Alex Blyth: Founder and CEO of LifT BioSciences

BioBoss host John Simboli speaks with Alex Blyth,  founder and CEO of LifT BioSciences.

Transcript

John Simboli  0:00  

Today I'm speaking with Alex Blyth, founder and CEO of LIfT Biosciences, headquartered in London. Welcome to BioBoss, Alex.

Alex Blyth  0:09  

Hi there, John, a pleasure to be on the show.

John Simboli  0:12  

Alex would lead you to your role as CEO of LifT Biosciences.

Alex Blyth  0:16  

I've always been an entrepreneur and an inventor. I've worked in biotechnology helping bring novel medicines through to patients for 18 years. And although I've worked on oncology therapies, they were always targeted and they were always, if I'm really honest, much of a muchness when you look at what pharma does. It's a model they do well, they're chemical companies, they come up with a target, they come up with a chemical to hit the target, off we go. And when my mother got pancreatic cancer, which is perhaps the most deadly of the cancers you can get, and died rapidly, within nine months, it really hit home to me that it wasn't being dealt with properly. And that actually, in the industry, that developing curative therapies is not actually taken seriously. To the point that in many big pharma companies where I worked as a strategy consultant, you actually were told to take the words out of your presentation, because they weren't realistic. And I think the thing about life is, if you don't set yourself that audacious goal, you're never going to achieve it. And they've been on that same road for a long time. And I decided I wanted to be on a separate road. And so I set up LifT Biosciences, to have a new way of approaching cancer where rather than looking at how do you kill cancer, I looked differently and said, "Why don't most people get cancer?" And how do we emulate what those fortunate people have, that the less fortunate don't have?

John Simboli  1:53  

When you thought about how you could do something after your mother's passing when you thought about how you could make a difference, were there other ways you considered that were different paths to make that change, to make that difference? Besides the hard, very hard thing you've set out to do, to create a cure?

Alex Blyth  2:12  

I think my mother was a very empathetic and kind and giving person. And so I think in my mind, something snapped, where, you know, in your 20s, you're very much about yourself, very sort of egotistical existence many of us lead, pursuing our career. And something just snapped in my mind where I realized that actually, that wasn't what life was about. And life was about getting down to helping each other and that we weren't individuals, we're a group. And actually, the solution LifT Biosciences has is a group solution. It's about finding the people with the best immune systems to help people with weak immune systems. And, to be honest, that's how I look at all of life, now. This isn't about my career. I don't even think about my career, so I have no interest in it. This is really about the mission I'm on and achieving that mission. And that's all that matters. 

Alex Blyth  3:07  

I was with my daughter, and I was doing bath time. And she was three, and my mother had just passed away. And she asked if we could bring back grandma. And it was through tear-filled eyes that I had to explain to her that we couldn't bring back grandma. But maybe we could stop other people from losing their grandmas. And that's when I decided I was going to do something.

John Simboli  3:33  

What was it about the idea, the scientific idea around LifT Biosciences that was appealing, as opposed to several other different scientific approaches you might have gone on? How did you land on that one,

