June 28, 2025 • 40 mins
Think of a biotech company and most people will think of a business trying to come up with cures and treatments for human illnesses. There's not a lot of discussion about companies trying to do the same for animals, insects, or even... crustaceans. And yet, healthy animals are a key part of the ecosystem and important for our food supply. In this episode we speak to Annette Kleiser, CEO of Dalan Animal Health, which has developed the world's first vaccine for bees and is now working on a similar treatment to protect shrimp. We talk about the development and regulatory process, plus what it's actually like raising money for a brand new business.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, all thoughts listeners. So you were about to listen
to an episode that we recorded back in April when
there was a lot of news around trade and tariffs,
so you might hear us reference that quite heavily. It's
a very interesting episode and I think you'll enjoy it.
Take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Authoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Joe, do you remember when you were a kid, presumably
you went on road trips like across America? Do you
remember how filthy cars used to get on road trips
because of like hitting millions and thousands of insects?
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Do you remember this? I thought you were going to
say how how filthy cars get inside as a kid,
and I was like, my car is filtering inside.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
It's disgusting.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
But I do remember that, and I you know, they're
like weird things like people like you know, like insects
and like people have talked about how like this is
like one of those mysteries. It's kind of like chemtrails.
Why did car windshields get filthy?
Speaker 5 (01:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:19):
I didn't know this was ever going to become an
odd lots topic, so I'm pleasantly surprised.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Well, I have a lot of thoughts on this. So
one the buggiest place I ever used to visit was
in Arkansas with my Grandma in the summer, and I
remember like the car just being like disgusting, not only
because of insects, but because there are also a lot
of armadillos there, and armadillo's I don't know if you
know this, but when they're frightened, they jump up, so
they tend to get caught in like truck girls. Anyway,
(01:46):
this is probably too much information, but I also I
tried to read a book on insects once and the
lack thereof in today's natural world, I guess, and it
was called The Insect Crisis. And it's one of the
few books that I had to stop reading after like
three chapters because I just found it too depressing.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
By the way, I just want to say, ay, I
liked it.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Whenever this episode is getting released, we're recording this April
twenty fourth. I appreciate a break from like or not
talking about stuffs every second. Two You mentioned armadillo's. It
reminds me of the famous sort of left wing Texas
populist Jim Hide Tower wrote a book There's Nothing in
the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos,
a work of political subversion. So thank you for reminding
(02:28):
me of that book. And I agree read that.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
I don't remember the other thing I was going to say,
so keep going.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Okay, Well, anyway, you know, I'm starting on a depressing topic,
which is there has been this notable decline in insects
over the past couple decades. And if you talk to
old people like us, Joe and me, we will say
that there is a notable lack of insects just when
you're out and about and you know, driving on highways
or whatever. But all of that said, this isn't a
(02:55):
doom and gloom episode because we're actually going to be
talking about some interesting efforts to kind of arrest that decline.
And you know, Joe and I, we've taken an interest
in biotechnology. It's recently, especially in the context of the
US versus China, but human biotech is not the only
thing out there. There is a pretty big industry around
(03:16):
animal and insect biotech, and I know nothing about it.
Pretty much and I find it very interesting and we
should talk about it.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
We should and also look, pets and animals are a
huge industry, and so for when it comes to biotech,
non human animals are huge. And of course the other
context besides the US versus China and biotech is of
course the cutting or the gutting some would say, of
sort of core research from the federal government level. So
this intersects with industrial and political trends. And so even
(03:47):
though it's not a terriff episode, I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well not just that. So you know, one of the
foremost examples of insects species that has been in decline
is honeybees, of course, and those are constantly in the news,
the lack of honey bees. And we all know if
we don't have as many honey bees, well then we
don't have as much honey, But we also don't have
as much other types of foods because they are very
important pollinators.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
You know.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
I just one last thing for me. When I was
in college, I lived in a vegan co op at
the university.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
Do you have a bee hive? No?
Speaker 4 (04:17):
But I had this business idea, Oh, we should have
hand pollinated produce and sell it to grocery stories as saying,
this is the only true vegan produce you can have
because we don't even use bees in the process. I
never did it, but I thought that'd be a good business.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Oh my god, have you ever hand pollinated something? No,
it's fun.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Oh, so you can do it.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, you got like a little like feather, little rag,
and you sort of spread the pollen around while doing
your best like biz impression. You have to be in
the mindset of a bee.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
If I were back at you know, twenty two years old,
I'd make a big radical stand about only eating hand
pollinated produce.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Don't make the bees work.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, it's cruel.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Okay, all right, Clearly we could talk about bees and
insects and armadillers for probably another hour or so, but
why don't we get straight to us. We have the
perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with, a net Kleiser.
She is the CEO over at Dallen Animal Health, which
has been doing some really really interesting things in the
field of animal biotech. So, Annett, thank you so much
for coming on our thoughts.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure
to be here.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I'm very excited to talk about something other than the
tariffs for a start, and I do like talking about
the natural world. But like, first off, why don't we
just kind of add some context to where we are.
Why is animal biotech an important field to be investing in.
Speaker 5 (05:32):
Well, a lot of of what we depend on in
food and agriculture. You've talked about pets. Of course they are,
you know, companions, they're very very important to us. But
a lot of what we eat depends on animals. So
not just the typical production animals that we think about,
which you know, the cows or chickens, but also you
(05:56):
know fish or shrimp. And then one of the the
most important workhourses probably that we have, is the honeybee.
Because our most nutritious foods wouldn't grow, wouldn't exist if
it wasn't for these little animals that buzz around and
pollinate them, or apples, and it's actually the most nutritious
(06:20):
foods that we have wouldn't exist, whether it's almonds or
pumpkins or onions. So they are extremely important and we
need to protect all of these animals, not just our
companion animals, but also these really important production animals, livestock,
everything that falls in it, and so biotech has a
(06:41):
big role to play, not just on the human side,
but also on the animal side.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
What do you tell us what DULLN Animal Health does
in your role there and give us some background about
your work.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Specifically, Yeah, happy to do so. So down on animal
Health focuses on these animals. We're a biotech company. We're
about six and a half years old, so we're relatively
young still, but we focus on what we called underserved animals,
which are primarily insects invertebrates, and we developed the world's
(07:17):
first vaccine for honeybees to protect them from diseases. They
get diseases, they get sick just like any other animals,
just like we do. They get viral infections, they get
bacteria infections. And despite the fact that they are so
important for our survival and so not just food production
but biodiversity. You had mentioned that the whole insect decline
(07:41):
are extremely, extremely important in a bigger picture, there is
nothing or there was nothing out there to really help
them fend off diseases. And so we decided to set
out and change that and decide, you know, these animals
they need they need protection, they need our care and
(08:02):
we can't just complain about the insects. We also need
to we need to protect them, and so that's what
we do.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I have so many questions already, but perhaps my biggest
one is how does a honeybee vaccination actually work? Because
I imagine you're not all going out there with tiny
little syringes and inoculating millions of bees, which would kind
of defeat the purpose of having all these pollinators do
our work for us. How does it work?
