The following transcript is automatically generated
00:00:04 Will Mountford
Hello I’m will, welcome to research pod.
00:00:07 Will Mountford
In market terms, pharmaceuticals and biologic companies represent a growth opportunity like few others. Vaccines alone have had over 350% revenue growth between 2007 and 2018, well before the COVID-19 pandemic. So how can a researcher behind the bench today think about broaching business?
00:00:27 Will Mountford
Professor Vivek Kumar from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is an advocate for and success story of developing companies from a research backing. We talked today about funding. Finding those angles to commercialize your research and what he sees as key developments that could revolutionize both business and technology.
00:00:52 Will Mountford
Vivek hello.
00:00:53 Will Mountford
Thanks very much for your time in joining us today for my own information and for everyone listening at home. Could you tell us a bit about yourself, some of your personal and academic background and how you're managing to kind of bridge the worlds of academia and business all at once?
00:01:08 Prof Vivek Kumar
Definitely. Again, my name is Vivek Kumar. I am an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and here at NJIT in my research lab, we innovate new biomaterials based.
00:01:23 Prof Vivek Kumar
Drugs. So what's unique and interesting about this is that these materials that we make out of proteins, these materials that we make, activate cell receptors, so they're classified as drugs anyway. So part of doing all of this is encouraging young minds to come up with these neat ideas to regenerate tissue, treat different diseases. We even had a therapeutic against SARS.
00:01:44 Prof Vivek Kumar
Too, but another aspect of that is you come up with these ideas. How do you take them to market? Not just market. How do you get them to treat someone like the dream of someone like me who went to school for bioengineering, undergrad bioengineering, Graduate School, got my PhD? I went to Northwestern, undergrad, Georgia Tech for Graduate School. I worked with the surgeon.
00:02:05 Prof Vivek Kumar
Elliot Heikoff, who then moves up to Beth Israel Deaconess, part of Harvard Medical School, where I finished up my PhD. The short postdoctoral stint there and then at Rice University. I did another postdoc where I got into protein engineering.
00:02:19 Prof Vivek Kumar
Anyway, the dream of someone like me, a biomedical engineer, is to take something. We've come up with. We've invented and put it into human beings to treat some disease and human beings and as a part of that, we invent these technologies, file intellectual property, patents and things like that. Published papers, our currency, right, papers and grants, and academia that we try to translate them using.
00:02:40 Prof Vivek Kumar
Startups using seed stage small idea based companies and one of the challenges with this is how do you get money? How?
00:02:48 Prof Vivek Kumar
Do you get people?
00:02:50 Prof Vivek Kumar
To run these high tech, you know, complex engineering projects and try to gain traction. So it's really it's been a tremendous adventure over the past six years as a professor and 10 years before that training to get to this stage doing research and it has been a really interesting adventure on how we can, you know, develop ideas and make them at the seed stage.
00:03:11 Prof Vivek Kumar
Startups and go out there and pitch try to get venture capital investment or Angel investment with many hats I wear to move technologies towards the clinic and I think one of the greatest things and one of the greatest experiences in all of this is you learn so many ways to fail.
00:03:26 Prof Vivek Kumar
Both from academia, all the way to pitching to.
00:03:30 Prof Vivek Kumar
VC's to Angel investors and as a part of that, you really learn how healthcare and medicine is practiced. How?
00:03:40 Prof Vivek Kumar
Healthcare Technologies gets implemented and taken towards the market towards the clinic and there are so many factors, so many push and pull factors that you couldn't even imagine influence how much uptake there is for a drug or a therapeutic, which has been a fun challenge but learning.
00:03:56 Prof Vivek Kumar
As well.
00:03:57 Will Mountford
Yes, I mean, he highlighted some of the many steps just in the academic development, let alone and then thinking actually there might be some business, there might be some money in this and picking that up as a profession.
00:04:08 Will Mountford
I suppose to look back on all of that, if you were to be able to send a message back to your younger self and tell you know, a fresh postgraduate, you one thing would it be about the business or about the academic sides, or do you think it would even be prepared for everything that you've undertaken since that first degree, let alone all the ones that followed?
00:04:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
So I think you know the the bachelors, I did my PhD, the postdoctoral.
00:04:32 Prof Vivek Kumar
Variants all of those were building blocks, right? Like I always think back to myself. Why did I have to learn calculus and linear algebra and all those things back in my high school and college? I never used that in.
00:04:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
My daily life.
00:04:45 Prof Vivek Kumar
To be fair, every now and then I do, and it's all these tools and the struggles going through those that I have learned, the resilience and perseverance to take that next step. Also it's things that you might use and it's important tools to have to approach these different problems.
00:05:01 Prof Vivek Kumar
If I could go back in time, I would tell myself what I tell all the students I advise today, which is go out and explore. I don't think I made the mistake of not exploring enough. I think I was a little scatterbrained in my approach. I think I could have been more focused in my approach of exploration and.
00:05:18 Prof Vivek Kumar
Sounds somewhat, I don't know, oxymoronic, right focus exploration. But I tell my students if you want to be a physician, if you want to get a PhD, if you want to go into healthcare or any different aspect of any career, go speak to someone who does it every day, right? Go speak to a clinician, not just a a surgeon not.