Alex Blyth  3:46  

I had the realization as I was watching my mum fade away that targeted therapies fail because tumors adapt, and they don't. So immediately, I was turned off from anything that was targeted. Because I could see it was always going to be a losing battle. And in pharma, they're increasingly putting combinations together. Which is, for me, is almost as foolish as trying to trap a hen by putting multiple bits of books down trying to trap it, it's just gonna run away. I see the same thing with tumor cells. It's like trying to get a key to an ever-changing lock. And there's just not one, there are 1000s. And I knew that was really fruitless in many cases. And so it had to be a living therapy that had a broad mechanism of action for killing where it would kill irrespective of mutational strain. So that ruled out pretty much all small molecules for me. It also ruled out adaptive immune cells that could no longer adapt. And so I was looking at the innate immune system with the idea as to, why my Mum, why did my mum die of this? When I've worked on lots of other cancer therapies, that wasn't quite in my head. And it was that realization that for many people, this doesn't happen to them why? This is something where we'll talk about families that have a history of cancer. But on a normal distribution curve, the other side of it's completely ignored. And that's that some families have no family history of cancer whatsoever. You never hear about that? So I started investigating those families. And trying to understand what it was because, in the innate immune system, you hear quite a bit about macrophages and NK cells, but they make up a tiny proportion of your white blood cells. The elephant in your body that nobody talks about is neutrophils that make up most of the white cells in your body. And if you talk to any doctor, when they look at cell count, after somebody's had, say, leukemia, or anything major, major trauma, the one thing that you look at very closely on that cell count is neutrophils, they don't look at T cells, you know, that's a bit low, okay? But they look at neutrophil count, because we all know, if you don't have your neutrophils, you're going to die. But what people don't really stop and think is, if you don't have the right type of neutrophil, you're going to die. So there needs to be quality and quantity. And so I was looking at these cells, and I found a piece of work done by Professor Cui, Zheng Cui, who I think is under-recognized in his age, and perhaps one day if this all works out will be the next Alexander Fleming for his discovery. But he found a mouse that he was experimenting on. And when he gave it sarcoma  S-180 cells with a view to testing it, with giving it this cancer for other things. It didn't take, and no matter how much he upped the dose, it didn't take. He then had the wisdom, I think, to do what most people don't do. Most people would throw that mouse away trying to get on with their experiment and find a mouse that did take. And I've heard many people say that to me, since, by the way, but what he did, which I think was so brilliant, is he was like, "Well, is this genetic?" And so he got this mouse to have progeny, he found that they also were mainly resistant, but it wasn't a simple on-off switch. It wasn't like all of them were. And then he took normal mice, new mice, and he injected them with sarcoma S-180 cells. And he created a few different arms, obviously, the first arm, just as a control, they will die within 28 days. But another arm, he gave the progenitor cells that were going to be neutrophils from the descendants of what in the press became known as super mouse. But let's say an exceptional immunity mouse. And 100% of those mice survived and went on and led a normal life, as far as a mouse can. That really surprised me when I saw that. He then did similar experiments with transferring other cell types, and he didn't find the mice survived. And for me, that was a big red flashing light. That neutrophils were where the game was at, and where my solution was going to be. So I teamed up with Professor Cui, I actually called him during another of my daughter's amazing bath times to convince him to help me set this up and work with me. And actually, it was my three-year-old daughter and me who persuaded him to help us get set up,

John Simboli  8:33  

I would just be guessing that as you went down this path, as you sought this solution, it must have been somewhat startling to actually find it and perhaps find it within whatever period of time. That sounds like quite a quest. And trying to put myself in that same position, I would think I hope I find something but I don't know if I will. And then you appear to have found something. Can you remember that moment? It must have seemed unreal.

Alex Blyth  9:04  

To take something on that big like, hey, tell your friends, you're going to cure cancer, you know, it takes a lot of gusto. And to be honest, I wasn't feeling like that at that moment. And seeing what this guy had and thinking, right, I can make this work in humans, I'm going to do this. You know, it was a massive jump forward to say I can do this. And it's actually talking to other friends who knew me from previous things I've built up in the past, and, you know, they were very encouraging and basically saying, these people need to give money to somebody who's going to do something. And if it was me, and it was my money, I'd definitely give it to you because I know you'll see it through. You know, if there's anyone to do this. It's you. So it was actually people were very supportive and kind. I think without them I wouldn't have managed to do it.

John Simboli  9:52  

When people say yeah, but what do you do as the founder and CEO, what do you do each day? What kind of answer is appropriate there?

Alex Blyth  9:59  

I'm good at strategizing, I'm good at knowing how to motivate people and really get people who are far more brilliant than I'll ever be to apply their big brain to a course of action that is very likely to result in a fantastic result. And that's really what I'm doing. I'm kind of the guy driving the bus. I've got this bus, I know where I'm going, I've got my route map, and I get the smartest people I possibly can on the bus. They're the people in the lab, they're the people who are actually doing the real science. And I'm just the guy driving the bus. And I'll go and raise money. I'll go and talk to investors. I'll go and tell them that this bus is going here. Do you want to back me going there? And I try to get them on the bus, as well.

John Simboli  10:48  

Did your experience in consulting help you prepare for that role you just described for me?

Alex Blyth  10:53  

I think certainly being able to pitch an idea when it's just a concept, and you haven't got the real evidence yet, is something that most scientists are not comfortable with doing. And I think when you're a consultant, and you've been used to building up a strategy first and then delivering the evidence second, and you see it that way round it's massively helpful. I still have very funny debates with scientists where I'm telling them, we're going to patent something. And they're telling me, you can't patent that, because there's no literature citing that that can be done. And I'm like, Yeah, that's why we can patent it. And we go round in this argument where they're like, but there's no evidence that can be done. And, you know, you really have to explain to them that we're going to get the evidence, and then we're going to do this. And it's going to be a patent, and it's going to work. And you know, they really have to look into your eyes and believe you or they would never get on that bus.

