The Scientist Developing "Remote Control" Livers

[00:00:08]Well, welcome. We're here today at the HP Garage in Silicon Valley, which is where it's said that was the birthplace of Silicon Valley, where Hewlett-Packard was founded. And I have the great pleasure of speaking with Sangeeta Bhatia, who was recently named Forbes' one of the 250 greatest living innovators, which is super cool. And it's for your work that you did basically taking microchip technology, I'm probably simplifying it here, oversimplifying it, microchip technology and applying it to safer drug development. So, we can get into what that really means. Um but thank you for coming. You're a professor at MIT, so thanks for coming across the country to get to meet you here in California.

[00:00:50]>> It's my pleasure. Nice to meet you.

[00:00:51]>> Yeah. So, you before we talk about the fascinating work that you've been doing, let's talk a little bit about your journey. You're you ended up getting an MD, PhD.

[00:01:00]Um what drew you to medicine and to engineering?

[00:01:04]>> Yeah, great question. Um so, I'm the daughter of immigrants and uh I was born in Boston.

[00:01:10]And when I was going through high school, uh the conversation in our house was not like, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" but "Are you going to be an engineer or a doctor or an entrepreneur?" That was sort of like the choices they laid out.

[00:01:24]>> Your parents laid this out for you, yeah. And were your were your parents any of those?

[00:01:27]>> My my dad was an engineer and my parents were both MBAs. Yeah, so and entrepreneurs. So, um my dad took me actually to a lab at MIT, where he had a friend that was using ultrasound to treat cancer.

[00:01:41]And it really captured my imagination that you could build instruments, machines to improve human health.

[00:01:48]And I decided to pursue biomedical engineering, which at the time, this was like the mid-80s, was a brand new field.

[00:01:55]Um most schools didn't even have that as a major.

[00:01:57]Um but I decided to of march in that direction.

[00:02:00]And I got my PhD as I continued on that journey. The MD sort of um just because I fell in love with the human body. It was so interesting and the program I was in allowed you to take medical school classes. Before I knew it, I had finished medical school, too.

[00:02:17]>> did you end up in college, did you major in like there was there a biomedical engineering >> There was biomedical engineering. Yeah, you would take general engineering and then you would specialize in biomedical engineering. And I didn't think initially I was going to get my PhD. I thought I was going to go, you know, be a captain of industry.

[00:02:33]That was like my dad's life plan for me.

[00:02:35]But I realized very quickly that the the field was moving fast and I needed more deeper education.

[00:02:41]>> Mhm. Did you spend any time working in the corporate world?

[00:02:44]>> I did. I took what we would now call a gap year and worked in pharma and um spent the year doing other fun things.

[00:02:51]Like I became an aerobics instructor.

[00:02:53]>> [laughter] >> And very quickly realized that every anybody who had the job I wanted um had either an MD or a PhD and just went right back to grad school. But >> So, why not get both?

[00:03:04]>> [laughter] >> But I mean, how long does that take to get an MD and a PhD?

[00:03:07]>> It varies. For me, it was 7 years, which is considered fast, I guess.

[00:03:12]>> For two big degrees.

[00:03:13]>> Yeah. Yeah, but I think um because I was in this kind of intermixed program, it was really like learning both at once.

[00:03:19]>> And you got and it was a program between Harvard >> MIT. Yeah, it's a it's a 50-year-old program. It's really a visionary program called Health Sciences and Technology.

[00:03:29]Um and even just the engineering students get to go in the hospital and wear the white coat and learn the physical exam and there's really no better way to understand the clinical problem than to be immersed in that environment.

[00:03:41]>> Right, and see how what's what's really happening with patients and that kind of stuff. So, talk a little bit about your work. It's so, you know, miniaturization mic- micro livers. I mean, you know, I mean, it's all kinds of stuff to >> Teeny tiny things.

[00:03:54]>> Teeny tiny things that yeah, that that have a role in in drug development, drug testing. Talk to talk about >> Yeah.

[00:03:59]So, my work started with the just the sort of simple idea that our tissues are ensembles of cells. Those are the building blocks of our tissues and they have all this beautiful architecture.

