This Week in Startups - E998: The Next Unicorns: Benchling CEO & Co-founder Sajith Wickramasekara is increasing efficiency for scientists with a cloud-based platform, gives insights on recent life-science innovations, ethics of gene therapy & defining the line between quackery & brilliance – E10 of 10-ep miniseries

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

0:53 Jason intros Sajith Wickramasekara 1:40 What does Benchling do? 2:24 How did Sajith get into life science? 6:55 Benchling's value proposition for scientists 9:04 How do they charge? 10:43 Is Chamath Palihapitiya the most famous Sri Lankan in the US? 13:25 Why immunotherapy is the most exciting development in life science 19:00 3D Printing & harvesting organs in other species 20:50 Ethics of editing a human embryo 28:19 How did the scientific community respond to the embryo controversy 29:52 Breakthroughs in gene therapy 34:09 Defining the line between quackery & brilliance 42:37 Upside & downside of genetically modified crops 47:54 What is the best approach for breakthroughs in life science?

The Next Unicorns is brought to you by NetSuite by Oracle, the business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy-to-use cloud platform. Get NetSuite's free guide, seven key strategies to grow your profits when you go to netsuite.com slash twist. LinkedIn. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash unicorn and get a $50 credit towards your first job post. and Embroker. The Embroker Startup Insurance Program helps startup secure the most important lines of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle.

Get an instant quote and $5,000 of AWS credits when you become a customer atembroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get 10% off your policy costs by using offer code Twist 10. All right, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. It's going to make a good show today. We're going to talk about the massive change. happening in life science and I've got a really amazing founder on the podcast. His name is Sajith. And here we go. I'm part of the hard last name club too. And you go by Saji, but Sajith is how you pronounce your first name. Sajith. Sajith. Sajith. Got it. Wikrama Sikara. Wikrama

Sikara. Wikrama Sikura. Pretty close. Do you do it for me? Go ahead. Wikrama Sakera. Wikrama secure. Yeah. There you go. All right. Got it. Thank you for having you, Jason. Thanks for coming on the pod. the CEO and co-founder of Benchling, which you started in 2012. What does the company do? In plain English, because remember, we're not all PhDs and life sciences. Sure. We make software that makes biotechnology research faster and more collaborative. Got it. And biotechnology research prior to your enterprise software product was inefficient how? Think of it as an industry that is running on paper, email, and Excel. Got it. So literally, people do.

doing this life science research are typing data into a spreadsheet. Not always typing, sometimes writing in paper notebooks. First and then transcribing those. And then they make some formulas and then make decisions about products and services that we will use to try to extend our lifespan or cure diseases. Yes, more or less. Biology is all around you and it's the biggest industry they are probably not aware of. Right.

Yeah. And how did you get into that? Yeah. So this goes back quite a while. So my background's in a mix of software engineering and life sciences. So I kind of did both. The story for me goes back to growing up in North Carolina. I was, you know, I've been programming most of my life.

You know, like many young adolescent males, I got into softworks. I wanted to work on video games. But I went to a nerd boarding school basically in North Carolina. Nerd boarding school. Wow. I didn't know it existed. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to go to a boarding school that was run by the state in North Carolina.

So their whole thing was, hey, if we, we set up a school that's math and science only. And we'll bring people in from all over the state. So if you were, like, out in the mountains and you have access to a great education, you could come to the school, live there and, like, take classes from a bunch of, you know, PhD professors. All folks on math and science was a really great opportunity. I was lucky enough to go there. And it was styled kind of like university. So you didn't have class all day. You had opportunities to do other things and they kind of expect you.

You got to do more. And I had, you know, pushy immigrant parents. who wanted me to become a doctor, which had zero interest in doing. But I was willing to try out doing research. And so I convinced a professor at a lab at Duke University, just down the road to, hey, let me, I'll be some extra hands and labor for you and let me work in your lab. This is in high school you convinced somebody at Duke to make you a research assistant during high school. Yeah.

And so I... So you're like a Doogie Hauser. Like a Doogie Hauser type thing. And so I was... Oh, sorry. Did they bully you and call you Doogie Hauser when you were there? Before nerd boarding school, yes, but I was at home with all the other. When you went back to nerd boarding school, they called you Doogie Houser,

but that was a compliment in NerdBer. Sure. Yeah. Did you have a Doogie Houser poster on your wall? Not. Also, I've never seen that show. Okay. It's a cultural reference.

It's basically what's the guy's name? Neil Patrick Harris plays a kid who's so smart, he becomes a doctor. You were very smart, you became a research analyst. It's a compliment. Thank you. So I tried out this research thing, and I actually hated biology before that, because I was like, oh, this thing's all about memorization, and, you know, I want to stick to my programming thing. And it turned out I really liked the problem solving in the lab and the impact of the work I was doing.

You know, I was studying DNA repair and yeast, which sounds like a very esoteric thing, but how DNA gets repaired is very important, how we treat cancer. Yeah. And so I, at that point, realized that biology was going to be it for me, and I was going to find a way to blend both completely. computer science and biology together, and I would go have a career in medicine and work at a biote company doing drug discovery. So got to school, you know, college from MIT and studying computer science, because again, like, I love programming. It was one of my, you know, first things I loved. And I started doing research. And I eventually, you know, at the juncture, we want us to get serious about doing life science research. You know, you got to get a PhD and it's a industry that

requires a lot of training and investment to, you know, join the workforce. I actually quit doing research at that time. You know, I sort of be lined out. And if I were to, you know, reflecting back on why I did that, if I were to compare and contrast my life as a software engineer and my life as a scientist, they were very different. And software was just so much more fun. And a lot of people have that epiphany. I don't think I'm alone. But I had the epiphany because, you know, a lot of people think that biology takes time to grow. It's too slow. You know, stuff, you know, it's alive. Yeah. It's slow. That didn't bother me so much. What bothered me is that it felt really lonely compared to building software. Software was this incredibly collaborative thing.

