 All right, it's Tuesday at 10, I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech, more specifically, this is what? Think Tech Talks. And we're talking with Patrick Sullivan, he's the CEO of Oceanit, down the block, the other end of Fort Street Mall. And we get to see him here once in a while and we get to look at his book, which is relevant to today's show. It's called Intellectual Anarchy. So welcome to the show, Pat. Nice to see you smiling face. Thank you and thanks for having me. No, it's an exciting time. I mean, obviously there's a lot of issues and challenges, but there's a lot of opportunities too. And I think it's important for the tech industry to have a voice that's relevant to how we build the future. And now is a really good time to talk about it. Well, you know, medicine, vaccines, therapeutics, all very important. And in fact, one of the headlines this morning was that Russia claims to develop, to have developed a vaccine without phase three testing. And there's a certain level, a high level of skepticism in the medical, the global medical community about that. But you know, the immediate problem is testing. In fact, I saw a very interesting piece on CNN just yesterday with Bill Gates. And he echoes that thought and he's putting money into this. And his idea is you really can't do much without testing. We have spikes all over the world now. And the way to deal with spikes is testing and tracing. So that's the immediate need. There's more immediate than anything else testing. And you're on it. I admire you so much for being on it, Pat. So you have this whole philosophy about intellectual energy. I wasn't kidding about the book at Oceanit. And you have this other philosophy about letting your scientists come together and express their innovation. And gosh, they come up with stuff. So tell us about the origin of your spit in the cup testing that was in the newspaper last week. Well, as I talk about in the book, you got to sort of step way back to what we call prerequirement. So right now you might say there's a requirement for a test, but a lot of the work started well in advance of that. I would go back to about six years when we started a new kind of artificial intelligence, human style intelligence. And we did some work with back then Office of Naval Research on this idea of small data, ambiguity, edge cases, things that machine learning is not good at, things that are more human style. Humans are good at those things. So we call it anthroponawetic artificial intelligence. So it's human style intelligence. So we started on that. And what began as maybe a kind of a crazy idea started to really bear fruit. We could do things. For example, we could look at malicious code before we knew it was malicious. Like for example, the zero day problem, right? So malware, you have an application on your computer it looks up on a table to find if somebody sending you something is on the table, that's how it recognizes malware. What we decided to do was to see if we could understand the intention of the software. So the intention of code, again, it's back to this human style AI considering code as a language. So we were really building what we now describe as a linguistic touring machine. So it's a computer, but it's using the fundamental idea of language and associating language with human intelligence. So the theory is that what makes humans intelligent is the ability to have language and to communicate in any language. So we said that on that course back then, looking at whether or not we could understand if code was malicious. Now, and that's in not just C++, but hexadecimal and machine language, all kinds of stuff. Turns out we could do a lot. And then about three years ago, we thought, well, what if you look at human genome you've got three billion base pairs with these letters. What if it's a language? What if it's not just a random string of things, but it actually is speaking about intention, together a program with DARPA actually. So once you do that, impossible to things that are bricks. There's these interesting puzzle problems and we got the break out. I'll walk through some of the things we did with that. Well, okay, that's a really remarkable way of looking at it. That's a different way of looking at it. And it does resonate to think that the genome and all the elements of the genome are a language and they're speaking to us and they're speaking to you. So you take that same concept and you apply it to the genome that we have. We have the genome of COVID and you look at what it says. What is it saying to you? Well, what it basically said was in our case we produced the grammatical interpretation and then we used that to create a computational model that said, okay, if I wanna produce a sensor, what sort of arrangement of a sequence and shape do I need to produce in order to create a molecule that is very unique to this virus that'll attach to it? And so you reduce the problem then to this question of, it's like a 3D printing machine that'll synthesize a molecule. And then of course you've gotta put indicator attachments, nanomaterials and other things on the molecule in order to turn it into a sensor. That's essentially what we did. So we took the work we did over the last six years where we were able to distill it down into the grammar of RNA, for example and produce a single-stranded DNA molecule using the same tools with a lot of iteration. So we've collaborated with the University of Hawaii, the Japson to synthesize and test. So if you think of a 3D printer, you might print