00:05:37 Prof Vivek Kumar
Just a PCP primary.
00:05:38 Prof Vivek Kumar
Physician or GP? Go speak to psychiatrists. Go speak to someone who works with Pediatrics. Go speak to someone. Works in, you know, underserved populations. Go speak to a private clinic. Get a full range of perspectives, because I'll tell you this. One of the lessons I learned by speaking not just to physicians, but speaking to patients who have debilitating blindness.
00:05:58 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right condition called Wet age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy as well. One of the leading causes of blindness in people above the.
00:06:06 Prof Vivek Kumar
Age of 50.
00:06:07 Prof Vivek Kumar
Five too many blood vessels on the retina. You inject drugs to kill the blood vessels. The biggest challenge is not injecting drugs into the eye. No, no, no, because they.
00:06:16 Prof Vivek Kumar
Is that the biggest problem for those patients? These elderly patients is inconveniencing their son or daughter to take them to the clinic because they can't drive there and they can't drive back, so they have to take time out of their children's lives to usher them to the clinic and to figure something out for that. That's a big innovation.
00:06:36 Prof Vivek Kumar
So our goal there was to figure out, can we develop a long term release solution for six months instead of monthly injections, right? That is the key innovation. It's not can we find a better antiandrogenic drugs, it's not. Can we find a new molecular tart? No, no, no, no.
00:06:51 Prof Vivek Kumar
It is. Can we ease the burden of the patient population and those are lessons that you cannot learn unless you have conversations with people in the field that you hope to get into. So if you want to be an optomology, just go speak to someone who's suffering from blindness due to diabetic and apathy. Go speak to a patient advocate. Go speak to the clinician.
00:07:11 Prof Vivek Kumar
Go speak to the pharmacy benefits manager.
00:07:14 Prof Vivek Kumar
Very short. If I could go back in time, I'd tell myself to explore and learn as many different aspects of the field as possible, because otherwise just not making very informed decisions.
00:07:28 Will Mountford
Well, you mentioned the lessons that you pass on to your students there and that I suppose all comes under the umbrella of the Kumar lab. Could you give us maybe a quick tour of what happens there, the developments that go into not just the drug design and devices, but the tissue engineering, the protein engineering that you mentioned? And I suppose the teaching materials and the teaching experience?
00:07:46 Will Mountford
Within that lab.
00:07:47 Prof Vivek Kumar
So in addition to doing research, I teach as well. I teach an undergraduate advanced biomaterials class, and in that class we talk about different applications and materials specific to my research lab where I spend most of my time in terms of advising my study.
00:08:03 Prof Vivek Kumar
You know we do drug design, we look at normal receptors, we use complex computer programs, some of the gaming computers that gamers love, we buy those because they run computational simulations really, really well. Graphics cards, GPU power, right, graphical processing, unit power. So we have some pretty cool computers in the lab where we do drug design.
00:08:22 Prof Vivek Kumar
All the way to synthesizing them, we have peptide synthesizers, so there's a lot of, like safety training we do in our lab to make sure students are safe with the different equipment we use, but also.
00:08:32 Prof Vivek Kumar
So I'd like to think we trained translational scientists, right? So not only do we synthesize materials that make scaffolds that we can implant, look at tissue processes, look at localized drug release, localized tissue regeneration, wound healing.
00:08:45 Prof Vivek Kumar
Stuff like that, not.
00:08:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
Just that but also.
00:08:48 Prof Vivek Kumar
Teaching this idea of hey, you know, if you have an.
00:08:51 Prof Vivek Kumar
Idea. If you want to.
00:08:52 Prof Vivek Kumar
Treat a certain kind of disease that doesn't have a treatment right now. What is the gap in the field, right? Like let's say this is new receptor that no one is targeted. That's a gap, right? Let's figure out how to target that. So all the way from computational design ideation to implementation to doing efficacy studies in rodents in canines.
00:09:13 Prof Vivek Kumar
Small, large animal models.
00:09:14 Prof Vivek Kumar
In vitro in Petri dishes, synthesis, characterization, materials generation, testing.
00:09:20 Prof Vivek Kumar
What I hope to do with my students is train them in this full gamut of being, a translational scientist, having the tools, skills, ability, and maybe even getting their hands went in all the way from ideation, computational peptide design, in silico on a computer all the way to making it and testing it to see whether what you came up with actually works.
00:09:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
And that's something that we're very excited about and each and everyone of those because it's new intellectual property, we try to file patents and we try to get novel claims on what these intelligently designed novelly designed materials can do.
00:09:54 Will Mountford
Now I'll come back to the kind of delineations between biology and business in a second.
00:09:58 Will Mountford
And but it sounds like straddling the world of biology business, but also the what a lot of people going to be hearing about, if not immediately, then very soon about massive data processing that can be done with artificial intelligence, machine learning that, you know, coming up with ChatGPT prompts come up with a new story or to come up with.
00:10:18 Will Mountford
Any text based ideas? That's one thing, but to then be able to scattergun approach 1001 different atomic combinations of 1001 different molecules at once.