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Yeah, we want to be kind to them, we want
to be careful, and you had you know, because some
of us are older. And when I was a child,
I remember how the nurse came to school and gave
us a sugar cube with the polio vaccine on it.
And this is very similar. The queen gets a sugar
paste to eat in her early stages before she gets
(08:54):
introduced into the new colony, and we just mix the vaccine.
It's an aural vaccine, it's a liquid. We mix it
into that sugar paste and she takes it up biting
in a nutshell.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And then she spreads it I guess to her offspring.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
Right.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
So insects have this interesting phenomenon that the maternal animal
passes on information about a disease that is in the
environment to the next generation, and the queen does this
via the eggs, so she there isn't disease in the hive.
(09:33):
There are pathogens in the hives, she can't get sick.
A lot of these these diseases are infant diseases, their
larval diseases, so they threaten the brood just when they
when they emerge from the egg. And so the queen
takes these passogens up and passes little pieces of it
to her ovaries, and the developing larvae will see this
(09:57):
piece of a pathogen and say, oh, there's something out there.
They mean system gets upregulated and before they hatch, and
they are protected when they hatch. And this is a
mechanism that is widely a scene in insects and invertebrates
and actually also in chickens and other animals. And so
what we do is just use that naturally occurring phenomenon
(10:22):
and the way we only have to vaccinate the queen.
Expose the queen to a dead bacteria that can't infect anything,
and the next generation is protected. It's pretty clever little
magic wand that you you know, put over the hive.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So within the field of animal biotech or even more
specifically rare animal biotech, or even more specifically B vaccine biotech,
I can imagine multiple different areas of what you'd call
business or value add creation. So there's the raw science
of like what does the molecular structure of a B
(10:58):
vaccine look like? Then I would agen there is the
challenge of turning raw science into something product tized that
can be distributed and sold at a profit. And then
there's the actual sort of distribution of it. So going
out to the actual customers, here's a product that exists.
Where does your company sit specifically, how much is it
(11:19):
at the raw science level, and how much is it
the productization of raw science, all of it.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
I'm laughing. You don't see me laughing, but I'm laughing
because that was actually what we were faced with when
we decided to do this company. This was very early
academic research at the University of Helsinki when I by
accident stumbled across it. The university had brought me in
(11:49):
to look at their life science portfolio to see if
there's this company that could be spun out, if technology
a pattern that could be licensed to an existing company.
And typically when you do this, you know, you see
a lot of really interesting research. I mean, universities are full,
it's just amazing, amazing research. But you know often is
(12:11):
there are incremental, small, you know, improvements that are really
important to move us forward, but they're really these completely
out of the box idea this way. And so I
stumbled the research. Happened to be in the office at
the university when I was there, and the director called
her in and said, you know, Daia, why don't you
(12:32):
tell these folks about your idea for a B vaccine?
And I just got really intrigued, because you know, somebody
needed to do something. I told myself and you know,
this is.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Your CSO founding Cso I'm looking at your website, Dahlia
Fried talk.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
Tech right, And so she's a professor at the University
of Gratz who was at Helsinkie and now she's in Gratz.
And so this was really early research, very early data
showing that this might be possible. The company then had
to start completely from scratch to find a strain to
(13:08):
go out and you know, infected hives, build a string connection,
go to the regulator. There was no regulatory pass, there
was no development pass. How do you conduct clinical tries?
Nobody had ever done this before, so there was the
whole development of the product that could then go out
(13:29):
into the market. And then there was no model of
how There were no channe. I mean, if you if
you develop a new shoe, you go to a shoe
store and that's where you sell the shoe. For a
B vaccine, there was that didn't exist. So there was
no discharge.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
No, there's no B clinics out there.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
There's no retailer on Fifth Avenue or you get your
insect vaccines.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
There's no channel.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
If your beehive is sick, you're not going to call
a vetinarian. And they were carrying the hive into the
veterinary clinics, like can you look at my queen? You
know right? That doesn't you call your neighbor, You call
you know, your father or your grandfather that had bees.
So it's a complete Even these large beekeepers and in
(14:15):
the US, when we're talking large beekeepers, they have seventy
one hundred thousand, one hundred and twenty thousand colonies. Wow,
these massive operations that are pollinating our crop during this
our apples you know, the beautiful apples that you get,
(14:35):
you know, the bit whole foods, and it's like they
need these big beekeepers, these big producers. But still there
is no veterinarian that comes by. There is no you know,
so it didn't exist. So we have we are creating.
Everything done basically is writing the playbook on how do
(14:57):
they develop these products, how do you get them licensed,
how do you commercialize them, how do you roll it out?
How do you work with the industry, and not just
with the industry, with state veterinarians with it's much bigger,
and these are these are global problems. I was talking
to one state government veterinarian in Europe who was then
(15:22):
asking me, well, we don't now really know what to
do here. What's the opinion of the World Health Organization?
And I say, you must be kidding me. You' say
the World House. But let me call them, you know,
let me pick up my phone and figure out what
they have to say about this. So really what we
had to do is the whole from bench to customer
(15:44):
and with the customer. It's exciting when you have an
opportunity to do that and to figure it out.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
I have so many questions about this, not just the
regulatory portion of this and the commercialization, but specifically to
begin with on the funding side, So you're doing something
relatively new, and I imagined if you go to a
traditional venture capitalist or a traditional investor in biotech and
you say I have a b vaccine, I'm sure some
(16:28):
of them are very excited because it's novel and it
sounds kind of cool. But on the other hand, it
is this kind of brand new thing, and I could
see some people being a little bit surprised. What are
those conversations like when you're first trying to raise funding?
Speaker 5 (16:42):
Right, So it has changed a lot over the last
six years, thankfully, but in the beginning when I set out,
it was really clear we did not fit any investment
themes so well, not animal health because even though bees
(17:03):
are classified as livestock, they are not. You know, it's
the pets, it's the companion animals, which the biggest, but
then the traditional ones the cows and the chickens, but
not bees. That just falls outside animal health investment. On
the agaculture side, most architect investors will look at microbiomes
(17:26):
of trees, drones, surveillance, more position agaculture technology driven AI
those themes, and then you have the food tech investors,
which are further upstream. Right, they look at the honey,
but they don't look where the honey came from. So
we fell into this complete Noman's land there was in
(17:49):
food tech. There were a couple of investors that at
the time a lot of money was going into alternative
protein production to lower you know, to be more sustainable,
a lower CEO two impact and meet meats right, the
meal worms and and and grasshoppers for animal feed and
human food production. They were really interested in this because
(18:13):
they said, well, we had a complete blind spot that
these animals could get sick too, but vaccines was not
in their in their target so they couldn't invest in us.