an object and then try it on and then go back and change it and adjust it and then try it on again and then go back and adjust it until you kind of perfect it. That's what we did. So we took what was maybe two years of work and reduced it to a couple of months. There's a kind of social justice here. What I mean is the significant element of the coronavirus is it has these prongs that attach to human cells and it rides on those cells and then does destructive work. It's a Helen of Troy sort of thing where you attach and now what you're doing is you're doing the same thing to the virus. You're attaching your nano molecule to the virus and it's sending signals back to you. You're conceptually, it's very similar to what the virus is doing to us, to what you're doing to the virus. Yeah, well, that's true. So normally what happens in producing antivirals or sensors is you try to discover something, sort of hunting and gathering where you go out and you look for it in the Amazon rainforest or the bottom of the ocean and you test it and that's what makes that problem pretty intractable because you might be lucky, you might be not lucky but we thought what if we could do it deliberately by design? So you think more like an engineer than just scavenging or randomly looking for something. We also include some of this work in, if you think of Darwinian evolution as these viruses evolve, they're developed and there's an efficient sort of kernel engine to what they do to become efficient. In this case, what makes this virus so dangerous and you have to give the virus credit is that it's very contagious in this asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic mode. So people don't know they have it and then they go out and they share it with everybody and it just spreads like wildfire. And that goes back to your earlier question about why is it tested, what Bill Gates is doing. But before we get to that, just to circle back to the book because the book, I kind of break down how we do this stuff. There's a chapter called left of boom but everybody focuses on the boom and that's the asymptotic spike that you see with growth. Everybody wants to see that hockey stick growth. Well, what we do is these basic fundamental science questions start way left of that. And what we did was kind of pre-requirement but we created a platform that we could then apply to a variety of things. In this case, we decided to really dig in and apply the tools we built to this question of the virus. And we thought we could do an antiviral but we thought first a test would be really helpful and we could do that pretty quickly and produce them pretty inexpensively. And I think that's the big issue is a fast inexpensive accessible test because the biggest challenge we have now is that people focus on the PCR test. PCR test matches a sequence with a sequence in a machine that amplifies a few strands of a virus. So from a forensic standpoint, it's a nice tool. If you're sick, you wanna definitively know what you got, it's a great tool. But when it comes to situational awareness, it's not the tool because you need lots of data. You need repeated data. So here we are and I guess we take a scraping or no, no scraping, you just spit and that assumes that the spit includes virus if you have coronavirus and you spit in a cup and now you have arguably the virus in the cup in your spit. How does the process work in general? How does the process work to put these molecules on the virus and then have the molecules sense the virus and send a message back so that we have some reliable way to determine there is virus? Yeah, so what we do that is we, in the cup, we have a reagent and the reagent, it's not that fancy, but we include materials that basically take, you know how you see these pictures of the spike protein and on the outside of the virus? It splits the virus open and inside are all these little particles called nucleocaps of proteins. There's maybe a thousand more times inside than on the outside. That gives us a little more sensitivity. And then what we do is in the cup with a reagent, we also have some little nanoparticles and those nanoparticles are designed now with the reagent that's in the cup. And they hook on to, uniquely hook on to the nucleocapsid protein. So it's like a lock-in key and it only fits on this very specific design. And then with it, you have these little nanoparticles and so when you pour them in this, what looks like a pregnancy test, you end up with a line because the material, with the reagent, the virus and, you know, the proteins and everything flow through a little piece of paper and they hook onto this line. And so you get a red line. And that red line- You can see, you can see the line. Yeah, and that's it. So the idea is that it's a really easy thing. You don't have special handling. You don't have to refrigerate it. You can just bind it longs. It's not expensive. You have paper and plastic, of course, that costs money, labeling, all that kind of stuff. But to synthesize these molecules is not expensive. And then to, the reagent isn't really necessarily that expensive. It's very specific, of course, right? You have to have the right molecule, the right kind of nanomaterials to kind of put it together like a Lego kit. And once you do, so you have the molecule that's designed for the COVID and then you've got this other kind of Lego piece you put on, which is what gives you the red line. So you go down, you buy this kit at longs or wherever. And does the kit include the cup or is the cup any old generic