July 30, 2025 • 34 mins
On the Inside View, we talk to the experts behind the innovations shaping our lives. This week, Andrey Zarur discusses the future of cancer surgery and makes a bold prediction — that we could effectively see the end of cancer within our lifetimes. Zarur, a biochemist and co-founder of Lumicell and GreenLight Biosciences, is on his way to making this prediction a reality. He sits down with Oz to discuss the FDA-approved technology that is helping surgeons see and remove cancer tissue with unprecedented precision. Then, they discuss how Zarur plans to address agriculture’s pest problem, without using chemical pesticides.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story, and today
I'm here with Cara Price. Hey os Hey, Cara. This
week's story is one that is quite personal to me,
and it has to do with the technology that we
use to detect and treat cancer.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
You know, I think cancer is unfortunately one of those
things that many people have confronted. Even if you have
never received a cancer diagnosis, many people have watched loved
ones struggle to overcome the disease.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's right, and my parents separated when I was very
very young one. In fact, my parents are sort lived
in different countries, so I was often shuttling around between
them in the company of a nanny who was essentially
a third parent, and she unfortunately got with breast cancer
(01:01):
that was detected too late. She had a double mistectomy,
but the cancer already metastasized and she died. And it's
one of the great sadnesses of my life.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
In fact, I'm sorry to hear that, you know, it's
unfortunately an all too common story.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Absolutely. So I got connected with this guy called Andre
Zor a few months ago, and he's a biochemist and
also the co founder of a company called Loomis cell
which is a company that's changing how cancer surgeries are performed.
So I was pretty intrigued.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So can you just explain to me what is wrong
with the way that surgeries are being done now?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, I was pretty surprised to hear from andre that
cancer surgery isn't as precise as perhaps we might imagine
or hope. He says that there's actually a fair amount
of art to the science of detecting and then removing
tumors in surgery.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
I think it's one of those dirty secrets in medicine
that people don't really realize. Cancer surgery is extraordinarily imprecise,
and even the best surgeons in the world will miss
cancer because, contrary to common perception, cancer cells are really
not that.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
Different from normal tissue.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
It's very difficult to tell in real time during a surgery,
with everything going on, where does the tumorand and the
healthy tissue start.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
In fact, Andrei told me that the best cancer surgeons
are considered the best because they're so good at detecting
where the cancerous tissue ends and where the healthy tissue begins.
This is through a process called palpating, which is basically
a fancy way of saying feeling out by touch, the
(02:55):
difference between healthy cells and cancerus cells.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I've been there, and I've tried, and I can't feel
a damn thing. It's not something that the untrained fingers
are able to detect. But all of the world's best
surgeons is able to tell whether there's cancer left behind
by pile paiding around where the primary tumor was and
deciding in real time whether more tissue needs to be
(03:18):
taken out or not. But most cancer surgeries are imperfect,
and on average, if we look at all cancer surgeries,
thirty to forty percent of the time, thirty to forty
percent of the time there will be cancer left behind,
not on purpose, unintentionally.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
That seems like a high percentage.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, I mean, of course, is not to say that
cancer surgery is ineffective. Alongside drugs, these procedures have saved
millions of lives in the past few decades. Andrew thinks
we can do better and save more lives, and so
he set out to solve this problem, and his company
has now created a technology to more precisely detect cancerous tissue.
(04:00):
It's called Loomis cell, and so far it's being used
to treat breast cancer patients. But Andre doesn't want to
stop at just one type of cancer. He wants to
treat them all, and he has a deeply personal reason
to do so. He told me that he watched one
of the women who he loved most in his life,
a woman he grew up with, suffer from an unsuccessful
(04:21):
avarian cancer treatment. Andre tells it best, So here's the
rest of our conversation. And I've lived through the tragedy
of an unsuccessful cancer treatment, and so of you, and
I'm wondering if you could tell that story.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
It was one of those incredibly sad stories that her
cancer was called relatively late. It was a varian cancer,
and he was a varian cancer that had metastasized to.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
What we call the peroneal cavity.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
That is the cavity where all the reproductive organs of
the women are, as well as several other Bible ord
And there is really no way to identify where cancer
has metastasized in the peritoneal cavity other than palpating around
and trying to figure out where the cancer is. And unfortunately,
(05:16):
more often than not, they failed. The vast majority of
times they failed.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
What was the name of the friend that you lost.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Her name was Monica.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
If I remember from our last conversation, though, you really
lived through the journey with Monic current and you may
have promised to her, I think before she passed away.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, it was one of these things that you never forget,
you know, we went through this journey together.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
She was in Mexico at the time I was here
in Boston, and so.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Because I was privileged to work with a lot of
top physicians in the field, I was able to put
her in contact with some of the best doctors in
the varian cancer and you know, the incredible team at
MD Anderson was able to extend her life by almost
nine months, which is unheard of or a stage four
over a cancer patient. She had just had a baby, Emilia,
(06:04):
who unfortunately grew up not knowing his mom. Her doctor,
David at m D Anderson said, look, we're at the
end of the line here, We're done here, and she
needs to find peace on the fact that she fought
with all her will, but it's time for her to
let go. And so I flew to Mexico City and
the whole family was there and we're talking, and you know,
(06:24):
she was making jokes, and then at some point we
were left alone and she said, I don't understand the
why why aren't we doing better? Why is in the
field doing something that will give women like me who
just gave birth to beautiful, healthy baby, the opportunity to
leave longer to do something with our lives. Why why
(06:44):
aren't you doing more? And I said, well, you know,
it's a combination of factors where she's like, look, I
don't want to hear you have to promise me, and
I did that you're going to do everything in your power,
everything you can to make sure this doesn't ever happen
again to another woman. That when a woman gets diagnosed
(07:06):
with a variant cancer, breast cancer, correctal cancer, whatever it
may be, and they tell her that she needs to
go to surgery, that they're not going to tell her
at the end of the surgery what they told me,
which is there's some cancer left behind and you have
weeks to leave. You have to promise me that you're
going to do everything in your power and you're not
going to rest until you have figured out a solution
(07:27):
to this. And I did. I, you know, held her
hand in mind, and I said, I promise you.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
I will do that.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
She passed away a few weeks later. We didn't discuss
this ever again, and you know, it was kind of
stuck in the back of my mind for a couple
of years. So I was like, Okay, well I made
this promise. And then you know, I met my co
founder David. He had just lost his wife to breast cancer,
