May 29, 2025 • 38 mins
Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centivax. Jacob’s problem is this: Can you create a vaccine that protects people against almost all strains of flu – even strains that haven’t evolved yet?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I love vaccines, I really do. Vaccines train your
body to make these antibodies that protect you against deadly diseases.
It's a thing you get so you don't get sick
(00:35):
in the first place, and it's so clever and so
elegant and so obviously useful. I think it is honestly
fair to say that vaccines are truly one of the
greatest inventions of all time, on the very short list.
They've saved hundreds of millions of lives. Give me all
of them, Give me all of the vaccines. But I
(00:57):
gotta say the flu vaccine sucks. The flu vaccine sucks.
It really does, And for a somewhat simple reason. The
flu virus mutates so quickly that we can't come up
with vaccines fast enough to keep up with it. So
every year scientists develop a new vaccine, but even in
(01:19):
the time it takes to manufacture that vaccine, the virus
keeps mutating. As a result, even if you get a
flu shot every year, there's still a good chance that
you'll get a bad case of the flu. Last year's
flu shot, for example, was only about thirty five percent effective,
And so for decades now, scientists have asked a fairly
(01:39):
obvious question, is there some way to come up with
a flu vaccine that would work not just for the
strain of flu that is circulating right now, but for
almost all strains of flu, including strains that haven't even
evolved yet. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem,
(02:01):
the show where I talk to people who are trying
to make technological progress. My guest today is Jacob Glanville.
He's a bioengineer and an immunologist, and he's the founder
and CEO of Centivax, a company that's trying to make
a universal flu vaccine, a flu vaccine that will consistently
and reliably prevent people from getting the flu.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
You imagine talking to a generation that didn't have flu anymore.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
They would think we were nuts.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
They were just like, oh, yeah, every year we have
a circulating pandemic and then six months later there's another one,
and yeah, you know, fifty thousand people die.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
But what do you do? And like, that's nuts, But
we take it for granted.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The vaccine that Jacob's company, Centivax, is developing for flu,
is likely to go into human trials next year. The
company is also in earlier stages of developing universal vaccines
for HIV and COVID, among other diseases, and wildcard. They
have also worked on creating a broadly effective anti venom
(03:01):
for snake bites. We talk about snake bites later in
the conversation. To start, Jacob told me about the moment
he first got the ia for a universal vaccine. It
was around twenty twelve. He was working for the drug
company Feizer, and he wasn't working on vaccines, but he
was doing something related. His job was to identify antibodies
(03:23):
that could be used to treat disease, and at this
particular moment, he was studying antibodies that would bind to
a particular protein called PCSK nine.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
And so I was riding back on my motorcycle one
evening and I was reflecting on this problem where there
was this target called PCSK nine. It kind of looks
like Mickey mouse's head, and they really wanted antibodies against
kind of where the neck is that if you get
an anybody there.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Then that can affect cholesterol and lower cholesterol.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
The problem is that they're getting anybodies against the ears,
and they weren't getting anybodies.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Against the neck.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
And so I was trying to figure out, is there
an engineering way to sort of focus the immune system
at arbitrary sites that would save me a bunch of time.
And I started imagining, what if I were to take
that target not just from humans, but from like a
donkey and an alligator and a chicken, and like just
take a swath of different versions of that. They were
(04:21):
different just about everywhere up in the ears, but they
were the same down where the neck was.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
And then if I.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Mixed those together and diluted each one so there wasn't
enough of any one of the species of PCSK nine,
then maybe only the neck would be the thing which
was shared across all of them, and the entire immune
system would focus on uh huh.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
So like in total, the sort of sum total of
the mix, it would be like a lot of neck.
The neck is conserved. The neck is what is the same,
and there's only enough of that to induce the antibody response.
So that then if you whatever inject that into an
animal or a person, what the person's immune system is
going to see is a lot of neck.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, And so they finally focus on the neck instead
of getting distracted by the ears. That was the principle,
And so I got home, and then at a certain
point I realized I was being an idiot and what
this was was not a way to save a few
months on an Anybody discovery campaign, that this was a
potential window opening to the to the.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Holy grail of vaccine science.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
The holy grail is that all of the major viruses
that we're confronted with flu, influenza, HIV, ebola, these viruses
mutate and change, but they always have some little spot
that they cannot mutate. And those spots are always super important.
That's why they can't mutate it because if you mutate it,
the virus.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Is no longer infectious.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, And normally they get away with it by having
distracting areas and most of the surface that can mutate.
And that's why we have to update our flu shots
every year.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Distracting meaning distracting to our immune systems, like our more
immune systems. Ooh, I like the ears. I like that
shiny part on top, and that's exactly Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Basically, the conserved Achilles heel is a small site and
most of the surface can vary, and it can't it
gets away with not changing the critical site by varying
lots of stuff around it and taking advantage of the
fact that the immune system doesn't know the difference, and
so to the ability to focus the immune system against
a conserve site would be the basis of a universal vaccine,
because instead of targeting one strain of flu or one
(06:19):
strain of coronavirus or one strain of HIV, you could
target the shared sites that the virus is never allowed
to mutate. And if you do that, then you're suddenly
hitting the entire class of influenza viruses, including future ones
that haven't evolved yet.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
I mean that part of the idea is the part
everybody knew already, right, Like that is the relatively obvious idea.
It's like, don't go for the part that changes, go
for the part that's the same. Right. The hard thing
is how do you do that? So had when you
described the idea of like, oh, just take a bunch
of different ones, dilute them, mix them together. Nobody had
(06:55):
thought of that before.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, so surprisingly not to your point, people since the
nineties were aware of these conserve sites, and so they
knew where the sites were.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
We had crystal structures it was just, how the hell
do you get the immune system focus on those sites?
Was the problem. Yeah, and people have tried a couple
different things.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
They tried chopping out parts of the protein, but then
the site you're interested in falls apart. It's like trying
to grab a snowflake. It'll melt in your hands. They
tried a couple other techniques that didn't work out.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
So okay, so you have this new idea for how
to make a universal vaccine that nobody's tried before, which
to use flu for an example, would mean you take
a bunch of different strains of flu, and in particular
the sort of spike protein of the flu that your
immune system sees. Then you dilute them and mix them
all together in a single vaccine. So what the patient's
(07:46):
immune system winds up seeing the most of is the
part that's the same in all those different strains, the
part that doesn't change. And then ideally the patient will
develop antibodies to that part, the part that doesn't change,
and therefore the patient will be immune to like almost
any strain of flu.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, and you recognize it might not work right.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
You always are like, look, this is a pipe drain,
but like I could not go to sleep because I
was like, if this works, this is such a stunning
breakthrough that it's like it's hard to sleep when you're
thinking about that.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It sort of becomes all consuming.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So you get this idea, and you're working for Pfeiser,
a company that makes vaccines. By the way, what do
you do?
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So again, I was not doing anything involving their vaccine group.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
I was doing for intellectual property reason.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Ye. Yes, I was not working on vaccines at Pfizer.
I resigned. So I did two things.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
I started my first company, Distributed Bio, and I also
applied for the PhD program in immunology at Stanford.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
And you do this because of your idea?
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, Because basically I applied to the PhD program because
I was like, if I'm wrong, I need to stop
thinking about this. I need to surround myself with brilliant
immunologists who can kick holes in this, and I need
to be able to make sure I'm not being myopic.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
And then if I'm right, I need the world to
hear me.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And so I need to be a card carrying PhD
immunologists from Stanford so that people go, Okay, this guy
is into some Yahoo and then for the company side,
I just saw this opportunity to be able to go
test it because I originally I did go out and
I try to talk to some vcs in twenty twelve,
and I think there, you know, predictably, their answer is like,
what the hell is this?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
And who the hell are you?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And you were a bachelor's degree, right, we'd worked at
Miser for a couple of years, like a million other people,
so not you.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Know, you can't blame him. I was like, I guess
I'm nobody right now. Let me go fix that.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, And so I decided that I was going to
go found a company because there was some work I
was doing at Pfeiser that i'd public created some publications
on using the deep genomic sequencers to look at the
immune system and then building better anybody libraries with what
we learned about that, and I realized there was a
business that could be built on that. And my intention
(10:02):
was to build that business and use it to subsidize
some of the early proof deep risking experiments.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
On this universal vaccine concept. And so that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
So I just did both for five years and didn't
sleep that much until the PhD. Graduated from that, and
then later I sold the first company distributed by it.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
So the company you start you're selling your clients are
drug companies essentially, right, But you're doing that that's sort
of your side hustle. That's sort of funding your vaccine dream. Right.
