iSelect: Recent Episodes
Carter Williams
In 2019 over 600,000 people died from cancer in the United States alone. One of the primary drivers behind these high mortality rates for cancer is late diagnosis. For this reason, we're seeing increasing demand for noninvasive methods to detect cancer easily and at earlier stages.
Many of the major medical conditions that we face in our lives share an underlying cause: chronic inflammation.
iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on early cancer diagnosis using blood-based tools. Testing patients for cancer has typically involved a tissue biopsy -- collecting the cells in question for closer examination. However, these tests can be invasive, risky, costly, and painful. Liquid biopsies, on the other hand, rely on analyzing bits of tumor material that are found in bodily fluids such as blood. In this conversation with iSelect venture associate, Tom Bunn, we discuss the growing field of blood-based cancer diagnostics and how it can improve patient care by finding tumors earlier in their development.
Tim Sprinkle: So, once again, we have Tom Bunn, with iSelect Fund, here to talk about this week’s Deep Dive topic. Tom, welcome.
Tom Bunn: Thanks Tim. Glad to be here.
TS: So, what did you guys learn this week?
TB: We have been seeing companies trying to tackle, early screening or diagnostics for cancer using liquid biopsies and blood. So, this week we focused on blood-based cancer screening and diagnostics tools, which will ultimately allow healthcare providers to understand, hopefully, when patients have cancer and hopefully where that cancer is in their body at a much earlier stage in the cancer development. Hopefully before it's metastasized.
TS: Interesting. And how far along is this technology right now?
TB: There are several very well-funded companies that are working on this. One is a very well-known company that spun out of Illumina in 2016 called Grail. It’s shown very good retrospective data and they're going into the clinic for prospective data next year. So, their blood assay has shown very good data in terms of looking back at cancer patients to determine and to basically prove out which ones had cancer and which ones didn't. The next step is really taking it into a wider cohort of patients, both with and without cancer, to be able to prospectively determine who has early stage cancer and who doesn't.
TS: And I would assume given cancer's predominance in just the general population, the market for this sort of technology is massive.
TB: It is. The estimates around how much money you can save from early diagnosis are massive. One estimate I read puts it at $26 billion a year, which is basically many more than any other therapeutic approach can promise. So if you look at where a lot of the cancer companies and R&D money has been spent, it's really been spent on late stage options for people who are likely going to add, unfortunately, a month or two under their life. This approach is kind of really a paradigm shift in that, instead of focusing on late stage patients who we should obviously still be focusing on, the lion's share of our work should really be around diagnosing and screening for cancer at its earliest possible stage so we can have a much better chance of curing it.
TS: The idea of curing cancer has been kind of the goal for a long time, but it’s true, if we're not going to cure it, finding better ways to better address it in the moment is the best approach. Is that kind of where the technology is right now?
TB: I think so. I mean, the earlier the earlier we can find cancer, the better results are. If we find prostate cancer in the early to the mid stage, it's almost 100% curable. It’s the same for breast cancer. There, there are anomalies to that rule, but generally speaking, most cancers can be cured if you solve them before a certain progression in the life cycle of the cancer.
TS: Excellent. Well, it’s really interesting stuff. Thanks very much for your time, Tom.
TB: For sure. Thanks for having me.
iSelect managing director Mark McCall recently participated in a panel discussion at the Family Office Impact Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Hosted by Gitterman Wealth Management, Family Office Insights and 5th Element Group, the event was a private gathering of 250 Family Office, ESG, Impact, and Climate Change Experts to discuss the relationship between private capital and positive social change. Mark was able to sit down with Ed Rogers, CEO of iSelect portfolio company Bonumose, to talk about the intersection of food and health, the potential impact of “healthy” sugars and the opportunities that Bonumose is seeing in the market for nutritious, natural sugars.
Mark McCall: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Mark McCall. I'm a managing director at iSelect Fund. We are a venture capital firm headquartered in the Midwest. With me is Ed Rogers. He's the CEO and cofounder of Bonumose, one of our exceptional portfolio companies.