00:10:29 Will Mountford
Like you're straddling not just the two worlds of biology and business there, but computational science as well. Does it ever get tiring having to learn something new about the bleeding edge of everything every day?
00:10:40 Prof Vivek Kumar
Oh my God, no. So coming back to exactly the question you asked me at the beginning, right.
00:10:44 Prof Vivek Kumar
It is a toolbox.
00:10:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
That every day is growing bigger and is being enriched and I cannot think of a better time to be doing science than today. And then yesterday, right, because ChatGPT is great. Chad TBT, Chad T for what have you?
00:10:59 Prof Vivek Kumar
Is a great tool to start asking some questions. Now. The complexity of those questions.
00:11:05 Prof Vivek Kumar
Starts to get to a point where you need quantum computing. So not only am I excited about AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning to help me think about how to approach these problems, but quantum computing can now help answer those problems and let me explain your classical computer. The computer we're talking about, right? The computer.
00:11:19
And so.
00:11:25 Prof Vivek Kumar
Use every day your phone. What have you. It runs data on logic gates on your typical classical computing and it works. It does calculations pretty quickly, but when you have to guess what kind of peptide protein sequence binds to a receptor.
00:11:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
Each and every peptide has 20 in general, commonly occurring 20 possible combinations. If you have a 10 peptide long sequence, it's 10 to the 20 combinations. More stars in the universe.
00:11:53 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right. So 10 to the 20 combinations which will take you till the end of time to start guessing if all of them fit. So now you've got to use some kind of computational power to start guessing these mean mean ridiculous numbers, which I don't.
00:12:08 Prof Vivek Kumar
Know the word for right.
00:12:10 Prof Vivek Kumar
Combinations. You cannot do that with the classical computer.
00:12:13 Prof Vivek Kumar
And just slightly better with those graph GPUs I was telling you.
00:12:16 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right. But with a quantum computer you can start doing these insane calculations. You can start calculating these numbers combinations which are so intractable, right? One of the same reasons that when people first started talking about quantum computing like Oh no, security is in jeopardy because now you can guess any security key because there are so many combinations.
00:12:36 Prof Vivek Kumar
But this can guess.
00:12:38 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right, in the same way quantum computers could solve all the bitcoins out there in like a couple of hours as opposed to 40 years. You know what I mean, anyway. And getting lost in that space, the point I'm trying to make is as IBM as Google as all these companies are making one 28250 whatever bit quantum computers. Once we get quantum computing up the scale, we can use the algorithms in AI and ML to start.
00:12:58 Prof Vivek Kumar
Capitalizing on quantum computing that gets better, what will fit the receptor? Long story short, we can make designer drugs and designer materials my focus materials very, very quickly and very, very efficiently. In the next 5 to 10 years. That's gonna revolution.
00:13:15 Will Mountford
Well, I think that the potential there and the partnerships that are going to be required to make that potential become a reality hopefully along the kind of lines that we're seeing here and not just, you know, liquid metal T1 thousands coming to kill us all in our sleep or something like that is very recently well until recently was sci-fi, it's now Bleeding Edge.
00:13:36 Will Mountford
That could materialize over the next 5 to 10 years for people who have been working in universities in labs for the last maybe 1020 years. That's going to seem.
00:13:48 Will Mountford
Possibly big and scary as a change and like doing anything that is not the lab work in front of you can be a big and scary change and it sounds like you have been embracing big and scary change every step.
00:14:00 Will Mountford
Along the way.
00:14:01 Prof Vivek Kumar
Well, COVID taught me that right so.
00:14:03 Prof Vivek Kumar
COVID happened three years ago and March. April of 2020. IW was told my lab has to shut down, as was everybody else. Everybody had to shut.
00:14:17 Prof Vivek Kumar
Down so the only thing we could do is one of two things. Either work on COVID right, because then you can get people in the lab to work or do computational work, right? I mean, there's many things can do, but those are two big things that folks like need could do. Right. So we did both. So we came up with an idea. So I told you about proteins, we work on proteins. One of the proteins in your body is collagen. And the way collagen.
00:14:38 Prof Vivek Kumar
Works as your cell makes collagen and it self assembles into a rope into a fiber. That fiber self assembles into tissue, right? You get very strong strength, bone, skin and everything because.
00:14:49 Prof Vivek Kumar
Proteins. Self assemble. They come together on their own by collagen. Our proteins self assemble as well. So our peptides form beta sheets, they form antiparallel beta sheets. They form fibers and they form hydro dose. So with self assembly we ask the.
00:15:04 Prof Vivek Kumar
Question can we bind to the virus? Because the virus has something called spike. Can we bind to spike?
00:15:10 Prof Vivek Kumar
And can we self assemble on top of the virus preventing it from interacting with human cells? So we came up with that idea. We filed the patent, we applied for a grant, we got some funding. So that's one thing that we did in the research lab. We're trying to publish that work.
00:15:23 Prof Vivek Kumar
Now, in addition to that, what we've also been looking at is ever since COVID came about is maybe 25 to 30% of my lab has transitioned from just Wet lab and animal work to computational work. And we do a lot of computational simulations ever since then and we've started to publish in that space as well. So yeah, I think if you do not embrace the latest and greatest technologies.