[00:04:11]And when I was in graduate school, I was really interested in understanding the architecture of the liver.

[00:04:16]Um amazing organ, it has 500 functions, it can regenerate, it detoxifies all the drugs in your body, it's vulnerable to insults when you take medicines. So, I was just really interested in understanding how it worked um because we knew if you take the liver cells out of the body and you put them in a Petri dish, they stop doing all those beautiful things. So, it's very clear that they were missing some kind of architectural cue.

[00:04:42]Um and at that time, which was the early '90s, um people had just started to think about using chip technologies, microchip technologies, which had been developed like this places like this um to speed computation. We were trying to build teeny tiny wires and transistors and circuits on semiconductor silicon and as part of that, the field had developed very good patterning tools where you could pattern a surface with chemistry.

[00:05:08]Um and so we realized, oh, we could pattern a Petri dish with chemistry that cells would stick to and then we could create kind of artificial architecture.

[00:05:18]Um and so we did that. I did that as a graduate student at MIT and found out um that I could stabilize the cells in a Petri dish.

[00:05:26]>> Liver cells.

[00:05:26]>> Liver cells. Yeah.

[00:05:28]>> And so that when by stabilizing that meant what? That they would continue to exist and function as they're as they would function >> for some amount of time. Yeah. So, instead of just starting to die from the second you put them in the Petri dish, they would live for about 4 to 6 weeks.

[00:05:43]Um and then we made them out of human liver cells.

[00:05:46]>> Which ones What of start cells did you start with at first? Like an animal >> An animal rodent cells. Um and then we started using human liver cells and we realized that we could tackle this this really big problem in drug development, which is that you develop drugs, you test them in the animals, which is um there's a big movement actually to get rid of that, but at the time that was the case. It's still required by the FDA.

[00:06:08]And then in spite of all that testing, when you got into humans, 25% of drugs would fail because specifically of liver toxicity that was in the human liver that was unpredicted.

[00:06:19]Um and so now we realized, oh, we had human micro livers in a dish and we could use those for drug testing.

[00:06:27]>> I mean, does it It seems like that if that works, right? Which uh then you don't even need animal testing for that part of it the testing anyway, right? You don't need to worry about it because it sounds like the animal livers weren't really good proxies for human livers.

[00:06:42]>> Yeah, I think that's that's right. I mean, I think that there's a big movement now um called non-animal models for screening, NAMS, and there's a big movement to replace all the things that you would do in animals um with these sort of what we call in vitro models or human-on-a-chip. And the human livers were some of the first ones that you know, really were tested against a library of compounds and it proven that you could find things that you couldn't find in animal.

[00:07:07]>> So, when you look at this liver on Is it like Is it like look like a chip? Does it look like a liver? Like what does it look like in the petri dish?

[00:07:15]>> Yeah, it's it's actually It's interesting because it actually doesn't look like the liver. So, the liver's very three-dimensional. We now make three-dimensional versions of it that we can implant and try and help patients with instead of transplant.

[00:07:26]>> Mhm.

[00:07:26]>> But in the beginning, we were just We were engineers. We're like, let's just like make them happy.

[00:07:31]>> Make it work, right?

[00:07:33]>> So, they basically look like colonies, like a bunch of spots >> Okay.

[00:07:36]>> in an array. Um so, they have a lot of self-contact, so that's of neighbors like themselves, and then in between the spots are supportive cells uh that create a friendly environment. And together those two things make them function.

[00:07:51]>> And the friendly environment is supposed to mimic the environment in the real liver in the human.

[00:07:54]>> Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[00:07:55]>> And so then how long can they can these you know, artificial livers, miniature artificial livers exist in this in future days?

[00:08:05]>> So they live about 4 to 6 weeks.

[00:08:07]>> Okay.

[00:08:07]>> Um which is you know, it used to be 24 to 48 hours.

[00:08:10]>> So that's a huge increase.

[00:08:11]>> increase. And it turns out a lot of the things that that are really important to study for toxicity happen quite quickly.

