Christopher Locher: Harness Nature at Scale for Good

On this episode of Founder's Sandbox, Brenda McCabe speaks to Christopher Locher, PhD; Co-founder and CEO of Versatope Therapeutics. He previously led drug discovery projects for infectious diseases at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, inflammatory diseases at Opsona Therapeutics in Ireland and malaria and alphaviruses vaccine development programs at Maxygen in California. Their conversation centers on harnessing the power of nature at scale for good: how and why did Versatope begin, what is deep tech, and how can we build a resilient culture in a pandemic world where the work could not be done “from home?"

You can find out more about Christopher and Versatope at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-locher-biotech/

https://www.versatope.com/

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/09/new-kind-influenza-vaccine-one-shot-might-do-trick

 

Transcript:

00:03
We're standing on the edge of something big. We're gonna make some changes. Welcome back to the Founder Sandbox. I am Brenda McCabe. I own and operate a consulting firm, NextAct Advisors, where I have a simple mission. I want to assist entrepreneurs

00:33
and entrepreneurs in building scalable, well-governed, and resilient businesses. The Founder Sandbox podcast is just an additional channel where I like to feature founders, business owners, corporate directors, and professional service providers who like me want to use the power of the private enterprise, small, medium, and large to create change for a better world.

01:03
Through storytelling with a guest on topics that will cover resilience, purpose-driven enterprises and sustainable growth, my goal is to provide a very fun sandbox environment where we can equip one startup founder at a time to build a better world through great corporate governance. Today my guest is Dr. Christopher Loeker.

01:33
harnessing the power of nature at scale for good.

01:39
Christopher is PhD, he's CEO and co-founder of Versatope Therapeutics, and after a long career leading drug discovery projects for infectious diseases at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and at other companies, he pursued drug discovery projects in inflammatory diseases, malaria, and alpha viruses. He chose

02:08
in 2017 to become a CEO and he co-founded Versatope. How he did this is the topic of our podcast today. So welcome Christopher. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm happy to be here, Brenda. I love it. So, you know, you contributed some time back. I wrote a blog.

02:36
published, I think it was in April, on Deep Tech. And I tried to describe with examples on what Deep Tech is. And the title was, Think Differently, a Deep Dive into Revenue Possibilities Through Deep Tech. You also asked me to serve on the board of directors of Versatope Therapeutics, where I've been serving since 2019. And when I interviewed with you, Christopher, you shared your vision with me.

03:06
that you're on a mission to harness biotechnology with efficient production cost and a safe means to develop a vaccine for multiple strains of pandemic and seasonal influenza. And four years later, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you as a guest to share how you progressed and how Versatopes progressed as a biotech company is also a deep tech company you where you harness nature.

03:35
machines, humans to address large unmet needs of the immune system while continuing to deliver on the launch program that I joined when I joined the board of the influenza vaccine. So can you tell us through your own story why you chose to become CEO? And like many deep tech or biotech companies, VersusDope started with

04:04
a technology transfer. Over to you. Hey, thanks Brenda. Ironically, at the time that I launched Versatope, I happened to be reading a book by Henry David Thoreau on Walden. And in that book, you know, I was kind of going back to the basics, if you will. There was a passage that really stuck with me and Thoreau writes, I went into the woods because I wished to live my life deliberately.

04:34
And I thought about that, you know, if you consciously live your life and if you build your life the way you want to with an ideal vision, what would you do? What would I do? So I was in between jobs at the time. I was doing a bit of soul searching. I knew what I didn't want to do but I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I had a passion to launch a company.

05:00
um, years ago, and I went through a series of courses when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in San Francisco. And there we went through the course work was over, I think, six or eight weeks. It was called from an idea to an IPO. And we had many guest speakers and panel discussions on what makes a successful business out of biotechnology. So I picked up that

05:28
binder, if you will, of handouts and Harvard business reviews, and was going through it. And I was thinking, you know, maybe now is the time to do this, to live my life deliberately, not necessarily to go into the woods, but to strike out on my own and launch a company. So I started talking to different university professors about technologies and the gaps that we have in RNA delivery. RNA therapeutics are very nascent, if you will.

05:56
I don't think they've realized their full potential yet. Many people have worked on them and overcome several of the obstacles, primarily stability and delivery. Those are the two fundamental hurdles that have overcome with the current technology. For example, the COVID vaccine, a messenger RNA-based vaccine is delivered with lipid nanoparticles. And unfortunately, even with all those improvements in RNA vaccines.