and I saw the opportunity to partner up with.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Somebody who was as heart and as deeply.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Moved by the fact that we can do better by
these women, that we can't do better by their families,
and you know, we have the power to do something
to change it.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
And so that's how a fifteen year journey started.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Fifteen years almost to the date. Let's talk about what
is loumicell, What does it do, how does it work.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
What we know is that if you catch cancer early,
surgery can be curative if you get all the cancer
cells out, But most cancer surgeries are imperfect. When you
do a breast conserving surgery, the problem is that thirty
to forty percent of the time, the surgeon will inadvertently
(08:38):
leave cancer cells behind. So what loomicell does, for the
first time in history is it gives the surgeons a guideline,
a signal where they are able to identify in real
time during the surgery whether there are cancer cells left
behind or not. How well, you get a Nobel Price
(09:02):
winner and you get a couple of really smart people
from MIT, and you define the problem. And that's what
people from MIT do. They go and solve problems, right,
And so in this case, Munjigu Weendi, Jorge Ferreer and
David Leif they sort of joined me in this journey
and said, all right, well, we need something that is
extraordinarily safe, inexpensive that can be injected before surgery and
(09:22):
will give surgeons the ability to make cancer cells illuminate,
be fluorescent under normal light.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
Only it's purple light.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And so the surgeon will switch off the big lamp
that you see on the ceiling on the operating room,
and the device that we use has purple light coming
out of it, and when it hits the cells that
are cancers, those cells fluores back and can be detected
and displayed on the screen so the surgeon can take
action immediately. The way it works at the molecular level
(09:52):
is proteins have a function, and if you can tailor
protein function you can make some real magic happen. And
so what we do is we take advantage of a
protein that is abundant in cancer cells. It's a protein
that cancer cells use to cut tissue that is surrounding
(10:13):
the tumor. One of the most important features of cancer
is that it destroys its environment so that it can grow.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Otherwise it just doesn't grow right.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
And so we detect that protein by providing it something
too cut. And when it cuts that substrate that we provide,
that's when light happens. Think about one of those little
sticks that you use, a glow stick, right that when
you crack it, it emits light. Well, the same but
at a molecular level. When you crack this little mini
glow stick, and the only way to crack it is
(10:44):
by a protein that is primarily expressed in cancer cells,
it gives you a luminous signal.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So you're injecting a substance into the patients, which you
know that the cancer will destroy. When it destroys the substance,
it emits this light, which is visible under purple light.
Correct well, and where are you on delivering on that promise?
Speaker 3 (11:09):
So we were incredibly fortunate that the FDA approved this
product last year. Hospitals started using it in the first
quarter of this year, and it's being used now at
several hospitals across the US.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Stanford was the first adopter.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
There are three surgeons at Stanford that are essentially doing
every single cancer surgery that they do using the Loomi
cell technology.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Breast cancer surgery or beyond breast cancer.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
Breast cancer.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
At this point, of course, the journey will continue for
a long time because I'm not going to rest until
we are successful in a varian cancer.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Ovarian cancer.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Unfortunately, in the list of difficult cancers to treat, ovarian
cancer is kind of at the top of one of
the hardest ones to treat, right up there next to
brain cancer and so on. And so right now there's
trials on going on sophageal called recto prostate cancer and
so on, and eventually we will get two complicated things
like brain cancer and varian cancer. But to know that
(12:08):
patients are going in big academic cancer centers like Stanford
and relatively small regional hospitals like Baker in Florida, and
patients are going in there and they're leaving the surgery
room and the doctor is saying we got it all.
And when they say we got it all, before they
had a seventy percent certainty that they got it all
(12:29):
based on our clinical data. Now they have like a
ninety eight percent.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
Certainty that they did in fact get it on.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
What did it feel like to watch the technology being
deployed for the first time?
Speaker 3 (12:39):
You know, you can never get over the loss, especially
the loss of somebody as incredible, as beautiful, as full
of energy and love and life as Monica was. There's
nothing that will ever substitute for having her around. There's
nothing that will fill that hole. But to fulfill a
promise that it's made under those conditions is one of
(13:01):
the most gratifying things that you can do in life, right,
because it's not an empty promise. This is not going
to benefit hurt, It's not going to benefit me. It's
going to benefit hopefully millions of people.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
Who who get the news that they have cancer and
that they need to have surgery. That is unique.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
And while it doesn't make up for the loss of
somebody that you love, the fact that you got fifteen
years worth of disappointments and failure and restarts and falling
down having to get up again, because you have this
energy that is propelled by the problems that you made.
I don't think that there's any other motivation that is
(13:38):
as strong as that. It is that kind of energy
that's like I can't quit. I don't have the right
to quit ever.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Zooming out a little bit to the wider field of
technology and cancer, I mean, you laid it out, I
think very well. Which is better detection allows for earlier intervention? Obviously?
You know nowadays in the US, one and eight women
are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer at some
point in their lives, but the mortality rate has been
(14:06):
in steady decline. Where are we on the bigger picture
of beating cancer? I mean where there was an article
in the New York And not too long ago about
how detection is getting better but doesn't necessarily mean better outcomes.
There's a lot of excitement around you know, AI, personalized drugs.
You know, taking a step back, what is the state
of the nation, of the wider field of technology's ability
(14:28):
to kill cancer?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
You're right to take a wider view, right, We're going
to live longer.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
And most mechanical things we will be able to fix,
including the heart, which at the end is a mechanical pump.
So cancer is the ultimate frontier if we continue to
improve our health as a society or be sitting the
US notwithstanding because that's a problem. But you know, if
you look at the rest of the world, people are
living longer and longer, and cancer is becoming the primary
(14:59):
cause of death, and so at some point we have
to address this in a much more efficient manner than
we are today. We have some wonderful drugs, and I'm
not against drugs at all. In fact, some cancers there's
nothing you can do surgery wise, and you have to
use drugs. So we are making significant advances and eventually
(15:19):
we will find drugs that are highly specific that are
going to be able to target cancer cells in ways
that we couldn't imagine ten years ago without the side
effects that we used to have with raw chemotherapy. But
I believe and I think most physicians will agree that
surgery will remain the front line way to deal with
(15:42):
cancer for the simple fact that if you have to
kill cancer cells, it's better to kill less cells, and
the more you can get out of the body, the
less cells you have to kill later on. And if
you can ensure that you didn't leave any cells in
the primary tumor site, then you're going to be better off.