John Simboli  11:47  

This came to you from what you described to me. You didn't seek this out this arrived powerfully in your life. But can you look back at when you were eight or nine or 10 and say, Oh, I wanted to do something. I wonder if it has anything to do with what I'm doing now?

Alex Blyth  12:00  

I was always that kid daydreaming out the window when I should have been listening to the teacher, for starts. So I think I was always daydreaming that I was going to do this thing one day. Yes, I dreamed big always. And I think I always knew I wanted to invent things. I loved reading about inventors. You know, Thomas Edison was somebody that I was always very infatuated with, as well as Sir Humphrey Davey. I was interested in these people, and how they came up with these inventions, and what difference they made to people's lives. But I guess another thing when I was that age is I was dyslexic. So up until about 10, I couldn't really read. I spent a lot of time in my own head. It was like trapped-in syndrome, where I was a very good strong chess player, there were lots of reasons that my parents knew I was smart, but I couldn't put it on a page. And so I spent a lot of time thinking, really, and the other thing I learned to do is persevere because things were tougher for me. So I had to work a lot harder. And I had friends who were much more gifted than me, who, today, when I look at them, they use their gift to really make their own lives easier by not letting everybody else know how smart they were. And so they have an easy life. They finish the job probably by mid-day, and then they're coasting, right? But I always knew that wasn't going to be me; I was going to work really hard at something that was just out of reach. But I was going to make sure I could do it.

John Simboli  13:31  

Over this period of time of being the founder and being the CEO, what have you learned about your management style, the management approach that works well for you, that that defines who you are?

Alex Blyth  13:41  

I think, naturally, I've always known I'm an ideas person, and I can always invent and problem-solve my way out of anything. And I've always kind of had that bit. And I've always had the bit where I can get people, I guess "followship," get people to follow in what I'm doing, you know, we will go on it together. And they, they know I'm going to look after them, basically. So there's an earnestness that people can read, I think. My face is so readable. Always people always say this, that I think naturally, people trust that things are going to be alright with me. But I think the thing I hadn't developed and it took me a while to really appreciate it was, in my younger days, I was trying to be the smartest guy in the room all the time. Maybe it was making up for childhood, having that locked-in syndrome that I couldn't express it fully. And I think the big switch is as I've got older, and I did have my low mood period, I no longer could do it all. And you couldn't just be reliant on how Alex is going to solve it. Alex it's just going to do it. Because I couldn't be that guy every day anymore. And so I actually learned to just give things completely over to other people, and I just watched them completely flourish. And the longer I stayed silent and didn't criticize or didn't intervene or didn't say what about this, the more I saw them become confident and make big leaps forward that they wouldn't have made if I had done it for them because that wouldn't have given them the chance to grow and learn themselves. And so that really changed. And it enabled me to delegate everything properly and realize I didn't need to be in control of it. And yes, they would get there, maybe not today, but they'll get there by tomorrow. And that was a big shift in my head. And so now, rather than try to be the smartest guy in the room, I spend a lot of my time recruiting and investing in people so that I'm the dumbest guy in the room, because that actually makes me much more comfortable, that everything's going to be alright, whether I'm there or not.

John Simboli  15:36  

When someone says who is LifT Biosciences, what's your usual answer for that?

Alex Blyth  15:41  

LifT Biosciences is an allogeneic innate cell therapy company—allogeneic, just meaning it's from somebody else—that is developing an affordable cure for cancer. And that's really what we're about. And I think the affordable thing people really haven't cottoned on to enough because we have actually, we're in an age where we're going to see a lot more cures coming through. But making it affordable is key. And people don't think about that early enough. And I'm a biologist and an economist, weirdly. And so for me, that's natural. And so I set about something that could be off-the-shelf, much, much cheaper, that can get really curative results,

Alex Blyth  15:41  

What makes LifT Biosciences different from other companies in the space, is and the space can be defined in so many ways. What is differentiating?

Alex Blyth  16:39  

We are the only neutrophil-based cancer therapy, I think is the first thing to point out. The second thing is that we are not a spin-out from the university. And I have to point this out, because literally, normally they're like, "Are you a pharma company, a big biotech company, or a spin-out?" That's normally like the three categories. And I'm like, No, we none of those things. I'm someone who had an idea. And I developed a patent for that idea, which got granted, along with a load of other patents. And I did build the evidence around it to show that I was right, the team was right, Professor Cui was right. And, you know, that's where this has come from, we're a result of approaching the problem and saying, how do you best solve this problem?