If I wanted to work with a team of engineers who might be distributed all around the world, I had the tools to do so to collaborate on code effectively. Yeah. And if something about the process of building software sucks, well, you're a software engineer. Make some tools. And if they're good, people will use them. And the industry gets faster, better, cheaper, easier, you know, every year. And more people get to participate in it. Exactly. And if I were to compare that to scientists. Now, scientists will really push the envelope when it comes to the methods and the techniques they use in the lab for doing science. The design of the experiment. Yes, exactly. things like CRISPR.

Right. Those are amazing step functions that have, you know, come out since I was in the lab, you know, and they're wonderful and move science forward in a breakthrough type way. But more or less the way everyone works together in life science is based on paper, email, spreadsheets. So literally they're in Excel spreadsheets, typing information. Yep. They're paper lab notebooks at every biotech, you know, company academic lab. And those notebooks just sit there and collect dust.

And so these are really, really important problems they're working on. and they're doing it with pretty lame tools. And so the complexity of the scientific work has gone up so much, and so the tools haven't kept pace. So if I were to describe the tool at Benchling, would it be Google Docs for researchers? Would it be a Salesforce, CRM or Slack for researchers? How would you describe it in a way that we would understand? Yeah. Actually, a lot of those metaphors are pretty good.

They're elements of all those different types of tools that we have. The thing, though, is that we are – we've built them in a way that is specific to the life sciences. Got it. And so we have applications that help. We have a suite of applications. They're all unified. So if you're a scientist, you just get to use one tool to do your job.

You're not jumping between 10 different things. So it's like a suite, like the office suite. It is. Word, Excel. Exactly. Except Word and Excel, in this case, they're going to talk to one another. Got it. So you have tools to design your experiments, tools to document them,

tools to track all the materials being produced, both logical tracking. So think how you like model all the different stuff you're building and how it relates to one another. And then physical tracking. So like the supply chain of where all my tubes and how much volume is in them. So it's like a project. manager. And instead of just dumping it all in Excel, you've got like a proper project management and product. And then workflow tools to how you can place requests to your fellow scientists

and how you can hand off experiments from one team to another. And so if you're a scientist, you can use this tool. You can do most of your day to day in it. And then for the organization, you're a part of all of a sudden, all of your data is in one single centralized location. You can ask questions of it. Got it. And how many, I mean, this is, you've been working on this for now. Seven years. Seven years. It's a long time. Yeah, it is. And you got, you went to YC at some point. Yeah, actually right after we started. Yeah.

I had had some friends when I was in undergrad MIT and I was working on bench selling. It was something I was really excited about. I didn't know much about starting companies and that wasn't necessarily the goal. But I had some friends who had been in my combinator and they said, hey, these guys will give you some money and you can work on this for a year or two if you're excited about it. And I was like, that sounds great. Sign me up. Perfect. And you've now gone on to raise $61 million in a couple of rounds of funding.

You just did your series C this July, which means you're over $100 million evaluators. pretty easily. How many employees now? We're about 150. 150 already. Wow. Yeah, we've really grown the team in the last year or two. How do you charge for the product?

You charge by experiment. You charge by university. Charge by CED. Is a SaaS model? Yeah, so the product, in the early days, we actually gave it away for free to academic institutes. So think your PhD students who are just being trained. And we still actually keep the product free for them.

That's really important to us. Not all the academic labs in the world have tons of fun. funding, but they're all working on really important research. So they can play with it. They can trial it for free completely. And, you know, for us, it's how we train the next generation of scientists to use benchling before they go out into industry. But for companies from small startups to the, you know, household name pharmaceutical companies, everyone knows. Like we charge them per scientist per year. So it's a SaaS model. Like a thousand dollars of scientists? Two thousand scientists? A thousand's is the lower end. It can go, you know, I would say the large companies can pay us, you know,

the seven figures per year. Wow. So, thousands of dollars per scientist. Which makes sense. I mean, I think Salesforce and some of those tools, you start hitting low thousands of dollars per year. Yeah. And they live in them. Yeah. And the work that's being done is incredibly valuable.

Again, this is the lifeblood of the company. They're going to produce medicines that are going to go to market or other products that are going to earn the billions of dollars per year. And, yeah, you raise that over a $400 million dollar valuation. That's kind of mind-blowing for you, yeah? Yeah. What did your parents do? I'm curious.

They obviously saw the massive value in you going to this nerd. as you call it. I don't think they saw value to me quitting MIT though. Yeah. Were they immigrants? Yes. And you told me before from Sri Lanka.

Yeah, from Sri Lanka. Yeah. So my dad came here for school to do his PhD in electrical engineering. Oh, wow. In North Carolina. So they valued it? Yeah. Absolutely.

Deeply. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a couple of friends who are Sri Lankan. Pressure works for me. Yeah. And then my friend Jamath Polly Hopatia, who is, I think, the most famous Sri Lankan. Definitely the most famous in the Bay Area for sure, maybe in America. Is there more famous Sri Lankan in America than Chimov-Bahatiah?

Let's think about it. Who's the Sri Lankan in the NBA? Is there a Sri Lankan in the NBA? No. Has there been? I don't think so. You have to go to like cricket to start finding. Yeah, that's right.

What's the population of Sri Lanka? I'm curious. 20 million? 30 million? Probably about, yeah. It's not a major population size. Yeah, 20 million sounds about right. Yeah.

All right. When we get back from this break, I've got you here. And you know all about this stuff and you're seeing all the trends. And what I want to know is what I want to know is what, I got a lot of questions because I am a neophyte. I don't invest in this area. Sure. But when I have somebody who's got some level of familiarity with it, I like to ask them about some of the topics I'm seeing all the time.

And a couple of them that I find super interesting is this immunotherapy with curing cancer and your own blood and like this custom therapeutic. Yeah, personalized medicine. Personalized medicine. Yeah. I want to know what that's going to do to lifespans of people. in, let's say, our generation, Gen X and Millennial, when we get back on this week in startups. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my friend Jason Maynard.