And there's no question about that. So my prediction is
(16:05):
we will see cancer quote unquote end within our lifetimes.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
That's a big prediction.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
I think it's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
I think our understanding of biology, the biology of cancer
over the next forty years is going to get us
to the point where we can address cancer very very
effectively through a combination of surgery and incredibly targeted therapies.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
How big a role do you think lo Miiselle could
play in that.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
I think lou Miisell will become the center of care
for cancer surgery for all cancers. I do believe that
we do. In the US, we do about a million
to two million cancer surgeries every single year. That's across
all cancers. Breast cancer is one of the highest ones,
with three hundred thousand surgeries a year. I would say
that this year we're probably going to do a couple
(16:51):
of thousand surgeries, and then that is going.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
To grow pretty quickly from there. So right now we.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Are in either full use or testing at about a
dozen hospitals in the US. We expect to be in
about twenty to thirty hospitals by the end of the year,
and the projection for the following years to be at.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
About one hundred health centers across the United States.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And if lou Misselle doesn't become the standard of care
for cancer surgery, why will that be What would have happened,
would have.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Gone wrong, because somebody will come up with a better
solution and that will.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Be a happy day. Technology is only as good as
technology is good. Right. We all used to use AOL At.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
One point, I still have a Yahue email account, and
I may be one of the only ones left. And
then technology got better and everybody moved to something else,
and that's entirely fine.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
That's what we want. We want to create ever rising bars.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
So that people get over them. We don't create barriers
so that people can't get over them. We create barriers
so that stronger will.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Prevail after the break. How Andrea is working to improve
another industry, our food system.
Speaker 5 (18:08):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
I'd have to know a bit more about you and
what brought you to the field of biotechnology.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
You know, I grew up in Mexico City, not really
knowing what I wanted to do.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
With my life.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I
had the opportunity, after finishing college in Mexico to come
to Boston and become.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
A part of M I. T. And Harvard, which.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Opened up an entire new universe of of what could
be done with biology. Very early on, I got interested
in a very specialized field, which is how proteins, which
of course are the building blocks of nature, how their
structure relates to their funk. And it opened up a
(19:03):
brand new universe to me that I was just not
aware of that. You know, all these little, tiny, microscopic
machines regulate everything that happens in nature in an incredibly
powerful way. And so the more I learned about that
microscopic biological world, the more.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
I wanted to know.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
And then, of course, you know, I learned that they
could be used to cure disease, which is what I
wanted to do all my life. You know, growing up
in a lower middle class household, my mom was teacher,
my dad worked in construction. You know, you're kind of
wondering what am I going to do with my life,
And there was always this desire to try to help
(19:41):
other people, and I really didn't know how, and so
this universe that opened up before my eyes gave me
an opportunity to say, if I can figure out some
of this very unique processes that happen in our bodies
at a microscopic level, I could help cure disease. I
could help make a better life for people. And that
(20:02):
was just incredible.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
When green Light Biosciences, your other company, was publicly listed,
you talked about having two missions in life. One was
quote the ability to provide solutions for healthcare, which we've discussed.
The other was to grow food sustainably and cleanly, which
we haven't discussed yet. This also begins with a personal story.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, and that personal story is a lot cuter because
of course nobody died, but it also involves My favorite
person in the world was my son Alex. And Alex
had something that you know, I think a lot of
parents will relate to, which was Alex didn't need a
lot and he was super thin and losing weight, and
(20:46):
a lot of the things that we would feed him
would make him sick, and we were just like racking
our brain trying to figure out what the hell was
going on. Like one of the only things he would
eat was bananas. He would eat bananas all day long.
And I remember my mom being like, let me bananas
is you know, when have you ever seen a you know,
a sickly gorilla and only it is bananas.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
They don't only eat bananas or whatever. But you know,
it made sense because bananas are protected.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
They have this incredibly strong peel that protects them from
basically everything that is outside. And so one of the
things that would make Alex really sick, for example, would
be strawberries, and we couldn't figure out why. My wife,
who is not a scientist, eventually figure it out that
it wasn't the strawberry itself, or the salary or the
(21:32):
carrot or whatever, it was whatever chemical leftovers where on
that particular food. Chemical synthetic pesticides were the.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Biggest s culprit.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
There were others, like some of the colorings would make
him fairly anxious, but what would make him really sick
would be And we later identified a class of insecticides
called organo phosphates.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Of phosphates.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
If you google or akin of phosphates, they're nerve agents.
Most famous or kind of phosphate of all times sarrying gas.
So here's human wisdom in full display for you. We
take a nerve agent that was used to kill people,
millions of people, okay, and we chemically modify it, and
we to solve it in water and dilute.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
It down, and then we spray it on.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
The same foods that we're going to feed our kids.
And so what I discovered is that we use thousands
of chemicals, none of which are particularly safe or specific
or bio degradeable or clean, and that if we don't
use them, by the way, we would lose seventy to
eighty percent of our food. So it's all like we
have an option. So a lot of people will tell you, ah,
(22:46):
it just short, all should just go organic.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Okay, Well, then we're going to need another eight planets to.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Feed the soon to be ten billion people that we
have on this planet, and there's no room for that.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
In fact, thirty to twenty.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Percent of our food gets destroyed on the farm before
we have an ability to harvest it. That's an insane number.
It's billions of metric tons of food that get destroyed
by pests because we cannot control them with the chemicals we.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Have, because they've become resistant.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Because most of the bogs have become resistant to the
chemicals we have, and so there came another impossible idea, right,
which is, okay, well, let's replace those chemicals with something
that is here's a list of stuff that we have
to come up with. First of all, cheap, because you know,
farmers are the engine or society. They already don't make
enough money. We can't give them something that's going to
(23:38):
be three times the price of what they're paying today.
That's just not going to work. So it's got to
be inexpensive. It's got to be potent, because they're not
going to sacrifice their yield. In fact, it has to
be more potent than the chemicals they're using today so
that they can recover more of their food.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
But it has to be one hundred percent safe.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
It cannot affect the environment, It can't affect beneficial insects,
can't affect pollinators, it cannot affect obviously human health, and
it cannot accumulate in our food because otherwise it'll end
up in our kids.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
And so, you know, that's the list of things that
we had to come up with.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
And it's kind of interesting when you put a list
of features that is that impossible you eliminate a lot
of things really really quickly, and the only thing that
was left was this wonder molecule called right on nucleic
acid RNA. And so it turned out that RNA was
at that point we thought would be, and now we
(24:34):
have proved that it is the solution to a lot
of those problems.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
RNA has become famous since the COVID pandemic as something
that you can inject to in a sense, change the
DNA of an organism, in our case humans. Is that
is that a fair assessment?