And while you're doing that, you start doing this research
on your vaccine in pigs in Guatemala, right, tell me
(10:39):
about that.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
The background is I grew up in Guatemala. My parents
are Americans, but they met in Guatemala in the seventies
and they built this hotel and restaurant with my grandmother.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Hippie dream.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, the hippie dream, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
There's small hippie enclaves down there, and then there's most
of the village is the wheel may In and then
there's Katchi Kels and some other Mayan communities, and it's
very beautiful lake. So it makes sense that the hippies
would go there.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
The Civil War largely.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Drove them away, but my family, when I was a
little boy, they went down there to try to fix
up and sell the property. And then one thing led
to another and we ended up becoming innkeepers.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
And so I grew up in the village.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I think it probably had an effect on my interest
in immunology in the first place. And I had this
connection to Guatemala, and I ended up maintaining a connection
to USAK, which is the University of San Carlos, the
National University. And so fast forward in my career too,
when I was thinking about universal vaccines, like one of
my I say, one of my deep impressions left from
(11:41):
some work adviser was this. I was very impressed with
a group that was doing animal health work because I
felt like, instead of using mice, they would often ask
what's the most relevant and similar animal model to humans
for this indication? Mouse is not a person like no
animal as a person, but you can find something that's
a closer fit and waste less time on failed translation.
(12:02):
And so I liked I had this technology. I was
trying to figure out where to apply it. I actually
called one of the guys and I was like, what's
the venor market that has a rapidly mutating pathogen that's
also found in humans?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
And he said, it's definitely flu in pigs.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
They get the flu in fact they transmitted to humans,
and so pigs are definitely not as convenient as mice,
but I felt that the data would be much more
meaningful because they actually get the flu.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
So I ended up doing it back in Guatemala with
Airwin Calagua, my collaborator at the University of San Carlos,
and some property that my father had. So I ended
up making some calls. I found out we could get
the pigs. There was a vet who was involved in
the H one in one two thousand and nine pandemic
shift monitoring.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
You're doing it in Guatemala because it's cheaper. Basically you're offshoring.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
You're yeah, it's way cheaper, radically cheaper and faster. I
think if the cycle time is astonishingly slow to do
animal studies and ask for grants like you're lucky to
get a study done like once every two and a
half years according to the US model, Whereas in Guatemala
the costs were radically cheaper. I could build a facility
to spec and I was, you know, I'm an engineer,
so I need to be able to do cycle yeah. Yeah,
(13:09):
and so this enabled me. I think we ran five studies.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
There over a couple of year period.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
We're able to go pretty quickly go in and do
rapidly de risk this universal vaccine technology in a way
that was economically feasible given the growing profits but still
finite profits that I had from the Anybody discovery and
software side of the business.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
So when you're doing those pig studies, I mean just
to return to your initial idea of using essentially different
different strains. Let's say you got to figure out what's
the right concentration, because if you do too little, it's
you don't get any meaningful immune response, and if you
do too much, then you're getting immune response to the
parts that are not conserved, to the parts that you
(13:48):
don't want immune response to exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I was just just proving the concept right because I
think there's definitely people who are like, this isn't going
to work.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
There's no way.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
And look, if I'm wrong, then if it doesn't matter
if I put fifteen things in, if each one's below
the dose and they're not interacting like I was hypothesizing,
then you should see no immune response.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Right, So I could have just been wrong. That's the
other thing I was testing, does the principle hold? And
the answer was definitively yes.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
So okay, So you have this idea that it works
somewhere around here, you sell I don't know which one
is the side hustle and which one is the main hustle.
I guess vaccinating pigs in Guatemala sounds like a side hustle,
even though it's the thing you really care about. Right,
you sell distributed bio and you've spin out sent to
vax the vaccine company, right, and then what then where
(14:37):
are you?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah? So it was a good time.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
So we got the Gates Foundation awarded us this in
the Pandemic Threatgrand Challenge award to test the vaccine no
longer in Guatemala, but up in American facilities that had
biosafety containment, so that we could challenge the animals who've
been vaccinated with these strains that had evolved after the mixture.
So we deliberately pretended it was two thousand and seven
(15:03):
and only included strains up to two thousand and seven.
Then we challenged the animals with the two thousand and
nine pandemic shift virus, a twenty twelve a twenty seventeen virus.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
That's a big question, right, It's like testing something that's
out of the model, right, Like it's saying, Okay, we
give somebody this vaccine and then there's a new kind
of flu. Does it work? Yeah? Yeah, And it.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Felt that that was essential.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
By the way, those same pigs we pulled their serum
out of the freezer over the last couple of months
and they neutralized the H five and one that's currently
outbreaking in cows and chickens and some people.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Huh the bird flu.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
The great super broad immune response.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
So the timing was good. CR wanted to buy. I
was happy to do it, and my condition was I'm like, look,
I want to take this universal vaccine technology with me
to a new company, and they agreed to that. That
was December thirty first, twenty twenty is when when the
sale completed, and so basically January first.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
That is a remarkable time to go all in on
a universal vaccine. December thirty first, twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
We transitioned over January first, twenty twenty one. I'm now
the CEO and founder of Cinevacs, and I started calling
an army of geniuses of the best people that I've
worked with to gather together, and I was like, look,
this is going to be the big one.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Where like a like a heist movie, like, oh it's eleven.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Yeah, it was like the best people of my entire
career I worked with.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
You don't need a lot, you just need every person
to be exceptional, and like, if we do our jobs right,
we touched the long arch of history.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, so what have you figured out? Like, what have
been the key things you've figured out? Since then?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
We identified a couple extra people we brought in, including
Jerry's Sadoff. He's this guy who has more vaccines approved
than anyone alive. So things like guarda cel MMRV that
all children take. You have the coronavirus vaccine from J
and J the one shot, and you know, I think
fourteen vaccines have been approved under his watch. It wasn't
(17:00):
just that he had done a huge amount of like
the modern vaccines that define the modern health era. It's
that his hit rate was unusually high, Like it wasn't
like he worked on one hundred get to those fourteen
he had, Like his ratio of success.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Was unusually high.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
And that told me I wanted to work with them,
And so I called them up and went out to
have dinner with them, and I was like, Jerry, you
told me this universal vaccine technology is the only thing
you thought was worth a damn like, come join me
and like, let's kick a hole in the universe. And
so he came. And the reason I'm telling you this
is that he didn't just come in with phenomenal clinical plans,
which he did. He also came in with some strategies
where he's like, one of the things I've noticed for
(17:35):
both the coronavirus vaccines and the RSV vaccines was that
the folks who added in little mutations to keep those
spikes stable, those vaccines were successful, and the folks who
didn't add in good stabilizing mutations their vaccines were unsuccessful.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
And he said, I think that that's just a critical thing.
You want to trap these spikes in their stable forms
so the immune system can target what the spike looks
like before it a tax a cellar before it falls
apart to confuse the immune staff.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
So, just to be clear, like the spike proteins, it's
the hema glutenants that are in nature on the outside
of the of the of the flu virus. They have
a three dimensional shape, right, Yeah, they can change three
dimensional shape, and that actually turns out to be important
for sort of simple mechanical like a key fitting into
a lock. Reason right, and it's and they don't if
(18:23):
you rip them off the virus as you are when
you're presenting them in this vaccine necessarily stay in the
shape you want them to stay in. That's a o.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
They're kind of like a little three prong grappling hook
and they change shape in order to like hook into
the cell membrane and then tear it open. And they're
designed kind of like with hinges because they need to
be able to be mobile and make changes. And so
this protein is not inherently stable, but what you want
is you want the thing very stable because you want
the immune system to train on defeating the trimer when
it's in it's sort of cocked and loaded, but prior
(18:53):
to shoot position. And we've seen with RSV and coronavirus
that that was absolutely essential for the successful vaccines.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
And so anyway, Jerry came in was like, we should
do this with flu.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I had a bunch of experience stabilizing proteins from work
we did stabilizing antibodies Advisor and then also at my company,
a distributed bio and so we ran a quick campaign
and we identified these great stabilizing mutations and they had
like a pretty stunning effect on the quality of the
immune response.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
So you're doing this basically atomic level engineering of the proteins, right,
yeah's the thing. Go on? What else?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
And then the other thing.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
The major thing we've done is we started the manufacturing,
we advanced the program not just for flu, but we're
also we have data validating the universal coronavirus vaccine, We're
testing on HIV, we're testing on a malaria and a
number of other pathogens right now to.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Be able to create a portfolio. So those have been
some of the major activities in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
When are you doing human clinical trials?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, so we've got about nine months left of manufacturing
or eight months of manufacturing, and then you spend a
month getting permission from the FDA to start your study
and then we'd start human trials.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
So okay, so next year you're starting human trials. Next year.