00:15:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
You end up doing what they did 50 years ago or 100 years ago, or even 10 years ago, which is go out into Amazon Rainforest, go on into many different places and do random screens.
00:15:56 Prof Vivek Kumar
Bunches of different chemicals and plants and different distillates and things like that, and try to figure out, oh, this might work. This might work, but you don't know the side effects now with much more rationalized design with the technologies we have today, we can see with almost molecular scale or at almost atomic scale resolution.
00:16:17 Prof Vivek Kumar
The structure of proteins and then we can design other proteins with again near atomic scale precision to bind them and target.
00:16:25 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right, we're getting to a point where we can treat many, many diseases at the near atomic scale of precision.
00:16:32 Will Mountford
This is making me miss leaving the.
00:16:34 Will Mountford
Lab, I mean, like you talk about Spike protein have a beta sheet tattooed on my arm. I.
00:16:40 Will Mountford
There were simpler times, but this was more fun.
00:16:41
There you go. There you go.
00:16:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
So but I have to say like you always have people who are.
00:16:47 Prof Vivek Kumar
Quite enthusiastic about these things, but end of the day there are still so many challenges, one of which is delivery. How do you get it to where you want it to go and for it to stay there? Stick around last a long time. Do what you want it to.
00:16:58 Prof Vivek Kumar
So the body is highly heterogeneous, trillions of cells that are all trying to do a variety of different things to break stuff down or what have you immune responses. And then of course, that's the academic or biological side. Then you've got the funding side. If Big Pharma met device, what have you is not interested in that portfolio of products, doesn't have interest in that.
00:17:18 Prof Vivek Kumar
Taking that technology.
00:17:19 Prof Vivek Kumar
Forward. It's very difficult to justify clinical trial costs, which cost hundreds of millions, if not, yeah, 10s of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to do so.
00:17:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
There needs to be a strong.
00:17:29 Prof Vivek Kumar
Justification and understanding of pharma or Med device appetite even before starting something in.
00:17:37 Prof Vivek Kumar
My opinion, understanding the whole translational gamut is critical in every step of the design process.
00:17:48 Will Mountford
Where we talked about some of the kind of the practical hybridization that you've been doing between wet and computational science to think about the, I suppose the philosophical hybridization between biology and business or you know commerce market development when.
00:18:04 Will Mountford
I suppose was the first time that you had the first notion about commercializing a model.
00:18:11 Will Mountford
When kind of in your personal trajectory was that and you mentioned that you've learned a lot from failure. So was it a success and then how long until the first big success came after that first idea?
00:18:22 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right. So I guess when I was doing my postdoc back in the end 2012 to early 2016.
00:18:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
I was at Rice University and I was doing self assembling peptides. We're working on angiogenic peptides peptides that help generate blood vessels and I was a scientist, right? I love doing science publishing papers. I didn't really care for the business side of things and I thought to myself.
00:18:42 Prof Vivek Kumar
I'll let the businessman figure that out. I'm happy with science and one of the patents that I had filed at Rice University, along with my advisor Jeffrey Harker, was taken in to be a part of this entrepreneurship course because they were looking for technologies.
00:18:56 Prof Vivek Kumar
And it just so happened that I was brought in as an advisor for that course. I ended up taking the course anyway. And Long story short, through that course I started realizing there.
00:19:06 Prof Vivek Kumar
Is so much.
00:19:07 Prof Vivek Kumar
More to medical device and drug development than sitting behind a research.
00:19:12 Prof Vivek Kumar
And it is easy to figure that out. The easiest way. Go speak to someone who actually does it. Go speak to someone in pharma. Go speak to a physician who administers the drug. Go speak to a pharmacy benefits manager who manages what drugs are formulary or what drugs that hospital or clinic buys.
00:19:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right. Go speak.
00:19:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
To different people in this ecosystem and actually understand.
00:19:32 Prof Vivek Kumar
That what you're doing at the bench may end up in nature may end up in these great journals, but may never go further than that. What really matters is you.
00:19:42 Prof Vivek Kumar
At this.
00:19:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
Perspective on what is required for translation, so I do this course. I realize sure basic science is important, but translating it coming up with lessons, understanding that pushes and pulls on what drives translation, what drives these ideas forward is important, and that transform the way I do work, I no longer ask questions for the sake of asking questions.
00:20:05 Prof Vivek Kumar
Every question I ask in the research I do is translationally motivated, like how can we improve delivery?
00:20:12 Prof Vivek Kumar
For this target for this application.
00:20:15 Prof Vivek Kumar
I believe, and I think that segues perfectly into the business side of things or the entrepreneurship side of things in that.
00:20:22 Prof Vivek Kumar
If you have.
00:20:23 Prof Vivek Kumar
The end target in mind if you understand that pharma requires XY and Z, this is the kind of efficacy study you need to do as opposed to just vanity science, right? I think answering those questions is a lot more important.
00:20:35 Prof Vivek Kumar
And a lot more prudent use of.