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Incorrect? Okay? The messenger on a Vaccines do not change
the DNA. First.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Now, RNA acts in two ways, right the way in
which we all know, which is the way we learn
in high school, which is our DNA gets transcribed into RNA,
So the RNA is a faithful copy of the DNA.
That RNA then gets read by a ribosome and it
gets translated into a protein. That's the machinery of the body.
(25:24):
DNA goes to RNA, RNA goes to proteins. That's what
we learn in high school. What we didn't learn in
high school is that there's another function of RNA, which
is a function of interference, and that means that there
are RNAs, they're called small interfering RNAs whose job is
actually to silence down some of the messenger RNAs that
(25:48):
are not needed. So why is that, Well, imagine that
your body says I have too much of this messenger RNA,
that I don't need it.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I don't need more.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Insulin or more growth RM or more cortisol or whatever it.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Is that your body is producing at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And so what your body does is then it produces
this small interfering RNase to suppress the excess messenger RNA
that is out there so that you don't end up
with an overproduction of a protein.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
So now you can take that tool that is natural.
It's nature. We're using nature. We're not using something artificial.
This is a natural pathway.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
But what you're doing, instead of saying we're just going
to suppress the excess messenger in a you can say
I'm going to suppress all of the messenger RNA that
leads to the production of something that is vital to
a fungi or a weed or an insect. Now, the
best part about this is it won't work on vertebrates.
(26:47):
It won't work on fish, birds, humans, cats, dogs. So
because we have this built in protection, it is quite
literally impossible for our products to have any impact on
human health or the health of a whole bunch of organisms.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
The best part, however.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Is that you can finally tune the sequence of that
RNA to only affect the pest that you're interested in
affecting and nothing else, and you can be extraordinarily specific
in that sense.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Let me give you an example.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Our very first product is an insecticide against something called
the Colorado potato beetle.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
It's just a beetle.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
It's about yay, big, has big stripes on its back.
Another beetle that you should be very familiar with is
the lady bog. The ladybug is in fact a beetle,
and it is very closely related to the Colorado potato beetle.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
They are like first cousins.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
If you apply any chemical synthetic pesticide that will kill
the Colorado potato beetle, you will likely destroy the ladybug.
Speaker 4 (27:46):
Colonies that are in your field or in your.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Surrounding areas and so on. Okay, because they're so closely
related that anything chemical that will impact the potato beetle
will impact the lady Our product is designed to affect
the Colorado potato beetle without having any impact whatsoever on
the ladybog, even though they share like ninety five percent
of their genes. We can tailor we can fine tune
(28:09):
our RNA to kill one and not have any impact whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
On the other one. And not only the ladybug is faired.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Honey Bees, butterflies, earthworms, et cetera, et cetera are not
affected by this RNA because this RNA specific to the
gene that exists in the potato.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Beet And where's it being used today?
Speaker 3 (28:29):
This product right now, it's the number one selling product
in potatoes in the US, and so it's approved in
the US. It's now its sales have now surpassed the
sales of all of the leaning chemical pesticides in potato
fields treating the Colorado potato beet So in two years
we became the market lead and we're incredibly happy with
its performance.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Now, you said a moment ago that is not GMO,
But there have been some criticisms that in a sense,
my releasing this biological agent and effecting the internal mechanism
of these insects that you're in essense to playing god
or intervening in nature in a way that's kind of
could have unpredictable consequences. How do you respond to some
(29:10):
of those criticisms.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
I love that question because like, oh, you're playing God. No, no, no,
We've been playing god for one hundred years. Agriculture is
not the natural state of planet Earth.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
It's a human invention.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Look, we scientific community have the responsibility to be extraordinarily
transparent about the mechanism of action, about the testing that's
been done, about how we've done it, about why we
feel so strongly that our products are safe and effective
and better for society and for nature than the products
that we're replacing. So, if we're going to sustain ten
(29:44):
billion people on this planet, we need industrial agriculture. It's
no way around it. And if we're going to do that,
it's much better to spray something that is highly targeted,
that is safe, that is a natural pathway, that is bithgradable,
that does not accumulate raise some chemical that is derived
from oil that is going to drill a hole or
(30:05):
destroy the brain of every insect that it comes in
contact with. If I had my choice, I would move
to a different planet, and I would keep the population
low and we would all leave off the land.
Speaker 4 (30:15):
Okay, that's not a choice we have.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
And we have a responsibility to another nine billion humans
to provide them with clean, inexpensive, sustainably grown food. That's
the state of reality. I love people who argue that
society's gone wrong. Okay, great, we know all right. It's
not our responsibility to bitch and wine about it. It's our
responsibility to fix it.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
We like bold predictions on this show. You have one
very bold prediction earlier about effectively curing cancer within our lifetimes.
What's your bold prediction for where this RNA technology might
lead us within our lifetimes?
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Well, I think green Light is going to have dozens
of products in the market.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
I think that we will provide tools to farmers in
every continent, will allow them to add more tools to
their toolkit to deal with destructive bests.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
What I can't tell you is if other companies will follow.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Suit and come up with other biological solutions that are
as good as effective.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
As ours are.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
My hope is they will, because farmers need them. Chemicals
are on their way out, whether we like it or not.
They are just not working anymore.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
You opened this conversation talking about growing up in a
middle class house in Mexico and with Monica got very sick.
She said to you know, we didn't send you to
Boston for no reason. What do you think that your
global perspective? I mean, the fact that you grew up
in Mexico brings you as a technologist.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, it's really interesting and it's hard not to get
political about this.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
But disease knows no boundaries.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Disease in any form, whether it's human disease, plant disease,
crop disease, animal disease doesn't care about the lines that
we humans have artificially painted on maps.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
They don't care about what rays you are. Cancer affects
every race more or less equally. They don't care whether
you were born in the US or not. It's global.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
We are fighting global battles, and we are increasingly using
local armies. Can't find a global battle using local armies.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
You need to be global.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
You need to make the tools that you have affordable
and accessible in the US to everybody. It is the
right thing to do. It is the only way in
which you can achieve global equilibrium. We have people from
one hundred countries working at Greenland, and we're only three
hundred people.
Speaker 4 (32:50):
Science is not Science is global.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
No matter what religion you are or what political system
you subscribe to, it is our responsibility to think globally
because these global problems affect us all. And so my
mission has always been from day one to make all
these solutions, whether it's in cancer, whether it's in our
ability to grow food global.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
Andrew, thank you, thanks my pleasure, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
For tech Stuff. I'm as Valoshian and I'm Kara Price.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Tapia.
