The concept of programmable biology is fueling a new breed of biotech, one that requires the marriage of computational and traditional science (and both computational and traditional scientists) on the entire journey from discovery to commercial. Bit.bio is exemplary of this new breed. Its CEO, Dr. Mark Kotter doesn’t pull any punches when addressing the complexity involved in building out the company’s capabilities. At the discovery stage alone, bit.bio has hired – and integrated – stem cell biologists, synthetic biologists, genetic engineering experts, cellular biologists, sequencing experts, data scientists, bioinformatics pros, and machine learning experts.
On this episode of the Business of Biotech, recorded in San Francisco during JPM Week, we catch up with Dr. Kotter on the work bit.bio is doing, how it’s doing it, and how he and his leadership team are recruiting and retaining a new breed of biotech talent to sustain the effort. Let’s give it a listen.
You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!
The concept of programmable biology is fueling a new breed of biotech, one that requires the marriage of computational and traditional science (and both computational and traditional scientists) on the entire journey from discovery to commercial. Bit.bio is exemplary of this new breed. Its CEO, Dr. Mark Kotter doesn’t pull any punches when addressing the complexity involved in building out the company’s capabilities. At the discovery stage alone, bit.bio has hired – and integrated – stem cell biologists, synthetic biologists, genetic engineering experts, cellular biologists, sequencing experts, data scientists, bioinformatics pros, and machine learning experts.
On this episode of the Business of Biotech, recorded in San Francisco during JPM Week, we catch up with Dr. Kotter on the work bit.bio is doing, how it’s doing it, and how he and his leadership team are recruiting and retaining a new breed of biotech talent to sustain the effort. Let’s give it a listen.
You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!
The business of biotech is produced by LifeScienceConnect and its community of learning, solving and sourcing resources for biopharma decision makers. If you're working on biologics process development and manufacturing challenges, you need to swing by bioprocessonlinecom. If you're trying to stay ahead of the Cell or Gene Therapy curve, visit cellenginecom. When it's time to map out your clinical course, let clinicalleadercom help, and if optimizing outsourcing decisions is what you're after, check out OutsourcePharmacom. We're LifeScienceConnect and we're here to help.
Matt Pillar:The concept of programmable biology is fueling a new breed of biotech, one that requires the marriage of computational and traditional scientists at every step of the journey from discovery to commercial. Bit. bio, spelled B-I-T, dot B-I-O, is exemplary of this new breed. The preclinical cell therapy company is developing therapeutics in metabolism and endocrinology, immunology and neurology, and its founder and CEO, dr Mark Kotter, doesn't pull any punches when addressing the complexity involved in building out the company's capabilities. On the discovery side alone, bitbio has hired and integrated stem cell biologists, synthetic biologists, genetic engineering experts, cellular biologists, sequencing experts, data scientists, bioinformatics pros and machine learning experts. I'm Matt Pillar this is the business of biotech and I caught up with Dr Kotter in San Francisco to talk about the work BitBio is doing, how it's doing it and how he and his leadership team are recruiting and retaining a new breed of biotech talent to sustain the effort. Let's give it a listen Dr Mark Kotter, founder and CEO at bit. bio. So let's start right there. bit. b io. What's behind the name?
Dr. Mark Kotter:It's really the convergence of data science and biology. We are dealing with a paradigm, of a paradigm of synthetic or programmable biology, which has opened up opportunities that and solutions to long-standing problems in turning pluripotent stem cells into different cell types. So we're really a cell manufacturing, creation and therapy company and this new paradigm, this program of biology, provides a solution to consistency, scalability, but also even functionality of the cells.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, okay, and you remain currently a cynical scientist at the university.
Dr. Mark Kotter:Yeah, my background is actually I'm a neurosurgeon and a stem cell biologist and I had naively the idea of developing cell therapies. I didn't know how hard this is actually when I started out, and it's only because we were able to assemble a fantastic team that we're actually now doing it. But the ambition always was to extend my medical practice to something broader.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, that's interesting. You didn't know how hard this was. You're a neurosurgeon, that's right. How much harder than that could it be?