So there was literally nobody that so it was it
was in the beginning, it was heavily angel funded because angels, Yes,
(18:33):
they want to make money. These are rich individuals that
that want to make you know, money with their investments,
but they also they are driven by by they want
to do you know, good in the world with with
their wealth. So the return expectations are and their timeframe
is a little bit different, and so they they really
(18:55):
backed this. So we were entirely entirely angel funded, and
then a lot of globally so not very few US
actually European Canadian growers that came from the agricultural space,
from the animal health space, but not vcs. And it
was in twenty twenty two, I don't you might remember
(19:17):
when the market went down. It was a cosible clime
for everyone, especially startups. Was in a few weeks. All
the discussions that I had and fundraising, you know, people
were jumping off left and right, and somebody asked me
to speak at a climate and space conference, and I said,
Climate and space. But when you're raising money, you take
(19:40):
every opportunity you can to spread the word. So I
went and there were these amazing talks about you know,
refueling stations in space and you know, hotels and you know,
whatever you have and these batteries and everything. And then
I came with my with my b vaccine and telling
(20:02):
the audience that this is great that you know, because
of climate change, we have to go to other planets
and we have to be prepared for this. But in
the meantime, we really need to solve this problem because
we're never going to be able to solve it here
on this planet. Or any other planet. If we don't
protect insects, we may not like them, but they are
(20:24):
incredibly important for human survival, plant survival, all living organisms
need these little you know, we can do wetland restoration,
it doesn't matter if we don't have insects to live
in them. And sure enough, at the end of the night,
I was approached by several climate investors we sees sustainability
(20:49):
in climate that understood the importance of what we were
doing and had more flexible investment themes and a longer
term and I was able to get funding. And so
now a lot of the investors of we're talking to
come from that space.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
I think this is so fascinating because something that's come
up in the podcast before in various contexts, is this
idea that like, you know, we think of like this
wall of capital out there that exists and it's seeking return. Well,
whether it's banks, whether it's vcs, whether it's private credit firms,
et cetera. There is specialization and there are categories of things.
(21:32):
And we talk a lot about this, particularly more often
in the context of certain energy texts. They sometimes they
call it the missing middle, this idea that there are
theoretically profitable investments out there, but it's just not in
anyone's specific wheelhouse.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
And no one is in charge of the B vaccine.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Yeah you know.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
Yeah, so it's like not something that someone has specialized.
And so even the theoretically profitable on some time horizon
investment doesn't happen because there isn't that I guess domain
knowledge or very specific domain knowledge. Where are you today
in terms of both funding but also in productization and distribution?
Speaker 5 (22:11):
Right? And I think there is one really important aspect
to it. I believe one of the reasons why they is,
you know, you have the specialization and you have these
I mean investors are they are willing to take risks,
Banks are willing to take risks, but there is still
going to be an assessment of return. And as of return,
(22:35):
you can only do if you know the market, if
you have understanding of how the market works. How to
go to market strategy is who's going to pay for it?
If you are developing a product that the world hasn't
seen before, how are you going to price it? Well,
(22:55):
you know, it's a total crystal ball that's in front
of you, and invest is are managing other people's money, right,
you know, it's a they can't you know, it's it's
a it's a huge turtle to make the argument. We
believe that, you know, somebody is going to pay X
for this novel product because you know, if you go
(23:16):
out and do market research and we've done that and
ask if there was a vaccine, how much would you pay? Right,
an investor expects you to do that, and but people
have no concept. This is like if you go out,
you know, would you pay a thousand dollars for one iPhone?
And you've never seen it, are you? And so you
have to really get push hard as quickly as possible,
(23:40):
get the product out. You know, most biotech products take
ten fifteen years and millions of dollars. We had to
do this in rapid time to get there with total
focus and show that the market that there is a need,
that we're solving a problem that actually exists, and that
(24:02):
people are willing to buy it because the problem is
so large. So we are we completed our first year
of commercialization, first full season. These animals are seasonal animals.
They hibernate over the winter and then the almond pollination
(24:22):
kicks off the new season, which just happened in California,
so we had a lot of beekeepers interested in it.
We had initial sales, we did a lot of you know,
this is high touch. You have to know these people.
They have to learn we weren't, you know, a known
little company and the first product. Who are these people?
(24:46):
So we had to overcome this. And so now the
second year, the season just barely started and we already
have like five times as many purchase orders we had
the same time last year, many more customers. I think
there was another five to six time increase in customer
(25:10):
that come to us. Now people are coming to us,
they've heard about it. So there's a lot of you know,
in in agriculture, you know, if your likelihood depends on it,
you won't just purchase a new product and apply it
in your entire operation, right, you will shut it out
in you know, one percent now, in a couple of hives,
(25:32):
maybe one hundred hives. Then the next year you say, okay, okay,
this is fine, I'm going to test it in twenty
percent of my operation. And then at some point when
once you see that it's really it really turns the
corner for you. Then it's when you place when you
when you adopted one hundred percent, either you're going to
adopt it or you're not going to adopt it. And
(25:53):
so that is what we are seeing that the customers
that are with the returning customers that as larger orders
with customers coming. So it's going really in a right direction.
I mean, this is a licensed product, is an animal vaccine,
it's not a supplement. So it's we can tell people
(26:14):
it is working preventing you know, American foul root. But
it's a journey, it's a real journey.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
So the B vaccine is not the only thing you've
been working on. You're also working on a shrimp vaccine, which,
as far as I understand, it operates on similar principles.
Would you anticipate that the development and the funding and
the commercialization of a shrimp vaccine, would that be easier
now that you've done the B vaccine or is it
(26:58):
still the case that you know, shrimps in aquaculture are
completely different to bees operating in commercial hives or in agriculture.
Speaker 5 (27:08):
Actually, the reason why weich so, yes, it's going to
be easier. It is easier. So investors that we're talking
to now, because you know the market in bees. Nobody understands,
you know, what are the losses? You know, how many
millions is this? Actually? What's the impact on you know,
(27:29):
losing three hives? That what are the real you know,
solid numbers are much more difficult to get to trimp industry.
We know that they are four to seven billion dollars
of losses due to disease every single year. These are
staggering numbers. One disease wide spot can be a billion
(27:52):
dollars in losses a year. This is very well documented.
We know it's a forty three of the six billion
dollar industry because the market is much better known because
people have tried to develop prophylactic solutions, try to develop vaccines.
(28:13):
There is in the last last fifteen years the emaging.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Wait, what's a sorry, what's a prophylactic solution to white
spot and shrimp?
Speaker 5 (28:22):
Oh? Vaccine that you give to prevent it a disease,
so that you know, make sure you don't get sick
before the disease, rather than treating once the disease.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Okay, I had a slightly different image in my mind,
but go on.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
So, yeah, so it's much better understood. People have tried
to develop it. There are many approaches through better feed,
through better genetics of the shrimp that are more disease resistant.
So there's a lot of money flowing into this area
and the market is much better and this, and so
(29:00):
you can do price calculations much more easily, and the
return on investment and are the you know, most of
the big animal health companies are looking at this space.
They might already be in aquaculture with salmon or telapia
with other species and might want to expand into this.