06:26
only 2% gets expressed of the messenger RNA vaccine when a person is immunized. That means that 98% is degraded. And as you know, you can't ship the vaccine around the world without cryo preservation at severe low temperatures, such as minus 80 degrees centigrade. There are some, like the Moderna vaccine, you can ship it at a little warmer temperature, but it's still frozen.

06:54
and there are limits with thermo stability. And I happened to be talking to one professor, Dave Putnam that I knew for many years ago when I worked at UCSF, working on nucleic acid delivery. And at the time we were delivering DNA, and DNA is a lot more stable than RNA. So I just asked him, what are some of the gaps that you have and what are people doing nowadays? Because I was kind of out of touch with that field for almost 20 years. And

07:23
He says, well, I have a great technology. I have unpublished data and I think we can start a company with it. Why don't you start a company with me and launch it in the Boston area? And I said, well, what do you got? And so we went through a slide deck. It was interesting. I got it, needed some improvement and some polishing. And so I went up to Cornell and I met with the other co-founder of Versatope Therapeutics, Matt DeLisa.

07:51
who happened to be a microbiologist. They launched this company or the technology, if you will, from two different scientific disciplines coming together. So Dave happens to be a chemist by training and worked at MIT for a number of years and launched a successful biotechnology company of his own called Transform Therapeutics. And Matt DeLisa is a very well-known microbiologist.

08:19
who writes a textbook for students on microbiology and genetic engineering. And he's also director of the Innovation Center for Biotechnology at Cornell. And they happened to be walking down the hallway one day and bumped into each other. And man asked Dave, if you had these little microbial vesicles, what could you do with them? And he just said, well, I'd make a vaccine with them. And so they kicked the idea around a little bit. They wrote a few research grants.

08:48
The one grant that did get funded, and this was based on feedback from the National Institutes of Health, they said, why don't you focus on Matrix II protein? It's an important vaccine candidate. We know that we need to improve it. And why don't you just try that? So they've scoured the literature. They came up with their own vaccine design. They tested it and it worked extremely well. Works against any strain of flu that they've tested it against so far.

09:17
works better than the commercial flu vaccine. And with that, in the studies that they had done in a ferret animal model with a biosafety level three, highly pathogenic influenza H1N1, they found it worked better than the commercial flu vaccine. So I knew the program had legs and we licensed the technology from Cornell University. And I started off at MassBio.

09:44
where they put together a small project team of diverse disciplines, commercial, business, intellectual property, legal, and we built a pitch deck for Versito. And that's how the company got started. Wow. And you know, we're four years in. I think it was in September 2020 when the company did receive

10:12
from the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases an award for up to $18 million to deliver on the platform. And we are on track for trials, clinical trials in 2024. So an amazing story and there's still more to come. Yes, it's an impressive story that we were able to do all this in a small laboratory affiliated with the University of Massachusetts in Lowell.

10:41
which is a up and coming post-industrial gateway city in Massachusetts. So we don't have the high costs and the overhead, and we had a lot of support from the university, which enabled us to make this happen. So we will deliver a clinical trial material very shortly, and we will start our clinical trial, yes, and probably realistically 2024, about a year from now. Can't wait to continue on the journey. You know,

11:11
I have listeners that come from all types of deep tech and perhaps coming out of the pandemic, fatigue, there's been a lot of lashback to science. And so I did want to, without offending you, kind of go back to the blog I wrote on deep tech. I explored five characteristics that I discovered. I've worked in clean tech myself. I sat on the board of biotech. I've been in pharma.

11:39
but I found kind of five characteristics. And I'd like to, through illustrations of what you at Versatope have done, make this more tangible for my listeners, right? So deep tech. One of the characteristics is the product of the solution is often invisible to the human eye. So can you talk about what are recombinant extracellular transport vesicles? Sure. So,

12:08
They aren't visible to the eye, indeed. They are so small, one can only visualize them with a 10,000x or 100,000 times objective lens on an electron microscope. They're about 100 nanometers in diameter, and that imparts unique properties for these vesicles to penetrate tissues and to get taken up by cells.

