine? We have to have another show very soon, Elliot. All right. Let's do that. There's an example, because we're happy to pay for the patents. Sometimes it's hard. Having been in the academics in the past is sometimes hard to find the money to pay for patents. It's not cheap. And we're happy to pay for the patents. They can do the development work with us. They can do really great science, and we can do the clinical work. So you spend a year in putting it together, putting the concept and the platform development aspect of it together. Now you're in trials. How long is it taking trials? Two, three years? What? More? Less? It all depends on the disease and the incident, and there's factors, I would say, five years minimum. It could be even more than that before you can get through all your trials. If we had a big outbreak, say in Zika, which could happen, I think, any virus could, you know, what's the word, change. And then you have an immediate problem. Could that five years be shortened to something shorter? Well, the FDA has some emergency provisions that we don't, commercially, we don't rely on those, but if the occasion arises, it would certainly use them. It might happen. It's been implemented on the Ebola in the last outbreak. There was a vaccine that wasn't licensed yet, but it was in development and they brought it out and started trials with that during that outbreak and they're still continuing that today. But again, as in, well, Ebola, Zika, these are vaccines and somebody who's already sick isn't going to get better because of the vaccine. You have to catch them in advance. But you like to catch them in a vector situation where you know that they're likely to be exposed. Right. Well, and for healthcare workers, for instance, who are working on Ebola patients, we need to protect them. Right. Well, you need to have them, therefore, it really pays to protect them. It encourages them to take that assignment. Sorry? It encourages them to take that assignment. Yes, right. Or it avoids the discouragement and the fear of taking that assignment. So where does it go from here? I mean, where does it go from here in terms of your effort? What do you have to do? And where does it go from here in terms of getting to the public? Well, in the short term, in terms of development, there are several agencies that are willing to support vaccine development. From the federal government to the Gates Foundation to the real health organization, Wellcome Trust, et cetera. But they all want to see evidence that this is probably a viable candidate. So we, entrepreneurially, have to do that spade work. And then we try to sell the project to one or another of those agencies. That's what gets us, gets the expanded development time. And then, ultimately, in our case, we're happy to work with a large pharmaceutical entity that has the ability to distribute, to manufacture and distribute around the world because that's really not where a fly-by ticket is now and may never be there. May never need to be there. Basically, at some point, we need to pass it off to somebody that has greater capacity. We do the initial stages of development and then we hand it over, you know, in some business transit section. You're not going to manufacture this. That's a deep resource kind of thing. Yes. You just pass it off. And passing it off means you give them what's in the patent, I guess. You give them all your know-how, how to use the platform and the genome and all. And then you give them your trial information so they have that. And then they run with it. But you hold the patent all the while. Right. Give is probably not quite the right term. Sell? Sell. Thank you. That was my last question earlier. What's the economics on this? I mean, I always thought that if you had a serious disease with global impact and all and unknown global impact that there was real money in the pharmaceutical effort here. And that if you hit it, hit the disease with a product that works that has global impact, global effect, you're going to make a lot of money, am I right? Well, our hope is it's a numbers game. Right? I mean, we're happy to sell vaccines for a very little amount of money per person as long as we can get a huge population. And that's a win-win for both the recipients and for ourselves. And the patent lasts for what? 20, 28 years in general. Yeah. About 20 years. 20 years. Yeah. So it's half the life's over by the time it gets on the market. Right. That's ironic, isn't it? You spend all that time and money working it out and then you get there and you only have half of the 20 years. Okay. Well, anyway, so is your work done? Or are you going to be active involved in time trials from this point? For Zika. I'm talking about. We always got work to do. We have many vaccines in our pipeline right now. But for Zika, it's something that we continue to pursue. We're looking at various options of what constitutes the best vaccine or immune response to allow us to move it forward. So we've done some work with the University of Hawaii and that's where we're at at this stage. And as Elliot said, we're chopping around to find who might be most interested in helping us to move it along. Yeah. Well, one thing I get out of this conversation is that everything you do is a lesson for the next thing you do. It's a cumulative effect, cumulative