I just want to first of all say thank you again to Jeff, to 5th Element, and everyone else for this fantastic conference. I am not from a family office, but I feel like I'm in a family of 300 people right now. This is right down our alley and I love everything that's going on here.
Just a few words about iSelect. Again, we are a venture capital firm. We're headquartered in the Midwest in St Louis. We primarily invest in food and agriculture and healthcare and life sciences, a little bit of resource efficiency as well. We have over 50 portfolio companies, and importantly we are an open ended evergreen platform, making it very accessible for investors to invest in the companies that we bring onto our platform, which is about two companies every month, to invest on a continuous basis and also to develop customized investment plans.
Ed, I'm going to let you introduce the company, but one of the things I’d like to point out is the title of this session starts with “natural nutritious sugars.” I'm quite sure that most of you have not seen the words “nutritious” and “sugars” in the same sentence. So, with that in mind maybe introduce the company a little bit and perhaps give the audience a little bit of a taste of what that means.
Ed Rogers: So our company is a 3- year-old startup based in Virginia and we’re focused on nutritious sugar. Right off the bat, nutritious sugar is a thing and our company has a technology that will democratize nutritious sugar, making nutritious sugar affordable for mass market adoption.
It's important to acknowledge whenever you're talking about an alternative to regular sugar, to sucrose, which is the gold standard of sweeteners. It's great tasting, it's very functional and food sugar does a whole lot of things in foods beyond just bring sweetness. It provides the structure to foods. It reduces water activity in baked goods, so it helps reduce microbial contamination. It depresses the freezing point in ice cream to result in a creamy ice cream.
So these are all things that sugar does: it's great tasting, it’s functional and it's cheap. So all alternatives are going to be judged that way at least by the consumers.
So we have a process for producing rare sugars such as tagatose and allulose. They occur naturally in fruits and some grains and actually tagatose occurs in the Cacau tree, the tree that produces the bean for chocolate. But they occur in such tiny quantities that they can't effectively be harvested.
There are processes for making these rare sugars that are expensive and we'll talk about that in a second, but what you really need to know is that they really shine when it comes to health. So allulose and tagatose do not raise your blood sugar level. In fact, tagatose has been shown in phase three clinical trials to reduce blood sugar levels. So not just not raised, but actually reduce. They are not going to cause cavities.
Allulose has even been shown to break up dental plaque,
iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on how many food producers are now using digital technology to stay ahead of the curve and bring innovative new products to market faster than ever before. We spoke with iSelect venture associate, David Yocom, about what this all means for the foods we eat and the companies that make it all.
On today's podcast, Cofactor Genomics COO, Dr. David Messina discusses how his company is working to make personalized medicine a reality by focusing on the potential of RNA as a diagnostic tool.
Unlike DNA, which is set in stone at birth, our RNA changes on a minute-by-minute basis and acts as a barometer of our health.
Led by 3 former researchers from The Human Genome Project, Cofactor Genomics is developing a patent-pending RNA-based technology that will allow medical researchers to detect specific RNA molecular markers in even small, low-quality tissue samples. This will make 100 times more patient specimens available for analysis and will open the door to massive, Big Data-style databases for use in both drug and treatment development.
Carter Williams: So, David, the way we normally do this, is we sort of walk through background.
David Messina: Great.
CW: Sort of just, you know ... Cofactor is doing some really exciting things and so we'll spend some time talking about that, but I also love technology and try and understand what's happening next, I think. In iSelect, we have this opportunity to see cool emerging technology, and when I tell other people, that's ... No, idea, what's ... And, so it's normal stuff for us -
DM: Right, but, not everybody knows what's going on.
CW: Not everyone knows what's going on and it sort of gives them some excitement, so ... But, I'm really intrigued about you're now at Cofactor, right? Part of the founding team. And, I'm sort of intrigued about how you got here, so, how did you become a computational biologist?
DM: You know, I never expected to be, actually, I ... When I went into college, I was thinking I would do international law, or maybe political science, and after trying to do that for a couple of years, I realized it wasn't for me, and I switched gears completely.