cup? Well, you put the material in the cup before you spit into it or after, or it doesn't matter. So what we're doing right now, so some of the work with Queens, we put the reagent in the cup, it's not very much. It's a little plastic thing. It's like a tiny little cup. And right now we're using a straw to spit in the cup so you don't get spit everywhere. So there's all these little practical issues, but it's way easier than sticking a thing up your nose. And you can just kind of do this at home or you could, we envision this being something that you could simply test getting off an airplane or getting on an airplane and show people that you're not making other people sick because to the question of the issue that Bill Gates brought up. So when you're exposed to the virus, if you have adequate exposure, which is a question, so you gotta have enough viral material, then you're gonna peak in terms of expressing viral particles four to six days, we say five days. And you go up that curve, it's a really steep curve. So it turns out that the threshold for making people sick is roughly around one times 10 of the six viral particles. The limit of detection of a PCR test, which is very accurate, is probably one times 10 of the four viral particles. We're right around between one times 10 of the seven and one times 10 of the six. So within, let's say six hours or less maybe of you being able to make anybody sick would definitely pick you up. And if you do this for several days in a row, we call it the aloha protocol. I love it. The aloha protocol, well, because it's not just enough to make a technology, but you have to operationalize it so you can impact humans and society to make everybody, easily have access to use it in a way to the benefit of everybody. When you follow this protocol, you can eliminate infectiousness in the whole community. You run the math, you run the numbers, the simulations, you drive it to zero. But what you would do, for example, Hawaii's a great place because we're surrounded by a moat. Everybody has to fly in. So everybody walking off the airplane, spits in this cup, do a test. If it comes out zero or clean, you're free to go. But for the next five days, you test, you spit in the morning. And if you're clean, you go, you take a little picture with it on a mobile phone and it just collects that data. After five days, you didn't bring in anything over on that airplane, even if you started out on the airplane without anything and somebody was sick next to you, you didn't pick up anything. You're not contributing to anything. But I guarantee you're gonna find that person who tests because when you either on day two, so you don't know when they were exposed. So within a couple of days of being exposed, you're gonna produce enough viral particles that we're gonna pick that up. So it makes it very easy to catch it. It's much, much cheaper, faster. You get a result in like 10 minutes. And you know right away what you got. So it's just, where does the red line appear? In the cup or you have to pour it out? No, it's on a little piece of paper. And so there's a little, we call it a cassette, but it's a little piece of, it's a pregnancy kit is what it looks like. A lot of people, a lot of women know a pregnancy kit. Maybe a lot of guys don't. But it's basically this little piece of plastic and inside is a piece of paper. And they may, in the case of pregnancy, they may urinate or do something on it. In this case, you just spit. And the spit with this, you know, you just shake it a couple of times, pour it in, and it just works like that. So it's very easy to use. And the nice thing about it is that there's a line that says the test is working and then there's a line that says you're positive or not. And that's it. So it becomes really easy to track. So, and your point about taking a picture with your smartphone, you can verify and you can verify it with third person what you're doing. So if the requirement, the regimen is that you take the test in the morning, then, and your obligate is to send in proof of it, you can do that with your smartphone. That's really great. But, you know, question comes though, I mean, we live, we seem to live these days in a world of FDA approvals. And when it comes to testing, you know, the FDA takes a long time. I'm not sure what they're looking at because there's no damage to be done by the tests you describe. You know, that's impossible. All you're doing is spitting in a cup. So the question is, what does the FDA have to look at? I guess it's efficacy. And how long is it gonna take the FDA to approve this to the point where you can go to market? Well, very good question. FDA has been really supportive. We've been talking to them for almost two months. We started out by explaining this idea of creating, we're kind of creating new categories called an antigen test, but what we're doing, nobody's doing. And whereas, for example, antibody tests, you have to have something produce an antibody, a bug or an animal or something is what they typically do. This is synthesized. It's like a 3D printer. So they're telling us they can turn it around in 72 hours. And what they did was, they actually sent us all the documents for the clinical test. So you have to prove specificity and sensitivity. And you send back like how many samples you take and the conditions and settings you take them in. Then there's another provision that's to have a test that doesn't require going to a lab. This is an important distinction because they literally have a special category just for this. And