So when you think about the future, the future of
the company, of your work, like, what are you worried about?
Speaker 2 (20:13):
So I worry about less and less things, and then
the things I worry about evolve. So in terms of
is it going to be safe. I worry about that
extremely little. We have been vaccinated with influenza HA protein
since the nineteen forties. It's actually the best validated, diverse
class of versions of HA compared to any other vaccine
(20:34):
that's been tested.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
And it's that's all. The history of safety has been
extremely good. We're using the.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Advisor Biointech mRNA chemistry, so you can get a non
exclusive license to it.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That's the same one they used for the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, it's been in billions of people, so we know
what the safety profile is. So safety I'm not concerned
about in terms of efficacy, like how well it works.
I basically don't believe in any one animal's immune system
because you could always overfit the immune system, could overfit
in a certain bizarre and unpredictable way. And so we've
tested this in pigs, but also ferrets, also rats, also mice,
(21:11):
also cows, and also human immune organoids, which is organ
donors offer their lymph nodes. They're smashed up and you
basically create a bunch of little mini lymph nodes from
a donor and you can vaccinate them under different conditions
to see how someone with a lifetime of immune memory,
including deflu and vaccines, would respond to our vaccine or
a control vaccine. And when we did that as well
(21:32):
as all the other animals, we consistently saw this universality effect.
And so going into the human trials, I think we're
pretty bullish that the effect is going to be dramatically
better than the current vaccine. So I think we're going
in assuming that the human trials probably will perform well.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
But I honestly I won't sleep well at night until
I get that data and I'm like, Okay, yeah, we're
on solid footing.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
We've done everything I can to de risk it with
these other organisms and even human immune organoids, and now
it's time to run it in humans.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Fundraising is always a headache where we've got.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Now at least multiple groups gathering around with sheet options
and we're looking at them. But it's it's been, just
to put it lightly, a difficult period for biotech fundraising,
and we've managed to survive where a number of other
companies have not. But you know, I've probably gained some
gray hair and probably you know, took away some of
my health span as a consequence of surviving this period.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
I mean does that last thing mean you're afraid of
running out of money? That's what I mean.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Every company worries about that. That's the nature of adventure.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
We've managed to pull it together and we just got
this grant which covers us. But the fear is that
we're stuck, that we need to go continue raising money
so that we can go pay for the rest of
manufacturing and pay for clinical and and armed for the
next parts. And to be blunt, this has been an
absolutely terrible period in biotech. So we got seventy five
percent off on all of our equipment for my entire
(22:55):
laboratory because we got it from auctions. A lot of
this stuff was in like new stuff in boxes where
a company just ran out of money and they're stuck.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
And you know, I've benefited from it.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
I've benefited from being able to hire remarkable people that
otherwise we're struck to find an opportunity because of it's
we've basically lived in this like a little bit of
a biotech hangover after I think there was too much
investment and sometimes in some pretty goofy stuff during the
pandemic for biotech, and I think we're in this like
a little bit of a headache, a little bit of
a macro economic global uncertainty area, and those things are
(23:26):
both slammed up against biotech in an unproductive way.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, it's okay. What's the happy version of the story.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
The happy version is that our vaccine works the same
as it has in all those animals and organoids that
we've seen. We bring it forward universal vaccine just becomes
the vaccine because that's suddenly a vaccine that you take
and you don't get sick. The first thing it does
is it creates a massive improvement in global health. And
then the major impact of you know, flu kills people, right, It.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Gets a lot of people sick. People lose a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Of time from school, pregnant women in their second trimester
to get flu, or seven times more likely to have
a child with schizophrenia and they're adult.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Like. There's a bunch of like squali and consequences.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
But the biggest effect is that when this gets out there,
the pandemic era is over.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
And when you say pandemic you mean flu pandemic.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Yeah, the flue pandemics are over, which is our most
common source of pandemics. We had five in the last
hundred years. We had two or three per century before then,
so they got faster. We have a lot more people.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
We have these pig megafarms, like we need to fix this.
And with this vaccine, you no longer have a pandemic
era because you have a decent proportion of the population
that's already immune to the new virus strains before they hit.
And that's what the new world looks like. And so
that's the happy version for flu. But our intention is
to do that for every pandemic pathogen, to just one
(24:53):
by one go and in the pandemic era, to come
up with countermeasures that first protect the world from pandemics
the medical, personal, and economic costs. Second protect the world
from just major outbreaks. And then ultimately I want to
have these same tools can arm future decade to attempt
eradication campaigns that previously.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Were not possible. And that's the future we want to build.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
We'll be back in just a minute. Let's talk about
snake bites.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
How'd you get into the snake bite business?
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, so it was twenty seventeen, and I think it
was because the World Health Organization was announcing, you know,
the neglected tropical disease nature of snake bite, kind of
declaring it a neglected tropical.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Disease, basically saying, hundreds of thousands of people are killed
or very badly wounded every year by snake bites. It's
not just some weird thing, and not enough.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
People are trying to develop countermeasures.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And I think what had happened because most of the
people who are who die or are severely injured are
super poor.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
It reminds me of a Mandy python where they have
the Roman Senate and someone goes.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
What do we do about the poor?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
And then all in unison they put up their hands.
They're like, fuck the poor, all right, next.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
That's a neglected tropical disease story.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
And the fundamental problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
I think also that I'm to be fair, I don't
know to be fair, but like the companies that make
anti venom, most of them are kind of doing it
as a public service, as a loss, because most of
the people who need anti venom, of the millions of
bytes per year, they're poor. They're subsistence agriculturists and their
children and people who live in rural environments. And if
(26:52):
you take that market, which is probably like five to
six hundred million total per year, but it's fractured across
thirty to forty products. Each of those things is pretty unattractive.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Just to be clear, because you need different anti venom
for different snakes different Yeah, there currently is.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
No universal anti venom on the market.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So people had started ending programs to make certain types
of anti venoms, and I think that was happening in
twenty sixteen. So then in twenty seventeen the World Health
Organization brings some attention to this, and then I started.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I you know, in my village we had snake bites sometimes,
and I just like, I like topical diseases, particularly if
they interface with cool bioengineering. And I'd been working on
the universal vaccine work, and so I started wondering, I'm like,
you know what, I wonder if that same idea of
the conserved Achilles heel that's found across all flu or
all HIV.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
I wonder if snake venom.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Toxins have that, Because if that's true, maybe you don't
need to make six hundred and fifty different anti venoms.
Maybe it's actually that you only make one cocktail of
broadly neutralizing antibodies and it could work against all snakes.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
A universal anti venom. And so I did a little
you know, playing around on my computer, and sure enough,
there's basically like ten major toxins that all snakes use.
Nature's lazy.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
And then when I pulled up a bunch of sequel
is from a bunch of different snakes and I compared
where they buried, where they mutated relative to each other
versus not again, I found a little conserved spot and
it's it's the business end, right, because these toxins can mutate,
except they can't mutate right where they need to go
bind your neurons, your nicotinic casido colon receptor to paralyze.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
You and so forth.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And so at that point I got pretty stoked, where
I was like, I'm pretty sure this is and like
at the time, no one had been talking about broadly
neutralizing anybody's outside of viruses.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
And I was like, this is so cool.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
And so then I was like, all right, where do
I find a person who has been met a couple times?