12:37
They're just the right size for that. They are about the size of a small virus. And they're not traditionally virus-like particles the way we think of them. They're actually an independent biological unit that nature uses to evolve. You may remember the idea of primordial soup and some of the theories behind it. Before life, there was nucleic acids

13:07
peptides and RNA came on the scene before DNA. But before even RNA came on the scene, there's some of the theorists believe that what came first was the vesicle. And these lipids, these carbon-like vesicles self-assemble. And in that way, they're like a small nanobot. They just self-assemble, they form these little blebs or blobs, if you will. And then they can package things such as RNA.

13:35
And nature has been doing this for billions of years. And they believe that that was the origin of life. How cells actually first got started. First as bacterial cells, and then later on as, you know, eukaryotic cells or having a true nucleus and acquiring other bacteria such as mitochondrial that's a little powerhouse in the cell that gives us the energy and keeps us warm in the winter. But nature does this naturally.

14:04
In our own bodies, we have vesicles floating around in our gut, and some people have them in their bloodstream. And you can measure this now because new methods have developed very sensitive analytical methods to detect these. They can be present in people with, for lack of a better word, leaky gut or inflammatory bowel disease, because the microbial environment in your gut produces a lot of these vesicles where

14:33
gram-negative bacteria live. And these vesicles can get into your tissues, they can cause problems, but in a healthy gut, when people have a healthy microbiome, they actually promote communication and enable the bacteria to thrive by communicating not only with the other bacteria in their microenvironment and their environmental niche, but also with the host cells. So these vesicles will

15:02
penetrate the epithelial layer, they will get inside cells, and for some bizarre reason, they get to the nucleus of the cell, and they can actually deliver their contents of DNA to the nucleus of the host cell. So we're walking around with bacterial DNA and RNA in our own nucleus of our cells, and it's modulating our behavior, and or, you know, cell function, if you will, cell behavior at that level, and we don't even know it. And all of this is just

15:32
coming on to light, um, in the scientific literature, it's impressive what some of the academic groups are doing. And you're harnessing this. Yes. And so our take on it is recombinant DNA. So if nature has been doing this for billions of years, and if people have been on earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and if our own microbiome is actually changing our, their environment in our gut and perhaps changing our own environment.

16:02
Can we use this for good? And hence your title, Harnessing Nature for Good, because it does make sense. So with genetic programming and synthetic biology and DNA, we can actually make these vesicles deliver pretty much what we'd want to within certain constraints. Delivering RNA, for example, can we make an improvement over lipid nanoparticles? Delivering vaccines, can we deliver...

16:30
genetic codes against multiple strains of influenza, for example. Can we deliver small molecules? It's known now that these vesicles, you can actually give these by the oral route. You can swallow them and they will, yeah, you can swallow them just like a pill and they pass through the stomach gut and they will start floating around in your body, in your bloodstream. They can be genetically engineered to target specific cells.

16:59
where you have like an antibody-like molecule on the surface that will encode for a specific sequence that will attach and stick to a specific cell type. And all of this has been proven and published in the scientific literature. So there's a few hurdles to this. One is scale. That's what we focused on at Versatope for the last few years. How can we scale this? The second thing is safety. We've spent a lot of time on making these vesicles safe.

17:28
because you can't just inject bacterial vesicles into your body because some people get a nasty reaction to them and you'll be limited by the dose you can use. So we've spent a lot of time taking out the toxins of these, ensuring that they're safe and administering a product that is still effective but won't have the nasty reaction that the wild type vesicles do. So these are semi-synthetic and all this is done with genetic engineering.

17:58
So that takes us to the second characteristic that I described in Deep Tech. The product of the solution combines knowledge from multiple domains of science and technology like organic chemistry, synthetic. Can you share the subject matter expertise and the talent required as you scaled the company? Again, it talks to the nature of Deep Tech, right?

18:28
Yeah, so like I said, the foundational work was done at Cornell University. Matt DeLisa, being a microbiologist, did a lot of the genetic engineering to improve the number of vesicles that are being made to make it scalable. Typically, when you grow these up, you don't get enough material, but he found ways that you can actually genetically engineer these. So these

18:58
And with our current process, I think we're approaching several thousand fold higher than you would with a wild type. Secondly, is in terms of chemistry, there are formulations that Dave worked on that you can actually give these in a single immunization. So you can actually coat these vesicles and other particles that enable like a time release capsule that will improve their efficacy. So these are just a couple of the foundational work that was done for us.