(29:22):
And then the big feed companies, whether it's it's you know,
they're they're a bunch of them that sell into that
industry and understand it very well and investors, then it
makes it much easier for investors to assess the risk profile.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
What is the stata you know, either for your company
directly or the peers that you talk to when you
go to industry conferences and such. You know, we've talked
about it a little bit on this show, the sort
of cutback in funding for pure science, which is obviously
the precursor to having a company. As you said, your
(30:00):
co founder had been working on this in a lab
in Helsinki. Can you give us a little bit of
the landscape of like what you see happening on the
pure science front and how it compares to Europe and
if you have any visibility into it, what's.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Happening in China. But again, I don't know if.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
That's something that you have is but I'm sure you
have at least US and Europe visibility into the science
funding landscape.
Speaker 5 (30:22):
Right from a company perspective, we so far have not
relied on any government money to support science. They are
a lot of you know, sbion and it's all these
grand mechanisms that out there to fund science, in product
directed science, and we've stayed away for it from from
(30:44):
a number of reasons because it's, you know, you can
get political, and you're always, you know, wherever the wind blows,
and we just don't want to get distracted with this.
They are very, very very lucrative funding mechanism in Europe
where the European Union backs innovation, and it appears to
(31:05):
be why they're very competitive. It's billions of dollars that
are dedicated towards that and a lot of and I
think that's probably where a lot of research is going
to go. I would think if this continues the lack
of resources available to universities in this country. We have
to see how this plays out. But from a company perspective,
(31:29):
I think from a regulatory environment or from the ease
of accessing capital from private markets, I would think US
is still leading this regardless independent on what happens. Of course,
do we feel it in discussions with investors, the uncertainty
(31:51):
in the economic climate. Before, like twenty twenty two, the
investor would ask, if you had more money, you know,
can you accelerate? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that question doesn't
come that often and with the.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
Risk the US capital markets are still the best in
the world, but they're not trying to basically stuff your pockets.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Full of money the way they were a couple of
years ago.
Speaker 5 (32:17):
That's correct, they're a little bit more. You know, how
is this going to play out? I think everybody is
in a in a you know, holding, but there's definitely
money out there to be deployed.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Got it.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
So it strikes me that what we've been talking about
obviously very creative solutions to ongoing problems. And you know,
people might be aware of the decline of honeybees, but
perhaps they're not as aware of the problem of white
spot in commercially farmed shrimp, how do you go about
actually selecting your next targets.
Speaker 5 (32:53):
It was a decision based on what do we know
the most problematic diseases from the economic impact, and we
know that we knew that our approach of vaccination of
the queen is effective against a number of diseases when
we tested in the lab and when we see how
(33:14):
the vaccine performs in the field. That we said, okay,
what are the biggest bacterial and viral diseases for shrimp globally,
whether whether this is in Southeast Asia, whether it's in
you know, an Ecuador, in China, what are the biggest problems?
And that's where white spot just really is at the top.
(33:38):
And then early immortality syndrome there they're on the bacteria side.
But white spot is definitely the disease that can wipe
out an operation when it hits a farm. When it
hits in three to seven days, the entire shrimp are
dead and it's rapid and you lose an entire haut
(34:00):
so for a farmer, and typically you can't clean up,
you know, so right now, for bacterial diseases, farmers still
use antibiotics because they don't have anything else, you know, chemicals,
all kinds of treatments when they see that something is happening.
But when white spot happens, it's very, very difficult to
(34:23):
clean up the ponds. You pretty much have to abandon
them and then find a new spot and make new ponds.
And that impact on the environment. You know, Shrimp is
one of the most neutrine rich lean protein that can
(34:44):
be grown at large scale. It is consumed at you know,
bigg amounts around the world, and it could be the
most sustainably grown protein. It's not. It's not because of
the chemicals that are needed, because of the mangroves that
have to be cut down, because of the other impacts,
(35:06):
because we don't have vaccines to prevent that from happening.
And that's why we, you know, we need more shrimp.
We picked shrimp also because it is so and it's
such an important protein and growing. The consumption worldwide is growing,
and it's relatively cost effective to produce, but the impact
(35:28):
is just devastating. And rather than saying, okay, let's get
rid of all the shrimp product, that's not a solution, right,
We have to just what we did with chickens or
cows or honey bees make them healthier so that the
impact on the environment is reduced. And of course the
shrimp don't die, you know in the pond.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, and so they can survive the industrialized scale at
which we seem to form them nowadays. But that was
so interesting, and I love a chance to talk about
honeybean vaccines and shrimp vaccines. So thank you so much
for coming on all thoughts.
Speaker 5 (36:04):
Well, thank you for having me. There's a pleasure, Joe.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
I just find this particular area of biotech just really
interesting and also more and more relevant. Right, it seems
like there's no doubt that there's increased pressure on our
food supply and we're having to be more creative in
figuring out ways to feed everyone all the things that
people seem to want to eat, and usually that means commercialized,
(36:42):
industrialized farming, right, And a lot of those conditions for
animals are not great, as we discussed in our chicken series,
and so finding ways of keeping them healthier so that
they can survive and preferably even thrive in some of
those environments, although I'm guessing that's a long shot, but
they can survive and actually become food and satisfy people's needs.
(37:04):
That seems more important than ever.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
While we were recording this, Tracy I bead me and
she says she hates shrimp. I like shrimp a lot.
I want I could eat a lot of shrimp. You know,
I thought that was fascinating. You know, the sort of
investing under extreme uncertainty. You know, we should have on
the podcast again sometime is We talked to him, remember
(37:26):
Bill Janeway oh CC, and he talks about like he's
a venture capitalist and he's also an economist, and he
talks about like basically, you know, investing under and this
is when under extreme uncertainty. And this is extreme extreme
uncertainty because it's actual life science. As she said, you
have no way of pricing it stakes. You don't know
(37:46):
the market size, you don't know what they're going to pay,
you don't have a distribution channel because it's not a
veterinary medicine where the veterinarians are kind of service sales people,
et cetera. So how you go about pricing that and
how you go about from sort of lab to company
and make that initial step and then there's it's not
really falls in anyone's category. It's to me just such
(38:08):
a fascinating economics question.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Absolutely, And the one other thing I want to put
in here this is a call to action for listeners.
But I've been wanting to do an episode on gender
selection technologies and agriculture for a long time. So you know,
there's a huge amount of waste if you're breeding something
like cattle or chickens, because you don't want a bunch
of roosters if you're trying to farm eggs, or you
(38:33):
don't want a bunch of bulls if you're trying to
produce milk. And I know there are companies working on
this particular technology. I don't know the name specifically. I
don't know if we can get them to come on
the show, but if anyone has any connections to them,
please let them know that we want to talk.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Tracy.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
I'm going to bring this back to World War two
history real quickly. This is my other takeaway of reading
about the history of war.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
The male are very expendable, is it like, right?
Speaker 4 (39:02):
Like countries lose millions of men and continue to operate,
and so it's similar to animals in that respect.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
I'm not gonna say anything. Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
This has been another episode of the Authots podcast. I'm
Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Annett Kleiser. She's at Annette Kleiser. Follow
our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman armand dash Ol Bennett
at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kalebrooks. For more odd
Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots.