It was executive produced by me Ozwaaloshan and Kate Osborne
for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley
mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Join us on Friday for the Weekend Tech when Karen
and I will run through the tech headlines you may
have missed.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story, and today
I'm here with Cara Price. Hey os Hey, Cara. This
week's story is one that is quite personal to me,
and it has to do with the technology that we
use to detect and treat cancer.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
You know, I think cancer is unfortunately one of those
things that many people have confronted. Even if you have
never received a cancer diagnosis, many people have watched loved
ones struggle to overcome the disease.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's right, and my parents separated when I was very
very young one. In fact, my parents are sort lived
in different countries, so I was often shuttling around between
them in the company of a nanny who was essentially
a third parent, and she unfortunately got with breast cancer
(01:01):
that was detected too late. She had a double mistectomy,
but the cancer already metastasized and she died. And it's
one of the great sadnesses of my life.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
In fact, I'm sorry to hear that, you know, it's
unfortunately an all too common story.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Absolutely. So I got connected with this guy called Andre
Zor a few months ago, and he's a biochemist and
also the co founder of a company called Loomis cell
which is a company that's changing how cancer surgeries are performed.
So I was pretty intrigued.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So can you just explain to me what is wrong
with the way that surgeries are being done now?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, I was pretty surprised to hear from andre that
cancer surgery isn't as precise as perhaps we might imagine
or hope. He says that there's actually a fair amount
of art to the science of detecting and then removing
tumors in surgery.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
I think it's one of those dirty secrets in medicine
that people don't really realize. Cancer surgery is extraordinarily imprecise,
and even the best surgeons in the world will miss
cancer because, contrary to common perception, cancer cells are really
not that.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
Different from normal tissue.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
It's very difficult to tell in real time during a surgery,
with everything going on, where does the tumorand and the
healthy tissue start.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
In fact, Andrei told me that the best cancer surgeons
are considered the best because they're so good at detecting
where the cancerous tissue ends and where the healthy tissue begins.
This is through a process called palpating, which is basically
a fancy way of saying feeling out by touch, the
(02:55):
difference between healthy cells and cancerus cells.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I've been there, and I've tried, and I can't feel
a damn thing. It's not something that the untrained fingers
are able to detect. But all of the world's best
surgeons is able to tell whether there's cancer left behind
by pile paiding around where the primary tumor was and
deciding in real time whether more tissue needs to be
(03:18):
taken out or not. But most cancer surgeries are imperfect,
and on average, if we look at all cancer surgeries,
thirty to forty percent of the time, thirty to forty
percent of the time there will be cancer left behind,
not on purpose, unintentionally.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
That seems like a high percentage.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, I mean, of course, is not to say that
cancer surgery is ineffective. Alongside drugs, these procedures have saved
millions of lives in the past few decades. Andrew thinks
we can do better and save more lives, and so
he set out to solve this problem, and his company
has now created a technology to more precisely detect cancerous tissue.
(04:00):
It's called Loomis cell, and so far it's being used
to treat breast cancer patients. But Andre doesn't want to
stop at just one type of cancer. He wants to
treat them all, and he has a deeply personal reason
to do so. He told me that he watched one
of the women who he loved most in his life,
a woman he grew up with, suffer from an unsuccessful
(04:21):
avarian cancer treatment. Andre tells it best, So here's the
rest of our conversation. And I've lived through the tragedy
of an unsuccessful cancer treatment, and so of you, and
I'm wondering if you could tell that story.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
It was one of those incredibly sad stories that her
cancer was called relatively late. It was a varian cancer,
and he was a varian cancer that had metastasized to.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
What we call the peroneal cavity.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
That is the cavity where all the reproductive organs of
the women are, as well as several other Bible ord
And there is really no way to identify where cancer
has metastasized in the peritoneal cavity other than palpating around
and trying to figure out where the cancer is. And unfortunately,
(05:16):
more often than not, they failed. The vast majority of
times they failed.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
What was the name of the friend that you lost.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Her name was Monica.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
If I remember from our last conversation, though, you really
lived through the journey with Monic current and you may
have promised to her, I think before she passed away.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, it was one of these things that you never forget,
you know, we went through this journey together.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
She was in Mexico at the time I was here
in Boston, and so.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Because I was privileged to work with a lot of
top physicians in the field, I was able to put
her in contact with some of the best doctors in
the varian cancer and you know, the incredible team at
MD Anderson was able to extend her life by almost
nine months, which is unheard of or a stage four
over a cancer patient. She had just had a baby, Emilia,
(06:04):
who unfortunately grew up not knowing his mom. Her doctor,
David at m D Anderson said, look, we're at the
end of the line here, We're done here, and she
needs to find peace on the fact that she fought
with all her will, but it's time for her to
let go. And so I flew to Mexico City and
the whole family was there and we're talking, and you know,
(06:24):
she was making jokes, and then at some point we
were left alone and she said, I don't understand the
why why aren't we doing better? Why is in the
field doing something that will give women like me who
just gave birth to beautiful, healthy baby, the opportunity to
leave longer to do something with our lives. Why why
(06:44):
aren't you doing more? And I said, well, you know,
it's a combination of factors where she's like, look, I
don't want to hear you have to promise me, and
I did that you're going to do everything in your power,
everything you can to make sure this doesn't ever happen
again to another woman. That when a woman gets diagnosed
(07:06):
with a variant cancer, breast cancer, correctal cancer, whatever it
may be, and they tell her that she needs to
go to surgery, that they're not going to tell her
at the end of the surgery what they told me,
which is there's some cancer left behind and you have
weeks to leave. You have to promise me that you're
going to do everything in your power and you're not
going to rest until you have figured out a solution
(07:27):
to this. And I did. I, you know, held her
hand in mind, and I said, I promise you.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
I will do that.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
She passed away a few weeks later. We didn't discuss
this ever again, and you know, it was kind of
stuck in the back of my mind for a couple
of years. So I was like, Okay, well I made
this promise. And then you know, I met my co
founder David. He had just lost his wife to breast cancer,
and I saw the opportunity to partner up with.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Somebody who was as heart and as deeply.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Moved by the fact that we can do better by