19:26
We've had to do some microbiology and improving the cell line. So at first we hired several bona fide bacteriologists that were gene jockeys, if you will, and that's what they do. They clone and express genes. That's kind of what we needed initially. And then you move on to process and scale. How can you make these bigger? So those of you who are competent protein purification people, generally biochemists by training.

19:54
And then we have analytics on top of that. So once you scale it up, how do you know you're making it consistently and what's the batch variability from batch to batch? And how many vesicles do you have? How many molecules are on your vesicle? What's the standard deviation between the batches and can you make a quality product? All of these require different expertises. So we've put together a team, if you will, that have domain expertise in each of these areas.

20:24
For consultancies, we focus on regulatory, quality, clinical, some of the other things that we can add on that we really don't need a full-time staff at this time because we still are an early stage R&D company. But those are pretty much the basics for now.

20:42
So a third characteristic, the process of discovery is chaotic, out of control, contained at a bench, right? Or even in a sandbox, but we're going to talk about a bench today because we're here with biotech, right? And the journey really begins, the rubber hits the road, and it's about the time you actually created a larger board of directors when you need to scale to a repeatable manufacturing process.

21:12
What I'd like you to do is describe why is it more difficult to scale in the biotech world versus pharma, right? And speak to payloads. It's, again, I've been in the world for not as long as you, but I've been, and it's fascinating because the biotech space has really only been around 30 years, which is nothing. That's true. You're right. So I think it's a difference between chemistry and biology. So biology has a lot of factors. When you're producing

21:41
a product in a cell, there's a lot of things that can go wrong. There's just a lot more variables. Cells are finicky. They're finicky to their environment. You can get contamination. You can get a failed batch. You can get poison in your water if your water isn't pure enough. There are batch media components that can go sideways, and if it's not measured properly or pHed properly, you can get a really squirrely result.

22:10
and you'll have an inferior product. Those are just a few of the examples of how a biological system, a biological system is affected by many different things. Really, I think that's what it is. There's a lot of components to it. In contrast with the chemical system, it's much more of a controlled process. You have a limited number of raw materials. You have a limited number of reagents. You can control the process much better in a vat than you can with a...

22:37
in a petri dish or a biological system. It's just the way it is. But the best we can do is just keep repeating it to the point of where we have a consistent process that shows batch consistency, as well as a quality product in the end that's safe and effective. Great. But yeah, there's a lot of variabilities there. Right, right. And I think it's just the nature of biology. As they say, science happens. And it's harnessing nature.

23:06
The last characteristic, and then we'll jump into JP Morgan and the like, is market size is not a risk in my discovery of deep tech, right? Because the product or services, they're truly addressing really large human basic needs, be it health or be it energy, right? Telecoms, there are certain sectors. And you have the possibility of changing.

23:34
the traditional way or the standard of care, right? Of addressing a market need. What has led the company Versatope to increase the number of addressable markets with one platform, right? Your team is now on a path of discovery of other suitable targets, largely in oncology. What is different in ETVs, right? To the standard of care for treating.

24:03
the flu or cancer? Yeah, so for flu, we've had a lot of time to think about it and we've developed what you call a target product profile. And there we kind of have a sense of what would be the minimum requirements and what would be the ideal requirements. Some of the key features of our technology is that first off, we target conserved proteins that are a part of the vaccine component.

24:34
These don't change as much. They are relatively stable. There's limited variability, and they don't switch when you go from a bird to a pig to a horse or a cow and a human, where you get this ping pong effect of viruses floating around in a zoonotic type of infection. And that's what happens with influenza. And what happens is there's a lot of immunological and environmental pressure on the virus to change.

25:04
So unfortunately, the current process of flu vaccines is done in fertilized chicken eggs. Most of them, some are recombinant nowadays, but most of them are still done in the traditional way. Unfortunately, people that are allergic to eggs or feathers are ineligible for getting the flu vaccine. So new vaccines have come on board, but in both processes, whether it's made in fertilized chicken eggs or some other means like choke cells,

25:33
What happens is that the only thing you're left after the inactivation procedure is hemagglutinin, which is a major polypeptide or protein on the surface of the virus that is very strain variable. So it'll change from season to season. And as a result, the new flu vaccine needs to be made every year because the vaccine is made primarily of hemagglutinin. And if the vaccine is not made of hemagglutinin, you can look at other conserved proteins, if you will.