[00:08:19]Right? Maybe not on the first dose, but on the second dose. And so you you can predict what we call acute toxicity, but also some chronic toxicity, which happens because metabolites build up or the cells get injured and then they get more injured and then they die. Um and then we also showed that we could use them to study liver infections, for which there were no good animal models.

[00:08:39]So we studied hepatitis C, hepatitis B.

[00:08:43]>> Two huge diseases.

[00:08:44]>> Huge diseases. 500 million people worldwide. And then um actually it turns out malaria stops first in your liver before becoming a blood disease.

[00:08:54]Um and so we've now made um malaria models for the two big malaria pathogens.

[00:08:58]>> So how's the how is this been adopted has it been adopted yet by any um pharmaceutical companies doing drug trials?

[00:09:05]>> It has many, yeah. So the way it worked for us is we did a startup company, which we spun out of MIT.

[00:09:11]>> Called?

[00:09:12]>> Called Hepregen.

[00:09:13]>> Okay.

[00:09:13]>> And that was my first company, 2007. Um and we scaled these down, sort of figured out the manufacturing, figured out how to transport them, did some pilot studies with pharmaceutical partners, and eventually developed a whole product line of um individual donors and multiple donors, and you can even make the animal version, so you can compare. So now they have I think 33 different products.

[00:09:36]Um and then eventually that company grew up and got acquired. You can go online and if you really want to buy a micro liver, you you can find one.

[00:09:44]>> Yeah. And they've been part of FDA packages or they're just sort of used pretty routinely now.

[00:09:48]>> I mean and I guess I have two two thoughts. So I imagine there's um in in just in development, if you're developing a drug before you even send it out for clinical trials, right? You probably would love to be able to test it on something like this, right? Before you spend the money to do a clinical >> Yeah.

[00:10:05]>> Is that happening?

[00:10:05]>> Well, so we learned a lot about the market um when you do a startup, right?

[00:10:09]You you really you have a theory about how you think your thing is useful. Um and then the market tells you what is really useful about >> What they're willing to spend money on.

[00:10:17]Yeah.

[00:10:18]>> So we thought it would be most useful for toxicity testing and it is now becoming um useful for toxicity testing and decision-making. But it turned out what was even a bigger pain point in pharma was drug metabolism.

[00:10:33]So you take a parent drug and the liver changes it into a daughter compound and sometimes those can be toxic.

[00:10:39]>> Oh, wow.

[00:10:39]>> And at the time there was this big movement to make drugs last longer and longer in your body. So instead of taking something twice a day, you take it once a day. Instead of once a day, you take it once a week. And what that means is the experiments that they were doing on liver cells that were dying were not predicting the metabolism well.

[00:10:58]So that turned out to be a much more rapid adopting set of customers >> So interesting.

[00:11:03]>> than tox- toxicology. Because it turns out it's really hard to get somebody to kill a compound based off of your test.

[00:11:12]>> Cuz they maybe don't trust your test cuz it's >> Yeah, it's a new test. They're all invested in all these animal studies that it was fine, but metabolism is objective. Like we're going to put this in a human and this metabolite's going to show up. The FDA is going to ask you about it. So it became a much shorter conversation and that really became the market pull.

[00:11:28]>> Wow. That's fascinating. So um who which did a bigger pharma company or tool company acquire?

[00:11:36]>> Yeah, BioIVT. Yeah.

[00:11:38]>> Interesting. So, this was so you developed this and you launched the product. How long ago was it more or less?

[00:11:46]>> Yeah, we launched it right almost right away when we started in 2007 and >> it's been out for almost 20 years.

[00:11:52]>> Yeah, and then I that was my first company we did seven more since. I this is like >> more companies since then.

[00:11:58]>> But that was like where I built my first entrepreneurial muscle.

[00:12:00]>> on your page on MIT.

[00:12:02]>> It's not on the MIT website. It's just got your your academic stuff. Wow, seven companies. So, how do you how how do you balance teaching and being an entrepreneur?