Speaker 3 (28:43):
Right?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
And I was like looking for a clumsy snake researcher,
Like there's like a site in Costa Rica. There's a
place in Arizona. There's some places in India where I
was reaching out and like I was kind of coming
up empty, and then I don't know how, somehow, like
I desperately just started like Google searching, and I found
these insane articles about this guy named Tim Freedy who
(29:03):
had spent like at the time, over seventeen years self
immunizing hundreds of times with sixteen different species of snake.
What he did is he milked the snakes, he weighed
out microgram initial doses and administered it, and then he
escalated over a period of months up until the point
that he took milligrams. And it was only after he
built up that immunity. Then he would then have the
(29:25):
animals challenge.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Him because no one lives people. You can't live from
a mamba bid it. He'll kill you. Yet he is
able to take it. You see that video.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
What you don't see is he spent about nine months
building up immunity against it by starting with microgram trace doses.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
That's crazy. So you're like, that guy is walking universal
anti venom.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Yeah, if anybody has.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
The secrets of universal anti venom, it's pumping through this
guy's veins right now and so I was like, I
have to meet him. I couldn't find his contact information
anywhere online, and so I contacted the reporters and one
of them put me.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
In touch with them and had his number.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
And so I had this call and I told I
remember it super clearly, and where I was just like, look,
I know this may be awkward, but I would love
to get my hands on some of your blood.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
And his response was I've been waiting for this call
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
And and so what happened, and.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Then what I do is we just scheduled twenty eight
days apart two blood draws and each one was for
twenty mili liters, so that there was no risk as
to the blood dramaut This is like a couple of tubes.
And so then that that got sent over to my lab.
I then processed it in my and I separated out
the serum and the cells, and from the serum, I
wanted to check his work. I think, you know a story,
(30:37):
you know, seemed credible and stuff what I wanted to confirm.
And so I had ordered a series of snake venoms.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Which, by the way, it is suspiciously easy to order.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
The bit of mistakes, I have learned during this project.
I was like, this should not be this easy anyway.
So I had a bunch of panel of snakes, some
that he said he'd immunized against, and I also picked
ones that he never had.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Oh interesting, this is testing the universality.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, yeah, And so I tested his sierra and I
also tested mine and a couple other control serra on
this on the venoms. Now, the control people like me
who have never been bit, we had no response to
this serum. He had blazingly high responses to all the venoms,
including the ones he had never been exposed to, including
new genera like very different snakes.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
So, based on this, right, you come up with this
anti venom cocktail that seems like it could work against
not all venomous snakes, but a lot a lot of
different kinds of venomous snakes. You publish a paper about
this in the journal Cell. Where does it go from here?
What happens next?
Speaker 2 (31:36):
We've reached out to the Welcome Trust and so some
other groups that might be interested in this. We've also
reached out to I guess I won't say their names,
but there are some pharmaceutical companies that develop anti venom
to try to see if this is something they'd be
interested in doing a partnership on to pick up. I
think my feeling is that I would ideally like to
have a pharmaceutical partner to go develop this with or
(31:57):
a massive support from some foundation, because otherwise it's you
can make it profitable, you can unfracture that market, and
you could be manufacturing this and serve maybe a five
hundred million.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Dollars per year market.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
But to get there you have to go spend at
least ten and probably more like twenty million dollars on
GMP and some other early activities, and then twenty five
million for clinical and I think it's hard to imagine
who's going to put that money up front for what
is a relatively small profit, which is the whole frustrating
aspect of neglected tropical diseases, and.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
That's why they're neglected. Yeah, we'll be back in a
minute with the lightning round. Okay, last thing is the
lightning round. So, as I understand that you dropped out
(32:54):
of school to run your family in hotel restaurant when
you were in high school, or you took a year
off high school, what's one thing you learned from that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
I think one thing I learned is that people on
teams don't that people do not crave chaos. I think
people want to know what the people are calmed down
by knowing that they're rules, even if the rules don't
benefit them. And I dropped out to go run the restaurant,
and I was like fifteen year old kid, and you know,
initially people didn't really listen to me.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
You know, it was just like a crazy time.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And that was crazy for the employees because the employees
are like, I don't know, like your son's here, but maybe,
you know, maybe David's going to die and my dad's
going to die.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
And then my mom was like, let's just shut it down.
I can't deal with that. I'm like, Mom, we need
the money to be able to go pay for the bill,
the medical bills. You know.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
So everyone was acting chaotic and it was like extremely
difficult to manage the team and try to keep people
focused to do their jobs. And you know, this thing
happened where one evening, one of our cooks was like
walking out and he had this big bag and I
went over and I was like, what the hell are
you doing? And I realized he was stealing a bunch
of steaks, like it was just stakes, but it was
(34:03):
with a bunch of the other chefs, and I was
just like, I didn't do it for a tactical reason.
I just did it because I was fed, and I'm like,
you're stealing from my dying father and I just the
last thing I need. So I was just like, give
it back, you're fired, go away, And they were shocked
and I was like, no, no, you're fired. You're not
allowed to come back in anymore. We'll send you your
severance basically in two weeks, get.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
The hell out of here.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
And like what I was not anticipating is the next
day everybody showed up for work and suddenly there was
actually everyone was calmer, And I think it was the
transition of perception of power that they were like, they want,
you know, I did something harsh, and yet suddenly everybody's
performance improved, partially because they're like, Okay, now I know,
like the hand that feeds, But it was also like
knowing that there was some rules and there was a plan. Yeah,
(34:42):
and I want to leave you with the thought that
wasn't like my lesson was like okay, be like the
Red Queen all the time.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
That's not absolutely the way to go. That's not leadership.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
But I think what I did learn is that when
times are difficult, people prefer to know that there's a
plan and it's organized and there's a solution, even if
it's rules that don't benefit them, rather than having opened
into chaos. And I think that was counterintuitive to me
because my personality is different actually thrive in chaos and
having those sorts of complicated choices and I resent confinement
(35:12):
of any form. But I think that that actually for
most organizations, that's empowering and important. And to articulate the
rules and people know there's a system that people are like,
I feel comfortable because now I understand and it can
work in a predictable environment.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I think that part's important.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
So that's something you learned running the restaurant that has
helped you as a CEO. I know you recently bought
the restaurant, so now you're a restaurant owner. Is there
something you've learned running a biotech company that now helps
you running a restaurant?
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Oh so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Well externalizing responsibilities so I don't run the restaurant. I
bought the hotel and restore or the restaurant and some
of the properties, not the full hotel. Some other people
bought some of the bungalows. And then what I did
is I basically wanted to maintain the value of the
property and increase it and make sure that all the
people who some of us have worked for our family
(36:04):
since my childhood, that their jobs weren't compromised, which during
the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Where tourism was like really bad, like there was a
risk of that.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
And so I run it essentially as a it's a cooperative.
It's really like, I don't extract financing from it. I
have basically a guy we worked with for a long
time and another team member. I've just told them, like, look,
my objective is for you to maintain the reputation of
the place. Just keep running it well and make sure
I don't. And my one requirement is I need to
not think about it at all.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
And I'm working on the universal vaccine techt so maybe i'll,
you know, in the future, I'll want to go and
settle around and be a restaurant tour but like right now,
I just needed to not think about it.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Her to use the word hard ass a few times
in other interviews, are you a hard ass?
Speaker 2 (36:50):
I think on myself and on an expectation of detailed
I think research needs to be done in a very
particular process. I don't think my team would say I'm
a hard ass.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
I don't I think that, or maybe I've evolved over time.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
I think I have exacting standards of expectation of how
to get things done. But it's not like it's more
like me driven of anxiety than me going in.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
And like I don't bark at people or anything. I'm like, guys, we.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Have to have this anxious hard as.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, I have to be like, look, we have to
have a set of standard you know, controls, and then
we need to run this in a certain way and
we need to have things documented. Otherwise we're just walking
on quicksand and we'll just mess up every time. So
now I don't think I'm a hard ass. I think
there's certain things where I have exacting expectations. But I
also think that you have to have that if you
want to build a I've struggled to find an example
(37:40):
of a big company that was built on technology where
the CEO did not have that property. Because I think
there's a certain expectation of excellence that is required to
build something great. Maybe a little bit of a hard ass,
A little bit of hard ass, all right, occasional.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centovax. You
can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm, and
please do email us. I read all the emails. Today's
show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, edited by Alexandra Garriton,
and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll
be back next week with another episode of What's Your
(38:18):
Problem
Pushkin. I love vaccines, I really do. Vaccines train your
body to make these antibodies that protect you against deadly diseases.