Dr. Mark Kotter:Well, I think the complexities are very different.
Matt Pillar:let's say yeah, what inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
Dr. Mark Kotter:It was the realization that the means that I have in academia would not allow me to really tackle this huge problem. So there's two things really. Cell therapies for spinal cord injuries were my initial inspiration. I see patients that you know whose lives change at the flick of a switch and the only thing neurosurgeons can do is put the bones together, but there's not much we can do to enhance recovery. And so that was really the driver and I thought small molecules biologics won't do it. It needs something much more complex.
Dr. Mark Kotter:And there's been really interesting studies in this field with cell therapies on the preclinical side, and we've seen some clinical transition. Now the problem with cell therapies is that they're extraordinary expensive. Quite frankly, even now those that work in oncology, you know it's not a good business model. Some of them must have lost making drugs, so that needed to change. That brought me into the idea of prebutinic stem cells, and then also I realized how incredibly difficult it is actually to control these cells.
Dr. Mark Kotter:And the second big thing that hit me was when I was doing my research like everyone else. We were using mouse, rat cells and models, but as a neurosurgical trainee I was able to access human biopsies, so comparing specific cell types of interest. They, I found out, they look the same, but biologically there's a huge difference. So, you know, growth factors that do one thing on the rat and the mouse have a complete opposite effect on the human cell. And for me that was like another sort of huge, huge sort of eviction point, because I thought, wow, if I continue what I've done before, I'm going to be a fantastic mouse doctor. That's really what I want to be. And so, and this really sort of you know, brought me to enter this space, yeah, and little did I know that we would be able to, you know, find a piece of biology that is really incredible.
Matt Pillar:Was Bitbio, your first foray into entrepreneurship and bio it sort of happened a little bit.
Dr. Mark Kotter:At the same time. We spun out Nalsv companies out of the lab. Bitbio is the one I'm sticking to and running. There's another company called Meetable in the cultured meat field. So they also need cells, obviously non human, they need muscle and fat cells. And it turns out this this technology is so scalable that they can reach price parity. So that was a parallel thing that happened. The companies, initially you really work very closely together Meetable very focused on scale up, bitbio very focused on generation of the fundamental tech and then more recently the flip side of IPSEs or pro buttons themselves and a you know the the in healthy, in young state led to a small other spin out called cloud biome.
Matt Pillar:OK, yeah, I've got some questions for you on those spin outs particularly meetable, very, very interesting company. But I want to link your for a minute on your transition from practicing medicine and being a research scientist to the business, to the biotech business. It's not an easy transition to me.
Matt Pillar:I love things to learn A lot of things to learn, so share with me a little bit about that. Like what was, I don't know, like what were some of the give me that, give me the top, I guess, three challenges that you faced in deciding that you had, you had science that was worth building a business or yet. But how do you do that?
Dr. Mark Kotter:Yeah, so let me reflect on what's foundation different between academia and business, and academia is really centered around the individual, and the questions that you ask, based on the funding system that is in place, are projects. Now, in biotech, I found it's the opposite it's a team sport. The questions that you ask is how do I make this work? So these are real big problems that you solve by bringing together, in our case, really very diverse teams and people that would never encounter themselves each other in an academic setting. The resources that it requires, of course, much larger and the pressure is higher. So I would say the big difference is team sport between in biotech and really a very individual sport in academia.
Matt Pillar:Let me ask you to pause there real quick. When you talk about bringing people together, creating a team and bringing people together from different disciplines that may have never encountered one or another in an academic setting. Give me an example of that.
Dr. Mark Kotter:You're talking like technologists or computational people and biologists, so the thing that we needed to solve to create BitBio, which is a platform that can reproduce any human cell type from pro-put and stem cells using transcriptive factor programming. So let's talk about what that actually means. So you can instruct cell identities by activating the right set of transcription factors. That's the foundational insight that can be traced back to 1980s, harvard-weintraub and then Yamanaka, of course, for transcription factors, pre-put and stem cell. And then I would really want to shout out Marius Wernicke and Tom Sudeau here at Stanford that have shown that this is a paradigm that seems to be generalizable. So that's the framework. Now this framework has two consequences. On the discovery side, when you think about stem cell biologists, they have been trying to find ways of coaxing cells, let's say, along warding things, landscape, using molecules to stepwise coach them into a skin cell or brain cell. The issue with that approach is you never know when you're there, and that's why there is nobody in industry that has ever created a differentiation protocol from scratch, as far as I know. So industry has taken academic IP and has process developed it, and that's the basis of the many IPC companies that you see.