26:02
that you don't have this high variability. Bristotope has taken multiple strains, looked at the genetic space, such as computational biology or bioinformatics, and has representation of the different flu strains of primarily influenza A or pandemic flu, all contained within a single particle. And that's what's different about this than the other ones.

26:29
People are now combining different strains. So for example, there's a quadrivalent flu vaccine. That's a big improvement. They're adding an adjuvant that helps the immune response. That's an improvement. And that's used primarily in the elderly people that have a weakened immune system. But with our vesicle system, we have a strong adjuvant that's inherent. We have conserved proteins. We don't have the allergens like from eggs and feathers from fertilized chicken eggs. We get coverage for multiple flu strains.

26:58
We don't need a whole lot of immunizations. You can give it just once with some formulations or a couple of times, works just fine. And one of the key differentiators is that our product is thermostable. So we found that we can actually freeze dry these and resuspend them in water. And they pop right back, primarily because they're made out of sugar. There's a lot of sugar in our vesicles. So that imparts an inherent stability that you're not gonna get with a lipid nanoparticle

27:27
for RNA delivery, for example, or with other vaccine candidates as well. And having this enriched sugar membrane also enables these to pass through the gastric juices so that you can tablet these and actually make a formulation with them so you can just swallow a pill. And this is how bacteria have adapted from living in your body. And yeah, so it's just some, those are some of the features. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah.

27:57
You're welcome. So the annual JP Morgan healthcare conference is coming, it's around the corner in January and it's back in person. It's been two years virtual. And while the agenda is not publicly available, three of the five keynote speakers represent the venture space and with experience in healthcare systems and innovation and the delivery of care.

28:24
Are we going to speculate Christopher, is this an off year for major breakthroughs in drug discovery or is it pandemic fatigue? Tell us what your your your insights are. You're reading into JP Morgan and you're going to be there next year, right? Yes, yes, I will. Yeah, I won't. I won't make it this year in the next couple of weeks, but I do plan to be there next year because we will be raising our series a fundraising, because to date we've only received government contracts and grants for our work.

28:54
privately owned and we have completely funded by non-dilutive resources. And the reason why is because the United States government sees this as an urgent need. You may have seen Bill Gates' TED Talk that the biggest threat to our society is not nuclear war, but it's pandemic influenza. So the government shares that concern and that's one of the reasons why we prioritized our

29:22
our influenza vaccine. And you can see with COVID, for example, how that's really crippled our economy in many different dimensions. It's really shaped the way we work now with many people working from home. But I think that in terms of pandemic fatigue, people are tired of sitting at home. People wanna get out and enjoy themselves and socialize. So I think it'll be a lot of fun this year at J.P. Morgan.

29:47
and the receptions will be great. It's a great time to catch up with old friends and to meet new ones. In terms of delivery of care and innovation, I think we have been handicapped, if you will, for the last couple of years, primarily due to supply chain constraints. And people haven't been able to come to work as much as they could. For example, in our own lab for, it wasn't very long, maybe a couple of months.

30:15
We were restricted by the number of people that could work, only two people at a time. So we had to work in shifts, we kept our work going, but it really severely limited us. We're a team of about 10 people, so we had to just cycle it. So we worked two shifts, one in the morning, one in the evening, and two people at a time, and just rotated during the week, up to seven days if we needed to, to get the work done. That was our adaptation for the pandemic.

30:45
Then the vaccine got rolled out and, you know, eventually masks came off and we're relatively back to normal now, but I don't know if people will really ever be back to normal since it's, some days it's nice just to work from home. It is. I did want to thank you for, you know, bringing us back to your employees, right? And the way that Versatope managed

31:14
with resilience. You can't do this virtually, right? People had to be at the bench and in the lab. And that truly is a sign of resilience and of a well performing company. Well, I wanted to give you an opportunity, Christopher, to provide contact information. How can my listeners reach out to you and the company? I want to give them some...

31:42
information. This will be available later in the show notes as well. Great. Easiest, probably just visit us at www.versatope.com. That's versa, V-E-R-S-A, and then Tope as an epitope or paratope, T-O-P-E. And that's the individual domain or minimal subunit that one needs to have an antibody response or the minimal domain of an antibody that actually sticks to a target.

32:11
You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn, Christopher Locher. My name comes up, Biotech, and we're here in Lowell, Massachusetts in the Boston area. Yeah, and then there's also, you know, our press releases that are available on our website as well. And Cornell has done a number of press releases on the technology. Yes, I did pull out one on the new kind of influenza vaccine. One shot might do a trick.