And, I was really looking for something 180 degrees different. And I ended up thinking about biology, and I had the opportunity to work with a very talented guy at Argon National Laboratory, a national laboratory just outside of Chicago, who is a mathematician and a computer scientist, originally, and he had met Carl Woese who, kind of one of the pioneers of computational biology.
In 1977, he, Carl Woese, had discovered, or postulated, that there is an entire third domain of life called the Archaea. And, so, you have to think about eukaryotes being multicellular organisms, prokaryotes being bacteria, and he was saying that there's actually a whole third domain that's kind of similar, some parts that are multicellular, some parts that are like single-celled organisms.
He predicted this using ... looking at RNA molecules, the very early sequencing, that was available at that time. And he looked at enough of them to be able to figure out that there was, in fact, this whole third branch of life. Nobody believed him for a long time. And, it turned out to be true. And, now we know this. This is accepted many years later.
So, Ross Overbeek met Carl and became enamored of applying computational techniques to biology. So, when I met Ross, this was just after a team had published the first free-living ... The genome of the first ... The first genome sequence of a free-living organism. So, Methanococcus jannaschii, this was done by Craig Venter's group.
CW: What year was this?
DM: This would have been 1996.
CW: Okay.
DM: And, so, Ross was a unique individual, in that, even at that time, this is when we have one genome ... He started thinking about, and we talked about, "Well, what do you do when you have ten genomes, or a hundred genomes, or a thousand? What can you do, in terms of comparative genomics, to better understand the world? So, in a nutshell, you can think about it, where, once you have the whole parts list, that's what a genome is, really, is how to make an organism. And, once you know what all the genes are, then you can look at two organisms,
Dr. Todd Mockler is one of the world's leading experts on plant genetics and has dedicated his career to better understanding how the genetic code of different types of plants impacts their behavior and responses. As a member and principal investigator with the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, his research has focused on the development of plant genomic tools, with the end goal of improving crop performance and yield.
On this episode of Innovation Anarchy, Dr. Mockler will discuss his career in plant biology, his work as an ag-tech entrepreneur and helped Benson Hill Biosystems -- the startup company where he's currently chief technology officer -- is working to unlock the genetic code of plants in order to improve yields, boost crop performance, and help feed the world.
Carter Williams: As we've talked before on previous podcasts, the agricultural industry is going through a huge sea change in the United States and around the world. The United Nations expects that we need to over the next 35 years produce a lot more food to feed the world as it continues to grow both because of the growing population and because of growing economies. This is putting a big challenge on farmers who have to grow more while there are challenges in the climate, eroding soils, limitations on natural resources. There's an urgent need to redefine the model of innovation in the ag industry in order to significantly improve crop performance and meet the demands. As it stands today most biology based innovation in agriculture happens in the R&D departments of major corporations like a Monsanto, which has the resources to reach and dedicate years of research and teams and experts to solve these big, world-changing problems, but this limitation is not sustainable and is no longer necessary.
Recent computational and biological advances have opened up a new era of innovation to address these global challenges with sustainable agricultural solutions allowing smart startups to enter the space as never before. Dr. Todd Mockler is one of the ag experts leading this transition. As chief technology officer of Benson Hill, principal investigator with the Danforth Center, and a long time professor of biology, Todd is at the forefront of plant genomics using the tools of genetic analysis to boost crop yield, improve agricultural output, and redefine how ag innovation is done. So, with that as an intro, Todd, welcome.
Todd Mockler: Thank you, Carter: Thank you for the nice introduction.
CW: That’s a really long list of stuff. What does being a chief technology officer at Benson Hill, principal investigator at Danforth, and long time in professor of biology -- what do you do right now?
TM: All right. Well, I have, I think, the best job in the world. I’m fortunate to be a faculty member, also called a principal investigator at the Danforth Plant Science Center here in St. Louis. At the Danforth, I run a large research group -- about 20 people. We are working on various problems in plant biology that I’m interested in like how plants deal with environmental challenges like stresses like cold, heat, salt stress, for example. Fortunately, at the Danforth as a faculty member there I can spend 20% of my time doing other things, and those other things are not defined, but they include spending that 20% of my time being an entrepreneur.