John Simboli  17:24  

Had you, early on in that process, thought, well, maybe I will seek out a big pharma company and show this idea and bring it under that umbrella because it's hard to build a company from the start?

Alex Blyth  17:36  

I went to charities actually originally and said, Look, here's this great technology, I'll give it to you. And they basically said, Well, you know, if you develop it a bit and take it and work it in humans, then we'd love to come in. And I said, you know, every pharmaceutical company in the world would love to come in what's done that; you're meant to be here to fill the void before them and try new things. And I couldn't get them to help me. And so I had to give up my consulting company that I was running, I had to get rid of that, leave it, and have no salary for two years. Put everything I had into this, lose everything in life in order to just keep going and make this work and try it myself. And then ironically, I went to a German company called Merck. And I asked them to help me, and they just gave me the money. They just gave me some money to get started. And I also went to MedCity. Sara at MedCitywas very kind and she got me started. So then I got partnered with King's College, and we managed to get the evidence. And it was amazing. I'd filed a patent before I had the evidence before I had the team. We had 12 months to get the data to back up the patent or it's void. And we managed to raise the money, get the team in from King's College, and get the evidence. And we have three weeks left on the clock when the evidence came in to support the patent. And that's the patent that's obviously been granted. And we've got others backing it up. But had we not got that, this may have been a very different story.

John Simboli  19:07  

It's remarkable. I was just about to ask, and I'll say what I was on my mind, I was just about to say something like, Well, how did you persevere given these tough odds? But it occurs to me now, just based on what you said, that things were happening so rapidly, and your deadlines were so tight, there might not have been much time for second-guessing. It must have been just flat out.

Alex Blyth  19:27  

We got very lucky. I mean, things that I thought would happen happened. I just intuitively got what we were doing. And I could see how the body should work. And I'm a big believer in evolution. And I could just see how things should work in people who don't get cancer. And Professor Cui's thoughts and input were very useful for setting the right course for that, as well. And, yeah, we got a hell of a lot right and hence we were able to patent it.

John Simboli  19:53  

In my experience, there's those, especially in investor conferences, there are those moments when the founder or the CEO describes what the idea is about. And then, you know, afterward, there are people who want to talk because they correctly understood there might be a match. There are people who don't want to talk because they've correctly understood they're just not in the same framework. There's that interesting third group that says they are interested, but after discussion, you might realize that actually, they heard something different than what you intended. And that can be an awkward and interesting moment, right? So when that happens, if that happens, and people say, Oh, I understand Alex, and you say, Well, it's actually not that, it's this. What is that conversation like?

Alex Blyth  20:39  

I'm a bit outspoken about what I call depreciating returns on technology investment. And I believe, again, it's the biologist-economist of me, you know, as you're spending money on something, as you go along on the X-axis, the Y-axis is then progress, and it has a depreciating curve. You know, we are misspending money, as a human race, to protect people and look after people we are being incredibly inefficient. And it's heartbreaking because 10 million people a year die because of this inefficiency. And the tragedy I see is herd mentality. Nobody ever got fired for just following everybody else and making the same mistake. And that's what's so sad, people who go out on the limb, expose themselves, they feel, and so they don't do it. And yet, if you think about where does the breakthrough come from, it's not going to be an increment on 249 of the same thing. That's not going to be where the cure happened, where it didn't happen before, it's going to be a completely different way of thinking,

John Simboli  21:45  

Because your approach is, sounds like, quite different from others, it would seem natural that investors, in particular, would say, would look for a model,  the comfort of Oh, I see you're one of those. When people do misunderstand and look for a category and pick the wrong one because yours is a new one, what category is that that they pick.

Alex Blyth  22:05  

I think they liken us often to macrophages. Because macrophages, there's a good type, an N1,  and a bad type an N2. And it's well known that the problem they have is that when the monocytes move from the blood into tissue, into tumor tissue, into a negative tumor environment, they switch to an N2 because they're actually having to differentiate from being a monocyte to be macrophage. So they're vulnerable. And that's what we get likened to. But with neutrophils, that isn't the case, they're more like a hovercraft of the immune system, I like to say. They move beautifully from the blood into tissue without changing state. And so they are not vulnerable at that moment going through that tumor microenvironment, if they were healthy in the first place, from an exceptional donor, for example. If they're from a cancer patient, that's different, they're not produced the right way, in the first place. There are sorts of N1 dummy, they're not really an N 1. And then they're susceptible to TGF beta, and they can switch to an N2. But if it's really healthy in the first place, and it's been produced in the bone marrow in the right way, or it's from N-LifT, our cells, that's not a problem.

