Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Spark Time. I'm Dani Stoltzfus. And I'm Will Riddle. Of Mighty Spark Communications. Our mission is to use scientific innovation to drive transformative change. We believe that compelling storytelling is the most effective tool we have in our arsenal to motivate and inspire audiences to invest themselves in audacious goals. We are scientists by training, storytellers by experience, and entrepreneurs by nature. Let's get started.
Speaker: Recently, we had the opportunity to interview John and hear him tell the story of his career and how he ended up where he is today. Whilst taking a different format to our journal content, there were so many good learnings that came out of John sharing his story with us. I like how he's always had onto the approach of be bold. It's okay to go into new spaces naive and still yourself against failures and use obstacles to your advantage.
Speaker: Right. He really exemplifies that in his willingness to build computers in college, work in income tax consulting after college, and then ultimately disrupt the field of drug delivery. He essentially thought this would be the problem of the century and he's run with that to success. Yes, that's so true. So let's dive in.
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Today, we are thrilled to be joined by Dr. John Lewis. Dr. Lewis received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Victoria and trained at the Scripps Research Institute. Now, he's a professor in oncology and the Burt Dog's Chair in Translational Oncology at the University of Alberta, and the founder and chief executive officer of several biotech companies, including Entos Pharmaceuticals.
Speaker: which is a clinical stage biotech company developing next generation genetic medicines with its nucleic acid delivery system. As an entrepreneur, John translates scientific discoveries from the lab to the clinic to improve patient health and quality of life. So like I said, welcome, John. We're delighted to have you here. How are you doing? Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Will. Yeah, I'm doing well. It's a beautiful day, a little bit rainy, but keeping our spirits up.
Speaker: That's fantastic. John, would you mind telling us in the audience a bit more about yourself? Maybe you can help us understand why you became a scientist and we can get into why you became an entrepreneur as well. Yeah. Where to start? I come from a family of five boys and so it was always a raucous household. I'm the oldest, so I had some advantages.
Speaker: But my parents, actually, my dad was a surgeon, an eye surgeon, and so was medically trained and very scientifically driven, basically throughout my childhood, was really exposed to the medical field and got to join him in his office and hear all about the challenges he had.
Speaker: just the joy that he got from improving people's vision. And so I became really struck with both the engineering side of science and the biology side of science from a very young age. And again, all through high school, I was taking science and math and with really the goal, potentially becoming a doctor, but I wasn't 100 % committed to it. And then in university, I took a biochemistry degree.
Speaker: and immerse myself in the pre -med courses, but also in a number of other courses. One of the more memorable ones was meteorology, believe it or not, where oftentimes we'd just go outside and lay in the grass and look at the clouds. Oh, I can see why you took that. Yeah, that sounds fun.
Speaker: Yeah, but there was some science to do it obviously in physics. So so always uh, you know I loved particularly topics that combined sort of physics math and biology uh, and uh, and so So when I got to university, so then so then uh, I was sort of at a crossroads at the end of my university You know what I want to go to med school would go to grad school. I was also quite entrepreneurial
Speaker: And, you know, sort of did a lot of sort of start a computer company front, became very interested in computer programming and started a computer company, sort of an amateurist computer company in my university. And so it was always relatively entrepreneurial as well. So actually, my left took a turn. At the end of my undergrad, I had an opportunity to become an income tax consultant, believe it or not.
Speaker: So I actually did that for three years. So I learned, and I credit that basically to my ability to start companies now, is I would travel actually to businesses and to people's houses and sort of do their bookkeeping, but also come up with tax strategies and stuff right on the spot. And I really learned a ton about, I guess on the one side,
Speaker: what kind of people are good entrepreneurs, what kind of people are good in business, you know, good in business and also the business itself, how to structure business, you know, how to obviously make money instead of lose money, which is a critical asset to keep businesses going and then achieving what you want to achieve.
Speaker: So I did that for three years. So I really learned a ton about business. But at the end of that, I was ready to stop doing other people's taxes and look at their business and get back to really what my passion was, which was science. And at the time, I had decided that I wasn't going to go to med school following my father's footsteps, but I just wanted to know more about science. So I went out to Victoria.