Dr. Mark Kotter:Now, a foundational consequence of this transition to that new paradigm is that you know when the endpoint is, because you have to find the right combination of transcription factors and that's going to give you the cell type. So you've got a set of 2,000, 2,500 transcription factors and you know combinations of these will create cell types and that means you can brute force it. You can build a platform that screens, functional screens with transcription factors and a data science platform that reads this out, and you can then sort of approach and when you build this, you can create new cell types from scratch, and we've demonstrated this in BigBio. The other thing that this approach can do is it shortens the time period of the transition from pre-polluted stem cell to the cell type by a factor of 10. So and it's single step protocols and the little thing that we developed in King, which is using genomic safe harbors we got to a deterministic paradigm so we can produce cells, batches of cells that are always the same. So that's the framework. Now, when you think about what, do we need?
Dr. Mark Kotter:to really build out this platform on the discovery side, we need stem cell biologists, we need synthetic biologists, we need people that are experts in genetic engineering, we need experts that know about the cell types that you want to produce. We need sequencing experts and technologists, we need data scientists, bioinformatics and machine-up people. So that's sort of the basis of the discovery platform. Now, one thing that we've learned is you put two biologists together in the room and they're using the same words and the connotations are very different. Differentiation stem cell speak is very different from differentiation, for example, in the immunology field. So we're divided by the same language, and so from the beginning onwards, we had to really come together and find language to describe what we do as a shared basis.
Dr. Mark Kotter:So that's the discovery part. Then you go into the manufacturing side. Suddenly you've got process engineers, you have people that know something about assays, biorectors and all of that. Again, that's a completely new chord of individuals with completely different mindsets and backgrounds. Again, those needed to come together and as a business, then you have to have, obviously, the commercial side as well. So it's been incredibly complex to bring all these people together and align them on a shared vision but at the same time, give them a language processes that they can follow in order to build an efficient machine. And I thought it was really fascinating. So we did this very consciously, also in terms of how we shaped the culture. I was very sort of I was the English word. I really tried very hard to get to a certain point and it worked.
Matt Pillar:How did you prepare for that? Like you talked about when you were in academics, you're sort of an island under yourself and now you've got diverse teams of many people doing many different things but having to do it in a unified fashion and you need to build a culture around that. How did you prepare to? How did you gain that skill set? So you're naturally very charming. I'm sure that that's played into it.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I think how did we get there? So? And you about the complexities? So I'm a first principle guy. I'm trying to sort of figure out the problem set that's in front of me and then try and find solutions Doesn't mean that I always get it right.
Dr. Mark Kotter:In fact, quite frankly, I think most of the time any progress in Bitbio has been based on failure. But that's also a thing we celebrate that we've learned something other than that something has failed. So I had certain ideas and then, of course, these were modified through reality and failure. One other thing that was very helpful at the beginning to really sort of put me on to a new mindset, that was an accelerator program in Cambridge that I joined, so at least I had some understanding of the language. And then the other thing that happened was, very quickly, the idea, the vision of Bitbio is pretty bold, I mean. I think it can be incredibly transformational and people have recognized this.
Dr. Mark Kotter:So I was very lucky to be backed by people that have done this before. So one of the first investors was Jonathan Milner. I built a company called AppCam. We had I had angels that had venture capital background and obviously I was drinking from the water hose, but I had an incredible support structure up until today. My board is incredible. They're helping me to understand what I don't know. Yeah, I just think you need to have a learning mindset, being open, and I love new stuff.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, and the community. I've seen it Having a building a community around you, people who've done it before having that incubation experience, accelerator experience. Excellent. Typically, more often than not, we talk with cell therapy companies. Their successes have been in rare and ultra rare disease, and BidBio strikes me as interesting because you're looking to tackle indications that are far more common. Yeah, what's this Like? What was the intent there, the strategy? Well, why is that?