It's a thing you get so you don't get sick
(00:35):
in the first place, and it's so clever and so
elegant and so obviously useful. I think it is honestly
fair to say that vaccines are truly one of the
greatest inventions of all time, on the very short list.
They've saved hundreds of millions of lives. Give me all
of them, Give me all of the vaccines. But I
(00:57):
gotta say the flu vaccine sucks. The flu vaccine sucks.
It really does, And for a somewhat simple reason. The
flu virus mutates so quickly that we can't come up
with vaccines fast enough to keep up with it. So
every year scientists develop a new vaccine, but even in
(01:19):
the time it takes to manufacture that vaccine, the virus
keeps mutating. As a result, even if you get a
flu shot every year, there's still a good chance that
you'll get a bad case of the flu. Last year's
flu shot, for example, was only about thirty five percent effective,
And so for decades now, scientists have asked a fairly
(01:39):
obvious question, is there some way to come up with
a flu vaccine that would work not just for the
strain of flu that is circulating right now, but for
almost all strains of flu, including strains that haven't even
evolved yet. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem,
(02:01):
the show where I talk to people who are trying
to make technological progress. My guest today is Jacob Glanville.
He's a bioengineer and an immunologist, and he's the founder
and CEO of Centivax, a company that's trying to make
a universal flu vaccine, a flu vaccine that will consistently
and reliably prevent people from getting the flu.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
You imagine talking to a generation that didn't have flu anymore.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
They would think we were nuts.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
They were just like, oh, yeah, every year we have
a circulating pandemic and then six months later there's another one,
and yeah, you know, fifty thousand people die.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
But what do you do? And like, that's nuts, But
we take it for granted.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The vaccine that Jacob's company, Centivax, is developing for flu,
is likely to go into human trials next year. The
company is also in earlier stages of developing universal vaccines
for HIV and COVID, among other diseases, and wildcard. They
have also worked on creating a broadly effective anti venom
(03:01):
for snake bites. We talk about snake bites later in
the conversation. To start, Jacob told me about the moment
he first got the ia for a universal vaccine. It
was around twenty twelve. He was working for the drug
company Feizer, and he wasn't working on vaccines, but he
was doing something related. His job was to identify antibodies
(03:23):
that could be used to treat disease, and at this
particular moment, he was studying antibodies that would bind to
a particular protein called PCSK nine.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
And so I was riding back on my motorcycle one
evening and I was reflecting on this problem where there
was this target called PCSK nine. It kind of looks
like Mickey mouse's head, and they really wanted antibodies against
kind of where the neck is that if you get
an anybody there.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Then that can affect cholesterol and lower cholesterol.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
The problem is that they're getting anybodies against the ears,
and they weren't getting anybodies.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Against the neck.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
And so I was trying to figure out, is there
an engineering way to sort of focus the immune system
at arbitrary sites that would save me a bunch of time.
And I started imagining, what if I were to take
that target not just from humans, but from like a
donkey and an alligator and a chicken, and like just
take a swath of different versions of that. They were
(04:21):
different just about everywhere up in the ears, but they
were the same down where the neck was.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
And then if I.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Mixed those together and diluted each one so there wasn't
enough of any one of the species of PCSK nine,
then maybe only the neck would be the thing which
was shared across all of them, and the entire immune
system would focus on uh huh.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
So like in total, the sort of sum total of
the mix, it would be like a lot of neck.
The neck is conserved. The neck is what is the same,
and there's only enough of that to induce the antibody response.
So that then if you whatever inject that into an
animal or a person, what the person's immune system is
going to see is a lot of neck.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, And so they finally focus on the neck instead
of getting distracted by the ears. That was the principle,
And so I got home, and then at a certain
point I realized I was being an idiot and what
this was was not a way to save a few
months on an Anybody discovery campaign, that this was a
potential window opening to the to the.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Holy grail of vaccine science.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
The holy grail is that all of the major viruses
that we're confronted with flu, influenza, HIV, ebola, these viruses
mutate and change, but they always have some little spot
that they cannot mutate. And those spots are always super important.
That's why they can't mutate it because if you mutate it,
the virus.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Is no longer infectious.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, And normally they get away with it by having
distracting areas and most of the surface that can mutate.
And that's why we have to update our flu shots
every year.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Distracting meaning distracting to our immune systems, like our more
immune systems. Ooh, I like the ears. I like that
shiny part on top, and that's exactly Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Basically, the conserved Achilles heel is a small site and
most of the surface can vary, and it can't it
gets away with not changing the critical site by varying
lots of stuff around it and taking advantage of the
fact that the immune system doesn't know the difference, and
so to the ability to focus the immune system against
a conserve site would be the basis of a universal vaccine,
because instead of targeting one strain of flu or one
(06:19):
strain of coronavirus or one strain of HIV, you could
target the shared sites that the virus is never allowed
to mutate. And if you do that, then you're suddenly
hitting the entire class of influenza viruses, including future ones
that haven't evolved yet.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
I mean that part of the idea is the part
everybody knew already, right, Like that is the relatively obvious idea.
It's like, don't go for the part that changes, go
for the part that's the same. Right. The hard thing
is how do you do that? So had when you
described the idea of like, oh, just take a bunch
of different ones, dilute them, mix them together. Nobody had
(06:55):
thought of that before.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, so surprisingly not to your point, people since the
nineties were aware of these conserve sites, and so they
knew where the sites were.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
We had crystal structures it was just, how the hell
do you get the immune system focus on those sites?
Was the problem. Yeah, and people have tried a couple
different things.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
They tried chopping out parts of the protein, but then
the site you're interested in falls apart. It's like trying
to grab a snowflake. It'll melt in your hands. They
tried a couple other techniques that didn't work out.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
So okay, so you have this new idea for how
to make a universal vaccine that nobody's tried before, which
to use flu for an example, would mean you take
a bunch of different strains of flu, and in particular
the sort of spike protein of the flu that your
immune system sees. Then you dilute them and mix them
all together in a single vaccine. So what the patient's
(07:46):
immune system winds up seeing the most of is the
part that's the same in all those different strains, the
part that doesn't change. And then ideally the patient will
develop antibodies to that part, the part that doesn't change,
and therefore the patient will be immune to like almost
any strain of flu.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, and you recognize it might not work right.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
You always are like, look, this is a pipe drain,
but like I could not go to sleep because I
was like, if this works, this is such a stunning
breakthrough that it's like it's hard to sleep when you're
thinking about that.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It sort of becomes all consuming.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So you get this idea, and you're working for Pfeiser,
a company that makes vaccines. By the way, what do
you do?
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So again, I was not doing anything involving their vaccine group.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
I was doing for intellectual property reason.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Ye. Yes, I was not working on vaccines at Pfizer.
I resigned. So I did two things.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
I started my first company, Distributed Bio, and I also
applied for the PhD program in immunology at Stanford.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
And you do this because of your idea?
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, Because basically I applied to the PhD program because
I was like, if I'm wrong, I need to stop
thinking about this. I need to surround myself with brilliant
immunologists who can kick holes in this, and I need
to be able to make sure I'm not being myopic.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
And then if I'm right, I need the world to
hear me.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And so I need to be a card carrying PhD
immunologists from Stanford so that people go, Okay, this guy
is into some Yahoo and then for the company side,
I just saw this opportunity to be able to go
test it because I originally I did go out and
I try to talk to some vcs in twenty twelve,
and I think there, you know, predictably, their answer is like,
what the hell is this?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
And who the hell are you?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And you were a bachelor's degree, right, we'd worked at
Miser for a couple of years, like a million other people,
so not you.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Know, you can't blame him. I was like, I guess
I'm nobody right now. Let me go fix that.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, And so I decided that I was going to
go found a company because there was some work I
was doing at Pfeiser that i'd public created some publications
on using the deep genomic sequencers to look at the
immune system and then building better anybody libraries with what
we learned about that, and I realized there was a
business that could be built on that. And my intention
(10:02):
was to build that business and use it to subsidize
some of the early proof deep risking experiments.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
On this universal vaccine concept. And so that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
So I just did both for five years and didn't
sleep that much until the PhD. Graduated from that, and
then later I sold the first company distributed by it.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
So the company you start you're selling your clients are
drug companies essentially, right, But you're doing that that's sort
of your side hustle. That's sort of funding your vaccine dream. Right.