Speaker: and started a pretty hardcore, you know, fundamental science biochemistry degree, learning about histones, which for your audience who aren't familiar with histones, these are the proteins that take six meters of DNA that's packed into every microscopic cell of your body.
Speaker: and wrap it up in a way that, you know, you can have complex gene expression. I was always fascinated by the fact, you know, these proteins could do these just amazing, you know, acts of origami to be able to pack DNA in every cell of our body. And so I learned a lot about the fundamental mechanisms of biochemistry and of cells and of cell biology
Speaker: Uh, and I did very well. So, you know, published a lot of papers and, and actually, uh, but still was an entrepreneur. So during my PhD, I, I actually still ran a computer company. So I was building, you know, started building gaming computers for my buddies and in university and eventually began building computers for, for the university itself and, and did some really super interesting projects.
Speaker: there. But I found by the end of my PhD, I actually had a close family member who was diagnosed with cancer. And it was very late stage metastatic kidney cancer. And I was using all of these amazing technologies in the laboratory. You know, we were sequencing DNA, we were sequencing proteins, we were, you know, at the time, I was just, you know,
Speaker: enthralled with sort of the engineering and technology side of what I was doing in research. But when it came to, you know, this family member's options in the clinic for cancer, I was appalled. There was nothing. They had no specific chemotherapies that were designed for kidney cancer. They had no targeted therapies at the time. We tried to get them on a clinical trial. And the only, believe it or not, the only clinical trial that was viable for this disease was thalidomide.
Speaker: And if you remember thalidomide, yeah, so this is the birth defects and really resulted in the, you know, the FDA being formed. Uh, so I was, I was blown away. So I really had decided at that point to pivot my, um, my scientific interest to something much more applied in oncology and then went down to Scripps research Institute in San Diego to pursue, uh, worked on nanotechnology to target cancer. Uh, and, uh, and that just opened a whole new world of, of being able to, you know,
Speaker: engineer and design nanoparticles to be able to do specific tasks in the body to either deliver chemotherapies and eventually turned into delivering gene therapies.
Speaker: He talked a little bit about your journey into entrepreneurship. I obviously started at a very young age and doing things like the computer company that you just described. I know this as well as you do. Starting a company and choosing the entrepreneurial path is challenging. We know from experience that it's very enticing, but also it's like a hard path to follow.
Speaker: Having said that, do you know inherently what it was about starting a company that really appealed to you as opposed to working for a company and building someone else's product or medicine or that type of thing? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because it's a hard path to take.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And I have to admit, I never really saw it as a hard path because it was always, for me, it was always the path of being able to follow the things I was passionate about. And I guess my years as an accountant really taught me that if you can create value and create some sort of product or value in a product that somebody is willing to pay for, then you can figure out the business aspects of it, right? So it's just a matter of, you know, creating that product, finding your customers and
Speaker: and selling it. And so after I was at Scripps and had just got married and my wife really wanted to become a doctor. And so she ended up getting into medical school at Dalhousie University. And so I was in this very successful postdoc in San Diego and loving it. I had a couple of surfboards, lived by the ocean.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So now I was faced with moving back to Canada. So, so actually started my first biotech company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. My goodness. And it was an oncology company. Yeah. So we were, we were screening drugs for pharma companies. Um, but after I moved to Halifax, I actually met this, you know, amazing individual, Dr. Roy Duncan.
Speaker: who is a virologist, now sort of semi -retired from Dalhousie. And he had discovered these amazing fusion proteins in nature that he already had the idea they could be used for drug delivery. And me coming off of this postdoctoral training using nanotechnology, I saw the potential of it immediately and we began to work together.
Speaker: Wow, that's really fortuitous. I love how you took all of that knowledge that you'd already been collecting and then allowed you to recognize an opportunity and go for it. I think that's a really key aspect of being an entrepreneur as well.
Speaker: seeing how the pieces fit together and having the courage to step forward and try it. I think that's a thing that you've repeated over and over again. My understanding is that initial work with Roy Duncan was the very, very early stages of the idea behind Entos. I'd love to hear more about how Entos came into being.