We have all of our episodes in a daily newsletter,
and you can chat about all of these topics twenty
(39:39):
four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash
od Lots.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
And if you enjoy odd Lots, if you like it
when Joe brings up how expendable the males of the
species actually are, then please leave us a positive review
on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are
a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our
episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is
find the Bloomberg channel on Apple podcast and follow the
instructions there. Thanks for listening
Hello, all thoughts listeners. So you were about to listen
to an episode that we recorded back in April when
there was a lot of news around trade and tariffs,
so you might hear us reference that quite heavily. It's
a very interesting episode and I think you'll enjoy it.
Take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Authoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Joe, do you remember when you were a kid, presumably
you went on road trips like across America? Do you
remember how filthy cars used to get on road trips
because of like hitting millions and thousands of insects?
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Do you remember this? I thought you were going to
say how how filthy cars get inside as a kid,
and I was like, my car is filtering inside.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
It's disgusting.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
But I do remember that, and I you know, they're
like weird things like people like you know, like insects
and like people have talked about how like this is
like one of those mysteries. It's kind of like chemtrails.
Why did car windshields get filthy?
Speaker 5 (01:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:19):
I didn't know this was ever going to become an
odd lots topic, so I'm pleasantly surprised.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Well, I have a lot of thoughts on this. So
one the buggiest place I ever used to visit was
in Arkansas with my Grandma in the summer, and I
remember like the car just being like disgusting, not only
because of insects, but because there are also a lot
of armadillos there, and armadillo's I don't know if you
know this, but when they're frightened, they jump up, so
they tend to get caught in like truck girls. Anyway,
(01:46):
this is probably too much information, but I also I
tried to read a book on insects once and the
lack thereof in today's natural world, I guess, and it
was called The Insect Crisis. And it's one of the
few books that I had to stop reading after like
three chapters because I just found it too depressing.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
By the way, I just want to say, ay, I
liked it.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Whenever this episode is getting released, we're recording this April
twenty fourth. I appreciate a break from like or not
talking about stuffs every second. Two You mentioned armadillo's. It
reminds me of the famous sort of left wing Texas
populist Jim Hide Tower wrote a book There's Nothing in
the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos,
a work of political subversion. So thank you for reminding
(02:28):
me of that book. And I agree read that.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
I don't remember the other thing I was going to say,
so keep going.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Okay, Well, anyway, you know, I'm starting on a depressing topic,
which is there has been this notable decline in insects
over the past couple decades. And if you talk to
old people like us, Joe and me, we will say
that there is a notable lack of insects just when
you're out and about and you know, driving on highways
or whatever. But all of that said, this isn't a
(02:55):
doom and gloom episode because we're actually going to be
talking about some interesting efforts to kind of arrest that decline.
And you know, Joe and I, we've taken an interest
in biotechnology. It's recently, especially in the context of the
US versus China, but human biotech is not the only
thing out there. There is a pretty big industry around
(03:16):
animal and insect biotech, and I know nothing about it.
Pretty much and I find it very interesting and we
should talk about it.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
We should and also look, pets and animals are a
huge industry, and so for when it comes to biotech,
non human animals are huge. And of course the other
context besides the US versus China and biotech is of
course the cutting or the gutting some would say, of
sort of core research from the federal government level. So
this intersects with industrial and political trends. And so even
(03:47):
though it's not a terriff episode, I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well not just that. So you know, one of the
foremost examples of insects species that has been in decline
is honeybees, of course, and those are constantly in the news,
the lack of honey bees. And we all know if
we don't have as many honey bees, well then we
don't have as much honey, But we also don't have
as much other types of foods because they are very
important pollinators.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
You know.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
I just one last thing for me. When I was
in college, I lived in a vegan co op at
the university.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
Do you have a bee hive? No?
Speaker 4 (04:17):
But I had this business idea, Oh, we should have
hand pollinated produce and sell it to grocery stories as saying,
this is the only true vegan produce you can have
because we don't even use bees in the process. I
never did it, but I thought that'd be a good business.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Oh my god, have you ever hand pollinated something? No,
it's fun.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Oh, so you can do it.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, you got like a little like feather, little rag,
and you sort of spread the pollen around while doing
your best like biz impression. You have to be in
the mindset of a bee.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
If I were back at you know, twenty two years old,
I'd make a big radical stand about only eating hand
pollinated produce.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Don't make the bees work.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, it's cruel.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Okay, all right, Clearly we could talk about bees and
insects and armadillers for probably another hour or so, but
why don't we get straight to us. We have the
perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with, a net Kleiser.
She is the CEO over at Dallen Animal Health, which
has been doing some really really interesting things in the
field of animal biotech. So, Annett, thank you so much
for coming on our thoughts.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure
to be here.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I'm very excited to talk about something other than the
tariffs for a start, and I do like talking about
the natural world. But like, first off, why don't we
just kind of add some context to where we are.
Why is animal biotech an important field to be investing in.
Speaker 5 (05:32):
Well, a lot of of what we depend on in
food and agriculture. You've talked about pets. Of course they are,
you know, companions, they're very very important to us. But
a lot of what we eat depends on animals. So
not just the typical production animals that we think about,
which you know, the cows or chickens, but also you
(05:56):
know fish or shrimp. And then one of the the
most important workhourses probably that we have, is the honeybee.
Because our most nutritious foods wouldn't grow, wouldn't exist if
it wasn't for these little animals that buzz around and
pollinate them, or apples, and it's actually the most nutritious
(06:20):
foods that we have wouldn't exist, whether it's almonds or
pumpkins or onions. So they are extremely important and we
need to protect all of these animals, not just our
companion animals, but also these really important production animals, livestock,
everything that falls in it, and so biotech has a
(06:41):
big role to play, not just on the human side,
but also on the animal side.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
What do you tell us what DULLN Animal Health does
in your role there and give us some background about
your work.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Specifically, Yeah, happy to do so. So down on animal
Health focuses on these animals. We're a biotech company. We're
about six and a half years old, so we're relatively
young still, but we focus on what we called underserved animals,
which are primarily insects invertebrates, and we developed the world's
(07:17):
first vaccine for honeybees to protect them from diseases. They
get diseases, they get sick just like any other animals,
just like we do. They get viral infections, they get
bacteria infections. And despite the fact that they are so
important for our survival and so not just food production
but biodiversity. You had mentioned that the whole insect decline
(07:41):
are extremely, extremely important in a bigger picture, there is
nothing or there was nothing out there to really help
them fend off diseases. And so we decided to set
out and change that and decide, you know, these animals
they need they need protection, they need our care and
(08:02):
we can't just complain about the insects. We also need
to we need to protect them, and so that's what
we do.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I have so many questions already, but perhaps my biggest
one is how does a honeybee vaccination actually work? Because
I imagine you're not all going out there with tiny
little syringes and inoculating millions of bees, which would kind
of defeat the purpose of having all these pollinators do
our work for us. How does it work?
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Yeah, we want to be kind to them, we want
to be careful, and you had you know, because some
of us are older. And when I was a child,
I remember how the nurse came to school and gave
us a sugar cube with the polio vaccine on it.