knowledge. So if you solve one or make advances on one, then you're more capable of making advances on the other. Am I right about that? There's some truth to that, but there's always tricks that you'll move on to another virus and it'll throw you a new curveball. So when you take what you can, when you learn them, but every now and again, they throw new things at you, you've got to figure that one out as you go. And the other thing I get out of this is there's a pipeline. There's always got to be a pipeline. If you want to be a successful biotech company, it's not just one product, not one vaccine. You always have to be looking at other diseases and other products going forward. And that's why we talk about platforms. To have some sort of platform, you can use multiple times on multiple different infectious agents. Okay, well, David Clements, we're going to take a platform now. We're going to take a short break, Elliot. We're going to take a short break and switch out and we're going to have some of your other products or your other research efforts in the next half of our show. Thanks for writing my statement. Thank you, Jay. Elliot, stay around, please. All right. We'll be right back. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. 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Go to hungarees.org and lend your time with your voice to make breakfast happen for kids in your neighborhood. Hey, Aloha. Standing Energy Man here on Stink Tech Hawaii, where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stand the Energy Man and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000-year odyssey where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us and stay with us as we explore all the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us. Hello. Back we're live and fellow at my left, you may recognize him. That's Elliot Parks. You saw him last half hour and he's the CEO of Hawaii Biotech. But to his left, we have Alan Johnson and Alan Johnson is a chemist with Hawaii Biotech and he's working on anthrax. We're going to learn about anthrax. And to his left, we have Sean O'Malley and he's working on botulina, which is related to Botox. It is indeed, yes. It's scary. Okay. And in terms of preparing here, I want to say that you're going to like this, that in the opera, we have the alphabet soup operas, the alphabet operas, the ABC operas. Okay. We have Aida, Lobo M, and Carmen. And in pharma, we also have the ABCs. Let me see. We got anthrax, botulinum, and cholera. Isn't that amazing the way that works? There you go. Sort of like opera, isn't it? So today, we're going to talk about the A and the B. But the C is cholera. We'll have another show. We'll come back later. We'll come back. Talk about cholera. Happy times. So this is a different pipeline. These are toxin, anti-toxin type. It wouldn't call it a vaccine anymore. It just fixes it after the fact or while you're sick. This is entirely different, more emergent actually. So can you talk about that earlier? What is this pipeline like? Well, the idea of switching gears completely is Alan and Sean and the chemists identify, discover, identify, and perfect small molecule drugs, the kind of pills that you take as opposed to biologics, which is what biotech has been doing for the last 20 years. Pharma has done small molecules for 200 years. And so Alan and Sean develop drugs that are anti-toxins, block toxins that are produced by either anthrax or botulinum. They're both chemists. Correct. Why is a chemist important in developing anti-toxins? Because small molecule drugs are chemicals. That's how to put them together. Chemists are into small molecules. Yeah, designing and building small molecules. What's a small molecule? I'm a molecular engineer. Technically, something that's less than molecular weight, 1,000. And aspirin is a small molecule. That's the best example. Most of the over-the-counter drugs that you take in pills are small molecules. As opposed to a large molecule. Most biologics are large proteins that you have to inject them. These could well be oral. It's a set of constructive atoms that's maybe 100 or 200 atoms together, whereas proteins are thousands of atoms linked together. This is a significant difference. You can see it on a microscope immediately. In an electron microscope. But not a typical one. Very smart. Doesn't everybody have one? So, let's talk about how the whole thing about anti-toxin works. In the case of anthrax, you don't die from the infection. You die from the toxin. How does the toxin kill you? Actually, with anthrax, both are a problem. So, anthrax is somewhat unique. It releases the toxins to try to block the immune system. So, we were talking earlier about immune systems with the vaccines. Basically, the toxins are released. They shut down the immune system. And the immune system then cannot fight the bacteria. So, the bacteria then goes on to do its nasty stuff. Clever! Yeah, like little ninjas, basically. So, you end up with the bacteria invading all your tissues and causing basically tissue damage. Nothing to stop it. Right, and then sepsis occurs and usually bad things after that. So, why not just enhance the... We talked at the last part about you put these drugs in and they help your immune system. Why not just bolster the immune system against the