Speaker: You obviously had a great idea and there was going to be some great science, but how did you get everyone else around you to believe in the vision that you think you'd come across and struck upon a pot of gold before everyone else had realized it?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that is the trick, isn't it? So, obviously, I saw the potential of drug delivery being sort of a major problem of, I would say, the next century. Totally, yeah. At the time, though, so this, you know, back, this is, you know, 2006, 2007. Yeah. This is back when, you know, Peter Collis was just publishing on ionizable lipids, and the concept of a lipid nanoparticle was just sort of
Speaker: being formed, and companies like Al Nailum were founded shortly after that. And I think, you know, that early stage genetic medicine, you know, SIRNA industry,
Speaker: I mean, and their investors sort of thought this was already solved. So lipid nanoparticles are going to solve genetic medicine and we really don't need sort of a complicated system where you have a fusion protein and lipids. And so I would say the first days were, you know, obviously we wanted to see what the potential of this platform might be.
Speaker: And then, you know, and obviously finding the funding to be able to do those studies to show what it could do. And we spent a lot of time in our academic labs sort of figuring out the science that was underpinning, you know, fusion and the potential for using fusion as a drug delivery mechanism. And then, basically, we were kind of ahead of our time, but eventually, you know,
Speaker: The promise of being able to now to up -regulate, down -regulate, even edit genes to cure diseases just is an immense possibility for medicine and health around the world. And we realize, you know, I guess the industry is still coming to terms with this, but sort of the current genetic medicine platform, whether they be lipid nanoparticles or viruses like adeno -associated virus, they can solve some of the problems. But there's probably a good 80 to 90 percent that can't be addressed using these platforms unless there's major
Speaker: you know, advances made, and it provided us an opportunity with our platform to basically address those limitations. Yeah, I love that it was, it was like, you know, it came before its time almost, it took a while for everyone else to catch up on the value of what you guys were creating at Entos. And you know, clearly, it's come to fruition now. And I guess when you in those early days of when you were first pitching the idea like how
Speaker: What were the tools that you used to get that early investment, and did you have any sort of spectacular pitching failures that you were willing to share with us? What worked and what didn't, I guess, is what we'd love to hear about.
Speaker: Sure. I mean, anybody who's been an entrepreneur knows, or even an academic scientist knows that probably 90 % of all of your efforts result in failure. And they can be spectacular. And I think the biggest lesson any entrepreneur or even academic scientist can have is that you need to steal yourselves to these failures and use your obstacles as your advantage because each one is a learning experience.
Speaker: And uh, and if you fail a lot, you know enough times you're going to learn a lot. Um, and, and, and again, that was it. So, you know, obviously we, you know, i'm a big fan of, of sort of boldly going into new spaces and being naive. I think, you know, particularly during my postdoc, I found that that was a huge advantage. So going into this nanotechnology field, not having the biases of being in that field for a while allowed me to sort of, uh,
Speaker: discover new things about nanoparticles that was pretty impactful, and so I've taken that approach my whole life. I mean, as far as generating interest, you know, I sort of think of it this way. It was sort of analogous to the situation I had with my family member who had cancer.
Speaker: You know, we have just incredible tools now, particularly with AI, with nanotechnology, with genetic medicine, the possibilities of being able to cure disease are immense. I mean, you know, I can see it'll be possible that we can cure almost every disease that affects humankind using this approach. And while in the clinic, and you know, as our families are getting sick and our kids are getting sick,
Speaker: none of these tools are available. So I almost feel like it's coming upon those of us who are familiar with these tools to do something with them. And so that's typically the message I convey. We have all these tools. We have people that need them. There are very tragic diseases that affect children at a young age just through the genetic deal of the cards. And we have the potential to be able to create and deliver life -saving medicines for these people.
Speaker: And so we should. And I think that is the message that's resonated through my team and our investors and partners throughout the years.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, we can definitely hear that that theme resonates throughout your career as well. And I'm kind of wondering about what you just said that it resonates with the partners that you're working with too. So, you know, compared to when you're at the early stages of a company and you're getting people to unite around a pretty nascent technology, how does that compare to when you're talking to partners who are really hungry for the next big thing that, you know, you've shown proof of concept and
Speaker: Is it the same story that you're telling again and again? Or how does that story change when you start talking to big partners? Yeah, so the story definitely does change. And I would say it's been quite the learning experience over the years to learn precisely what drives sort of each aspect of drug development.