And this is very similar. The queen gets a sugar
paste to eat in her early stages before she gets
(08:54):
introduced into the new colony, and we just mix the vaccine.
It's an aural vaccine, it's a liquid. We mix it
into that sugar paste and she takes it up biting
in a nutshell.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And then she spreads it I guess to her offspring.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
Right.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
So insects have this interesting phenomenon that the maternal animal
passes on information about a disease that is in the
environment to the next generation, and the queen does this
via the eggs, so she there isn't disease in the hive.
(09:33):
There are pathogens in the hives, she can't get sick.
A lot of these these diseases are infant diseases, their
larval diseases, so they threaten the brood just when they
when they emerge from the egg. And so the queen
takes these passogens up and passes little pieces of it
to her ovaries, and the developing larvae will see this
(09:57):
piece of a pathogen and say, oh, there's something out there.
They mean system gets upregulated and before they hatch, and
they are protected when they hatch. And this is a
mechanism that is widely a scene in insects and invertebrates
and actually also in chickens and other animals. And so
what we do is just use that naturally occurring phenomenon
(10:22):
and the way we only have to vaccinate the queen.
Expose the queen to a dead bacteria that can't infect anything,
and the next generation is protected. It's pretty clever little
magic wand that you you know, put over the hive.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So within the field of animal biotech or even more
specifically rare animal biotech, or even more specifically B vaccine biotech,
I can imagine multiple different areas of what you'd call
business or value add creation. So there's the raw science
of like what does the molecular structure of a B
(10:58):
vaccine look like? Then I would agen there is the
challenge of turning raw science into something product tized that
can be distributed and sold at a profit. And then
there's the actual sort of distribution of it. So going
out to the actual customers, here's a product that exists.
Where does your company sit specifically, how much is it
(11:19):
at the raw science level, and how much is it
the productization of raw science, all of it.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
I'm laughing. You don't see me laughing, but I'm laughing
because that was actually what we were faced with when
we decided to do this company. This was very early
academic research at the University of Helsinki when I by
accident stumbled across it. The university had brought me in
(11:49):
to look at their life science portfolio to see if
there's this company that could be spun out, if technology
a pattern that could be licensed to an existing company.
And typically when you do this, you know, you see
a lot of really interesting research. I mean, universities are full,
it's just amazing, amazing research. But you know often is
(12:11):
there are incremental, small, you know, improvements that are really
important to move us forward, but they're really these completely
out of the box idea this way. And so I
stumbled the research. Happened to be in the office at
the university when I was there, and the director called
her in and said, you know, Daia, why don't you
(12:32):
tell these folks about your idea for a B vaccine?
And I just got really intrigued, because you know, somebody
needed to do something. I told myself and you know,
this is.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Your CSO founding Cso I'm looking at your website, Dahlia
Fried talk.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
Tech right, And so she's a professor at the University
of Gratz who was at Helsinkie and now she's in Gratz.
And so this was really early research, very early data
showing that this might be possible. The company then had
to start completely from scratch to find a strain to
(13:08):
go out and you know, infected hives, build a string connection,
go to the regulator. There was no regulatory pass, there
was no development pass. How do you conduct clinical tries?
Nobody had ever done this before, so there was the
whole development of the product that could then go out
(13:29):
into the market. And then there was no model of
how There were no channe. I mean, if you if
you develop a new shoe, you go to a shoe
store and that's where you sell the shoe. For a
B vaccine, there was that didn't exist. So there was
no discharge.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
No, there's no B clinics out there.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
There's no retailer on Fifth Avenue or you get your
insect vaccines.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
There's no channel.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
If your beehive is sick, you're not going to call
a vetinarian. And they were carrying the hive into the
veterinary clinics, like can you look at my queen? You
know right? That doesn't you call your neighbor, You call
you know, your father or your grandfather that had bees.
So it's a complete Even these large beekeepers and in
(14:15):
the US, when we're talking large beekeepers, they have seventy
one hundred thousand, one hundred and twenty thousand colonies. Wow,
these massive operations that are pollinating our crop during this
our apples you know, the beautiful apples that you get,
(14:35):
you know, the bit whole foods, and it's like they
need these big beekeepers, these big producers. But still there
is no veterinarian that comes by. There is no you know,
so it didn't exist. So we have we are creating.
Everything done basically is writing the playbook on how do
(14:57):
they develop these products, how do you get them licensed,
how do you commercialize them, how do you roll it out?
How do you work with the industry, and not just
with the industry, with state veterinarians with it's much bigger,
and these are these are global problems. I was talking
to one state government veterinarian in Europe who was then
(15:22):
asking me, well, we don't now really know what to
do here. What's the opinion of the World Health Organization?
And I say, you must be kidding me. You' say
the World House. But let me call them, you know,
let me pick up my phone and figure out what
they have to say about this. So really what we
had to do is the whole from bench to customer
(15:44):
and with the customer. It's exciting when you have an
opportunity to do that and to figure it out.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
I have so many questions about this, not just the
regulatory portion of this and the commercialization, but specifically to
begin with on the funding side, So you're doing something
relatively new, and I imagined if you go to a
traditional venture capitalist or a traditional investor in biotech and
you say I have a b vaccine, I'm sure some
(16:28):
of them are very excited because it's novel and it
sounds kind of cool. But on the other hand, it
is this kind of brand new thing, and I could
see some people being a little bit surprised. What are
those conversations like when you're first trying to raise funding?
Speaker 5 (16:42):
Right, So it has changed a lot over the last
six years, thankfully, but in the beginning when I set out,
it was really clear we did not fit any investment
themes so well, not animal health because even though bees
(17:03):
are classified as livestock, they are not. You know, it's
the pets, it's the companion animals, which the biggest, but
then the traditional ones the cows and the chickens, but
not bees. That just falls outside animal health investment. On
the agaculture side, most architect investors will look at microbiomes
(17:26):
of trees, drones, surveillance, more position agaculture technology driven AI
those themes, and then you have the food tech investors,
which are further upstream. Right, they look at the honey,
but they don't look where the honey came from. So
we fell into this complete Noman's land there was in
(17:49):
food tech. There were a couple of investors that at
the time a lot of money was going into alternative
protein production to lower you know, to be more sustainable,
a lower CEO two impact and meet meats right, the
meal worms and and and grasshoppers for animal feed and
human food production. They were really interested in this because
(18:13):
they said, well, we had a complete blind spot that
these animals could get sick too, but vaccines was not
in their in their target so they couldn't invest in us.