Alex Blyth  22:21  

Is it necessary to understand why a donor's family has no history of cancer, to be able to apply your science or is it sufficient to just identify those people and then develop the technology?

Alex Blyth  23:35  

If you were thinking of how do you find a really fast runner, a really good test is to get them to have a run and then see who's fastest. And we basically have that test. We have an assay where we test the cancer-killing ability of different donors. So we have a good way of doing it, and we select, then, the stem cells from those people. But if you were looking at say the racehorse industry, you could predict which young horses were going to be fast based on their ancestors, their parents. We do a similar thing. We look at people who have no family history of cancer because they're very likely, also, to then not develop cancer and have very good immune cells. So it's the same logic. There's not enough data, yet, to absolutely say it's this yet, but it looks like it's about five times more likely that you will have an N1A, an N 1 Alpha, super-killing neutrophil if you have no family history of cancer,

John Simboli  24:34  

What kind of partners are a good fit to LifT Biosciences?

Alex Blyth  24:37  

Certainly, people who have a very open mind. And so, you know, from that old Buddhist story of in order to take on more information your glass cannot be full. So I look for people who are really smart, they have a huge amount of information, but they're humble about what they know. And they're interested in new ideas so they don't know it all. And my CSO is fantastic in that regard, I mean, she's a really brilliant lady. So, you know, Oxana Polyakova is fantastic. And really has that very humble attitude, despite being a very experienced cell biologist and in what she's done, she's already brought two cell therapies through to the clinic in what she's doing. And I look for partners who have that sort of mentality. And I actually invite them to our socials. So when we have our socials for my team, I invite the people who manufacture our cells, our lawyers, and our investors. I have everyone. We're a big team who think different.

Alex Blyth  24:37  

How does the pipeline at LifT Biosciences an expression of your vision for what you're trying to achieve?

Alex Blyth  25:26  

Our pipeline is very different in that when I worked in big pharma, and biotech, everyone really, it's a bit of an American phrase, but everyone uses it, we go for low-hanging fruit, is what they tell me. And what that means is, when you're trying to take a product and look at its lifecycle over its patent, which normally is about 12 years, you go for the easiest indications first, we're going to get great results. And then you take on the tough ones as you go. So you're building out from a position of strength. So it makes sense in business terms. However, it really doesn't make sense for patients. Because if I invert that on its head, when you look at actually unmet needs, and who gets therapies, the result is the toughest things don't see therapies come through, because by the time it gets to the end of the patent life, and they're like, hey, what about that pancreatic cancer thing, we were going to do something about? Oh, well, the patent's at the end of its life, you know, there's no money to do that now. And you can imagine that happening constantly in every company for 50 years. That explains why there's been no real progress in the survival rate in pancreatic cancer for 50 years. And I turned that on its head and said, we're going to do the complete opposite of that, we're gonna go for the toughest things first. And we're doing that because we are tumor agnostic, we actually can destroy pancreatic tumors just as easily as we can kill, so get rid of lymphomas or softer targets. Therefore, we've gone for the sort of dark horsemen of the apocalypse. So literally, if you look at what Cancer Research UK have, as their number one targets, as a charity, they're our number one targets, as a company,

John Simboli  27:21  

My understanding from reading just a bit of the background material about you and about the company is that the standard application of the mouse model might not always be in the best interest of patients. If that's the case, why would that be so for your company? And what is the alternative? And how do you get people to understand the alternative?