Dr. Mark Kotter:I think, when you think about the history of stem cell biology, it was always felt that this is the key that we need to unlock for regenerative medicine. So maybe 10 years back, 15 years back, cell therapy was always in the context of regenerative medicine. Then, of course, the world changed with the cartee field, which became an incredibly effective weapon against cancer, and I think we'll only start at the start of that Now.
Dr. Mark Kotter:Bidbio has embraced this regenerative medicine paradigm and the way that we look at our internal pipeline is really trying to see what has worked. We need to do risk clinical risk. If you think about your own pipeline, there's, of course, technical risk, execution risk, regulatory risk, et cetera. So, if you take a risk-based approach on structuring your pipeline, what you want to see is patients that have benefited from a cell transplant, almost and these cells might have been donor-derived cells or autologous cells that come from the patients themselves. All of these approaches have massive constraints in terms of cost, in terms of scalability, and the value of the position of BidBio is really that we can produce cells on mass and really democratize access to these therapies.
Matt Pillar:The next line of questioning I have for you was around that very thing. I mean, the cell therapy space has been showing so much promise, but at the commercial stage it's been a rough go. I mean so unpack that a little bit for me, how the BidBio approach to addressing these indications shifts that cost, that incredible cost paradigm.
Dr. Mark Kotter:Yeah, the moment is, if you think of cartes, it's really taking blood from late-stage patients with cancers. You scratch these cells together, you then modify them genetically, you put them back, and you can already see how difficult this is. So the only way away from this at this moment in time is an allergenic paradigm, ie a centralized manufacturing capability. Now, the cool thing is that and of course, I've raised these questions about how do we match the cells, how to make sure that they integrate, et cetera the cool thing is lots of progress has been made on this, so you can either in the CNS.
Dr. Mark Kotter:We just saw some beautiful data from Blu-Roc therapeutics. These cells persist after a year of treatment with immunosuppressants. So you've got a paradigm for the CNS. You have seen encapsulation, for example in the context of vertex, and criticised cells, curative treatment for IVtiv. You've seen very enticing data from SANA, for example in terms of the hyperimmune approach, where you take away surface epitopes and that cells can no longer be recognised. So this, together with a centralised manufacturing basis that can really create scale and consistency of highly functional cells, I think is going to be transformative. We think that we can lower the cost of goods of cell therapies by two orders of magnitude. We've got line of sight and the reason why I can say that is because meetable. They're moving to 500-litre tanks. They need to reach costs of a kilogram biomass cells, that's a prudent of cells for $10. Otherwise they won't be commercially viable. I can see them Sure.
Matt Pillar:It was one of my questions about meetable like following on the heels of the cell therapy space. Is the pork chop going to cost $3,000? That's going to work Exactly.
Dr. Mark Kotter:The crazy thing is they have a clear path to get there and for a cell therapy company, obviously, you can add two zeros and you're still in the realm of biologics. So I feel very confident and that's part of the disruptive power of this approach that we can do that. We will do that.
Matt Pillar:Where are you on the clinical continuum?
Dr. Mark Kotter:So we're preclinical. The earliest we can go into clinic is about 18 months from now. We have announced a pipeline, so the first product will be in the liver space, again, as I said, based on something that worked really well in an early stage study. We have other cell types, pancreatic eye notes, we have various different immune cell types, cns cell types and, of course, the company is at the stage where we want to augment diluted funding sources with partnerships. This is a classical new modality platform very complex, very broad and, of course, as you think about the mRNA companies, what they've done is ended a lot of partnerships to get to the next stage, where they become self-sufficient companies. So we've already announced one deal with Bayer, blue Rock Therapeutics, we're going to develop T-Rex together and yeah, and now DPM, of course, is a good conference to add to that partnership pipeline Very good.