Who works at NetSuite? Tell everybody, what do you do, Jason? You know, I do many things here at NetSuite, but I run the field operations for the business unit. Fundamentals matter. They do. I mean, I think it's part of the promise of what you're doing on NetSuite is to make sure people have strong fundamentals.

So the business itself, which is going to be complex, which is going to have ups and downs, but you're going to face competition. You're going to face losing employees to other companies. you're going to face accounting or cash flow issues at some point. You want to have all that stuff tight. Everybody says this is like the most chaotic time in business, and I can't remember any period in business that wasn't chaotic. It's always chaotic.

It's always change. So the key is how do you become resilient as an organization that you can withstand change? And I think that's one of those lessons you learn. If you've been around for a little while, 20 plus years, we've been through nothing but change. Part of it is you've got to be a grinder. You've got to embrace the mundane. Whether you're a basketball team or a football team or a software company,

you're to embrace that everyday practice grind and it's not always super sexy. All right. Right now, NetSuite is offering you valuable insights with a free guide, the seven key strategies to grow your profits. So go to netsuite.com slash twist, netsuite.com slash twist and get that free guide. Seven key strategies to grow your profits. We appreciate the work you're doing in the startup community. It's great stuff.

Thanks, pal. All right. We'll be back one more. All right, the CEO and co-founder of Benchling, That's Benchling.com is here. Saji, when we went to break, we were talking about your company and you work with all of these major life sciences companies. Am I correct in that this immunotherapy and this customized drugs is the most promising aspect of life expansion, life extension for humanity? Is this the most promising thing that scientists that use your software are working on?

Yeah. It is. It is. It is the most exciting thing in medicine right now. And I would say it's a bit broader than just immunotherapy. So I think the big shift that's happening is from chemistry to biology. So we can do a really basic science lesson right now. Let's do it, yeah.

So when you think about drugs in general, think like Advil or aspirin, you know, medicines that everyone knows about, those are what are called small molecule drugs. Small molecule drugs, got it. And so they're made through a chemistry-based process. And they're literally small molecules. So if you had a whiteboard, if I was a chemist, I could draw a structure on that whiteboard. And a chemist would look at it. And I'm simplifying. But they'd more or less be able to like mix some stuff together and make it.

Different compounds, different elements. Yeah. And so that's how most medicines have been made historically last 50 years. But if you plot the graph of R&D productivity, so dollars we invest in R&D, how many drugs do we get out? Right. That graph looks pretty bad. We're now spending $3, $4 billion if you bake in all the failures to get one drug to the market. And that one drug may not even move the needle in some significant way.

Yeah, it may only be an incremental improvement over what we have. We're not going to, to be honest, though, like, we're not going to, it's not like the industry is like bad at this. Like, we're not going to, it's just that we have a bunch of good drugs. Like, we're not going to make an Advil that's 10x better than Advil or a better aspirin or better lipidore. Because physics of molecules. Or they just do a good job. Yeah, but we've sort of exhausted that, right? Yeah, a lot of the low-hanging fruit is gone.

That's exactly it. But where's the high-hanging fruit? Is it in the Amazon at the bottom of the ocean? It kind of is because now we're trying to do things like cure genetic defect or treat Alzheimer's. We're trying to do stuff that is way higher stakes and higher value than we previously did before. We're not just treating the symptoms of disease. Not a headache, not shoulder pain. Yeah, this is cancer in people's lives and, you know, neurogenital disorders and so forth.

Wow. And so we need new tools for doing that. And so the industry's really been shifting from being heavily chemistry focused to heavily biology focused. Got it. And so we're leveraging human biology to do this. And so now we're making large molecules instead of small molecules. and as the name sounds, they're much larger. I couldn't draw the structure of one of these drugs on a whiteboard.

And instead, the way we make them, a human doesn't make them. We re-engineer organisms and kind of use them as these cellular factories to produce these large molecules. So we're taking advantage of what exists in nature and we're editing DNA. Give me an example of this that exists today. Yeah. Some of the most famous, I'm trying to think of names that people will know, but some of the most famous breast cancer drugs, for example, are what are called monoclonal antibodies. They're almost like homing missiles that can target specific. specific mutations in DNA, and these are what are called biologics.

They're proteins, and we grow them up in a bioreactor. Not too different from how we would like ferment, like beer or something. Exactly. Yeah, it literally is like a bucket where you're fermenting. And these organisms are secreting. You're extracting some compound that the organisms are producing. Wow. Yeah.

What do you put into the bucket when you start? Well, many, like, this is a decade of work that goes in before that to re-engineer an organism to produce a molecule that has the effect that you want. And so we've got this new class of medicines, and some of them fall into the category of immunotherapies where we are able to take a patient's cells, re-engineer them, and then combine that with other existing treatments, whether it's antibodies or other types of drugs and, you know, supercharge a patient's immune system to go, you know, fight cancer. which is actually working today. It is working today. There's a Nobel Prize that was won for work on immunotherapy. I think last year there are two medicines on the market in the U.S. that take advantage of this.

There's one that's a gene therapy that treats blindness and children that's on the market. So it's very early innings for this type of medicine. How early? Like when did it start and when did we first start putting it in humans? Two years ago was the first approved medicine in humans for these cell therapies. So it's very early innings. And we were talking about these, though, what, 10, 15 years ago? We've been talking about it for a long time.

But sometimes the science just takes a long time to get from the basic discovery phase in academic labs all the way to works in people. Only people had software, enterprise software, that would make that journey more efficient, which is kind of what you're doing. Literally making the tools to help them compress that timeline, aren't you? Absolutely. We're trying to help them get more shots on goal to do it quicker, make better decisions. More shots on gall. I love it. So breast cancer used to be surgery. I think there was also chemotherapy. Was there hormone therapy as well for it, or is that mostly for prostate cancer? I'm a little bit far as much since I'm not sure. So now we're going to be able to do this.