So there was literally nobody that so it was it
was in the beginning, it was heavily angel funded because angels, Yes,
(18:33):
they want to make money. These are rich individuals that
that want to make you know, money with their investments,
but they also they are driven by by they want
to do you know, good in the world with with
their wealth. So the return expectations are and their timeframe
is a little bit different, and so they they really
(18:55):
backed this. So we were entirely entirely angel funded, and
then a lot of globally so not very few US
actually European Canadian growers that came from the agricultural space,
from the animal health space, but not vcs. And it
was in twenty twenty two, I don't you might remember
(19:17):
when the market went down. It was a cosible clime
for everyone, especially startups. Was in a few weeks. All
the discussions that I had and fundraising, you know, people
were jumping off left and right, and somebody asked me
to speak at a climate and space conference, and I said,
Climate and space. But when you're raising money, you take
(19:40):
every opportunity you can to spread the word. So I
went and there were these amazing talks about you know,
refueling stations in space and you know, hotels and you know,
whatever you have and these batteries and everything. And then
I came with my with my b vaccine and telling
(20:02):
the audience that this is great that you know, because
of climate change, we have to go to other planets
and we have to be prepared for this. But in
the meantime, we really need to solve this problem because
we're never going to be able to solve it here
on this planet. Or any other planet. If we don't
protect insects, we may not like them, but they are
(20:24):
incredibly important for human survival, plant survival, all living organisms
need these little you know, we can do wetland restoration,
it doesn't matter if we don't have insects to live
in them. And sure enough, at the end of the night,
I was approached by several climate investors we sees sustainability
(20:49):
in climate that understood the importance of what we were
doing and had more flexible investment themes and a longer
term and I was able to get funding. And so
now a lot of the investors of we're talking to
come from that space.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
I think this is so fascinating because something that's come
up in the podcast before in various contexts, is this
idea that like, you know, we think of like this
wall of capital out there that exists and it's seeking return. Well,
whether it's banks, whether it's vcs, whether it's private credit firms,
et cetera. There is specialization and there are categories of things.
(21:32):
And we talk a lot about this, particularly more often
in the context of certain energy texts. They sometimes they
call it the missing middle, this idea that there are
theoretically profitable investments out there, but it's just not in
anyone's specific wheelhouse.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
And no one is in charge of the B vaccine.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Yeah you know.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
Yeah, so it's like not something that someone has specialized.
And so even the theoretically profitable on some time horizon
investment doesn't happen because there isn't that I guess domain
knowledge or very specific domain knowledge. Where are you today
in terms of both funding but also in productization and distribution?
Speaker 5 (22:11):
Right? And I think there is one really important aspect
to it. I believe one of the reasons why they is,
you know, you have the specialization and you have these
I mean investors are they are willing to take risks,
Banks are willing to take risks, but there is still
going to be an assessment of return. And as of return,
(22:35):
you can only do if you know the market, if
you have understanding of how the market works. How to
go to market strategy is who's going to pay for it?
If you are developing a product that the world hasn't
seen before, how are you going to price it? Well,
(22:55):
you know, it's a total crystal ball that's in front
of you, and invest is are managing other people's money, right,
you know, it's a they can't you know, it's it's
a it's a huge turtle to make the argument. We
believe that, you know, somebody is going to pay X
for this novel product because you know, if you go
(23:16):
out and do market research and we've done that and
ask if there was a vaccine, how much would you pay? Right,
an investor expects you to do that, and but people
have no concept. This is like if you go out,
you know, would you pay a thousand dollars for one iPhone?
And you've never seen it, are you? And so you
have to really get push hard as quickly as possible,
(23:40):
get the product out. You know, most biotech products take
ten fifteen years and millions of dollars. We had to
do this in rapid time to get there with total
focus and show that the market that there is a need,
that we're solving a problem that actually exists, and that
(24:02):
people are willing to buy it because the problem is
so large. So we are we completed our first year
of commercialization, first full season. These animals are seasonal animals.
They hibernate over the winter and then the almond pollination
(24:22):
kicks off the new season, which just happened in California,
so we had a lot of beekeepers interested in it.
We had initial sales, we did a lot of you know,
this is high touch. You have to know these people.
They have to learn we weren't, you know, a known
little company and the first product. Who are these people?
(24:46):
So we had to overcome this. And so now the
second year, the season just barely started and we already
have like five times as many purchase orders we had
the same time last year, many more customers. I think
there was another five to six time increase in customer
(25:10):
that come to us. Now people are coming to us,
they've heard about it. So there's a lot of you know,
in in agriculture, you know, if your likelihood depends on it,
you won't just purchase a new product and apply it
in your entire operation, right, you will shut it out
in you know, one percent now, in a couple of hives,
(25:32):
maybe one hundred hives. Then the next year you say, okay, okay,
this is fine, I'm going to test it in twenty
percent of my operation. And then at some point when
once you see that it's really it really turns the
corner for you. Then it's when you place when you
when you adopted one hundred percent, either you're going to
adopt it or you're not going to adopt it. And
(25:53):
so that is what we are seeing that the customers
that are with the returning customers that as larger orders
with customers coming. So it's going really in a right direction.
I mean, this is a licensed product, is an animal vaccine,
it's not a supplement. So it's we can tell people
(26:14):
it is working preventing you know, American foul root. But
it's a journey, it's a real journey.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
So the B vaccine is not the only thing you've
been working on. You're also working on a shrimp vaccine, which,
as far as I understand, it operates on similar principles.
Would you anticipate that the development and the funding and
the commercialization of a shrimp vaccine, would that be easier
now that you've done the B vaccine or is it
(26:58):
still the case that you know, shrimps in aquaculture are
completely different to bees operating in commercial hives or in agriculture.
Speaker 5 (27:08):
Actually, the reason why weich so, yes, it's going to
be easier. It is easier. So investors that we're talking
to now, because you know the market in bees. Nobody understands,
you know, what are the losses? You know, how many
millions is this? Actually? What's the impact on you know,
(27:29):
losing three hives? That what are the real you know,
solid numbers are much more difficult to get to trimp industry.
We know that they are four to seven billion dollars
of losses due to disease every single year. These are
staggering numbers. One disease wide spot can be a billion
(27:52):
dollars in losses a year. This is very well documented.
We know it's a forty three of the six billion
dollar industry because the market is much better known because
people have tried to develop prophylactic solutions, try to develop vaccines.
(28:13):
There is in the last last fifteen years the emaging.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Wait, what's a sorry, what's a prophylactic solution to white
spot and shrimp?
Speaker 5 (28:22):
Oh? Vaccine that you give to prevent it a disease,
so that you know, make sure you don't get sick
before the disease, rather than treating once the disease.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Okay, I had a slightly different image in my mind,
but go on.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
So, yeah, so it's much better understood. People have tried
to develop it. There are many approaches through better feed,
through better genetics of the shrimp that are more disease resistant.
So there's a lot of money flowing into this area
and the market is much better and this, and so
(29:00):
you can do price calculations much more easily, and the
return on investment and are the you know, most of
the big animal health companies are looking at this space.
They might already be in aquaculture with salmon or telapia
with other species and might want to expand into this.
(29:22):
And then the big feed companies, whether it's it's you know,
they're they're a bunch of them that sell into that
industry and understand it very well and investors, then it
makes it much easier for investors to assess the risk profile.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
What is the stata you know, either for your company
directly or the peers that you talk to when you
go to industry conferences and such. You know, we've talked
about it a little bit on this show, the sort
of cutback in funding for pure science, which is obviously
the precursor to having a company. As you said, your
(30:00):
co founder had been working on this in a lab
in Helsinki. Can you give us a little bit of
the landscape of like what you see happening on the
pure science front and how it compares to Europe and
if you have any visibility into it, what's.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Happening in China. But again, I don't know if.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
That's something that you have is but I'm sure you
have at least US and Europe visibility into the science
funding landscape.