00:20:36 Prof Vivek Kumar
Taxpayer money, right? In terms of grants and things like that, coming up with strategies, technologies that have benefit and help human.
00:20:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
A lot of failures along the way. In fact, my first company in Angiotech is still going right now. We're trying to develop an angiogenic hydrogel for dental pulp regeneration. We've had many hiccups along the way. One of the lessons that I think one can learn throughout this.
00:20:57 Prof Vivek Kumar
Process is pivoting.
00:20:59 Prof Vivek Kumar
And also you only learn through failure.
00:21:01 Prof Vivek Kumar
Almost everything I know today in terms of entrepreneurship, in terms of.
00:21:05 Prof Vivek Kumar
Even self assembling peptides, the applications of the materials I use, I've learned after my formal training.
00:21:10 Prof Vivek Kumar
In school for.
00:21:11 Prof Vivek Kumar
Example after my PhD, after undergrad and all of that. Sure I needed to know Orgo and transport and things like that that I learned in college and.
00:21:19 Prof Vivek Kumar
Me. But what I do today I've learned after skills I've learned on the jobs and skills I've learned by going out and pitching at events and winning or losing or getting someone coming and tell me that it was terrible or great. So.
00:21:32 Will Mountford
Do you find that just the time commitment in any one day of balancing a teaching commitment versus lab time versus attending a board meeting for one of the companies is a juggling act or two things just kind of take the time that they take?
00:21:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
So the companies that I have are very small and that they have either 1-2 or zero employees outside of myself. These are see state startups, a lot of them. What we try to do is we apply for federal grants or.
00:21:57 Prof Vivek Kumar
Or state grants, different kinds of funding initiatives to get pilot seed money, and then we apply for bigger grants or go out to apply for VC Angel money, things like that.
00:22:07 Prof Vivek Kumar
Oftentimes at the seed stage, startup is doing pharmaceutical development, Med device development most of the time you're not selling to the market most of the time you will exit to pharma, you'll exit to a bigger partner once you're in late stage. Animal trials, late stage, clinical trial or early stage late stage, mid stage clinical trials because you don't have the infrastructure distribution network, things like that to compete with.
00:22:29 Prof Vivek Kumar
However, if you partner with them, you can synergize and you know translate that way.
00:22:34 Prof Vivek Kumar
And that's the goal of my companies as well, is to partner or exit the pharma in late stage animal or early stage human trials. But to answer your question, I guess my number one priority, my number one priority are my kids, right? And every day I try to find the time to make sure that I'm doing something with them, spending as much time as I can with them.
00:22:53 Prof Vivek Kumar
But outside of that, everything, it's like water. It's like a constant hole spilling this tortuous canal of life. Right. Or tortuous bucket of life that things will always take up any spare time that I.
00:23:04 Prof Vivek Kumar
Have so yeah.
00:23:06 Will Mountford
Well, from all of the experience that you've had of going, you know, through these courses, the pitching, the development, the company development, do you find that being in Bioscience compared to any other, you know people going through a similar trajectory offers a wider range of opportunities or do you think that this is a time for putting all of those tools to use across?
00:23:27 Will Mountford
Physics. Chemistry. Social.
00:23:30 Will Mountford
I suppose you know is biology the best place to be starting or do you look at chemists with envy and think all they get to do copper nanospheres or something?
00:23:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
Yeah. Honestly, I think one should challenge themselves to study the most rigorous aspects of whatever discipline they're interested.
00:23:52 Prof Vivek Kumar
Because fundamentally, if you can learn how to learn which.
00:23:58 Prof Vivek Kumar
Is a big.
00:23:59 Prof Vivek Kumar
Part of doing a PhD right is learning how to problem solve. It's learning how to learn, learning how to ask questions. If you can learn how to learn, you can learn anything. You can learn anything and learn anything well, like for example to treat patients.
00:24:12 Prof Vivek Kumar
One could go through medical school, do their residency, become an attending and then eventually do a fellowship or whatever, and then do a many, many years of training or one could become a nurse after two years of training or a PA or a there's assistant or a variety of other things that require a lot less.
00:24:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
But still have a significant amount of patient care patient to patient contact, things like that, right. It may not be the same intricacy. It may not be the exact same thing, but still, if your goal is to treat patients now, I think there are multiple ways you.
00:24:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
Can go about and getting to these different points. However, I would argue that by and large, many more physicians do.
00:24:49 Prof Vivek Kumar
Research do clinical trials do implement new stages and types of innovative care?
00:24:55 Prof Vivek Kumar
As opposed to as many PAS or nurses or what had. In fact, I would argue that there's a lot of nurses do a lot of research. So anyway, the point I'm trying to make is the more education you get, the longer you're in school, the more time you spend trying to problem solve, the better you are. When you approach almost any problem, right? And that could be either in the world of medicine.
00:25:16 Prof Vivek Kumar
Innovation. Entrepreneurship. What have you. When I go out and pitch a lot of entrepreneurs that I see a lot of really successful folks that I see have very, very, very diverse background.
00:25:27 Prof Vivek Kumar
They come from.
00:25:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
Art. They come from medicine. They come from folks, I mean.