For different types of cancers, actually some of those promises, for immunotherapy specifically, some of the most promising cancers are ones that we've actually had no treatments for before. They're actually like blood cancers in little children. Huh. It's like different leukemias that were really hard for us to address before. And now it's still, you know, small populations that we're testing this on, but the results have been miraculous. Okay. Now, another thing I hear about on the periphery with other investors is the 3D printing and or creation of new organs for humans.

Now, this was something that was in science fiction 10, 20 years ago. We'd create a clone of ourselves, then we'd harvest the various organs from a human. But my understanding is now is that we're 3D printing some easily printable, like parts of the heart and valves maybe with biological material. Yeah. So that's a huge area of active investment. And another area, another sort of angle on that is where at this point trying to figure out how we can grow up organs in animals and then transplant them over to human. humans. Wow. Because as crazy as it sounds, like, genetically, some animals are like not too far off pigs and dogs from humans. Pigs are the most common? Yeah, pigs are definitely very well studied

and it's something that I think people think is a lot of promise. Well, who's the closest then? Would it be like a primate? A pig is, I think pigs and primates tend to be the most well studied for this kind of purpose. And the thought is that with techniques like CRISPR where we can do gene editing, Okay. Maybe we can figure out a way to kind of trick the body into thinking that, hey, this isn't actually a pig organ. It's okay. And don't reject it. Wow.

Where are we on that timeline? Because you have people studying that using your software, I take it? We actually do have a couple of companies that work on xenotransplantation using bench sling. Xenotransplantation. That's a fancy way of saying cross-species creation of organs. Yeah. Can you imagine the moral outrage and debate this is going to spark? It hasn't really happened yet.

I think the gene editing debate is going to, it's going to be much more visceral when it comes to, like, for example, earlier this year, someone in China edited human embryos. Yes. And that, I think, caused huge. What did they do? They were doing something with twins or something and they wound up going to jail. They were trying to demonstrate that they could cure HIV or make some change to it in baby embryos, which is, there's a, it's illegal to do. the U.S., to be clear. You cannot make babies in petri dishes and do science in the United States on them.

Yeah, you cannot edit the like embryos, yeah. Right. And so I think the, but the scientific community is- Let's stop for a second and talk about that. Editing of a human embryo. So this is a tiny, tiny speck of a human that has- It's a clump of cells, yeah. A clump of cells, that would be the size of a, I don't know, sand or a pea or something.

something. Much smaller. And we're down to the embryo level. You're on a super microscope to see this. And they're editing it with no intention of that. Oh, no, they're going to insert it into, to be brought to birth. In this case, I think it was. But generally speaking in the U.S. when people want to do something, that's more for research purposes. The goal is not to, you know, have a genetically modified baby that is born. Yeah. That's kind of crossing an ethical line at this point. in America, but we are at the moment now where we are, or some people in humanity on the planet, are editing human embryos. Yes.

What do you think is actually going on in places with high science, but maybe low, you know, or fluid interpretations of the ethics here? Sure. I think it's important to be graceful here. Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to remember that the science is still. very early. There's no, we're not, you know, there aren't going to be gene edited babies walking around China next week. Like, we're still figuring out how to deliver these medicines, how to make

sure they're doing editing reliably and precisely and safely. So it's going to be a while before we see that kind of, uh, that, that come to fruition. Where it is being used in a more positive ways in treatments of different diseases and as a model to study, uh, different organisms and, and study different diseases in the lab. Here's the Here's just the quick recap from the Wikipedia. The Lulu and Nana controversy revolves around twin Chinese girls

born in October 2018 who have been given the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana. According to the research, He Gianquai, the twins are the world's first germline genetically edited babies. The girls were born healthy.

The girls' parents participated in a clinical project run by he, who is offered standard in vitro fertilization service. In addition, used CRISPR-Chi, a technology that can modify DNA to modify the CCR-5 gene in the emberos that were generated to attempt to confer genetic resistance to the HIV virus. And this was done in secretly, I was done in secrecy. Yeah.

So his intent was to make, to flip that CCR-5 gene, in some way to modify or flip it and then make the baby's immune to HIV. Wow. In 2019, lawyers in China reported

in light of the purported creation by Chinese scientists He Jiang Kui of the first geneated humans, the drafting regulations that require anyone to put in the human genome by G90s like CRISPR

would be held responsible for any related adverse consequences. Yeah, so that crossed the line And it's not something the research community is willing to support right now. Yeah. Yeah. When do you think we will hit that moment when we feel so good about the technology, we've been so confident in it, that will want to do, which this person obviously had good intent to make people immune to HIV.

It's on a short list of what could be one of the most beautiful things you could do for humanity. Good intent, ill thought out, you know. So when would this same approach? approach, not be ill-thought-out, but be appropriate for us to deploy in terms of the number of years from now, 20 years from now, above or below when we get back on this week in startups. Oh my God, I love LinkedIn for hiring. I have hired three out of the last four people on my team through LinkedIn. Hold on a second. Three out of the last four came from LinkedIn, and they are crushing it for me. Amazingly talented people are on LinkedIn.

every day. And some of them are not looking for jobs. They're just doing their messages, reading their feed, getting all the great content, all the great groups, all the great news, all the great articles and influencer. They're just living on LinkedIn, just like you do. You've been on LinkedIn all day today, I'm sure of it. Over 600 million people visit LinkedIn and search for jobs. And a new hire is made every eight seconds. And that's where you're going to find those qualified people. And here's Prash putting up a job posting for our new client success manager position in a our Toronto office because we can't find people in San Francisco very easily. So we're tapping other markets and we use LinkedIn to do that strategy. And my associate, Prash, huh, he's not CMO anymore.

He's an associate on the investment team. He is going on to LinkedIn and typing in a bunch of what we're looking for in terms of the skills needed and the description. Maybe he adds a couple screening questions, which I love. And then he sets the daily budget and zoom, zoom, zoom, here we go. We start getting candidates all within a couple of minutes. It's so. simple. It's so easy. And I want to give you $50, a $50, a $5.0. Just for typing the word unicorn, you know how to type unicorn. And you are building a unicorn right now with the help of your team that you're going to source on LinkedIn. So why don't we just give you $50 right now? LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. Can you remember it? LinkedIn.com. That's already in your history.