anthrax? Well, there are vaccines for anthrax. But again, as was mentioned, if they're not taken before you're infected, they're not effective. Okay, I see. So, it's too late already. Right. So, the first line of defense for anthrax is antibiotics. So, you want to kill the bacteria as soon as possible. The problem is that after the bacteria has been killed and your blood is, say, sterile, you still have all these circulating toxins in the body. The other potential issue is that you could have resistance to the bacteria by the bacteria to the antibiotic and so you have a real problem where now you need to clearly shut down the bacteria's offense system, which is the toxins in order to help the body clear the bacteria. Is there a point where it's too late? Yes, there is, unfortunately. What is that point, logically? Well, I wish there was a clear endpoint for that. That would certainly help us with our research because unfortunately, the disease is asymmetric as the word sometimes you hear. Certain people, depending on their strength of their immune system, have a shorter time window for treatment than others who may have a stronger immune system. Depends on the person. Depends on the person is basically the bottom line. So, the point at which one would call the point of no return is when you really become septic. So, there's what's called a fulminant stage of the disease where the bacteria is basically running rampant. Your body cannot clear the bacteria any longer and at that point even giving antibiotics may be too late. So, Alan, how do you build the anti-toxin that will stop this process? We're following the kind of classic method of medicinal chemistry as it's called and that is basically we have the protein, the toxin itself. You design and build a molecule that you think will fit into the box where the active site is. In this particular toxin, the toxin cleaves a protein, several proteins in the body which allow it to function properly. So, what you're trying to do is you're trying to put something in that space so that the protein can no longer clip the target in the body. Okay, so you have to identify the protein. You have to identify the protein. Is that a DNA kind of thing? Is that a genetic sequencing thing? Actually, this was done through, well, molecular biology is not my forte but that's really what was the basis of the whole thing. However, the toxin that actually Merck had done some early work as well as others and they had published a crystal structure so they actually gave us a picture of what the box looked like. So it was our job to try to find something that would fit tightly in that box. You sound like it's a physical fit. It fits a lot in key. How do you like that? And the box is a contained space. It's a contained space. The protein does change its shape because it's a dynamic kind of living thing. So basically the way we do what we do is we it's by somewhat trial and error once you find a let's call it a core structure something that has a general correct shape you start adding bits and pieces to it to see if you can get it to fit better and we test those molecules just to see how well they bind to that particular box site. And so once you get the right configuration the right antitoxin material again then it's going to bind to the protein and neutralize the protein. So chemically how does that happen? How does a neutralization happen? By filling that space. It's just a matter of filling the space. It can't function if the space is filled. That's correct. That's clever. That's classic. It is. That's why medicinal chemistry and the small molecule drugs have been around for so long because people figured this out well before us. How far advanced are you on this project? We are now in early development which means we have selected a particular molecule that we believe will work in people and our goal is very similar to what would be with any other therapeutic and that is you have to demonstrate that it's safe for humans and that takes several years and that's the stage we're in right now. What about the patent? You can get a patent on this too, right, Elliot? We try to have patents on whole families of compounds so someone can't just tweak one end of the lock and key. They can't make another key that looks almost the same but also fits. Prior art but not. Okay, well let's go to I hope you've been listening, Sean. I have. I've been listening to this guy for a long time. Botulism Botulism is a really scary thing. It's frequently fatal, you can tell me I'm wrong. It's also that goes into plastic surgery with what we call it? Botox. But it's really deadly. It works faster than the, am I right? The anthrax toxin. Well let's just say it works differently. Okay, differently. And this one, it affects the nerve system and it neutralizes your whole nervous system including the nerves that drive your diaphragms. That's how it kills. It is different from anthrax in some ways and similar in some ways so it's different in that the threat is actually not an infectious agent. You don't get infected by botulinum. The actual toxin itself is a weapon so it's a poison. Yeah, exactly. It's what's called an enzyme which is a protein that has a function and its function is to get inside the body, find a neuron, it actually finds the nerves that attach to muscles and in the nerve it