[00:12:13]>> Yeah, it's a great question. I I tend to like space them out in time.

[00:12:17]I have two kids of my own with my husband and I think of each company like a baby. So in the beginning they need lots of care and feeding just to function and eventually they learn to walk and talk and be on their own in the world and that's when you grow the team and you figure out the market and you've raised the capital and then you can let go a little bit and you you can be less involved. And so if you look at my subsequent seven companies you can see that they're spread out in time.

[00:12:43]They do accelerate in recent years cuz my own kids were older and also you that entrepreneurial muscle gets stronger, your networks get stronger.

[00:12:51]>> Yeah, you you know how to do the VC fundraising, you know how to write >> Exactly.

[00:12:54]>> who to hire and that kind of So, talk about like is there a theme that connects the next seven companies?

[00:13:00]>> Yeah, the theme really is this engineering set of technologies which were developed to speed computation. And so when in the 90s microtechnologies so cells are about 10 microns that's human hair is 100 microns.

[00:13:14]So those were easy to pattern but now the field has come down to nanotechnology so a thousand times smaller and like the latest AI chips for example have features that are about 4 nm. Teeny tiny. So, the receptor on a cell is is about 10 nm. So, now we have materials and patterning capabilities to really speak the language of biology.

[00:13:40]And every one of these companies has some version of that theme in it.

[00:13:44]>> And are you producing like micro versions of other organs or is it all related to the liver or you know, what's going on? What's the What do these companies been doing?

[00:13:54]>> Yeah, it's a good question. No one's ever accused me of being focused.

[00:13:57]>> [laughter] >> I want to guess so they're not and not related.

[00:14:00]>> So, there I mean there is like I you know, we really like the liver was my first love. Um and you know, I I met it before my husband. Like I I had many chances to break up with it and always continued to study it.

[00:14:12]Um so, half you know, fully half of the companies are on versions of the liver.

[00:14:15]Drug testing, um therapeutic, uh liver implants. We've worked recently on an injectable liver, remote control liver, all kinds of liver things.

[00:14:24]>> Remote control liver? Wait, how I'd love to hear how that works.

[00:14:28]>> So, we we um the way we invent things in my world is we sort of put fields together.

[00:14:34]Um and say like what could happen at this interface? And so, I have a colleague of mine who I went to to graduate school with, Chris Chen. And he and I were just sitting around one day saying like there's this new field of synthetic biology where you can rewire cells and you can turn on different circuits with chemicals.

[00:14:51]Like wouldn't it be cool if we could make a liver that could regenerate on demand? Um and so, that's the sort of remote control. So, we we put a circuit in the cells and we surround them with friendly neighbors.

[00:15:04]Um put them in mice and put a drug in the water and showed that you could get these livers to grow remotely, kind of on demand. Yeah, so that's this a recent study. That's not in people yet.

[00:15:14]>> Yeah, okay. So, that and and that's the other thing is like it takes a while, right? To for something like that, I would imagine. What's if it keeps going well in the animals, when do you think I mean this is a big deal, right? So when I'm sure you have to be kind of cautious.

[00:15:28]How long would it take before you could do this?

[00:15:29]>> Yeah, well the first generation product is actually starting clinical trials this summer.

[00:15:35]Yeah, and that those are for babies with metabolic errors of metabolism and that's like our very first first product. So it's not the remote control.

[00:15:45]It's not we have a bioelectric one now it's very simplest one where you do an infusion in a baby that has high levels of ammonia in its blood that can cause brain damage and these cells can take over for that baby's liver.

[00:16:00]>> Wow.

[00:16:00]>> So that you know, we've working on that 20 years really excited to see how the trials go.

[00:16:06]>> Is this a very I don't know I haven't heard of this problem in babies is it very widespread or is it very rare?

[00:16:13]>> It is it's a rare disease. There's and each there's a there's category they're called inborn errors of metabolism and there's actually a lot of them and what's kind of interesting is that if you look at the ones that we're treating in the company, they're all involved with ammonia processing they're called urea cycle disorders and there are many many little genetic defects that can cause the same problem. So the cool thing about using a cell to treat that is when you put in a cell that has the whole normal cycle it can treat any baby with a defect, right?