the FDA point of contact has been really supportive. So they sent us a bunch of materials, but basically they said, look, you gotta make sure it's usable by at least one more language like Spanish speaking. You've got to have some demographic variability. So small, young people, old people, that kind of thing, usability. So the basic three things we need to show, which we've already laid out a plan and are pretty well on that is sensitivity, specificity and usability. Usability is just so you can sell it over the counter at longs. You can have it at schools. You can have it at the airport. Anybody can get it. And the key to doing this and are really getting the infections, the virus under control in a community is a lot of testing that's accessible to a lot of people. So it has to be simple and fast. It has to be available. And in order to really drive it into, drive the virus into the dirt, you've got to collect five samples every day. And if you do that, you're going to find out. Yeah. What about the cost? You said it was cheap. And I've heard, you know, for the, what is it, the other kind with the swab up the nose, cost $150. My guess from what you said is this is way less than that. And the average person can afford to pay, although I don't know, maybe there's a system where the government can pay. After all, this is all for the benefit of the community. And frankly, I think the government should pay. So there should be no barrier, none at all to taking these tests. Well, the key, like what we've, we've actually had that conversation with some of the folks in the state, as we said, the big cost is setting up. We want to set up manufacturing right here in Hawaii because- Great, Pat. That's great. You can synthesize the molecule right here. You've got to control the room. So you have to have a clean room. But these are all, we're doing all this downtown. We just need to scale it up. So the going out is 20 bucks, but we think we could drive that down by volume. And we suggested that the state acquire a bunch of them and that would help us get started with actually manufacturing right here and training up a bunch of people. So you figure everybody getting off the airplane does this. We've been contacted by some of the airlines. They want to do it before they get on the airplane. Sure. Contacted by restaurants and hotels. They really want to do this because they want to make sure that they've got a safe environment and that they can operate. And what this will do, this will significantly reduce the risk so that, I mean, effectively you can drive infectiousness in the community to pretty close to zero. This is so good. Oh, let me hear, there's a couple of questions came in. So let me ask you, the people are watching Pat, telling you now, what can the public do to help support Ocean's development of COVID-19 testing vaccine or testing or vaccine? What's your answer to that? I think I'd suggest you let the governor and your elected officials know that you think this is important. See, there's one of the big shifts in mindset here is one strategy is you just kind of wait in the dark and hope that something's gonna change or that hope is on the way. The other is we actually build a solution and we solve the problem and we go, what I call from Hawaii to the world versus from the world to Hawaii. And so we think that this is an important time to show that we can make a difference from Hawaii and it's a problem we can bring to the world because we've looked at and we've been in discussion with a bunch of Scalop partners, but around the planet there's a need for something like this and if we can do this in scale, we can reduce the cost but it's a really good opportunity, I think, to demonstrate how Hawaii can make a difference with science and technology, with innovation in a way that's, you know, back to the book you brought up earlier, intellectual anarchy. It isn't anarchy, there's a process that goes from ideas, programs, projects, products and I kind of lay out the whole thinking in the book so everybody can see it. But the point is there's a way to build an industry to make world a better place, to create really good jobs and this is one of those opportunities. Yeah, a couple of loose questions here. Does the FDA participate in the setting of the price or is that up to you, the state, the market cost? How do you see that unfolding? Well, they don't dictate the price, but I think it's our responsibility to make it as affordable as possible because I think there's a duty to, I mean, if we can do something to reduce suffering and make the world a better place, I think that's what we need to do. So what we're looking at is making sure that we can afford to do it, setting up the machines and the infrastructure to manufacture and building that next generation of people that can be part of an emerging medical industry, what we refer to as digital medicine. So it goes way beyond just COVID-19. Yeah, well, okay, so then you have, I know you have laboratory space, I've seen it, I've toured it. And I suppose you can start there, but the thing is that when you give a vaccine, where are there seven billion people in the world and every person gets at least two shots of the vaccine, that's the way it seems to be shaping up. So that's seven times two, it's 14, 1.4, wait, 14 billion shots. Okay, but when you're talking about a test, when you're talking about a virus that is out of control, when you're talking about all these people around the world that are infected, then it's way more than 14 billion. And in your