these women, that we can't do better by their families,
and you know, we have the power to do something
to change it.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
And so that's how a fifteen year journey started.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Fifteen years almost to the date. Let's talk about what
is loumicell, What does it do, how does it work.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
What we know is that if you catch cancer early,
surgery can be curative if you get all the cancer
cells out, But most cancer surgeries are imperfect. When you
do a breast conserving surgery, the problem is that thirty
to forty percent of the time, the surgeon will inadvertently
(08:38):
leave cancer cells behind. So what loomicell does, for the
first time in history is it gives the surgeons a guideline,
a signal where they are able to identify in real
time during the surgery whether there are cancer cells left
behind or not. How well, you get a Nobel Price
(09:02):
winner and you get a couple of really smart people
from MIT, and you define the problem. And that's what
people from MIT do. They go and solve problems, right,
And so in this case, Munjigu Weendi, Jorge Ferreer and
David Leif they sort of joined me in this journey
and said, all right, well, we need something that is
extraordinarily safe, inexpensive that can be injected before surgery and
(09:22):
will give surgeons the ability to make cancer cells illuminate,
be fluorescent under normal light.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
Only it's purple light.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And so the surgeon will switch off the big lamp
that you see on the ceiling on the operating room,
and the device that we use has purple light coming
out of it, and when it hits the cells that
are cancers, those cells fluores back and can be detected
and displayed on the screen so the surgeon can take
action immediately. The way it works at the molecular level
(09:52):
is proteins have a function, and if you can tailor
protein function you can make some real magic happen. And
so what we do is we take advantage of a
protein that is abundant in cancer cells. It's a protein
that cancer cells use to cut tissue that is surrounding
(10:13):
the tumor. One of the most important features of cancer
is that it destroys its environment so that it can grow.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Otherwise it just doesn't grow right.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
And so we detect that protein by providing it something
too cut. And when it cuts that substrate that we provide,
that's when light happens. Think about one of those little
sticks that you use, a glow stick, right that when
you crack it, it emits light. Well, the same but
at a molecular level. When you crack this little mini
glow stick, and the only way to crack it is
(10:44):
by a protein that is primarily expressed in cancer cells,
it gives you a luminous signal.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So you're injecting a substance into the patients, which you
know that the cancer will destroy. When it destroys the substance,
it emits this light, which is visible under purple light.
Correct well, and where are you on delivering on that promise?
Speaker 3 (11:09):
So we were incredibly fortunate that the FDA approved this
product last year. Hospitals started using it in the first
quarter of this year, and it's being used now at
several hospitals across the US.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Stanford was the first adopter.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
There are three surgeons at Stanford that are essentially doing
every single cancer surgery that they do using the Loomi
cell technology.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Breast cancer surgery or beyond breast cancer.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
Breast cancer.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
At this point, of course, the journey will continue for
a long time because I'm not going to rest until
we are successful in a varian cancer.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Ovarian cancer.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Unfortunately, in the list of difficult cancers to treat, ovarian
cancer is kind of at the top of one of
the hardest ones to treat, right up there next to
brain cancer and so on. And so right now there's
trials on going on sophageal called recto prostate cancer and
so on, and eventually we will get two complicated things
like brain cancer and varian cancer. But to know that
(12:08):
patients are going in big academic cancer centers like Stanford
and relatively small regional hospitals like Baker in Florida, and
patients are going in there and they're leaving the surgery
room and the doctor is saying we got it all.
And when they say we got it all, before they
had a seventy percent certainty that they got it all
(12:29):
based on our clinical data. Now they have like a
ninety eight percent.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
Certainty that they did in fact get it on.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
What did it feel like to watch the technology being
deployed for the first time?
Speaker 3 (12:39):
You know, you can never get over the loss, especially
the loss of somebody as incredible, as beautiful, as full
of energy and love and life as Monica was. There's
nothing that will ever substitute for having her around. There's
nothing that will fill that hole. But to fulfill a
promise that it's made under those conditions is one of
(13:01):
the most gratifying things that you can do in life, right,
because it's not an empty promise. This is not going
to benefit hurt, It's not going to benefit me. It's
going to benefit hopefully millions of people.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
Who who get the news that they have cancer and
that they need to have surgery. That is unique.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
And while it doesn't make up for the loss of
somebody that you love, the fact that you got fifteen
years worth of disappointments and failure and restarts and falling
down having to get up again, because you have this
energy that is propelled by the problems that you made.
I don't think that there's any other motivation that is
(13:38):
as strong as that. It is that kind of energy
that's like I can't quit. I don't have the right
to quit ever.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Zooming out a little bit to the wider field of
technology and cancer, I mean, you laid it out, I
think very well. Which is better detection allows for earlier intervention? Obviously?
You know nowadays in the US, one and eight women
are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer at some
point in their lives, but the mortality rate has been
(14:06):
in steady decline. Where are we on the bigger picture
of beating cancer? I mean where there was an article
in the New York And not too long ago about
how detection is getting better but doesn't necessarily mean better outcomes.
There's a lot of excitement around you know, AI, personalized drugs.
You know, taking a step back, what is the state
of the nation, of the wider field of technology's ability
(14:28):
to kill cancer?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
You're right to take a wider view, right, We're going
to live longer.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
And most mechanical things we will be able to fix,
including the heart, which at the end is a mechanical pump.
So cancer is the ultimate frontier if we continue to
improve our health as a society or be sitting the
US notwithstanding because that's a problem. But you know, if
you look at the rest of the world, people are
living longer and longer, and cancer is becoming the primary
(14:59):
cause of death, and so at some point we have
to address this in a much more efficient manner than
we are today. We have some wonderful drugs, and I'm
not against drugs at all. In fact, some cancers there's
nothing you can do surgery wise, and you have to
use drugs. So we are making significant advances and eventually
(15:19):
we will find drugs that are highly specific that are
going to be able to target cancer cells in ways
that we couldn't imagine ten years ago without the side
effects that we used to have with raw chemotherapy. But
I believe and I think most physicians will agree that
surgery will remain the front line way to deal with
(15:42):
cancer for the simple fact that if you have to
kill cancer cells, it's better to kill less cells, and
the more you can get out of the body, the
less cells you have to kill later on. And if
you can ensure that you didn't leave any cells in
the primary tumor site, then you're going to be better off.