Matt Pillar:Earlier you were talking about the breadth of talent and skill and the need to bring them all together.
Dr. Mark Kotter:You talked about like beyond the lab manufacturing.
Matt Pillar:What is the manufacturing strategy? A bit by, are you doing that internally?
Dr. Mark Kotter:So BigBow has launched research, great sales, which are now used by the top 10 pharma companies and considered as best in class for drug discovery and understanding human biology. So we've built obviously R&D grade manufacturing capabilities and there are now significant portions not optimized. So that's also been part of the mission always is democratize access to human cells, close the translation gap, make sure that conventional drugs are being developed with more efficiency and then, of course, on the technical side, we have GLP at the moment and we work with external GMP partners as we grow, obviously in-house all of these processes.
Matt Pillar:So the process is announced, but the intention would be moving forward to most likely outsource maybe.
Dr. Mark Kotter:At this point in time we have to, but I think one of the key capabilities of BigBio is that manufacturing know-how so I think that is will be part of the business model is part of the business model. So we just have to grow to clinical stage and before we can justify the investment at a larger scale.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, when I look at the cost paradigm aside, when I look at recent cell therapy approvals, there have been plenty. You can write many case studies on commercial transition failure. Yes, right, like I'm wondering, and I know it's early, never, you are pre-clinical, but I'm wondering, as a leader of BigBio when do you start thinking about that?
Dr. Mark Kotter:Right at the beginning. Now, one of the things that has been really transformative for the company is when Catherine Corso joined us. She led cell therapy development at Takeda very large portfolio and she's one of the rare human beings that was able to create multiple products from scratch to commercialization. And she very clearly stated that we have to think about scale and the ability to industrialize our manufacturing from the beginning. So this is all baked in from the onset. I talked about it seamless protocols, fully defined media conditions, 2d, 3d, transition and that's working extremely well, plus all the processes, assays that need to come with it. So this is part of, I would say, the DNA.
Matt Pillar:If you had to put your finger on a potential rate limiting factor or risk that could slow you down.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I mean, capital is one.
Matt Pillar:Everyone has those constraints.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I mean, obviously now we are blessed in some sense that we have a revenue generating business which is going to offset platform costs in the next two years.
Matt Pillar:What's the revenue generating? So these?
Dr. Mark Kotter:are you know. So if you go to a website you can order, for example, neurons, these models. They have neurons without time mutations. You have CRISPR-ready cells, which essentially cells that you can put in your culture. You throw some guides in, you've got your experiment. So it's really about one of the big things about stem cell is so difficult to control, so we want to make it easy. Anyone can use them, you don't have to have any knowledge. You just take out a cell of microbe of our cell that are myocytes, so muscle cells. You've got disease, disease mutations, et cetera. And that's how we connect again back to also the rare disease world, where I think the rare disease world is incredibly rich in terms of scientific insight that you can gain. I mean it's and of course, there's huge unmeted kinetics.
Matt Pillar:Yeah. So getting back to the now, I have a tendency to just go down radicals and take out that but getting back to potential rate limiting factors, yeah, so capital is one thing, of course.
Dr. Mark Kotter:What else could happen you can have in the clinic? All sorts of things can happen, from not being able to recruit patients to, you know, halts that are possible. So we're quite aware of all the risks there. What else could happen? I think there are risks around. I don't think we have technical risks any longer. So one thing that we've learned over the last four or five years is how robust the technology is. In fact I'm going to just throw out something. We've not had a single manufacturing failure in the last two and a half three years in a cell therapy product. We've done other things that went wrong. We didn't pack the right number of cells in the vials for our customers, we misladled vials, but we've never had biological failure. So that's very different, I would say, from any of the cell manufacturing company.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, you mentioned, hinted at regulatory, regulatory landscape. What similar to starting to think about commercial and making others that make sure that you're beginning with that end in mind? At what point does regulatory expertise come into play?