It's going to auto fill it slash unicorn as in the company you're building with the incredibly talented people you find on LinkedIn. $50. Terms and conditions apply because it's $50. Obviously, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Sajia and I are having a really interesting conversation about CRISPR and genetically edited babies of which we now have two on the planet. Is that literally true?

These are the first two? I believe they're the first two reported. Got it. Okay. So we can assume that there are others that we are not aware of. In all likelihood. This is really. It's got to be great.

Challenging science. Yeah. Oh, so there's a few number of people who could do it. Very likely. And it's, you know, you're talking research universities. Okay. Yeah. The equipment is super expensive and complicated.

Is that the issue? That's part of, it's, well, it's not just that, but like, you know, access to this kind of material, like how do you just get human embryos? Like, most universities have pretty strong ethics boards in place to make sure this doesn't happen. There's a lot of controls to make sure this isn't, you know, going wild. Right. I wonder how this actually became news.

I wonder how he. published a paper about it. Oh, okay. Yeah. So he said, here's my results. Wow. What was it like in your community when they saw this? Were people just aghast that this actually occurred in the world? They were. All of the leading researchers who helped discover the CRISPR technology, they kind of raised their hand and said, like, hey, this is not okay. And like, we as a community need to talk about it. So I think at least the majority of the scientific community that I think we're part of, I think responded really, really well. That's good. to bring the experts who are at the forefront of this technology together, to talk about it,

to make sure that everyone agreed on sort of the rules of engagement, what you can and can't do. And by the way, what was done was definitely illegal in the U.S., so it never happened here. It wasn't legal there. They've just added a law that you're responsible for whatever happens, adverse effects, which is kind of a review mirror type legal wording. Who knows what's correct there? It is China, so we're not sure. But when we left for break, we will get to the point where the CRISPR

community, the ethical, moral, leaders in science will say, yeah, it's time for us to genetically edit and solve some of these problems for humanity. Yeah. I put a line. You gamble it all? You like a little poker? You like a little poker? A little hold and PLO?

What do you like? A little mixed game? I'm not very good a PLO. It's mostly hold them. Little hold them. Okay. Well, I know a game if you're interested in playing. It looks like you're doing okay with that $400 million valuation, so you might have a seat.

I'm going to set the line at 20 years. Would you say the scientific community in America would say, okay, let's start slowly engaging in this type of behavior, the same exact scenario, the Lulu and Nana controversy. Would that happen in under 20 years or over 20 years? Which side would you take? This exact scenario? This exact scenario. I would go under 20 on that. Really?

I would. But I think putting, you know, baby embryos aside, something that's not totally. dissimilar is actually happening today in like a healthy and positive way, which is that for certain types of diseases, we're able to deliver medicines that can correct a genetic defect. So like a, it's called like a gene therapy as an example. And so think of things like cystic fibrosis or specific types of muscular dystrophy or even the first gene therapy in the US, which was approved a couple years ago, which is basically an injection to the eye of, you know, something that can correct for a faulty protein being produced. And,

save children from being, you know, congenital blindness. So you think cystic fibrosis could be resolved through this technique post being born? Yeah, hopefully for diseases like that, we can make ones that are chronic and have a terribly debilitating effect on, you know, a child's life. We can make those diseases bear. We can fix the underlying issue. So we don't have to change and modify the DNA at the embryo time scale. Yeah.

We can wait. Yeah. Until the person is five years old and then send in an immunotherapy? Aminotherapy is something a little bit different. A little different. Yeah. So a gene therapy. A gene therapy.

A gene therapy. How does a gene therapy get deployed in a human? Yeah. Delivery is actually a really tough part of it. This is going to sound crazy, but sometimes we use viruses. So we take a virus that would normally not be so great for a human and we like kind of use it as like a delivery vehicle. Okay.

It's like the syringe. Yeah. And so we can find a way to deliver maybe. maybe we're correcting a genetic defect, so hey, the body can't produce this one protein well, we're going to fix that, or maybe we're just taking the protein and sending it into the human. You can't make it on your own, but we'll give it to you. It's like a Trojan horse coming in there. Yeah, yeah.

I'm definitely simplifying the science a little bit. No, and I like it. I think it's like an important discussion for people to have because these. These gene therapies are happening today. Yeah. What are the first couple of dominoes that will fall in this, you know, genome therapy? Yeah. So for gene therapy, I would look to, they're typically going to be rarer diseases,

and they're going to be for diseases whose underlying biology is more simple. So maybe, not that there are any simple disease, it's all actually very hard, but diseases where there might be, you know, one mutation. You know, one T is a C and something like that, where we can kind of easily identify model disease and treat it. Yeah. Where do the brain diseases live on this spectrum? Because it does seem to me that our human physical, you know, carcasses that house us seem to be making it further and further. But our brains are not lasting as long as our muscles and bones. Yeah.

Neurodegenerative disorders or Alzheimer's stuff like that. That's almost the holy grail of medicine. Yeah. That's, they're really hard. Why is that? Because the brain's complex in its structure? Extremely complex, not well understood. Extremely hard to test, too.

Because Alzheimer's, think of that. That's a disease where when you image a patient's brain after, you know, many years of that, there's not a lot left. So if there's not left, how do you treat it? It's almost you have to be like prophylactic about it. Wow. Yeah. So it's extremely hard to test, you know, obviously a massive market and extremely important in the U.S.

worldwide. So companies are working really hard on it, but it is a graveyard of failures. I don't think there are any Alzheimer's medicines out on the market. Yeah. And so that one, you take the over 20 years that will be able to manage it or reverse it? I don't know about reversal, but that seems hard given that you're physically, you know, the brain is deteriorating. Yeah. But in terms of slow the progression or, you know, have some way to prevent it, I would still take under on 20 years.

