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