00:25:32 Prof Vivek Kumar
Sciences PHD's.
00:25:33 Prof Vivek Kumar
Or purely from business and all of them have.
00:25:36 Prof Vivek Kumar
A deep and.
00:25:37 Prof Vivek Kumar
Intricate knowledge of whatever product they're pitching because all of them in their respective fields, it could be whatever are super strong hard workers, experts that put a lot of time.
00:25:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
And effort into that to get to that stage.
00:25:49 Will Mountford
OK. Well, with all of the, I suppose the diverse backgrounds that you're working with, do you find that, well, I'll stick to the way that our phrases on paper because I don't think I can put it more suitably.
00:25:59 Will Mountford
Is spinning off for everyone.
00:26:02 Will Mountford
Is commercialization is development best suited for every Ave. of research or every individual researcher?
00:26:08 Prof Vivek Kumar
So I think the answer to that is yes and no. I think every researcher should go through the process of understanding translation right of understanding from start to finish what that entails, whether you are a clinical trial scientist looking at, you know, dosing a drug, whether you are a chemical engineer designing a pipe for.
00:26:29 Prof Vivek Kumar
Actor right. I think every person should know from start to finish how their product is going to work. Like when I have a student talk to me about an idea, I asked them what do you envision on the product insert. You know a piece of paper. When you take Tylenol and you buy a drug or anything, it has a product. Insert a piece of paper. What do you envision being written on that piece of paper as all the studies that would have been done?
00:26:51 Prof Vivek Kumar
To approve this drug, right? How is it gonna be dosed? Where is it gonna be dosed? What's the dosing formulation? You might not know the answer to all of this or any of this.
00:26:59 Prof Vivek Kumar
But at least you should think about it. Understand that this might be important one day. Like you could create a really, really good cure for something, but if it's extremely unstable, you may never get it to the masses. You may create a vaccine for X, but they can't survive the cold chain to be delivered in remote locations. It may never get there, right? So there are so many.
00:27:19 Prof Vivek Kumar
Considerations that I think every scientist should know about.
00:27:22 Prof Vivek Kumar
So in a sense, it's translation for everyone. Yes, knowing the steps about it, knowing the pathway forward for it is critical and essential and should be taught at every level of school, right. Entrepreneurship and translation of ideas, right? How do you take that idea for a lemonade stand and actually implement it? Right? There's a Home Depot trip. There's a trip.
00:27:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
To the grocery store.
00:27:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
There is a setup fee. There is a weather check right. There are so many different aspects and anybody can go into this translational process and gain an appreciation for this from a lemonade stand to drug development. I honestly believe everyone should plan, right?
00:27:57 Prof Vivek Kumar
Yeah. And the no part of this is I myself am not the right person to take my product to human beings. I will tell you that right now I'll tell you that on every podcast I do, until I am maybe, but I don't think I'm the right person. I think the right person to do this is someone who has raised $50 million with pharma before.
00:28:16 Prof Vivek Kumar
I haven't.
00:28:17 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right, because at the right time you need to bring on the skills for that position, right? When we take our product into phase one clinical trials, we need to hire a CEO who has done phase one clinical trials who has experience doing that. Then we might need to hire a new CEO or maybe have that guy had that person right and raise a Series A.
00:28:37 Prof Vivek Kumar
Please be have that person exit the pharma, right? The person with track record. If you're going into war, you want to be prepared with the right generals, with the right equipment. Can't go in there, not unprepared. How about that? Too many examples to use, but I won't.
00:28:51 Prof Vivek Kumar
I think yeah, having that adequate level of preparation is important. So yes, in a sense, I think even I myself there is a limit to how much I can translate comfortably with efficiency and after that it is inefficient and a waste of your time and your innovation to not hand over the reins, not even handle the reins but not bring on the right.
00:29:12 Prof Vivek Kumar
Partners at the right time to move things forward. I think that's critical for translation the team.
00:29:21 Will Mountford
If there is a undergrad listening to this who thinks I just want to do my narrow band of biological research, I want to get into a lab. I want to be there with a pet for however long that takes. I want to do that and kind of stay in my lane.
00:29:36 Will Mountford
Do you think that there is going to be a future for keeping the?
00:29:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
Just up 100%. Oh my God, so 100%. And not just that whatever you are interested in, if you like pipetting, but you go home every day and you just love coding, right? Ohh forget that you love playing computer games, right? Or maybe designing stuff right? Or you. Like artistic design. Synergize those. We live in the age.
00:30:01 Prof Vivek Kumar
Where diversity of thought is celebrated, right? If you can bring together art and medicine and engineering, you are someone that is unique, more so than that person who knows only engineering, or that person knows only medicine.
00:30:13 Prof Vivek Kumar
Something else?
00:30:14 Prof Vivek Kumar
Synergizing your talents is important, dizzying around and wasting time is not right. Everything you do should be worth something. What is the goal? What are you trying to get out of it? Right. Like what is the win here? What is the achievement? What is the milestone? What is the best that you gonna have having done this? Right? What is the achievement? But if you pipette?
00:30:34 Prof Vivek Kumar
Then you go home, you're doing some artistic design. Maybe tomorrow you're gonna design new pipette. Maybe tomorrow you're gonna.