goes in and it clips the protein machinery that is responsible for release of neurotoxin. So if you tell your muscle to contract the muscle doesn't hear the signal anymore. And if that happens to your diaphragm you don't have any impulse to breathe and you die. So it is definitely a threat in terms of a weapon or in terms of a biodefense concern. It's also about 150 to 200 cases annually in the U.S. for infant botulism that comes about just from getting the toxin. Food is also an issue for spoiled food. It's an anaerobic bacterium that will grow a little bit of contamination from the soil and no oxygen. And so the issue of having the same kind of approach as we do with allen is we bring a small molecule in we try to design something that will fit into the active site of this toxin to prevent it from working in the cell so that if someone is getting sick or is pretty far gone and maybe even on the respirator we can give them this drug after they've gotten it and the drug will go in and it will stop the toxin from doing what it does and the body will naturally start to heal and they'll either recover more quickly or they'll never need to get in a respirator in the first place. What would you rather have a botulism point poisoning or anthrax toxin? I'm a botulism guy all the way. I guess so. Your faith told to the mission. Would you rather have anthrax or botulism? No, I'd rather have bot. With the disease itself untreated typically if you're exposed to high enough level of the bacteria untreated you have about 7 days period. So with botulinum toxin you've got a little bit longer time. And if you can get to the hospital they can keep you alive. It's very challenging. It's a very rapid disease if it's left unchecked. Well, I think the magic word here for both of you guys is weaponized because 1500 cases are patient-wide. It's not that much to warrant a multimillion-dollar effort to deal with it. But if it's used as a weapon then that could happen anytime. My guess is it's not that hard to develop these. We had an example of anthrax after 9-11 and botulism you can manufacture. You mentioned botox. And actually there is an issue because botox is something that it stops nerves from overacting. So it can relax muscles that are too tight. So everyone knows about wrinkles but there's actually over 200 uses of it medically. And it has to do with conditions any condition in which the muscles are contracted and palsy issues recovery from dramatic surgery or war injuries. It's even finding uses in pain phantom limb pain and migraine. In other countries internationally that all manufacture botox. So you can imagine that that means there's more access to this potential weapon. And that has a little concern. The guys who manufacture botox could just as easily manufacture botulism. Just last year Iran started manufacturing it for medical purposes. That's scary. What a bunch of guys over there honestly. So is it by a pill or what? You mentioned before the show that if you digest if your nerves are messed up on your digestive system where you're swallowing then you may not be able to swallow a pill. How do you initially the drug for botulism would probably be IV assuming that that's going to be given to somebody who's in the ICU already. Now on the other hand if you're thinking about a situation where there's a large scale terrorism event you may also want to be giving it to people but who have likely been exposed. And in that case a pill form may also be useful. So probably first is IV and then you would follow that up immediately with something that's easier to distribute to a large number of people. What about an anthrax, the anti-toxin anthrax? How do you administer that pill? Pill, yes. That's our current target for delivery. Because again if you look at a mass casualty event say someone releases a couple of kilograms of spores from an airplane over Honolulu you're going to infect 300,000, 400,000 people. Thank you for mentioning that. And how do you treat all those people? You can't have them line up and I'll get an injection that would take 5 days to inoculate. Yeah we know the Postal Service does a pretty good job of delivering the mail every day so you could potentially deliver it to the mail. They could deliver the powder, they could deliver the pills. Don't quote me on that. I didn't hear anything. This is all so encouraging. Biotech is reaching a whole new height here with all these things in the pipeline. This is so excited that I'm here with you. I'm only two feet away from you. I'm so excited. Where are we in terms of biotech in Hawaii? Where is this all going? Is this going to be as big as I think? Well, what a biotech does is going to be big, clearly. We're well established. We have good funding. We have great programs, if you've seen. We don't hire hundreds of people but we hire a couple people a year and we, as I said before, we bring in interns from UH and so we'll be here to stay for a while. Whether we're going to have 50 companies like Hawaii Biotech here, probably not. But sometimes quality is as important as quantity. We can all be proud. We are proud. You are a bright light. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. Kelly Parks. Thank you. Allen Johnson. Thanks. Was that usually operating for you? Don't touch me. Thanks a lot. Thank you. You'll like this.