Dr. Mark Kotter:It's, of course, very early. You have to think about your target profile, the way, the path that you want to navigate through the regulatory landscape. Of course, rarer conditions have an easier path. So that's going to be the entry the far first cell therapy effort. Yeah, I've lost my naivety, I would say, and I've got a team that has all of these things covered. I'm very proud of that team. Just think about who sits on our board Greg Winter. So Greg Winter Nobel Prize for his anti-public technology. I think Several companies, I think two years ago the three best-selling products were based on his technology. So he's seen a lot of nonsense and things that can go wrong. So I feel that the board as a whole is an incredible resource that helps us think through what could go wrong, and I've got a very experienced management team.
Matt Pillar:What's your thoughts? What's the funding strategy been to date? We're going to talk a little bit about what is going forward. I want to get your sense for the sentiment of the market at this point. Since founding, what's been your?
Dr. Mark Kotter:So the trajectory we spent out. I had this idea and it was a single person idea at the beginning. We raised a small amount of pre-seed from people that know what they're doing in the Cambridge ecosystem. Then, very quickly after that, we had an early-stage investor I think, fantastic capital DeepTech, slash Biotech, called BlueYard I always refer to it as US money in Europe super supportive. And then in another year later we struck really lucky. I was able to get Rick Klausner, a botanist, and Jim Tannenbaum so Arch Ventures a full-size capital and Yuri Milner, milky Way, rick Klausner interested and they led our series A and that was a big splash, really allowed us to At that point in time they contributed more than 40 million that allowed us to build the platform, understand how we could create something that can create new cell types and industrialize the creation of new cell types. And then, at the end of 2021, we raised a larger financing amount 140 million and that was again led by Du Staples' combination of insiders, of strategic transfer, of national resilience, et cetera. So that's given us a good capital base that allowed us to build this.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I think we were quite outstanding when you look at the UK landscape and actually we followed nearly a textbook approach. You think about platform, new modernity platform. It takes a lot of capital to build it. So that's, we're now there. I can say the platform is fully validated, end to end. Of course, proof of concept in the clinic is still in front of us At that point in time.
Dr. Mark Kotter:We then have to think about non-nilodifunding opportunities. So we talked about our deal with Bureaux and Bayer and our ambition to really increase that now and we've got a real pipeline of interest and that's very positive. And of course, we will need further funding in order to drive the bid by to the next level. At the same time, I think from a company size, from a maturity perspective, we're reaching a point where maybe in 18, 24 months we'd be ready for an IPO. So this is not to be seen as an exit. I think this is a transition from one capital pool to another capital pool. We've done our homework, we've brought all our systems in place. We could jump anytime if necessary. But I do also think that now is the time where we're sort of actively bringing investors together to finance another round. That then sets us up for that next stage, that next stage being the clinic, the clinic and potentially the transition into public markets.
Matt Pillar:Gotcha Okay. So what specifically is your strategy when you come into an event like this?
Dr. Mark Kotter:We've obviously lined up a lot of investor meetings. We already have started to engage them since November. There's been education earlier on last year. I think we're in a very good spot at the moment and we've got ambition to crystallize this in the very near future.
Matt Pillar:So I want to just jump back to MediBull real quick because I'm curious about like that from a leadership perspective. You're obviously leading pit by and MediBull you found it.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I found it. I'm at arm's length. There was a very strong tech collaboration at the beginning. Naively again, I said I can translate this into non-human species. It took a bit more than the idea, but I found the teams really were able to do it. And then MediBull took it and ran with it and now they've got an excellent technical team there and I've just visited their facilities and tried some of their products and it's extraordinary actually.
Matt Pillar:How close to commercial is that?
Dr. Mark Kotter:So, in terms of they need to get to that next scale point, which is now no longer a biological question, it's really about having access to the infrastructure and solving some of the things the distribution of nutrients in the bioactor that's looking extremely, extremely good. And then they are launching, let's say, early access in Singapore. They're eyeing up the US now as well. I think the relative framework in Singapore, of course, is incredibly conducive. In the US, it's also very positive now and then, once this is demonstrated, I think that's when the capital will be available to really create the commercial scale facility that will drive down costs to the point that it's competitive.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, that's super interesting. What was the third company?