[00:16:46]Which is very different than the approach that's being taken with gene therapy or genome editing.

[00:16:50]>> It's like my genes and >> Right, which is personalized super powerful set of technologies but this is like what we think of as universal.

[00:16:57]>> Yeah, and you don't have to worry about immune system rejection of any of this or this stuff.

[00:17:00]>> Well, it depends on where the cells come from. Yeah, so right now we use donor cells cuz we want to grow them quickly and we want to freeze them so they could be ready kind of off the shelf.

[00:17:09]And so those those patients do need immunosuppression just like if you were going to get a liver transplant.

[00:17:15]But we're now working on growing patients own cells, and then they wouldn't need immunosuppression.

[00:17:20]>> Oh, really?

[00:17:21]>> Yeah.

[00:17:21]>> That'll be so cool. My goodness. So >> So the other companies are all in the cancer space.

[00:17:27]>> Okay. Topics. Yeah, so let's hear about that. How does this How does this have a role in cancer?

[00:17:31]>> Well, it might seem like a far cry from the liver, but when you're a biomedical engineer, actually, the architecture of tissues, what we call the microenvironment, there's a lot of similarities between a solid organ like the liver and the tumor microenvironment, which is essentially a tissue.

[00:17:47]>> Mhm.

[00:17:48]>> Um and so as we were able to make tinier and tinier and tinier materials, we got to the point where we realized we can inject these tiny materials, and they will circulate through the body and find their way to the tumor.

[00:18:01]Um and that became this incredible capability. So what could you do with that? You could image it, you could deliver radiotherapy, you could make a measurement about what kind of DNA mutation is there to help doctors decide what medicines the patients could get, and so on and so forth. So So injecting safe nanomaterials into humans is actually now a whole field. It's called nanomedicine, and I run a center at MIT called the Nanomedicine Center. Um and and our subsequent companies are kind of all in those areas.

[00:18:34]>> Wow.

[00:18:34]>> And and is this um where are we in the development of this field? Is this happening on a routine basis that people are getting nanomaterials injected into their bodies?

[00:18:44]>> I know. It's It's So it's really interesting. So the the National NIH had decided about 20 years ago now that this was an important growth area, just in the same way you see like quantum now is is something that we're investing in.

[00:18:57]And they funded a bunch of centers of excellence around the country. Um collectively, we published a lot of papers. We learned how to make materials that would do all kinds of interesting things.

[00:19:05]>> your you guys were a center of excellence in this >> Yes. Yes, we were. And Bob Langer and Ralph Ralph Weissleder, who's an investigator at the Mass had a center.

[00:19:13]And in 2005, uh um 2005-2010, NIH said like, "Okay, this this this work has been stimulated. We are now done. We've catalyzed." Yes, exactly.

[00:19:25]Um and we none of us thought we were done, so that's when I started the center with with philanthropic funds from a family named Kurt and Kathy Marble. And um what happened was COVID came along.

[00:19:36]And actually for the nanomedicine field, it was a huge boon because the way you package mRNA is in a nanoparticle.

[00:19:46]A lipid nanoparticle. And the only reason we knew how to package mRNA, how to scale that up, how to manufacture it in microfluidics, how to store it, how to do that so rapidly was because the field had been developing that technology for 20 years. And the COVID vaccines are mRNA The COVID vaccines are mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccines. You mostly hear about the mRNA, um but we think the nanoparticles are like the unsung hero.

[00:20:10]>> Yeah, I'd say I I've only heard about the mRNA. I didn't know about the other particle yet.

[00:20:14]>> Um and so now these particles have been in millions and millions of people safely. And >> Anyone who's gotten a COVID vaccine has gotten this. Fascinating.

[00:20:23]>> Yes. And what that means is that you can now use them safely for other things without people worrying about it. So now there's a whole movement in cancer vaccines, um for diseases like pancreatic cancer, which is looks very promising. Um and it's all really what we would say nano enabled.