And while you're doing that, you start doing this research
on your vaccine in pigs in Guatemala, right, tell me
(10:39):
about that.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
The background is I grew up in Guatemala. My parents
are Americans, but they met in Guatemala in the seventies
and they built this hotel and restaurant with my grandmother.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Hippie dream.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, the hippie dream, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
There's small hippie enclaves down there, and then there's most
of the village is the wheel may In and then
there's Katchi Kels and some other Mayan communities, and it's
very beautiful lake. So it makes sense that the hippies
would go there.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
The Civil War largely.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Drove them away, but my family, when I was a
little boy, they went down there to try to fix
up and sell the property. And then one thing led
to another and we ended up becoming innkeepers.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
And so I grew up in the village.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I think it probably had an effect on my interest
in immunology in the first place. And I had this
connection to Guatemala, and I ended up maintaining a connection
to USAK, which is the University of San Carlos, the
National University. And so fast forward in my career too,
when I was thinking about universal vaccines, like one of
my I say, one of my deep impressions left from
(11:41):
some work adviser was this. I was very impressed with
a group that was doing animal health work because I
felt like, instead of using mice, they would often ask
what's the most relevant and similar animal model to humans
for this indication? Mouse is not a person like no
animal as a person, but you can find something that's
a closer fit and waste less time on failed translation.
(12:02):
And so I liked I had this technology. I was
trying to figure out where to apply it. I actually
called one of the guys and I was like, what's
the venor market that has a rapidly mutating pathogen that's
also found in humans?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
And he said, it's definitely flu in pigs.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
They get the flu in fact they transmitted to humans,
and so pigs are definitely not as convenient as mice,
but I felt that the data would be much more
meaningful because they actually get the flu.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
So I ended up doing it back in Guatemala with
Airwin Calagua, my collaborator at the University of San Carlos,
and some property that my father had. So I ended
up making some calls. I found out we could get
the pigs. There was a vet who was involved in
the H one in one two thousand and nine pandemic
shift monitoring.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
You're doing it in Guatemala because it's cheaper. Basically you're offshoring.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
You're yeah, it's way cheaper, radically cheaper and faster. I
think if the cycle time is astonishingly slow to do
animal studies and ask for grants like you're lucky to
get a study done like once every two and a
half years according to the US model, Whereas in Guatemala
the costs were radically cheaper. I could build a facility
to spec and I was, you know, I'm an engineer,
so I need to be able to do cycle yeah. Yeah,
(13:09):
and so this enabled me. I think we ran five studies.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
There over a couple of year period.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
We're able to go pretty quickly go in and do
rapidly de risk this universal vaccine technology in a way
that was economically feasible given the growing profits but still
finite profits that I had from the Anybody discovery and
software side of the business.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
So when you're doing those pig studies, I mean just
to return to your initial idea of using essentially different
different strains. Let's say you got to figure out what's
the right concentration, because if you do too little, it's
you don't get any meaningful immune response, and if you
do too much, then you're getting immune response to the
parts that are not conserved, to the parts that you
(13:48):
don't want immune response to exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I was just just proving the concept right because I
think there's definitely people who are like, this isn't going
to work.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
There's no way.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
And look, if I'm wrong, then if it doesn't matter
if I put fifteen things in, if each one's below
the dose and they're not interacting like I was hypothesizing,
then you should see no immune response.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Right, So I could have just been wrong. That's the
other thing I was testing, does the principle hold? And
the answer was definitively yes.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
So okay, So you have this idea that it works
somewhere around here, you sell I don't know which one
is the side hustle and which one is the main hustle.
I guess vaccinating pigs in Guatemala sounds like a side hustle,
even though it's the thing you really care about. Right,
you sell distributed bio and you've spin out sent to
vax the vaccine company, right, and then what then where
(14:37):
are you?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah? So it was a good time.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
So we got the Gates Foundation awarded us this in
the Pandemic Threatgrand Challenge award to test the vaccine no
longer in Guatemala, but up in American facilities that had
biosafety containment, so that we could challenge the animals who've
been vaccinated with these strains that had evolved after the mixture.
So we deliberately pretended it was two thousand and seven
(15:03):
and only included strains up to two thousand and seven.
Then we challenged the animals with the two thousand and
nine pandemic shift virus, a twenty twelve a twenty seventeen virus.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
That's a big question, right, It's like testing something that's
out of the model, right, Like it's saying, Okay, we
give somebody this vaccine and then there's a new kind
of flu. Does it work? Yeah? Yeah, And it.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Felt that that was essential.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
By the way, those same pigs we pulled their serum
out of the freezer over the last couple of months
and they neutralized the H five and one that's currently
outbreaking in cows and chickens and some people.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Huh the bird flu.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
The great super broad immune response.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
So the timing was good. CR wanted to buy. I
was happy to do it, and my condition was I'm like, look,
I want to take this universal vaccine technology with me
to a new company, and they agreed to that. That
was December thirty first, twenty twenty is when when the
sale completed, and so basically January first.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
That is a remarkable time to go all in on
a universal vaccine. December thirty first, twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
We transitioned over January first, twenty twenty one. I'm now
the CEO and founder of Cinevacs, and I started calling
an army of geniuses of the best people that I've
worked with to gather together, and I was like, look,
this is going to be the big one.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Where like a like a heist movie, like, oh it's eleven.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Yeah, it was like the best people of my entire
career I worked with.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
You don't need a lot, you just need every person
to be exceptional, and like, if we do our jobs right,
we touched the long arch of history.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, so what have you figured out? Like, what have
been the key things you've figured out? Since then?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
We identified a couple extra people we brought in, including
Jerry's Sadoff. He's this guy who has more vaccines approved
than anyone alive. So things like guarda cel MMRV that
all children take. You have the coronavirus vaccine from J
and J the one shot, and you know, I think
fourteen vaccines have been approved under his watch. It wasn't
(17:00):
just that he had done a huge amount of like
the modern vaccines that define the modern health era. It's
that his hit rate was unusually high, Like it wasn't
like he worked on one hundred get to those fourteen
he had, Like his ratio of success.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Was unusually high.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
And that told me I wanted to work with them,
And so I called them up and went out to
have dinner with them, and I was like, Jerry, you
told me this universal vaccine technology is the only thing
you thought was worth a damn like, come join me
and like, let's kick a hole in the universe. And
so he came. And the reason I'm telling you this
is that he didn't just come in with phenomenal clinical plans,
which he did. He also came in with some strategies
where he's like, one of the things I've noticed for
(17:35):
both the coronavirus vaccines and the RSV vaccines was that
the folks who added in little mutations to keep those
spikes stable, those vaccines were successful, and the folks who
didn't add in good stabilizing mutations their vaccines were unsuccessful.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
And he said, I think that that's just a critical thing.
You want to trap these spikes in their stable forms
so the immune system can target what the spike looks
like before it a tax a cellar before it falls
apart to confuse the immune staff.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
So, just to be clear, like the spike proteins, it's
the hema glutenants that are in nature on the outside
of the of the of the flu virus. They have
a three dimensional shape, right, Yeah, they can change three
dimensional shape, and that actually turns out to be important
for sort of simple mechanical like a key fitting into
a lock. Reason right, and it's and they don't if
(18:23):
you rip them off the virus as you are when
you're presenting them in this vaccine necessarily stay in the
shape you want them to stay in. That's a o.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
They're kind of like a little three prong grappling hook
and they change shape in order to like hook into
the cell membrane and then tear it open. And they're
designed kind of like with hinges because they need to
be able to be mobile and make changes. And so
this protein is not inherently stable, but what you want
is you want the thing very stable because you want
the immune system to train on defeating the trimer when
it's in it's sort of cocked and loaded, but prior
(18:53):
to shoot position. And we've seen with RSV and coronavirus
that that was absolutely essential for the successful vaccines.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
And so anyway, Jerry came in was like, we should
do this with flu.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I had a bunch of experience stabilizing proteins from work
we did stabilizing antibodies Advisor and then also at my company,
a distributed bio and so we ran a quick campaign
and we identified these great stabilizing mutations and they had
like a pretty stunning effect on the quality of the
immune response.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
So you're doing this basically atomic level engineering of the proteins, right,
yeah's the thing. Go on? What else?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
And then the other thing.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
The major thing we've done is we started the manufacturing,
we advanced the program not just for flu, but we're
also we have data validating the universal coronavirus vaccine, We're
testing on HIV, we're testing on a malaria and a
number of other pathogens right now to.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Be able to create a portfolio. So those have been
some of the major activities in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
When are you doing human clinical trials?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, so we've got about nine months left of manufacturing
or eight months of manufacturing, and then you spend a
month getting permission from the FDA to start your study
and then we'd start human trials.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
So okay, so next year you're starting human trials. Next year.