Speaker: And as a result, the people that you're talking to, what is their world like? What problem are they trying to solve? And how could my technology address that problem? And for each person in, say, a large pharma company, that answer is slightly different, right?
Speaker: So for someone higher up, it might be, you know, market market size indication. For somebody in the formulation department, it'll be, you know, does this lipid in your formulation cause inflammation? And so so again, it's so we've really spent a lot of time generating the data.
Speaker: to support answering each of these questions at each stage of the discussion. And of course, working with Large Pharma Company, you talk to almost everybody up and down the chain, from the scientists on the bench, to potentially the chief science officer, and each one who potentially wants your technology for a slightly different reason and need to solve for different challenges they have. Yeah, that's so many different audiences that you have to speak to. So it's really cool to hear how you think about doing it.
Speaker: Yeah, so I'm going to take us in a different direction, John, and bond with you over the fact that neither of us are United States citizens by birth. And I can tell you that coming to the United States from Australia and trying to adapt to the cultural differences of how you talk about science and how you get people interested in what you're doing and starting a company here versus Australia, it's hugely different.
Speaker: I'm just curious, did you have a similar experience coming to the US market from Canada? I mean, are you guys more like the Brits or more like us? What did you experience when you first started doing your science in the US and translating what you'd say to a Canadian audience to what you'd say to a US audience?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't think I've really thought about that too much before. I think so. Interestingly enough, my father's British and so definitely had sort of that conservative, you know, approach growing up and very pragmatic.
Speaker: And of course, I grew up in small town, Ontario, Canada. So a town of 20 ,000 people, very rural and sort of had that kind of upbringing as well. And, you know, drank Lebats Blue and went to pit parties as a high schooler. But honestly, I think there was always a bit of American in me. So I think my demeanor and my approach has always been, I think, well aligned with the culture in the United States. And so I think
Speaker: And particularly when it comes to entrepreneurialism as an academic scientist, so academia anywhere, but particularly in Canada, very dubious of the private sector, very dubious of organization. Traditionally, I think that's changing quite a bit and I hope to see it change even more. But again,
Speaker: There is this concept and thought in academic science that you don't want, I guess, your free will and your decision -making around experiments to be tainted by commercialization. And I completely understand why that is, and certainly there are great examples how money corrupts plans and interpretation of results, et cetera. And I think, obviously, that's a real danger.
Speaker: as scientists and as academic scientists, we ideally need to be thinking at least at some times of our day about how what we're studying can make an impact. And particularly for me, because I was interested in addressing some of the key unmet needs in oncology and cancer, that it was really important for me throughout my career to keep sort of a line of sight to the patient.
Speaker: What, you know, even if we're not working on something that can be put in patients tomorrow, you know, what is the path eventually if we come up with something exciting that that could make an impact on patients? That's always driven me. And I think what a lot of academics don't fully appreciate is that if you come up with something groundbreaking that could have an impact on patients, it is very likely not going to have that impact on patients if you haven't even thought about the commercialization path, you know.
Speaker: Am I going to protect the intellectual property to sort of build the value in it so somebody can take it, you know, now invest potentially hundreds of millions of dollars into it to make, you know, that transition from an awesome idea to an actual useful tool that can benefit patients.
Speaker: As the person who came up with the idea, you are the world's expert in that idea and you are most closely associated with it and have the power to do that, but obviously it takes a huge amount of energy to translate it into a real impact in the world. I also sometimes think that commercializing something, although it can have a bad rep to it, it's also the ultimate test of whether an idea works or not, because it has to work if it's going to be commercialized.
Speaker: Absolutely. But often in the form that you've discovered it in, it may not be a useful product. So there is that step in between where you're de -risking it or maybe molding it into more of a product to basically attract that investment or attract a company to come in and take that risk to make it a product.