[00:20:38]>> Wow. And pancreatic cancer is such a tough one. And so that any anything you can do to help improve the treatment for that cancer would be we welcome.

[00:20:48]Fascinating. So we're on the road. We we these the nanomaterials are in in all of us who've had the back to the cancer the COVID vaccine, but then in terms of the cancer treatment, we're still in a testing phase, would you say? Yeah.

[00:21:00]>> Yeah, there there are some there are some treatments actually that are routinely um prescribed that again where the nanoparticle is sort of like the unsung hero.

[00:21:08]>> You don't even know it's [laughter] there. Yeah.

[00:21:09]>> Yeah. Um, there's a material called the liposome, which is liposomal doxorubicin is a common chemotherapy. The liposome is a nanoparticle.

[00:21:17]>> Okay.

[00:21:17]>> Um, so people just Yeah, they don't They think about the contents, but not the packaging.

[00:21:22]>> So, I mean, just hearing you talk about the evolution of just technology over the the lifetime of your career, I mean, sounds pretty impressive like sounds like you can do a lot of things now that you probably couldn't have done 20, 30 years ago >> Yeah.

[00:21:36]>> because technology is advanced like the nano nano technology. I mean, am I right? Am I Am I >> You are. Yeah. And I think what's really exciting is some people call this idea convergence, right? Which is that yes, the cancer biology knowledge was advancing on its own, right? Like we discovered immunotherapy as a community.

[00:21:52]We didn't know that 20 years ago. But microchip technology was advancing. AI was advancing. Stem cell biology was advancing. Chemical biology was advancing. So, all these fields are accelerating on their own and like the power of the collision is just incredible. Like >> And you're right at the center of that.

[00:22:10]Like you're right in So, what are your like your students at MIT? Are they kind of inspired to to marry these two areas of engineering and and medicine like like you all have done?

[00:22:21]>> I think so. I mean, I think they choose our lab because um, people with the parlance is it's a translational lab.

[00:22:27]So, it's a lab that's like looking to the hospital, looking to the clinic, trying to feel assess what the human health issues are.

[00:22:34]Um, but we do, you know, a lot of basic work and knowledge creation um, at that interface. And over the years we've had about 20 inventions that I would say like are, you know, kind of worth taking out into the world. And >> Which is a lot.

[00:22:48]>> Yeah.

[00:22:48]>> So.

[00:22:49]>> Which is a lot, but we've we published like 200 and something papers, right?

[00:22:52]So, not every project is a useful invention. And I think it's really important for people to to realize that.

[00:22:58]Like you have to really preserve curiosity-driven science. Um, and sometimes you're just like asking the question like what happens if I do this, which is like what happened in this garage, you know.

[00:23:08]>> Well, that actually ties into you the next question I was going to ask you um which is, you know, we're doing this we did this list of 250 greatest innovators tied to America's 250th birthday this year.

[00:23:22]But but you know, what I'm wondering is um how you think the the American [clears throat] system has helped you in your career and in the advancements that you've been able to make. And then what do you think needs to happen going forward so we have another 250 years of great innovation.

[00:23:39]>> Yeah, so many things. Um I mean I really feel like my story really only exists at this moment in America.

[00:23:46]Like in this place in the world. Um To be >> And why is that? There is Yeah, there's no no um kind of program like the MD PhD program in the >> No, even more than that. To be an immigrant, to be a woman engineer, to be an MD PhD, to be a product of the public schools, to be at this incredible university surrounded by brilliant minds with public funding. Uh >> The favorite cross that they keep getting in the public funding.

[00:24:14]>> exactly. In the center of a venture community. I just think that story just doesn't it just doesn't happen anywhere else um that I get to be all those things. So I think it's really special and we have to like lean into that.

[00:24:28]>> Yeah.

[00:24:28]>> And and actually I think we could do really a lot more, which is what excites me. Um if you look at for example our startups at MIT, um only 9% of them are started by women faculty. Um so I started a program to sort of hack that problem called the Faculty Founder Initiative. And so far we have had 30 women faculty come through and 20 startups and they've raised a bunch of money and the idea is to like get more people off the bench, right? Because the innovation ecosystem should reflect the full breadth of our ingenuity.