So when you think about the future, the future of
the company, of your work, like, what are you worried about?
Speaker 2 (20:13):
So I worry about less and less things, and then
the things I worry about evolve. So in terms of
is it going to be safe. I worry about that
extremely little. We have been vaccinated with influenza HA protein
since the nineteen forties. It's actually the best validated, diverse
class of versions of HA compared to any other vaccine
(20:34):
that's been tested.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
And it's that's all. The history of safety has been
extremely good. We're using the.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Advisor Biointech mRNA chemistry, so you can get a non
exclusive license to it.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That's the same one they used for the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, it's been in billions of people, so we know
what the safety profile is. So safety I'm not concerned
about in terms of efficacy, like how well it works.
I basically don't believe in any one animal's immune system
because you could always overfit the immune system, could overfit
in a certain bizarre and unpredictable way. And so we've
tested this in pigs, but also ferrets, also rats, also mice,
(21:11):
also cows, and also human immune organoids, which is organ
donors offer their lymph nodes. They're smashed up and you
basically create a bunch of little mini lymph nodes from
a donor and you can vaccinate them under different conditions
to see how someone with a lifetime of immune memory,
including deflu and vaccines, would respond to our vaccine or
a control vaccine. And when we did that as well
(21:32):
as all the other animals, we consistently saw this universality effect.
And so going into the human trials, I think we're
pretty bullish that the effect is going to be dramatically
better than the current vaccine. So I think we're going
in assuming that the human trials probably will perform well.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
But I honestly I won't sleep well at night until
I get that data and I'm like, Okay, yeah, we're
on solid footing.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
We've done everything I can to de risk it with
these other organisms and even human immune organoids, and now
it's time to run it in humans.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Fundraising is always a headache where we've got.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Now at least multiple groups gathering around with sheet options
and we're looking at them. But it's it's been, just
to put it lightly, a difficult period for biotech fundraising,
and we've managed to survive where a number of other
companies have not. But you know, I've probably gained some
gray hair and probably you know, took away some of
my health span as a consequence of surviving this period.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
I mean does that last thing mean you're afraid of
running out of money? That's what I mean.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Every company worries about that. That's the nature of adventure.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
We've managed to pull it together and we just got
this grant which covers us. But the fear is that
we're stuck, that we need to go continue raising money
so that we can go pay for the rest of
manufacturing and pay for clinical and and armed for the
next parts. And to be blunt, this has been an
absolutely terrible period in biotech. So we got seventy five
percent off on all of our equipment for my entire
(22:55):
laboratory because we got it from auctions. A lot of
this stuff was in like new stuff in boxes where
a company just ran out of money and they're stuck.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
And you know, I've benefited from it.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
I've benefited from being able to hire remarkable people that
otherwise we're struck to find an opportunity because of it's
we've basically lived in this like a little bit of
a biotech hangover after I think there was too much
investment and sometimes in some pretty goofy stuff during the
pandemic for biotech, and I think we're in this like
a little bit of a headache, a little bit of
a macro economic global uncertainty area, and those things are
(23:26):
both slammed up against biotech in an unproductive way.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, it's okay. What's the happy version of the story.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
The happy version is that our vaccine works the same
as it has in all those animals and organoids that
we've seen. We bring it forward universal vaccine just becomes
the vaccine because that's suddenly a vaccine that you take
and you don't get sick. The first thing it does
is it creates a massive improvement in global health. And
then the major impact of you know, flu kills people, right, It.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Gets a lot of people sick. People lose a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Of time from school, pregnant women in their second trimester
to get flu, or seven times more likely to have
a child with schizophrenia and they're adult.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Like. There's a bunch of like squali and consequences.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
But the biggest effect is that when this gets out there,
the pandemic era is over.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
And when you say pandemic you mean flu pandemic.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Yeah, the flue pandemics are over, which is our most
common source of pandemics. We had five in the last
hundred years. We had two or three per century before then,
so they got faster. We have a lot more people.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
We have these pig megafarms, like we need to fix this.
And with this vaccine, you no longer have a pandemic
era because you have a decent proportion of the population
that's already immune to the new virus strains before they hit.
And that's what the new world looks like. And so
that's the happy version for flu. But our intention is
to do that for every pandemic pathogen, to just one
(24:53):
by one go and in the pandemic era, to come
up with countermeasures that first protect the world from pandemics
the medical, personal, and economic costs. Second protect the world
from just major outbreaks. And then ultimately I want to
have these same tools can arm future decade to attempt
eradication campaigns that previously.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Were not possible. And that's the future we want to build.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
We'll be back in just a minute. Let's talk about
snake bites.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
How'd you get into the snake bite business?
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, so it was twenty seventeen, and I think it
was because the World Health Organization was announcing, you know,
the neglected tropical disease nature of snake bite, kind of
declaring it a neglected tropical.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Disease, basically saying, hundreds of thousands of people are killed
or very badly wounded every year by snake bites. It's
not just some weird thing, and not enough.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
People are trying to develop countermeasures.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And I think what had happened because most of the
people who are who die or are severely injured are
super poor.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
It reminds me of a Mandy python where they have
the Roman Senate and someone goes.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
What do we do about the poor?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
And then all in unison they put up their hands.
They're like, fuck the poor, all right, next.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
That's a neglected tropical disease story.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
And the fundamental problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
I think also that I'm to be fair, I don't
know to be fair, but like the companies that make
anti venom, most of them are kind of doing it
as a public service, as a loss, because most of
the people who need anti venom, of the millions of
bytes per year, they're poor. They're subsistence agriculturists and their
children and people who live in rural environments. And if
(26:52):
you take that market, which is probably like five to
six hundred million total per year, but it's fractured across
thirty to forty products. Each of those things is pretty unattractive.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Just to be clear, because you need different anti venom
for different snakes different Yeah, there currently is.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
No universal anti venom on the market.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So people had started ending programs to make certain types
of anti venoms, and I think that was happening in
twenty sixteen. So then in twenty seventeen the World Health
Organization brings some attention to this, and then I started.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I you know, in my village we had snake bites sometimes,
and I just like, I like topical diseases, particularly if
they interface with cool bioengineering. And I'd been working on
the universal vaccine work, and so I started wondering, I'm like,
you know what, I wonder if that same idea of
the conserved Achilles heel that's found across all flu or
all HIV.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
I wonder if snake venom.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Toxins have that, Because if that's true, maybe you don't
need to make six hundred and fifty different anti venoms.
Maybe it's actually that you only make one cocktail of
broadly neutralizing antibodies and it could work against all snakes.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
A universal anti venom. And so I did a little
you know, playing around on my computer, and sure enough,
there's basically like ten major toxins that all snakes use.
Nature's lazy.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
And then when I pulled up a bunch of sequel
is from a bunch of different snakes and I compared
where they buried, where they mutated relative to each other
versus not again, I found a little conserved spot and
it's it's the business end, right, because these toxins can mutate,
except they can't mutate right where they need to go
bind your neurons, your nicotinic casido colon receptor to paralyze.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
You and so forth.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And so at that point I got pretty stoked, where
I was like, I'm pretty sure this is and like
at the time, no one had been talking about broadly
neutralizing anybody's outside of viruses.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
And I was like, this is so cool.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
And so then I was like, all right, where do
I find a person who has been met a couple times?