And there's no question about that. So my prediction is
(16:05):
we will see cancer quote unquote end within our lifetimes.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
That's a big prediction.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
I think it's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
I think our understanding of biology, the biology of cancer
over the next forty years is going to get us
to the point where we can address cancer very very
effectively through a combination of surgery and incredibly targeted therapies.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
How big a role do you think lo Miiselle could
play in that.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
I think lou Miisell will become the center of care
for cancer surgery for all cancers. I do believe that
we do. In the US, we do about a million
to two million cancer surgeries every single year. That's across
all cancers. Breast cancer is one of the highest ones,
with three hundred thousand surgeries a year. I would say
that this year we're probably going to do a couple
(16:51):
of thousand surgeries, and then that is going.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
To grow pretty quickly from there. So right now we.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Are in either full use or testing at about a
dozen hospitals in the US. We expect to be in
about twenty to thirty hospitals by the end of the year,
and the projection for the following years to be at.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
About one hundred health centers across the United States.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And if lou Misselle doesn't become the standard of care
for cancer surgery, why will that be What would have happened,
would have.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Gone wrong, because somebody will come up with a better
solution and that will.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Be a happy day. Technology is only as good as
technology is good. Right. We all used to use AOL At.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
One point, I still have a Yahue email account, and
I may be one of the only ones left. And
then technology got better and everybody moved to something else,
and that's entirely fine.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
That's what we want. We want to create ever rising bars.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
So that people get over them. We don't create barriers
so that people can't get over them. We create barriers
so that stronger will.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Prevail after the break. How Andrea is working to improve
another industry, our food system.
Speaker 5 (18:08):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
I'd have to know a bit more about you and
what brought you to the field of biotechnology.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
You know, I grew up in Mexico City, not really
knowing what I wanted to do.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
With my life.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I
had the opportunity, after finishing college in Mexico to come
to Boston and become.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
A part of M I. T. And Harvard, which.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Opened up an entire new universe of of what could
be done with biology. Very early on, I got interested
in a very specialized field, which is how proteins, which
of course are the building blocks of nature, how their
structure relates to their funk. And it opened up a
(19:03):
brand new universe to me that I was just not
aware of that. You know, all these little, tiny, microscopic
machines regulate everything that happens in nature in an incredibly
powerful way. And so the more I learned about that
microscopic biological world, the more.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
I wanted to know.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
And then, of course, you know, I learned that they
could be used to cure disease, which is what I
wanted to do all my life. You know, growing up
in a lower middle class household, my mom was teacher,
my dad worked in construction. You know, you're kind of
wondering what am I going to do with my life,
And there was always this desire to try to help
(19:41):
other people, and I really didn't know how, and so
this universe that opened up before my eyes gave me
an opportunity to say, if I can figure out some
of this very unique processes that happen in our bodies
at a microscopic level, I could help cure disease. I
could help make a better life for people. And that
(20:02):
was just incredible.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
When green Light Biosciences, your other company, was publicly listed,
you talked about having two missions in life. One was
quote the ability to provide solutions for healthcare, which we've discussed.
The other was to grow food sustainably and cleanly, which
we haven't discussed yet. This also begins with a personal story.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, and that personal story is a lot cuter because
of course nobody died, but it also involves My favorite
person in the world was my son Alex. And Alex
had something that you know, I think a lot of
parents will relate to, which was Alex didn't need a
lot and he was super thin and losing weight, and
(20:46):
a lot of the things that we would feed him
would make him sick, and we were just like racking
our brain trying to figure out what the hell was
going on. Like one of the only things he would
eat was bananas. He would eat bananas all day long.
And I remember my mom being like, let me bananas
is you know, when have you ever seen a you know,
a sickly gorilla and only it is bananas.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
They don't only eat bananas or whatever. But you know,
it made sense because bananas are protected.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
They have this incredibly strong peel that protects them from
basically everything that is outside. And so one of the
things that would make Alex really sick, for example, would
be strawberries, and we couldn't figure out why. My wife,
who is not a scientist, eventually figure it out that
it wasn't the strawberry itself, or the salary or the
(21:32):
carrot or whatever, it was whatever chemical leftovers where on
that particular food. Chemical synthetic pesticides were the.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Biggest s culprit.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
There were others, like some of the colorings would make
him fairly anxious, but what would make him really sick
would be And we later identified a class of insecticides
called organo phosphates.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Of phosphates.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
If you google or akin of phosphates, they're nerve agents.
Most famous or kind of phosphate of all times sarrying gas.
So here's human wisdom in full display for you. We
take a nerve agent that was used to kill people,
millions of people, okay, and we chemically modify it, and
we to solve it in water and dilute.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
It down, and then we spray it on.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
The same foods that we're going to feed our kids.
And so what I discovered is that we use thousands
of chemicals, none of which are particularly safe or specific
or bio degradeable or clean, and that if we don't
use them, by the way, we would lose seventy to
eighty percent of our food. So it's all like we
have an option. So a lot of people will tell you, ah,
(22:46):
it just short, all should just go organic.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Okay, Well, then we're going to need another eight planets to.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Feed the soon to be ten billion people that we
have on this planet, and there's no room for that.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
In fact, thirty to twenty.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Percent of our food gets destroyed on the farm before
we have an ability to harvest it. That's an insane number.
It's billions of metric tons of food that get destroyed
by pests because we cannot control them with the chemicals we.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Have, because they've become resistant.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Because most of the bogs have become resistant to the
chemicals we have, and so there came another impossible idea, right,
which is, okay, well, let's replace those chemicals with something
that is here's a list of stuff that we have
to come up with. First of all, cheap, because you know,
farmers are the engine or society. They already don't make
enough money. We can't give them something that's going to
(23:38):
be three times the price of what they're paying today.
That's just not going to work. So it's got to
be inexpensive. It's got to be potent, because they're not
going to sacrifice their yield. In fact, it has to
be more potent than the chemicals they're using today so
that they can recover more of their food.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
But it has to be one hundred percent safe.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
It cannot affect the environment, It can't affect beneficial insects,
can't affect pollinators, it cannot affect obviously human health, and
it cannot accumulate in our food because otherwise it'll end
up in our kids.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
And so, you know, that's the list of things that
we had to come up with.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
And it's kind of interesting when you put a list
of features that is that impossible you eliminate a lot
of things really really quickly, and the only thing that
was left was this wonder molecule called right on nucleic
acid RNA. And so it turned out that RNA was
at that point we thought would be, and now we
(24:34):
have proved that it is the solution to a lot
of those problems.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
RNA has become famous since the COVID pandemic as something
that you can inject to in a sense, change the
DNA of an organism, in our case humans. Is that
is that a fair assessment?
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Incorrect? Okay? The messenger on a Vaccines do not change
the DNA. First.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Now, RNA acts in two ways, right the way in
which we all know, which is the way we learn
in high school, which is our DNA gets transcribed into RNA,
So the RNA is a faithful copy of the DNA.