[00:24:59]>> you think that that um is it is it what was holding women back from from starting companies, do you think? Like faculty members at MIT?

[00:25:07]>> Yeah, it's complicated, right? Like I think um the things it's not is how excellent they were, how inventive they were, how big their labs were, how decorated they were, none of those things. Uh it seems as though they are less um appointed to scientific advisory boards, less on boards of directors for sure, single-digit percentages, which means you have less of a network, >> Yeah.

[00:25:30]>> you don't recognize when you have something that could necessarily be resourced at scale, and even if you do, who do you call?

[00:25:36]>> Right.

[00:25:37]>> Right? So, that's one problem. Um and then the other one is a is a is a prioritization.

[00:25:42]Um women, I will say, as a mother of two, like are incredibly disciplined about their time. And so, when we did a listening tour, we talked to women faculty, we said like what's holding you back? And it's like, well, it's just not an option thing.

[00:25:55]>> Yeah.

[00:25:55]>> I have two young kids, I'm pre-tenure, entrepreneurship is optional.

[00:26:00]Um and you know, what we say to them is, well, it doesn't have to look like you see it.

[00:26:04]>> Right.

[00:26:04]>> Right? Like I started my first company, Hyperion, at night after the baby went to bed. My co-founders would come over.

[00:26:09]Like it doesn't have to be how it's portrayed in the press. There's many, many ways to be an entrepreneur.

[00:26:15]>> are all all consuming, right? I mean, that's all people do, right?

[00:26:19]>> But you don't have to do it that way.

[00:26:20]You can do it as a team, you can have people help you, you can yeah.

[00:26:22]>> Yeah, fascinating. Yeah. And then so, in terms of going forward, so that's amazing that you're you've made progress already to get more women faculty to start companies. Um what do you think the country needs else could could happen in the country that make sure that innovation continues?

[00:26:38]>> Yeah. I mean, I think this this idea that universities and the federal government have a compact uh to invest in the future of science that is good for the country really needs to be reinvested in.

[00:26:51]>> It's also good for the world, right?

[00:26:52]Because some of our >> Some of our medicines, you know, drugs that get developed or people come here to get treated or they get exported.

[00:26:59]>> So many, if you look at the list, I mean, I was actually looking at it on on my way here. So many of those things are are really world-changing that were born here, but born because of these systems that we put in place and it's very easy to kind of take them for granted. You can't turn them on and off.

[00:27:15]Um young people are very smart about how they want to spend their time. If you want them to choose science and engineering, you have to make these careers attractive and stable uh invisible.

[00:27:28]>> Yeah, and seeing things that oh, funding just got cut. Sorry.

[00:27:31]>> Yeah, and it's really hard.

[00:27:33]Our university funding is down 20% this year and >> Yeah. And also just the serendipity of what you might learn doing basic research, what you might come across.

[00:27:42]Yeah, even if you're not, you know, so having that basic funding, I think, is also a need, right? Going forward.

[00:27:48]>> Yeah, and I think people don't understand that idea like of serendipity. Like, what does that really mean? But I think it's like it's just like creating art or music. Like you need space to just wonder. So I I tell all my students to spend 20% of their time tinkering.

[00:28:02]And I say like, don't hurt yourself, but barring that, like do whatever you want.

[00:28:06]And it could be frivolous, it could be a partnership, and you know, if something interesting happens and bubbles up, which it often does, bring it to me. Um and I think like you really you have to remember why you love science.

[00:28:19]>> That's fascinating.

[00:28:20]>> You know what's so interesting, too, is like Google started out giving, you know, one day a week, 20% do stuff on your own, and Gmail came out of that. A bunch of stuff came out of that. So it's so fascinating that you're doing the same thing. That's wonderful.

[00:28:32]Well, thank you so much. So great to meet you. So interesting to hear about the work that you're doing.

[00:28:36]>> Great to meet you. Thanks for the opportunity to share.