Speaker: Yeah, and there's definitely a gap there in terms of the translational scientist. I know that's something that you've really specialised and focused in, but coming from a long time in an academic background as well and outside of the US, I have experienced a similar frustration and lack of ability for academics to see the future of what they're doing in terms of how to translate it and what the
Speaker: opportunity could be. For me, coming to the US really resonated with part of my personality because I've always been really interested in really bringing scientific innovation to fruition and using whatever tools I can get my hands on to make that happen. One of the wonderful things about the US biotech sector is that it's really alive with that
Speaker: And, you know, I really, really value that. And it's always lovely to talk to other people who see the value of that too. Absolutely. Yeah. I would say the, so I was talking about Canada, but I think the biggest thing for me is in, you know, Canada, Canadians hate talking about what they've done and how - Yes, same in Australia. Trumpeting their own successes. And it's not like I love trumpeting my own successes, but how is anybody going to know what you've done if you don't talk about it? Yeah, very true. And so that's what I, you know, it's very, I mean,
Speaker: the way that, you know, in America, how they talk about, you know, the possibility of what they've done, the potential application and, you know, the sort of this, it's not really even self promotion, but it's just, you know, explaining the possibility and getting excited about things. I think it's really important to generate, you know, interest from all the parties that could be involved in making that a success.
Speaker: I think in some form you have to tell a story about what you're doing, otherwise no one else is going to invest themselves in it.
Speaker: Yeah. And just following on from that will, like at MightySpark, you know, you and I talk a lot about how can we really invest in, especially in Australia, because it's my home country, but like taking and working with those founding teams in countries outside the US and really translating their science and their message to the US audience. And, you know, that's one of the things that we work with clients to do because we understand just how different it is and how much of a
Speaker: challenge it is to, you know, to, as John said, to trumpet your own successes, which is how it feels. But realistically, no, you're just telling people about the importance of what you're doing. So we're really passionate about that at Mighty Spark. So I want to go back to something that we've talked about before that
Speaker: John, you're sort of a master in translating ideas from academia to industry. And you hold so many different leadership roles across academia and industry. And in my experience, those leadership roles are very different between those sort of silos. So I'm curious, what is it in your leadership style that allows such flexibility and capability across different industries?
Speaker: Yeah, so I would say I've been extremely fortunate in that regard. But I would say it's mainly because I have, so obviously I hold an academic position, this chair position at the University of Alberta. But to be fair, in my almost 20 years of academic research now, I've always kind of run my lab as a company, but it's
Speaker: It's not really a company either. It's more of a close -knit group of friends working passionately toward a goal. I would say I approached my academic research in exactly the same way I would approach my entrepreneurial efforts as well.
Speaker: Find an idea that is worth solving and bring all of your resources to bear to solve that problem and then find people who get that, who align with that and get excited about that because you're not going to solve the great problems of the world coming into work eight hours a day and clocking in your time.
Speaker: You're going to solve the big problems of the world by caring about solving that and applying all of your effort and expertise and resources toward cracking that because science problems are extremely challenging. As we started the program off, 90 % of the efforts we put in fail because if these things were easy to do, they would have been done already. And so you really need to surround yourself with people who get that and are passionate about solving those problems with you.
Speaker: So what's your opinion on how to get people out of, you know, you work with a lot of grad students, a lot of postdocs, and what's your opinion on getting people out of a slump? Do you bring it back to what originally inspired them? The, you know, the story of we're taking a technology forward and we're going to make a huge impact with it? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think the way I've dealt with that personally is by
Speaker: doing multiple projects simultaneously because while you have 90 % failure in any single project at any one time, if you're working on multiple things, they're going to get some successes and that's going to carry you through those hard times. Uh, and I think, you know, when you see, you know, PhD is a great example. You might take, you know, five or six years to do a PhD. There's a good three years in there where you're just depressed and you're typically
Speaker: any progress. I think everybody who's had on PhD has been through that. And I think the key to that is we just, we, you know, both either in the lab or in the companies, we just get people working on different things. So at Entos, for instance, we have some people that simultaneously work on, you know, doing assays for, you know, biological assays to look at outcomes of experiments we have, but they're also, you know, performing some experiments
Speaker: They're also involved maybe in some manufacturing, and typically we'll have, you know, some of that will be very successful. Typically some of the basic science questions will be very difficult to solve, but I think they can take the excitement of the successes and use that to drive, you know, their, you know, stubbornness towards solving the really difficult biological problems.