32:40
the Tres. Oh, which is a fundamental piece back in 2017. So before we go, I'd like to bring it back to the Founder's Sandbox. And I do discover with my writing and the work I do with founders, topics around resilience, corporate purpose, and sustainable growth. And I always like to ask my guests, you know, what does resilience mean to you and your own words?

33:10
I think adaptability and is part of resilience. One has to adapt to survive. As a startup company, there's a lot of landmines out there and one almost needs a mine detector, before you step on something. Cause it's really, there's a lot of things that could hurt an early stage company. And I know that a lot of folks are well-intended, but

33:38
You know, you really have to watch your cash burn. So that's number one and forefront in my mind is how we can stretch every dollar in the company and adapt to changing times and still achieve the objectives we need to. One of the things we've done as a team to help build resilience is to help them de-stress. So I brought in a meditation teacher to help people de-stress. And he was trained in the...

34:07
Tibetan Buddhist tradition. So we have group meditations where we can de-stress and one of the things that some companies do such as a Green Mountain Coffee in Vermont, before they start a business meeting, we have a one minute meditation. Just get everybody on the same page, breathe, be calm, stay grounded and focus. And that being just primarily mindful concentration. That's all it is, is speaking consciously.

34:36
and not interrupting other people and allowing them to express themselves and get their point across heard, preferably in a very short amount of time. Because as you know, people get distracted really easily these days and they have an attention span of an ad. So you have to get your point across real quick. Exactly. And that's very important in the lab environment to keep concentrated, right? Yeah. And it's not about our health.

35:04
Hey, so what does purpose driven enterprise mean to you? Well, for us, I think purpose driven, there was a book written a number of years ago that I received when I was at Vertex Pharmaceuticals that was given by our CEO at the time, Josh Boger, and the book was called Good to Great. And it's about how companies really become great. And one of the things to be a great company, companies need to do good things. If you're doing things for the betterment of humanity,

35:33
if we're preparing ourselves for the next pandemic, if we can come up with new technologies that will reduce the costs of healthcare, keep patients out of the hospital so they don't have to get an intravenous transfusion for chemotherapy, these would all be big milestones that would reduce healthcare costs. So I think by doing these good things and having this purpose-driven philosophy, we're not just relying only on how much money we're gonna make.

36:03
in the latest rare disease space. That's important. Making money is important, I get it, but we have to have a fundamental mission that helps motivate the team that we can deliver and focus on a program that will deliver value in the long-term by doing good things for humanity and making the world a better place. And I think that's a great segue into the last term, which is sustainable growth. So.

36:32
You're at the helm of Versatope. We've got the 18 million in. We're going to be going to human clinical trials. What is sustainable growth for you?

36:46
Sustainable growth is, again, it's tied to resilience to some extent, so we'll make a product. We will have a universal influenza vaccine candidate for what it's worth. We think it's valuable because it's a growing industry and it could help prevent the next pandemic. But my R&D team that's focused, that did all the optimization to deliver a clinical candidate and the work that they've done the last few years.

37:15
now need a new project. So that is tied into sustainability and resilience. So there's a lot of scientific evidence in the literature about how this vesicle technology can help improve the immune responses to cancer and help cure cancer in various models. And I think that what we could do is really add value to our society by improving the outcome of cancer patients.

37:43
Currently 15 to 20% of cancer patients only respond well to immunotherapy. So we have an 80% margin there to improve. And I think that these vesicles can help do that not only for chemotherapy, but immunotherapy as well for cancer patients. So sustainability means now that we're wrapping up the flu program, we're passing it over to manufacturers and clinical.

38:11
research organizations that will move on on its own. We'll have to hire a separate project in the Alliance Management Team to drive that. But now that the R&D team in the lab, they're ready for their next challenge. And we believe that that's the best value add for our technology at this time. Thank you. You're not getting up with just three questions. There's a final question, Christopher. Did you have fun in the sandbox today?

38:41
I did. It was great to connect. And I love telling people about our technology because I think it's very impressive. And if people look to nature, they will find answers. And a lot of that is going back to that book by Henry David Thoreau. He went into the woods to discover himself and to live deliberately. And that kind of formed this whole environmental movement, if you will, to appreciate nature for what it has to offer. So yes, it's been fun.

39:11
And thank you for allowing me to share our technology with your audience. Thank you, Christopher.