Speaker 3 (28:43):
Right?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
And I was like looking for a clumsy snake researcher,
Like there's like a site in Costa Rica. There's a
place in Arizona. There's some places in India where I
was reaching out and like I was kind of coming
up empty, and then I don't know how, somehow, like
I desperately just started like Google searching, and I found
these insane articles about this guy named Tim Freedy who
(29:03):
had spent like at the time, over seventeen years self
immunizing hundreds of times with sixteen different species of snake.
What he did is he milked the snakes, he weighed
out microgram initial doses and administered it, and then he
escalated over a period of months up until the point
that he took milligrams. And it was only after he
built up that immunity. Then he would then have the
(29:25):
animals challenge.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Him because no one lives people. You can't live from
a mamba bid it. He'll kill you. Yet he is
able to take it. You see that video.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
What you don't see is he spent about nine months
building up immunity against it by starting with microgram trace doses.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
That's crazy. So you're like, that guy is walking universal
anti venom.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Yeah, if anybody has.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
The secrets of universal anti venom, it's pumping through this
guy's veins right now and so I was like, I
have to meet him. I couldn't find his contact information
anywhere online, and so I contacted the reporters and one
of them put me.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
In touch with them and had his number.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
And so I had this call and I told I
remember it super clearly, and where I was just like, look,
I know this may be awkward, but I would love
to get my hands on some of your blood.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
And his response was I've been waiting for this call
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
And and so what happened, and.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Then what I do is we just scheduled twenty eight
days apart two blood draws and each one was for
twenty mili liters, so that there was no risk as
to the blood dramaut This is like a couple of tubes.
And so then that that got sent over to my lab.
I then processed it in my and I separated out
the serum and the cells, and from the serum, I
wanted to check his work. I think, you know a story,
(30:37):
you know, seemed credible and stuff what I wanted to confirm.
And so I had ordered a series of snake venoms.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Which, by the way, it is suspiciously easy to order.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
The bit of mistakes, I have learned during this project.
I was like, this should not be this easy anyway.
So I had a bunch of panel of snakes, some
that he said he'd immunized against, and I also picked
ones that he never had.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Oh interesting, this is testing the universality.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, yeah, And so I tested his sierra and I
also tested mine and a couple other control serra on
this on the venoms. Now, the control people like me
who have never been bit, we had no response to
this serum. He had blazingly high responses to all the venoms,
including the ones he had never been exposed to, including
new genera like very different snakes.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
So, based on this, right, you come up with this
anti venom cocktail that seems like it could work against
not all venomous snakes, but a lot a lot of
different kinds of venomous snakes. You publish a paper about
this in the journal Cell. Where does it go from here?
What happens next?
Speaker 2 (31:36):
We've reached out to the Welcome Trust and so some
other groups that might be interested in this. We've also
reached out to I guess I won't say their names,
but there are some pharmaceutical companies that develop anti venom
to try to see if this is something they'd be
interested in doing a partnership on to pick up. I
think my feeling is that I would ideally like to
have a pharmaceutical partner to go develop this with or
(31:57):
a massive support from some foundation, because otherwise it's you
can make it profitable, you can unfracture that market, and
you could be manufacturing this and serve maybe a five
hundred million.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Dollars per year market.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
But to get there you have to go spend at
least ten and probably more like twenty million dollars on
GMP and some other early activities, and then twenty five
million for clinical and I think it's hard to imagine
who's going to put that money up front for what
is a relatively small profit, which is the whole frustrating
aspect of neglected tropical diseases, and.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
That's why they're neglected. Yeah, we'll be back in a
minute with the lightning round. Okay, last thing is the
lightning round. So, as I understand that you dropped out
(32:54):
of school to run your family in hotel restaurant when
you were in high school, or you took a year
off high school, what's one thing you learned from that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
I think one thing I learned is that people on
teams don't that people do not crave chaos. I think
people want to know what the people are calmed down
by knowing that they're rules, even if the rules don't
benefit them. And I dropped out to go run the restaurant,
and I was like fifteen year old kid, and you know,
initially people didn't really listen to me.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
You know, it was just like a crazy time.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And that was crazy for the employees because the employees
are like, I don't know, like your son's here, but maybe,
you know, maybe David's going to die and my dad's
going to die.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
And then my mom was like, let's just shut it down.
I can't deal with that. I'm like, Mom, we need
the money to be able to go pay for the bill,
the medical bills. You know.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
So everyone was acting chaotic and it was like extremely
difficult to manage the team and try to keep people
focused to do their jobs. And you know, this thing
happened where one evening, one of our cooks was like
walking out and he had this big bag and I
went over and I was like, what the hell are
you doing? And I realized he was stealing a bunch
of steaks, like it was just stakes, but it was
(34:03):
with a bunch of the other chefs, and I was
just like, I didn't do it for a tactical reason.
I just did it because I was fed, and I'm like,
you're stealing from my dying father and I just the
last thing I need. So I was just like, give
it back, you're fired, go away, And they were shocked
and I was like, no, no, you're fired. You're not
allowed to come back in anymore. We'll send you your
severance basically in two weeks, get.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
The hell out of here.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
And like what I was not anticipating is the next
day everybody showed up for work and suddenly there was
actually everyone was calmer, And I think it was the
transition of perception of power that they were like, they want,
you know, I did something harsh, and yet suddenly everybody's
performance improved, partially because they're like, Okay, now I know,
like the hand that feeds, But it was also like
knowing that there was some rules and there was a plan. Yeah,
(34:42):
and I want to leave you with the thought that
wasn't like my lesson was like okay, be like the
Red Queen all the time.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
That's not absolutely the way to go. That's not leadership.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
But I think what I did learn is that when
times are difficult, people prefer to know that there's a
plan and it's organized and there's a solution, even if
it's rules that don't benefit them, rather than having opened
into chaos. And I think that was counterintuitive to me
because my personality is different actually thrive in chaos and
having those sorts of complicated choices and I resent confinement
(35:12):
of any form. But I think that that actually for
most organizations, that's empowering and important. And to articulate the
rules and people know there's a system that people are like,
I feel comfortable because now I understand and it can
work in a predictable environment.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I think that part's important.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
So that's something you learned running the restaurant that has
helped you as a CEO. I know you recently bought
the restaurant, so now you're a restaurant owner. Is there
something you've learned running a biotech company that now helps
you running a restaurant?
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Oh so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Well externalizing responsibilities so I don't run the restaurant. I
bought the hotel and restore or the restaurant and some
of the properties, not the full hotel. Some other people
bought some of the bungalows. And then what I did
is I basically wanted to maintain the value of the
property and increase it and make sure that all the
people who some of us have worked for our family
(36:04):
since my childhood, that their jobs weren't compromised, which during
the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Where tourism was like really bad, like there was a
risk of that.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
And so I run it essentially as a it's a cooperative.
It's really like, I don't extract financing from it. I
have basically a guy we worked with for a long
time and another team member. I've just told them, like, look,
my objective is for you to maintain the reputation of
the place. Just keep running it well and make sure
I don't. And my one requirement is I need to
not think about it at all.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
And I'm working on the universal vaccine techt so maybe i'll,
you know, in the future, I'll want to go and
settle around and be a restaurant tour but like right now,
I just needed to not think about it.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Her to use the word hard ass a few times
in other interviews, are you a hard ass?
Speaker 2 (36:50):
I think on myself and on an expectation of detailed
I think research needs to be done in a very
particular process. I don't think my team would say I'm
a hard ass.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
I don't I think that, or maybe I've evolved over time.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
I think I have exacting standards of expectation of how
to get things done. But it's not like it's more
like me driven of anxiety than me going in.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
And like I don't bark at people or anything. I'm like, guys, we.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Have to have this anxious hard as.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, I have to be like, look, we have to
have a set of standard you know, controls, and then
we need to run this in a certain way and
we need to have things documented. Otherwise we're just walking
on quicksand and we'll just mess up every time. So
now I don't think I'm a hard ass. I think
there's certain things where I have exacting expectations. But I
also think that you have to have that if you
want to build a I've struggled to find an example
(37:40):
of a big company that was built on technology where
the CEO did not have that property. Because I think
there's a certain expectation of excellence that is required to
build something great. Maybe a little bit of a hard ass,
A little bit of hard ass, all right, occasional.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centovax. You
can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm, and
please do email us. I read all the emails. Today's
show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, edited by Alexandra Garriton,
and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll
be back next week with another episode of What's Your
(38:18):
Problem
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