I'm like macro optimist on this stuff. Really? Five years, I'm definitely over on that, but under 20, like 10 years ago, we didn't have CRISPR, we didn't have immunotherapy, next generation DNA sequencing was still extremely expensive. I think we underestimate the progress we can make in a decade. When you look at these crazy scientific discoveries, how do you assess them and how should we assess them when trying to figure out if this is quackery or brilliant? I am amazed by the number of startups that come to me with CBD products, and they say this is going to cure anxiety

and muscle relief. I mean, literally the list of things that CBD cures, it would put you out of business, Sagi. Like, there's no need for benchling anymore because we just rub some CBD on it. Don't tell our customers. They'll stop doing the research. Exactly. No need to do research, folks. Just rub a little CBD oil on. But the CBD does nothing. Why do people believe that this solves everything? And how do you look at when people say that kind of stuff and they make these crazy claims? But then there's some things that seem crazy like we're talking about CRISPR here. So, you know, the same investors will get pitched on a CRISPR project and they get pitched on a CBD.

And I'm looking at it going like, well, yeah, and both of them seem equally crazy. and insane. Yeah, well, the lucky thing is in the U.S. we have this, you know, wonderful body called the FDA, and they're going to, you have to, in order to get a medicine and market as such, you got to run it through a clinical trial and you need to show that, hey, this actually has a material effect on a patient population and it's not just some anecdotes. Yeah. CBD aside, you know, I'm not, I'm not a huge expert on that, and I don't think most of our customers, although I think there's like, there is merit in something there. Sure, why not.

Leveraging similar solutions for thousands of years. Yeah, I mean, THC obviously helps people with pain and pain mitigation. That doesn't make a genius. There are something there. There are people who do, you know, legit biotech research on the underlying, like, kinobinoids that are in THC. There's definitely stuff there. Is it a miracle cure?

Probably not. There aren't any silver. Is it much better than opioids? Likely. Very much likely. Very much likely. We go out of the limb and say, yes. Much better for society.

The chance of being addicted to edibles and versy. or opioids. I think we're going to. It's a better gamble to take. Yeah, I think we're all going to see that flop. Yeah. But in terms of quackery and not, that's really tough because sometimes science, stuff that is quackery ends up being true.

I think immunotherapy is like a really great example of this where there was a period of time where the people who believed in, you know, leveraging the patient's immune system to fight cancer, those people were the quacks in science for a little bit. And if you look back, you know, a hundred years, you find all these records of patients who had a hospital. And then back then, you know, hygiene wasn't very good. So you had a lot of, like, infections at the hospital and doctors didn't wash their hands and stuff like that. It might be a little further back than 1900.

But so you have these- I think it was still happening in the 50s. Have you read this book, The Checklist Manifesto? No, it's right there. It's right there. It's right there. I don't know if you've ever read it. I have read it.

Yeah. I mean, they basically came up with this device because doctors who think they're gods sometimes refuse to wash their goddamn hands. Yeah. And the tools and they just made it mandatory. Cuts down errors, yeah. And they put like a little caps, a little like tent over the surgery. tools to show that they were sterilized.

Yep. And they would remove the tent. And the doctors wouldn't do it, so they just had the nurses do it. Yep. And then all of a sudden people stopped dying in surgery because they don't get septic shock. Same thing happened with washing your hands at some point. And so you had, you know, doctors weren't washing their hands, whatever, and patients would get infections. And they might have cancer. And all of a sudden, they get this 104 degree fever and the cancer miraculously disappears. And there are a couple cases like that through history. And

so some doctors began to formulate the hypothesis that, like, hey, the immune system went into overdrive. And like, it took care of the cancer. And it took care of the cancer. cancer. And for a long time, though, that fell out of fashion at some point and those people were the quacks, but then it made a comeback. Like, some people really believed. And now, you know, therapy is one of the most promising breakthroughs that we have to treat cancer. Turns out cancer had a way to kind of trick the immune system and say, like, hey, I'm a good guy. Don't, don't like, go crazy on me. And these people figured out how to, how to deal with that and block that so that the, and then we could take a patient's immune cells out, you know, engineer them,

put them back in and more or less, you know, go crazy on the cancer. This sounds crazy. It is crazy. It's total science fiction, but we're living in it right now. And the other thing that, by extension, seems crazy right now is there are people who believe that positivity and seeing your loved ones and talking to them and joy and what some mental state could also put people into remission or cure cancer. Maybe not totally alone, but I'm sure, like, attitude and outlook have a big impact. Right. Like, you know, if you're, like, fighting cancer is like a tough thing. Like, it's probably really draining.

And if you give up, like, you, human biology is very complex and not well understood. So I wouldn't be surprised if that had some effect. Could be correlation between fighters and remission, but it might not be causation. Yeah, it would, I would hesitate to say causation. And I think, like, you know, it's important to have that outlook and go see a doctor and get medical treatment. Yeah. I mean, Steve Jobs, tragically, thought he could use a diet to be pancreas. Pancreatic cancer, yeah.

Which everybody told him, like, Steve, pancreatic cancer is no joke. You're not going to solve it with diet. It's crazy. Yeah. He would have survived? I'm not an MD. It is possible.

People survive. I mean, it's one of the tough ones, right? He had a rare form, though, that was treatable. So maybe if he, you know, took the treatments earlier, you know, possibly. But, hey, I'm not a know. It's crazy. All right. Well, we get back from this final break.