Speaker 5 (30:22):
Right from a company perspective, we so far have not
relied on any government money to support science. They are
a lot of you know, sbion and it's all these
grand mechanisms that out there to fund science, in product
directed science, and we've stayed away for it from from
(30:44):
a number of reasons because it's, you know, you can
get political, and you're always, you know, wherever the wind blows,
and we just don't want to get distracted with this.
They are very, very very lucrative funding mechanism in Europe
where the European Union backs innovation, and it appears to
(31:05):
be why they're very competitive. It's billions of dollars that
are dedicated towards that and a lot of and I
think that's probably where a lot of research is going
to go. I would think if this continues the lack
of resources available to universities in this country. We have
to see how this plays out. But from a company perspective,
(31:29):
I think from a regulatory environment or from the ease
of accessing capital from private markets, I would think US
is still leading this regardless independent on what happens. Of course,
do we feel it in discussions with investors, the uncertainty
(31:51):
in the economic climate. Before, like twenty twenty two, the
investor would ask, if you had more money, you know,
can you accelerate? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that question doesn't
come that often and with the.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
Risk the US capital markets are still the best in
the world, but they're not trying to basically stuff your pockets.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Full of money the way they were a couple of
years ago.
Speaker 5 (32:17):
That's correct, they're a little bit more. You know, how
is this going to play out? I think everybody is
in a in a you know, holding, but there's definitely
money out there to be deployed.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Got it.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
So it strikes me that what we've been talking about
obviously very creative solutions to ongoing problems. And you know,
people might be aware of the decline of honeybees, but
perhaps they're not as aware of the problem of white
spot in commercially farmed shrimp, how do you go about
actually selecting your next targets.
Speaker 5 (32:53):
It was a decision based on what do we know
the most problematic diseases from the economic impact, and we
know that we knew that our approach of vaccination of
the queen is effective against a number of diseases when
we tested in the lab and when we see how
(33:14):
the vaccine performs in the field. That we said, okay,
what are the biggest bacterial and viral diseases for shrimp globally,
whether whether this is in Southeast Asia, whether it's in
you know, an Ecuador, in China, what are the biggest problems?
And that's where white spot just really is at the top.
(33:38):
And then early immortality syndrome there they're on the bacteria side.
But white spot is definitely the disease that can wipe
out an operation when it hits a farm. When it
hits in three to seven days, the entire shrimp are
dead and it's rapid and you lose an entire haut
(34:00):
so for a farmer, and typically you can't clean up,
you know, so right now, for bacterial diseases, farmers still
use antibiotics because they don't have anything else, you know, chemicals,
all kinds of treatments when they see that something is happening.
But when white spot happens, it's very, very difficult to
(34:23):
clean up the ponds. You pretty much have to abandon
them and then find a new spot and make new ponds.
And that impact on the environment. You know, Shrimp is
one of the most neutrine rich lean protein that can
(34:44):
be grown at large scale. It is consumed at you know,
bigg amounts around the world, and it could be the
most sustainably grown protein. It's not. It's not because of
the chemicals that are needed, because of the mangroves that
have to be cut down, because of the other impacts,
(35:06):
because we don't have vaccines to prevent that from happening.
And that's why we, you know, we need more shrimp.
We picked shrimp also because it is so and it's
such an important protein and growing. The consumption worldwide is growing,
and it's relatively cost effective to produce, but the impact
(35:28):
is just devastating. And rather than saying, okay, let's get
rid of all the shrimp product, that's not a solution, right,
We have to just what we did with chickens or
cows or honey bees make them healthier so that the
impact on the environment is reduced. And of course the
shrimp don't die, you know in the pond.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, and so they can survive the industrialized scale at
which we seem to form them nowadays. But that was
so interesting, and I love a chance to talk about
honeybean vaccines and shrimp vaccines. So thank you so much
for coming on all thoughts.
Speaker 5 (36:04):
Well, thank you for having me. There's a pleasure, Joe.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
I just find this particular area of biotech just really
interesting and also more and more relevant. Right, it seems
like there's no doubt that there's increased pressure on our
food supply and we're having to be more creative in
figuring out ways to feed everyone all the things that
people seem to want to eat, and usually that means commercialized,
(36:42):
industrialized farming, right, And a lot of those conditions for
animals are not great, as we discussed in our chicken series,
and so finding ways of keeping them healthier so that
they can survive and preferably even thrive in some of
those environments, although I'm guessing that's a long shot, but
they can survive and actually become food and satisfy people's needs.
(37:04):
That seems more important than ever.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
While we were recording this, Tracy I bead me and
she says she hates shrimp. I like shrimp a lot.
I want I could eat a lot of shrimp. You know,
I thought that was fascinating. You know, the sort of
investing under extreme uncertainty. You know, we should have on
the podcast again sometime is We talked to him, remember
(37:26):
Bill Janeway oh CC, and he talks about like he's
a venture capitalist and he's also an economist, and he
talks about like basically, you know, investing under and this
is when under extreme uncertainty. And this is extreme extreme
uncertainty because it's actual life science. As she said, you
have no way of pricing it stakes. You don't know
(37:46):
the market size, you don't know what they're going to pay,
you don't have a distribution channel because it's not a
veterinary medicine where the veterinarians are kind of service sales people,
et cetera. So how you go about pricing that and
how you go about from sort of lab to company
and make that initial step and then there's it's not
really falls in anyone's category. It's to me just such
(38:08):
a fascinating economics question.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Absolutely, And the one other thing I want to put
in here this is a call to action for listeners.
But I've been wanting to do an episode on gender
selection technologies and agriculture for a long time. So you know,
there's a huge amount of waste if you're breeding something
like cattle or chickens, because you don't want a bunch
of roosters if you're trying to farm eggs, or you
(38:33):
don't want a bunch of bulls if you're trying to
produce milk. And I know there are companies working on
this particular technology. I don't know the name specifically. I
don't know if we can get them to come on
the show, but if anyone has any connections to them,
please let them know that we want to talk.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Tracy.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
I'm going to bring this back to World War two
history real quickly. This is my other takeaway of reading
about the history of war.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
The male are very expendable, is it like, right?
Speaker 4 (39:02):
Like countries lose millions of men and continue to operate,
and so it's similar to animals in that respect.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
I'm not gonna say anything. Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
This has been another episode of the Authots podcast. I'm
Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Annett Kleiser. She's at Annette Kleiser. Follow
our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman armand dash Ol Bennett
at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kalebrooks. For more odd
Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots.
We have all of our episodes in a daily newsletter,
and you can chat about all of these topics twenty
(39:39):
four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash
od Lots.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
And if you enjoy odd Lots, if you like it
when Joe brings up how expendable the males of the
species actually are, then please leave us a positive review
on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are
a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our
episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is
find the Bloomberg channel on Apple podcast and follow the
instructions there. Thanks for listening
Hosts And Creators
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy Alloway
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