Dr. Mark Kotter:you said that you founded Bio. It's really a take on a unique property of pre-port and stem cells. They reside in, you could say, a state of perfect homeostasis. They can buffer all the entropy of the things that go wrong at every moment in time and repair themselves. But the problem is, once they exit this pre-port and stem cell age starts to come in, the repair mechanisms and I think potentially by design are being turned off very slowly, and that's the reason why we get gray hair, because we have all these things that change as we grow older.
Dr. Mark Kotter:And so we found a way of figuring out how stem cells maintain this useful state. We have a complete map of all genes that are involved in the repair process, regulation or the repair of what's called the aging hallmarks. So, and then again bit by on the top bio, both of them are nearly hypothesis free, pure data place where large data processes in our day of all same for clock bio, all we want to understand every gene in its relationship to these aging hallmarks and then use that knowledge to create rational choices and prioritizations for interventions that can deal with age related conditions or maybe even extend the health standard as such. So you could see, this is the flip side of the coin is something went wrong. We need severely wrong, we need bit by making sure that things don't go wrong or preventing that At that time, pushing it out of that stock by all. And the magic in the middle is the purpose, mm hmm, what is your engagement level with clock bio?
Dr. Mark Kotter:So I sort of we discovered the approach in the academic lab and now I've handed it over again to a team. So I'm on the board, I'm curious of what they're doing, but I'm not involved in the day to day management.
Matt Pillar:Okay, yeah, I was curious. I mean the anti aging space, I'd say. I'd say I'd say nascent, but it's coming to the board.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I think the biology is solid and it's very interesting.
Matt Pillar:What has been the most on this trip to San Francisco? What's sort of opened your eyes the most in terms of what you're hearing and seeing as you traverse the streets and have your meeting with Jake?
Dr. Mark Kotter:Look, I've been very focused on, you know, on bit bio meetings, so partnership meetings and investor meetings, and what my take is that bit bio has now reached visibility that we did not hear about. So you go somewhere and actually people say, oh bit bio, I've heard of you, and of course we need to amplify this. That's an important thing. The validation that the partnership with Blue Rock has provided has also dropped into people's minds. So, if you think about it, there are really two big companies.
Dr. Mark Kotter:We talked about them Vertex, bayer, blue Rock that knows something about this space, and I think the signal that one of them has asked us for help has really sort of changed the perspective, and so I think that's extremely positive. And on the investor side, look, there seems to be a better. You know, the weather seems to be better, and I think that's true literally when you think about the Torrens of last year.
Matt Pillar:Visorable.
Dr. Mark Kotter:No, and we can. You know there's an uptick in terms of, you know, mergers and acquisitions. There was good news flow in terms of financing. There's a number of companies that are going IPO. I'm really sort of keen to figure out how metagenomics, for example, is going to. It's very exciting. I think we've turned the corner. That's what we, that's what we sense. Is it going to be smooth sailing from here? We don't know. But let's take the momentum that exists and our objective is really to crystallize the round now in Q1.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, excellent. Well, I wish you luck with that, and I appreciate the fact that you set some time aside during this very busy week to spend with me and the business biotech listeners. So, dr Mark Potter, it's an honor, a pleasure, and we'll be following along. All three of these companies are very fascinating and in really good positions, so we'll be following along and hopefully we'll have an opportunity to meet with you again down the road. Thank you so much Political stage.
Dr. Mark Kotter:I'd love to get some clinical updates when you're here. Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to that as well, and I think you know. On the other side, the use of cells to create better drugs. It's so exciting, very exciting. Well, thank you for having me.
Matt Pillar:Thank you for joining me, appreciate it and safe travels. Thank you. I'm Matt Piller and you just listened to the business of biotech, the weekly podcast dedicated to the builders of biotech. We drop a new episode with a new exec every Monday morning and I'd like you to join our community of subscribers at BIO process onlinecom, apple Podcasts, spotify, google Play or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to our Never Spammy, always insightful monthly newsletter at bioprocessonlinecom backslashbob. If you have feedback or topic and guest suggestions, hit me up on LinkedIn and let's chat and, as always, thanks for listening.