Speaker: I really love that, John. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's almost like diversifying your scientific portfolio, like almost like an investment portfolio. You want to spread success as far as you can. That's cool. So, you know, John, you do so much. I have to ask the question, do you ever sleep? That's a good question. I've been asked that before.
Speaker: You can ask my parents and the answer is no, I don't really sleep. Really?
Speaker: It was fun. Actually, even this morning, so my son, a seven -year -old son was up at four in the morning wandering around looking for something to do. And he must've got that same gene. So, yeah. I typically only spent four and a half to five hours. Oh my gosh. Wow. Well, you're definitely cut out for the role that you have then because it's definitely a lot of work and a lot of time involved. So it sounds like you found the right calling. You found your calling. Absolutely. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I think that
Speaker: brings us to the end of our questions. Well, did you have anything else to say or shall we? Yeah, go ahead. So John, we've loved having you on Spark Time, but tell us what's new and exciting in your world. We saw that Entos recently finished work on a new manufacturing facility, for example.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess excited about several things that are going on right now. So you, so you mentioned Entos. So Entos is this platform technology genetic medicine company. We were working with companies like Eli Lilly, for instance, uh, looking at curing, you know, devastating brain diseases. Uh, but because our platform, this proteolipid vehicle platform is pretty differentiated from, as I mentioned, viral and LMPs, uh, we thought it was really important to be able to manufacture our own product for clinical trials. Um,
Speaker: We just had a fantastic meeting with the Canadian regulators about our single shot, fridge stable COVID -19 DNA booster. And so we're going back to clinic with that in the coming months. We're going to use this new facility in Carl's bed to manufacture that vaccine. We're really excited about that.
Speaker: One thing we haven't talked about in this conversation is the company called Nanosix that I created with this fantastic team. We actually have our first real product. We launched on the market several months ago now, so I'm really excited to have real revenue coming in. This is a novel screening company. That's a big milestone. Absolutely. No, it's wonderful. We have a bank account that says revenue. Wow.
Speaker: That's a big thing in the biotechnology industry, and we're expanding. So this is a screening test for prostate cancer, very simple blood test plus AI that just does a fantastic job of deciding who might have aggressive prostate cancer or not. And so we've launched this. It's available to all Albertans now in Canada, but we really think it should be available all across North America and eventually the world. So we've just signed a couple of really exciting agreements to do that, and so we'll make it available to all throughout North America over the coming months.
Speaker: Wow, that's amazing. I actually want to ask a follow up question about that. Now, what is it like with the regulatory process and AI products in med tech right now? I mean, was that a challenging process or was that more straightforward?
Speaker: That's a great question. There have been several commercialized products on the AI image analysis side of things. There was some area that had been sorted out, but it is really a very new area. The rapid pace of development, I would say, is outstripping the regulators and the people in the industry to figure out where things go.
Speaker: I would say for the most part, it's been a challenge trying to figure out what we should do. But I would say everybody is very excited about the technology. And we found trying to figure out a path is everybody's on the same page. We think these are useful tools. We think they can dramatically benefit the patient experience and patient care. So we should figure out a path. And so we've been able to find those. Absolutely agree. That is so cool. Thanks so much, John, for joining us today and sharing all of your experiences. We really appreciate it.
Speaker: I really enjoyed how John spoke to the basic researchers in that they should always have in their mind a line of sight to the patient. Having spent many years at the bench, I can remember it was very easy to lose focus on this key outcome of the research that I was working on and that it was ultimately all about the patients.
Speaker: I agree. Sometimes at the bench in industry as well, it becomes easy to think just about hitting your objectives and you can lose sight of getting the right cure to the right patient, which is the reason that I became a scientist and I think a lot of people become scientists.
Speaker: Yeah, so true. I also really appreciate the concept of no matter what you're working on, whether being in an academic or industrial setting, that finding people who align with the goal and who are passionate about finding a solution is really key. I personally have worked in many different scientific fields in my career and the people 100 % make the experience.
Speaker: Right. Well, I hope everyone enjoyed hearing John's story about his journey in biotech. We love talking about this and biotech communication, and we'd welcome anyone who wants to continue the conversation with us. So join us next time as we continue to power scientific innovation with storytelling to drive transformative change and solve our most demanding challenges.