I want to talk to you about nutrition. There's a new movement that, hey, maybe what we're putting in our bodies is causing a lot of these problems. Maybe our bodies, obesity seems to be a huge problem. And then there's a bunch of people, and I see this on a pretty regular basis with alternative meats, and then genetically modified foods, which for some reason, people seem to think saying genetically modified foods equals automatically bad. What I want to know from you is what are your concerns about genetically modified foods? modified foods. And is this all overblown? Like, isn't genetically modifying them for the good, this incredible has incredible potential? Yes or no when we get back on this week in startups. All right. Listen, you need to have insurance for your startup. I do. And with me today,

Matt Miller from Embroker. He's the CEO and founder. Welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me, Jason. Tell me an insurance horror story, somebody who didn't have insurance and how bad it got for them. Because you must have done some customer research when you started this company. Yeah, we see that happen. a number of times, we try to prevent it, obviously, but where our company just didn't buy insurance and something goes really, really wrong, I'd say one of the worst things we've seen is a fight between founders where they actually sue each other. And rather than being able to settle it or manage it, they end up turning the company bankrupt and actually running up personal

debts rather than anything else. How would insurance have helped that situation exactly? If you have a director as an officer's policy that can cover that type of liability, it can pay for lawyers to settle the lawsuit. It can pay for damages and it can just help you manage through those type of things. Awesome. How does a startup's risk change over time from being just two people building an MVP to say having 20 employees and a million dollars in revenue as a software enterprise software company? How would that change over that period? as you grow as a startup the risk that you take on grows as well so when you sign larger contracts with larger organization the potential liability you have if those things go wrong also increases get an instant quote and the $5,000 in aWS credits right now by going to imbroker.com slash twist and when you check out use twist 10 to get 10% off thanks for coming in man thanks for having me jason all right we've got an underreported it on founder, Saji from Benchling.com.

You don't do a lot of press, do you? No. Pretty quiet. Put your head down, you do the work. That's the style of our software. We're behind the scenes. We help the customers who are doing the really exciting stuff, you know, making medicines, meatless meats, you know, new kinds of materials, you name it.

So we went to that break. I was wondering about two things. Take it in whatever order you like. Genetically modified food, I mean, people are freaking out about this. seems to me to be like something we want to do. Yeah, I think so. So we do want genetically modified foods. This would be something good.

To be clear. Yeah. We have been genetically modifying foods for thousands of years. Yeah, we take two husks of corn and the big ones, we put them together, right? Exactly. That's genetically modified. Exactly. And every day, you know, all cells get lots of mutations randomly.

And so, you know, all the crops, we, you know, there's ultraviolet light, the sun, like, these crops are getting naturally genetically modified. Yeah. Genetic modification is a description of what occurs in nature. Yes. Evolution. Absolutely. And so we've been doing that for thousands of years and now we just figure out how to

speed up the clock cycle of that a little bit as in a lab. And the downside of making genetically modified corn or wheat is what? I don't understand what the downside is. I think there are certainly people have ethical questions about the business practice around it, but from my perspective, I think it's great. You know, there are lots of places in the world where food is not plentiful and having a way to increase the yield of crops. Like, that's a win for them. Or, you know, you have areas where kids have specific vitamin deficiencies and being able to make sure that we re-engineer foods to have the right profile of vitamins so that

they're healthier for those kids, like all huge wins or in the case of meatless meat, you have the environment to think about where meat production is, you know, one of the leading causes of global warming. Yeah. And so if we can make tasty and healthy meat, that's, you know, doesn't, you know, require the, you know, animal husbandry. That's a huge win for everyone. Yeah, I mean, people don't know, but there was this really good book, Why We're Fat,

and it talked about the creation of dwarf wheat back in the 70s. And they just had a contest, like, almost like a prize to see who could make the most wheat per, like, hector acre or whatever they do. and as they genetically modified the crops, they just were able to have less husk, which means a little bit less fiber, but bigger and bigger, you know, pieces of wheat.

And what happened was it got so heavy, it made the wheat, you know, the big, long stalks of wheat fall over. And that's evolution at work. And that's evolution work. And so then they made them shorter. And they're like, oh, if you make the wheat shorter and it's not 12 feet amber waves of whatever,

which make it lower, then it won't fall. over. And that's how we made this incredible flour that's a little bit too refined, which is why we can make like these desserts, like these cupcakes that are super fine. But they convert into glucose very quickly in your bloodstream is my understanding. So you eat it. It spikes your blood. So you just have to be aware of what we're actually creating. But everything in moderation. And everything in moderation. But this 3D printed food or food in a lab. There's two flavors. You have you have, you have lab. lab-grown meat where you've actually got, you've got, you know, meat tissue almost from an animal and your culture in that, you're growing it. And then you've got the folks who are a different approach, same problem, where they're assembling meat out of plant. Right.

Yeah, so two different flavors. So Impossible Burger is just assembling out of plant. That one's a plant-based. Yeah, and that's in market and people love it. There's another company, I think, Memphis Meets, that grows it up in the lab. There are a lot of companies doing this all now for seafood and chicken and other different things. And it tastes good. Yeah.

It's already okay to good. Yeah. Which means in another five years or 10 years, it's going to be great. And in 20 years, we might. We'll prefer it. Maybe, yeah. Of course we're going to prefer it. I mean, think about the course of history.

Like, if we're starting with it's good now. And like, sometimes I'll have an impossible burger and I'm satisfied with it. It tastes different, but it's kind of satisfied. We could actually make a steak that had maybe some lighterness to it, but that had the richness of, you know, a wild. steak or a Kobe steak or Miyazaki. I mean, 15 years would probably like, you know, real meat will probably be some high-end dining experience that people go to, you know, as a separate thing. Or savage.

Yeah. Or savage. I mean, we may look at this part in history in factory farming as like this great tragedy. Our grandkids may look at us like. Really? Yeah. You guys had like millions of cows on giant slaughter farms and you just butchered them constantly. And like it's going to be a weird reckoning, I think, when we look back on this era.