laboratory on Fort Street Mall, can you make 14 billion times five, or whatever, seven billion times five? That's a good question. No, so what we're doing is the plan is to produce here in Hawaii right now about 25,000 tests a day. But according to a study at Harvard a little while back, they said, you need just for the United States, maybe five to 20 million tests a day. So we've actually talked to and started collaborating with some Scalop partners, companies in Korea, companies on the US mainland, there's some companies in Europe. And so the idea would be to set them up with the molecule and the process from what we're doing here. Again, because there's nothing quite like what we're doing that is that easy for them to replicate. Lateral flow assays, what the test format is, that is understood. There's lots of little details. So the thought was, get it going here in Hawaii, get this protocol rolled out. So we reduce infectiousness in Hawaii and then go to the rest of the planet. And these other Scalop partners working. So for example, Japan is interested because they've got the Olympics coming up. You could test everybody walking in the door. You could test all the Olympians. The visitor industry, travel industry, think about it. You've got 300 million people working in the travel industry, 10% are global GDP. It's not just Hawaii. So the entire travel industry can benefit from it. And the thought is to make it so that it's affordable so that people can use it. The scale is enormous. So we would need lots of collaborating partners to do this. And we've been talking to a bunch of them. So we're just trying to get it bolted down here in Hawaii. And then the Scalop will go real fast. I'm so impressed with this. It's like all of the threads of ocean it for the past. Oh my gosh, it must be 40 years already. You've been working on science and this really brings it all together. But I have one more question that is, it seems clear that Hawaii hasn't done much of a job on tracing. In fact, the country hasn't done much for job on tracing. I don't know if there's any standard protocol on tracing, standard training on tracing, standard way of writing the data down and then using the data to actually take action on the tracing. And one of the elements that would make, the spit in the cup test so powerful to stop the virus before a vaccine is developed, even before a therapeutic is developed is tracing. And there you are, you're into information systems, you're into design thinking and artificial intelligence. I took a class, you know, once from you guys in artificial, it taught me a lot. So the question is, is ocean it thinking? Are you thinking about a tracing system, which is information technology and artificial intelligence? It's the other hand clapping on the spit in the cup test, isn't it? It is. And we've tried to kind of stay in the background on that issue, but we actually built one of the first global space situational awareness systems, it's called an SSA. And so the suggestion was to apply the same basic thinking for a contagion situational awareness. Using of course mobile phone as a collector of data, but you need to drive it all to a command center so that you actually know where you've got these outbreaks and you know where to put the resources and you know where you've got the flare ups and you know where all these things are. So it becomes an efficient utilization of scarce resources to manage the risk and get people help that need it. And that also gives you an idea how to manage some of the hospital supplies and medical response and all those things. We've deployed a version of that with the actually the state civil defense for hurricanes, for we did a tsunami piece where you've got a mobile phone that becomes a collector, drives data to the command center. It goes to a central place, you put all that data together. We've built about six of those over the years, everything from transportation infrastructure and Amtrak, it all started with a space work. And when we built this global center to track space 24 seven, all of space and drove data to a special place in a mountain which I won't get into. But we literally invented this category a long time ago, almost 30 years ago. So that's the kind of thing the tool set that you would bring to this. So it isn't just training people to call up, that's part of it. But it's actually the efficient use of information. And then understanding from a geographic distribution standpoint, medical resource standpoint and all of the other resource, scarce resource standpoint how do you deploy it to really efficiently support and protect the community? You're also perfectly positioned for that. Pat, speaking on behalf of the state of Hawaii, let me say we are so damn proud of you. This will change the world. I hope you get the FDA approval really soon and that you can play this out the way we all want you to. Well, thank you. And one last comment is, although I'm kind of a spokesperson but the team that's involved is nothing short of remarkable. And they bring magic pretty much on a daily basis. So, and this rumor that you don't have talent in Hawaii is totally wrong. These are our local folks that most of them grew up here. Some of them have come lately but the level and quality of talent is just unbelievable. And so for me, I feel really fortunate to work with this really talented group of people. And we feel fortunate to have you in our community. Thank you so much. Pat Sullivan, Founder and CEO of Oceanit. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.