00:30:42 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right. So what I would advise that person who likes pipetting is find whatever you're interested in and deep dive into that and explore right. Find as many people you can talk to about it. Start innovating. Think about anything that's innovative and exciting about it, because there are opportunities to innovate. There is money out there for you to build your ideas.
00:31:02 Prof Vivek Kumar
And if you have any questions about those things, contact people like me, contact your local entrepreneurship office, right. I don't know if I can make a plug here for.
00:31:10 Prof Vivek Kumar
People. But the National Science Foundation runs this program, called NSF right National Science Foundation, NSF I-C ORPSI Corps icore they call it icore icore. It is a phenomenal program. It's very, very intense. They can get a little mean at times to make sure you complete.
00:31:30 Prof Vivek Kumar
Waiting on time. But if you go through the ICORE program that's available at your local universities and universities, have site programs, and if you're good, they can go to the national program. They will give you money.
00:31:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
To go speak to people, to figure out if your idea is a good idea or a bad idea. Now, obviously before you do the program, you kind of have to do some homework. Your Google searches, things like that, but there are so many resources available.
00:31:53 Prof Vivek Kumar
Wikipedia is available, Google, Google Scholar, and then get deeper, get more specific, learn a little bit more and.
00:32:01 Prof Vivek Kumar
Verify your sources.
00:32:02 Prof Vivek Kumar
But the information is available. Verify your ideas. Try to innovate in whatever sphere you're in, because that's where it comes from, right? Because if you're pipetting every day, you're going to say to yourself, man, I really don't like X and that's a gap. Maybe no one has thought about.
00:32:18 Prof Vivek Kumar
Innovate there and make a new pipettor make a new what's it called? I don't know. Maybe a finger splint.
00:32:24 Prof Vivek Kumar
Something there are so many things you can innovate and just because someone like me sitting in the process.
00:32:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
Chair barely pipettes. I'd never know about that. I'd miss that you wouldn't.
00:32:34 Will Mountford
Are there any other things to plug? Is there anything else on the near future horizon for what the lab is working on? Or any courses that you might be leading at NG80?
00:32:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
So in terms of Ngit in terms of education, in terms of courses in general, I would strongly recommend getting into.
00:32:52 Prof Vivek Kumar
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. I think the future is going to leverage these tools and you can speak some of that language, no pun intended, with machine learning and AI. But if you can speak any of these languages, I think you will have a leg up. That being said, you can learn a lot of this on YouTube.
00:33:13 Prof Vivek Kumar
One of the core languages that a lot of these programs use is Python. You can learn a lot of Python for free on YouTube, or you can learn CS 101, right?
00:33:22 Prof Vivek Kumar
You can learn in the course.
00:33:24 Prof Vivek Kumar
But get in there, Start learning. In fact, a lot of these resources are available for free from Google or MIT Open course, whereas so many different places get lost in education, get lost in learning about these things because I didn't go to school for these things and I talk about it now because I got lost in it and I just loved it and I thought.
00:33:44 Prof Vivek Kumar
How can I do what I'm doing now?
00:33:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
Which is peptides right? Making peptides making proteins and how can I synergize that with this really cool technology that's out there right now and now we have people working on it, so and speak to people and the most important thing you can do is stand on the shoulders of giants, right? When you go to Google Scholar on the bottom below the search bar, it says standing on the shoulders of giants.
00:34:07 Prof Vivek Kumar
The research is done by not inventing something out of the blue. In my opinion, research is done by taking a look at all the work that's been done.
00:34:15 Prof Vivek Kumar
Out there this.
00:34:15 Prof Vivek Kumar
Huge foundation and body of work and then saying.
00:34:19 Prof Vivek Kumar
What is a gap that exists and how can I innovate there? Right. So you have these light posts and sometimes they become beacons and sometimes they revolutionize the field. But oftentimes you have this huge body of work and you're making, you know, small beacons of change innovations.
00:34:34 Will Mountford
They say one of the best things you can do is talk to people. If anyone wants to talk to you, where can they find you? Either online social media? What would be the best way to reach out?
00:34:43 Prof Vivek Kumar
So I'm pretty big on LinkedIn. I spent a lot of time there. I guess if I can plug things, I'll plug LinkedIn as well because I think it's a phenomenal social networking app. Ever since COVID I have used LinkedIn to make so many collaborations that have significantly changed the type of work I do and the folks I speak to in the nature of the work I do.
00:35:04 Prof Vivek Kumar
In addition to that, it's a great way to communicate with people who you might never respond.
00:35:08 Prof Vivek Kumar
Before one of the things I've always believed in is people like me, as is evidence right here. Love to talk about themselves. Loves to talk about what they do. So if you e-mail someone or message someone and say, hey, you know, I'm really interested in self assembly. I'm really interested in how we can leverage quantum computing in peptide design.
00:35:28 Prof Vivek Kumar
I'm really interested in. I don't know diabetic retinopathy. I'm really interested in therapeutic, angiogenesis, dental regeneration, something right. I'd love to talk to you about it. So reach out with something you're interested in. It always helps to, you know, we will search a little bit, watch a couple of YouTube videos, get yourself up to speed, you know, make the most.