That RNA then gets read by a ribosome and it
gets translated into a protein. That's the machinery of the body.
(25:24):
DNA goes to RNA, RNA goes to proteins. That's what
we learn in high school. What we didn't learn in
high school is that there's another function of RNA, which
is a function of interference, and that means that there
are RNAs, they're called small interfering RNAs whose job is
actually to silence down some of the messenger RNAs that
(25:48):
are not needed. So why is that, Well, imagine that
your body says I have too much of this messenger RNA,
that I don't need it.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I don't need more.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Insulin or more growth RM or more cortisol or whatever it.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Is that your body is producing at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And so what your body does is then it produces
this small interfering RNase to suppress the excess messenger RNA
that is out there so that you don't end up
with an overproduction of a protein.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
So now you can take that tool that is natural.
It's nature. We're using nature. We're not using something artificial.
This is a natural pathway.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
But what you're doing, instead of saying we're just going
to suppress the excess messenger in a you can say
I'm going to suppress all of the messenger RNA that
leads to the production of something that is vital to
a fungi or a weed or an insect. Now, the
best part about this is it won't work on vertebrates.
(26:47):
It won't work on fish, birds, humans, cats, dogs. So
because we have this built in protection, it is quite
literally impossible for our products to have any impact on
human health or the health of a whole bunch of organisms.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
The best part, however.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Is that you can finally tune the sequence of that
RNA to only affect the pest that you're interested in
affecting and nothing else, and you can be extraordinarily specific
in that sense.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Let me give you an example.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Our very first product is an insecticide against something called
the Colorado potato beetle.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
It's just a beetle.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
It's about yay, big, has big stripes on its back.
Another beetle that you should be very familiar with is
the lady bog. The ladybug is in fact a beetle,
and it is very closely related to the Colorado potato beetle.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
They are like first cousins.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
If you apply any chemical synthetic pesticide that will kill
the Colorado potato beetle, you will likely destroy the ladybug.
Speaker 4 (27:46):
Colonies that are in your field or in your.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Surrounding areas and so on. Okay, because they're so closely
related that anything chemical that will impact the potato beetle
will impact the lady Our product is designed to affect
the Colorado potato beetle without having any impact whatsoever on
the ladybog, even though they share like ninety five percent
of their genes. We can tailor we can fine tune
(28:09):
our RNA to kill one and not have any impact whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
On the other one. And not only the ladybug is faired.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Honey Bees, butterflies, earthworms, et cetera, et cetera are not
affected by this RNA because this RNA specific to the
gene that exists in the potato.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Beet And where's it being used today?
Speaker 3 (28:29):
This product right now, it's the number one selling product
in potatoes in the US, and so it's approved in
the US. It's now its sales have now surpassed the
sales of all of the leaning chemical pesticides in potato
fields treating the Colorado potato beet So in two years
we became the market lead and we're incredibly happy with
its performance.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Now, you said a moment ago that is not GMO,
But there have been some criticisms that in a sense,
my releasing this biological agent and effecting the internal mechanism
of these insects that you're in essense to playing god
or intervening in nature in a way that's kind of
could have unpredictable consequences. How do you respond to some
(29:10):
of those criticisms.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
I love that question because like, oh, you're playing God. No, no, no,
We've been playing god for one hundred years. Agriculture is
not the natural state of planet Earth.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
It's a human invention.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Look, we scientific community have the responsibility to be extraordinarily
transparent about the mechanism of action, about the testing that's
been done, about how we've done it, about why we
feel so strongly that our products are safe and effective
and better for society and for nature than the products
that we're replacing. So, if we're going to sustain ten
(29:44):
billion people on this planet, we need industrial agriculture. It's
no way around it. And if we're going to do that,
it's much better to spray something that is highly targeted,
that is safe, that is a natural pathway, that is bithgradable,
that does not accumulate raise some chemical that is derived
from oil that is going to drill a hole or
(30:05):
destroy the brain of every insect that it comes in
contact with. If I had my choice, I would move
to a different planet, and I would keep the population
low and we would all leave off the land.
Speaker 4 (30:15):
Okay, that's not a choice we have.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
And we have a responsibility to another nine billion humans
to provide them with clean, inexpensive, sustainably grown food. That's
the state of reality. I love people who argue that
society's gone wrong. Okay, great, we know all right. It's
not our responsibility to bitch and wine about it. It's our
responsibility to fix it.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
We like bold predictions on this show. You have one
very bold prediction earlier about effectively curing cancer within our lifetimes.
What's your bold prediction for where this RNA technology might
lead us within our lifetimes?
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Well, I think green Light is going to have dozens
of products in the market.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
I think that we will provide tools to farmers in
every continent, will allow them to add more tools to
their toolkit to deal with destructive bests.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
What I can't tell you is if other companies will follow.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Suit and come up with other biological solutions that are
as good as effective.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
As ours are.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
My hope is they will, because farmers need them. Chemicals
are on their way out, whether we like it or not.
They are just not working anymore.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
You opened this conversation talking about growing up in a
middle class house in Mexico and with Monica got very sick.
She said to you know, we didn't send you to
Boston for no reason. What do you think that your
global perspective? I mean, the fact that you grew up
in Mexico brings you as a technologist.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, it's really interesting and it's hard not to get
political about this.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
But disease knows no boundaries.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Disease in any form, whether it's human disease, plant disease,
crop disease, animal disease doesn't care about the lines that
we humans have artificially painted on maps.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
They don't care about what rays you are. Cancer affects
every race more or less equally. They don't care whether
you were born in the US or not. It's global.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
We are fighting global battles, and we are increasingly using
local armies. Can't find a global battle using local armies.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
You need to be global.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
You need to make the tools that you have affordable
and accessible in the US to everybody. It is the
right thing to do. It is the only way in
which you can achieve global equilibrium. We have people from
one hundred countries working at Greenland, and we're only three
hundred people.
Speaker 4 (32:50):
Science is not Science is global.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
No matter what religion you are or what political system
you subscribe to, it is our responsibility to think globally
because these global problems affect us all. And so my
mission has always been from day one to make all
these solutions, whether it's in cancer, whether it's in our
ability to grow food global.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
Andrew, thank you, thanks my pleasure, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
For tech Stuff. I'm as Valoshian and I'm Kara Price.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Tapia.
It was executive produced by me Ozwaaloshan and Kate Osborne
for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley
mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Join us on Friday for the Weekend Tech when Karen
and I will run through the tech headlines you may
have missed.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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