So, I’ve taken advantage of that and had the good fortune to meet the right people, to help co-found companies like Benson Hill Biosystems, for example, where I’m CTO, as you mentioned. As a co-founder of Benson Hill, I brought in some technologies that are essentially spent out technologies from my lab at the Danforth Center, and helped shape the science that underlies Benson Hill’s technology platform. Yeah, I think that’s what it involves. It’s have it providing some scientific guidance and leadership, pointing the direction. Say, “Okay, this is an interesting area. Let’s tackle it,
There is massive consolidation occurring in the healthcare space right now, and as a result hospital systems are acting almost like private equity groups. They're sucking up all of these once-independent primary care providers and are distributing all of the administrative functions that these providers manager to shared, centralized care teams in an effort to cut costs, just like any good private equity investor would.
In the case of healthcare, most of this is happening in outpatient care management. As of today, 99% of all health care delivery in this country happens outside of the office, not when people are face to face with their doctor. Healthcare systems are starting to realize this, and they are now staffing rooms full of nurses who are monitoring the highest risk patients to address this need.
This is a trend that, with support from the right technology, has the potential to dramatically improve patient satisfaction, patient health and business health all at the same time. At the same time, the health system can save money by pooling all of its resources in these back-offices, and patients are getting more access to their providers and better out-of-office care as a result. The missing piece of the puzzle is simple enough: how can care managers identify the patients that need their support and thereby connect with the right patient at the right time? Epharmix and iSelect: Improving Healthcare That is why iSelect has invested in a company called Epharmix, which is taking the digital transition of healthcare a step further by developing new tools to enable effortless, seamless patient monitoring. Epharmix creates technology that sends disease-specific questions to patients automatically, enabling the existing care managers to serve many more patients and bend the cost curve. The unobtrusive system uses mobile technology to collect patient data while they go about their daily lives, improving patients results while simultaneously reducing workloads for providers.
I recently had Blake Marggraff, the CEO and co-founder of Epharmix, on iSelect's "Innovation Anarchy" podcast to talk about the technology the company is working on, the challenges it faces in the digital medical space, and the opportunities he sees to vastly improve healthcare delivery in this country.
Click above to listen to the podcast.
The global population is booming, diets are shifting and urbanization is rising. Never has so much been asked of agriculture to meet the needs of our society. Never have the external risks to agriculture advancement been greater, whether from changing climate, limited natural resources, concerns over chemical inputs, protests over GMO, industry consolidation or reduced choice in the marketplace.
In the face of all these challenges, new innovations are needed to advance agriculture for people and our planet. Cloud biology -- the combination of plant biology, Big Data analytics and cloud computing -- is one such innovation, driving new developments in agriculture throughout the value chain. What Exactly Is Cloud Biology? It isn't a new field. It is something that has existed in the broader life sciences community for several years, and is centered around the convergence of cloud computing with biology. Think about the cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services and what that really represents, both from an analytics perspective and a computational scale perspective. Combine that with tools like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and more, and you suddenly are able to take very, very large data sets and extract value from them that humans might not be able to see. Then you can take that information, those insights, and develop biological solutions or recommendations from them.
Obviously, this transcends many, many industries, not just the life sciences, but agriculture is quickly becoming fertile ground for cloud biology. Cloud Biology in Agriculture The resulting products from all this, of what the computational engine is telling you to do, is in the crop. Sometimes that means higher productivity. Sometimes that means better nutritional profiles. Sometimes that means a different leaf architectures so that you can plant at a higher density in a field and get effectively more outputs for no additional inputs. Whatever it is, it is a result of cloud biology and analytics informing those decisions.
On this week's podcast we are featuring Matt Crisp, founder and CEO of Benson Hill Biosystems, an iSelect portfolio company that is pioneering the use of cloud biology for agriculture, leveraging technology to solve some of the world's greatest agricultural challenges.
Click above to listen to the full episode.