00:35:44 Prof Vivek Kumar
Use of every opportunity.
00:35:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
That these conversations will change your life. You'll learn lessons that you otherwise wouldn't have learned. Also, another thing I can tell you is don't go in as a salesman, right? Don't go in pitching. Here is my product. Drink it. Right. Don't go in saying hey. I want to be an astrophysicist. Tell you know, what are the steps I need? I would go and say, hey, you're an astrophysicist, what do you do?
00:36:07 Prof Vivek Kumar
Everyday, what's your favorite part about your job? Like like discover something true about it. Discover something unique about it, because everything else you will get from Google right information is out there. But that perspective, that feel that unique aspect that's hard, right. And even your ChatGPT is not gonna.
00:36:24 Prof Vivek Kumar
Tell you? Yeah, I really don't wanna bother my son to take me to the clinic. That's a big inconvenience, right? You can ask AI. What's the biggest challenge with developing drugs for blindness? And it might tell you, extend relief, blah, blah, blah, right? Or efficacy targeting different, you know, soluble a number of different things. But fundamentally through customer discovery, through speaking to people.
00:36:45 Prof Vivek Kumar
You're going to realize.
00:36:46 Prof Vivek Kumar
You know that inconvenience should influence how you make things.
00:36:50 Will Mountford
I think that it's heartening that for all of our talk about, you know, the cutting edge of technology and the atomic scale resolution technology that you used to examine molecules that go into medicine, but it still comes back to people.
00:37:06 Prof Vivek Kumar
I think it starts and ends with people, right? And my argument is at every step of the way you should be thinking about those people, whether it's the patience. Right. But I mean, you can think about that.
00:37:16 Prof Vivek Kumar
Patient, but the farmer is not interested. They're not gonna pick up your product. The patents gonna expire. It's never gonna make it the clinic, right. So you gotta think about pharma. You can't think about pharma unless you think about the physician because the physician needs to have uptake. Otherwise, pharma isn't gonna buy in, right. And then you got to think about the insurance company because the insurance company doesn't have a reimbursement code for this product.
00:37:37 Prof Vivek Kumar
You're gonna have to apply for one. It's gonna cost several millions. Delay your.
00:37:40 Prof Vivek Kumar
Gave filing right. So Long story short, you gotta learn the ecosystem. Whatever game you wanna play, right? Go learn the rules. Go watch a couple of games. Go speak to some of the players, speak to the umpires. Speak to the fieldsman. Speak to the bending guy because that bending guy is gonna have some lessons that you will never have heard of before. People that it cleans the seats because he's going to tell you something that you will not know.
00:38:02 Prof Vivek Kumar
And then by a baseball.
00:38:04 Prof Vivek Kumar
I mean, you know what I mean? That's the homework you want to do before you become a baseball player. Go do that. Yeah. Doing your homework is critical. It is critical. I would advise every kid who's in high school in college who's a professor. I would advise you go out there and speak to people because I myself and my colleagues.
00:38:24 Prof Vivek Kumar
Make a mistake all the time. Make the same mistake all the time, which is getting siloed into this.
00:38:29 Prof Vivek Kumar
Small world of.
00:38:31 Prof Vivek Kumar
Self assembling peptides and not doing anything else right and not exploring being resistant to changing out of that. And I would argue that unless you capitalize on the latest technologies, you're going to become outdated and you're not going to be innovative, you're not going to change the world. And if you're not doing that, do something else right? That's what we're here for. That's what's fun. That's the goal of this.
00:38:52 Prof Vivek Kumar
My opinion.
00:38:52 Will Mountford
Well, I can't think of any better note to wrap things up on, then go out there.
00:38:56 Will Mountford
And change the world.
00:38:57 Prof Vivek Kumar
Changed the world. You know, my PhD advisor, Elliott Chaikoff, he gave a talk once and on this last slide. I don't remember the.
00:39:04 Prof Vivek Kumar
Exact words, but you know, he said.
00:39:06 Prof Vivek Kumar
Sometimes it gets.
00:39:06 Prof Vivek Kumar
Tiring, right? You're in the lab. You're pipetting. You're doing this animal work you're doing.
00:39:10 Prof Vivek Kumar
Whatever gets tiring.
00:39:11 Prof Vivek Kumar
And you're like, you know.
00:39:12 Prof Vivek Kumar
What? Just forget it. I'm gonna.
00:39:13 Prof Vivek Kumar
Come back tomorrow or you gotta time part of the week and you're like, forget it. I'll just do it on Monday, but just keep in mind that extra second that you put in that extra minute, that extra day, that extra hour, that extra day, extra year, right for some people.
00:39:26 Prof Vivek Kumar
Right. That you put in might change someone's life, right? The clock is ticking. The clock is ticking. And ever since then, remember that talk from 2011 at a Gordon Research Conference in Tucson during biomaterials in 2011 in June.
00:39:41 Prof Vivek Kumar
Till now, the clock is ticking right. Patients are waiting. The clock is ticking and that's what drives me. And that should drive all the people in my shoes.