Alex Blyth  27:41  

If you look at the history of medicines, they've come from a world of chemical companies. And the thing about chemicals is when you're giving an amount of chemical, something, it's very much equivalent to its body mass. So we all know that when things have only been tested in adults, and you're giving it to your kid, people tend to just sort of half it, don't they? But you can be a bit more exact than that. But people just inherently get the basic idea. Don't give them too much if they're little. With a mouse model, you essentially you're giving them like 1/1000th of what you would give a human. And there are even like calculators that nicely dose adjust. And it's because it's just a toxic chemical. And so you reduce it down to see, does it hurt the mouse? And does it actually help the mouse destroy, let's say the tumor, and you dose adjust it. And that makes sense. And then we move on to more recent things like antibodies. Antibodies also can work quite well in a mouse, they had a few problems, but generally, you can make it work. When you start getting to even bigger things like whole cells, whole human cells, if you put a human cell in a mouse, it's a completely alien environment for that cell. And the problem we have is we're not trying to cure cancer in mice, we're trying to cure cancer in humans. If I wanted to cure cancer in mice, I'd do what Professor Cui has already done. And I'd use mouse cells. And we already know that works. We've got all the mouse data. I am trying to cure cancer in humans, I want to test it in humans. And we find that when we put them into mice, they don't have the right chemokines, they don't have the right growth factors for ourselves to mature from progenitor state into the super cancer-killing neutrophil stage. And for storage reasons, you can't store neutrophils very well, you'll get very poor recoveries, you need to store them as progenitors. And so, we then have that problem. We can also have a problem if we use mice that have got more of an immune system, then they start killing our cells. So we tend to use the mouse with a very compromised immune system, it's an NSG and then we will use a gene knock-in so it's able to produce some of the growth factors our cells need. But it's never going to be the right environment because it's not a human. When you do solid tumor analysis, when you have predictive power in a mouse study for what would then happen in the clinic for a human, they've looked at it and it's 8.5%. 8.5% of those things would, say, be curative in a mouse will then be curative in humans, for example, we'll get similar levels of efficacy. I mean, that's pathetic. And there are new technologies called organoids, or tumoroids, specifically, for solid tumors. And when they've looked at testing in these tumoroids, you get 80 to 90% predictive power of what will then happen in the clinic in a human. 10 times better. Why would you not switch the efficacy studies to focusing on the tumoroids and just keep the toxicity study to the mouse, it just doesn't make sense to be using such a backdated method, when cell therapies are not comfortable in mice, and we're holding back progress. And that means, it's unethical, people are going to die because things are delayed, unnecessarily, because we're trying to cure cancer in humans. Not nice.

John Simboli  31:06  

What's new at LifT Biosciences?

Alex Blyth  31:09  

We're particularly focusing our efforts on tumoroid models. So developing our efficacy data there. We have some new mouse models coming through as well. We're getting our quality target product profiles ready so that we can have consistency, we've been nicely simplifying our manufacture, which is very simple compared to most cell therapies anyway. So all of that is going incredibly well. And I'm also excited about the IPSC work we're doing, because, you know, as I said earlier, we want to open an affordable cure for cancer. And when you switch from a donor-led model, where we can look to produce about enough from one donor to treat 100 patients, with the IPSC, it becomes donor independent, you no longer need the donors, again, and you have potentially an infinite supply. And that means you get massive economies of scale. So we could hope to, you know, move from a cost that was putting us as a sort of third/fourth line to actually, realistically, trying to get into maybe even a first-line position for some high unmet need cancers like pancreatic by bringing the cost low enough that when you do the health economic modeling, that it would stack up

John Simboli  32:24  

What aspects of thought leadership are especially interesting to you as far as new areas in biopharma and biotechnology.

Alex Blyth  32:31  

I am very interested in going before the word target. So rather than saying what are we trying to target as the start point, which literally in most pharmaceutical companies is where they start, is realizing that there's a whole load of options that could be taken before you use the word target, that you are ruling out by starting there. And so I would like people to actually look more broadly and recognize there can be a broad mechanism of action, you don't have to have this total mechanism, and particularly living therapies, they will have good judgment, and so they will be selected anyway. And they will not damage healthy tissue just as our N-LifT doesn't. You don't have to just have a targeted molecule to then not damage something else. It's sort of 1950s thinking. And I think people need to move on, in thinking that to have selected for only destroying diseased tissue or whatever it is, does not mean it has to be targeted in that sort of way. It can naturally have a good judgment. And I think that a softer approach, rather than a sort of digital on/off approach, is better. And I think things will move more and more to that of realizing you can take this broader approach. Nature has an answer. Let's look at nature's answer because nature's already done millions of years' worth of experiments through natural selection, and you're completely ignoring them. So I think going to those is the place people should start. Not, what's the target?

John Simboli  34:09  

Alex, thanks for speaking with me today.

Alex Blyth  34:13  

Thanks so much, John, for having me on the show. It's been a real pleasure talking to you and a real delight meeting you.