But yeah, wow, science. But the same complex biology being used to make the meatless meats, not too different from what's being used to make the next generation of medicines and materials and so forth. So I think that just kind of ties things back to the fact that like this huge shift to biology is happening now. So this huge shift to biology was driven by the computer, the computing power in part? I think computing power is helping cope with the massive amount of data that's being generated with this shift. But really, it's like scientific ingenuity, new techniques, whether it is learning how to harness immunotherapy the first time or making the first antibodies or learning how to deliver gene therapy. Like, you know, by necessity, scientists have moved on and made new tools and the industry is adopting them so that we can, you know, make the next set of products and medicines. If you could wave a magic wand and say this would be the ultimate way to solve.

society's problems that could be solved by science in this process, what would you do? Because it seems like we have this very like political academic environment. Then we have the corporate interests. And everything, you know, capitalism drives people. It also can get a little funky. Yeah. Is there something we should be doing, call it a Manhattan project of food or a Manhattan Project of, you know, CRISPR and bioscience and, you know, DNA and immunotherapy, should this be done in a more centralized way? Because we think sometimes centralization would get us further. Or is the messy, multi-state, multi-corporate interest versus academic? Is it actually kind of brilliant in its chaotic approach? It's kind of brilliant and

kind of works. I would say that the one thing the government has to do is not cut funds. for basic research. So it's really important that you're allowing people in academia, grad students and whatnot to like push the boundaries of science. And then companies do a good job. There's actually a lot of work that goes from taking a proof of concept from academia and turning it into a drug. Like that takes decades. And if you look at all the top companies in the world by R&D spending, you're going to see like Apple up there. But you're also going to see mostly biotech and life science companies. So tremendous amounts of R&D investment. And so I think like, you know, earlier we were talking about the cost of making a drug, like all that money is

going to R&D. It's incredibly expensive. So the system does kind of work, though. Obviously, we need to make it more efficient. We need to make it faster. We got to get down cycle times from taking 10, 15 years to make a drug. The faster we get it, the more patients benefit. But it sort of works in this case. And don't get me wrong, I think the biopharmor industry has a PR problem. People see drug pricing and, you know, it's easy to get up in arms about that. But there's a lot of good work going on under the hood. Yeah, you know, I look at the drug pricing thing. And it definitely seems on the margins that there is abuse. Yeah. And people go a little crazy.

Yeah. It's, there are certain, it's actually tends to be regulatory when there's abuse where the, you know, there are certain laws that govern how we can make generic drugs and how we can test our competitors to the brand name drugs and so forth. And I think those, especially in the case of like insulin and so forth, there, there's, there's some skull dougar you get, you know, involved there. Yeah. That's not great. But by and large, when you do see these big sticker prices for, you know, million dollar medicines and so forth, those medicines are doing incredible things like curing a disease. And they're doing it for a very specific population. It's, you know, it's somewhere a disease. And yes, it's not great that the system has to

absorb the shock. But, you know, the company spent hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D to get that treatment to market. Yeah. But then you have this guy like Screlli. I don't know if you remember that dipshit kid on Twitter. He's ruining it for everyone else. I think he's in jail now. But he's still in jail. I mean, this human piece of garbage, I said it, not you know, is like buying drugs that are abandoned. Yeah, that's where there's a lapse in how, you know, the laws around generic drugs, like, that's a, I think that is a problem that can be solved by proper government intervention. What is the problem there? With that one specific, I don't know the specifics of the drug he bought, but I would, that,

like, abandoned drug thing seems to be like, or abandoned diseases. Because in theory, like, just take, you know, I don't know, vacuum, you've got some free markets, right? If someone's able to take some abandoned drug off the street, basically, and jack up the price, that means competition should come in easily and undercut them and you get a more market-based price. And so sometimes there laws that get in the way of that, that maybe make it so that the companies you have the brand name drug are very difficult about a line of their competitors, just test to generic and so forth. So there's a lot of nuance there. And I don't want to.

This material science thing is getting big too, huh? I know that nanotubes and all that kind of stuff was really big in the 90s. But it seems like there's other stuff going on right now. We're beyond the plastics era. Yeah. I mean, plastics, nylon, that stuff is like a hundred years old. We haven't had big breakthroughs in materials in a long time. but, you know, with biology, you're seeing people are re-engineering organisms to produce materials that are typically hard to produce or have new properties.

Maybe they're extra strong or something like that. So a great example of folks out on the East Bay Bolt Threads who, you know, they produce spider silk using yeast and now mushroom leather as well. Yeah. Spider silk, but no, no. Yeah, no. I was a big fan of Marvel Comics when I was a kid. I understand what they're doing. They're literally making web slinging.

Yeah, I'm sure it's a secret. It's the first step to making Spider-Man. I know what these guys are doing on there. They just want to be Spider-Man. I mean, that's going to be the ultimate is when you're going to be able to flip your DNA to become a, you know, and do something to become a superhero. I may take the over 20 years on that one. All right. The ability to increase muscle mass and all that stuff already exists, right?

We have that. But to literally, like, increase the number of IQ points and other stuff. That's upon us, right, in the next couple of decades? Yeah. Yes. Is there any downside to increasing everybody on the planet's intelligence by 10% if it was equally distributed? I don't, it's probably not as simple. There's not one magic IQ gene that we can turn the crank on and make everyone smarter.

It's probably more, there's a lot of different factors in there that are hard to control for. So I don't think we totally understand that. But I mean, it kind of, you've got to think about it. Like a lot of this stuff happens through nature already. You have parents who value education and have kids. Razor because that's that selection process already happening yeah and so you know yeah but we might be able to speed it up oh my god if I got those extra 10 IQ points and I went to MIT oh boy you seem to be in yours I'm doing okay you seem to be doing okay yeah well you know you just find the people who

did go to MIT and you invest in them you'll be just fine you'll be just fine uh all right listen saji great to get to know you I'm going to get you an invite to the poker game uh and I'll get my this is good now I got my Sri Lankan squad all three of us in the all three of you I've got all three of you. There's no Sri Lankan, my Sri Lankan Avengers. Yeah, it's very good punch up. Is there a Sri Lankan restaurant here? There's one.

Any good? What's the signature dish in Sri Lankan cuisine? I mean, a lot of curries. It's not too different from South Indian food, actually. Like South Indian, yeah. You get the chicken mock me. I don't know if that's North Indian, actually. That may be North Indian. All right, listen, Saji, great work. If you are a software engineer

and you want to work for coming that's changing the world. Please join Benchling. Please join Benchling. He needs engineers. Go get him. Great job. Thank you for the work you're doing for humanity.

It's really awesome, dude. I sincerely mean that. Okay, we'll see you all next time. Thank you, bye-bye.