Benjamin Lewis once ignited his competitive spirit on the open water as captain of the 2004 Olympic K4 team, the four-person men's sprint kayak. He also trained competitively for cross-country skiing. These days, he is channeling that passion into quite different, yet vital areas: animals and research. As founder of The One Health Company in Philadelphia, Lewis – along with a team of researchers, vets and scientists -- has developed humane clinical trials in animals that lead to the advancement of important pharmaceuticals to treat illnesses in people. And he is keeping those animal research subjects alive and wagging.

 An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

https://youtu.be/yvR0wGkglFQ

Knowledge@Wharton High School: Benjamin Lewis is founder and chief operating officer of The One Health Company, an innovative and humane animal testing business based in Philadelphia. The One Health Company is an active member of Wharton's venture initiation program (VIP), an incubator program that helps University of Pennsylvania students as they grow their businesses. Ben has studied veterinary medicine at U of Penn and health care management at Wharton. Ben, thank you for joining us today.

Benjamin Lewis: Thank you for having me.

KWHS: Tell us about your startup. What is The One Health Company? Help us understand how it is unique in the marketplace.

Lewis: The One Health Company is a social impact company that's revolutionizing animal testing. [The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires all human pharmaceuticals, medical devices and diagnostics to be tested on animals prior to human trials]. Animal testing is a pretty taboo industry that hasn't seen much innovation in the last 100 years. The current method of animal testing is to take a healthy animal, give it a disease, test on it, and then kill it at the end. And sadly, we kill about 100 million animals using this traditional method. That being said, while I was at veterinary school I realized that there's no shortage of naturally sick animals that come to see us every single day at the veterinary hospital. I [thought], why are we creating disease when we have so much naturally existing disease in the pet population?

The One Health Company operates clinical trials in animals the same way you operate clinical trials in people. You would never give a person a disease just to test on them. And likewise, we find naturally sick animals and enroll them into clinical trials. The animals stay at home with their owners the entire time, they receive cutting-edge treatment at the world's best veterinary hospitals and we pay for everything. This is very beneficial for the pet because they're receiving some really cutting-edge therapy. It's beneficial for the owner because we pick up the bill for everything.

We never use a placebo arm, which means the pets will always receive either the gold standard of care or the experimental therapy. And in the end, we accelerate the pace of innovation for pharmaceuticals and new biologics coming to market.

Because we don't actually have to make the animals sick, it's a lot faster because we don't have to wait for the disease to take place and we don't have to track it. We actually get a lot better data. So right now, the industry operates at a 92% failure rate from pre-clinical trial to clinical. And [with our approach] we estimate about a 65% success rate, because it turns out natural disease in animals is a much better proxy for natural disease in people, whereas when you try to induce artificial disease in an otherwise healthy animal, it's not a very good approximation of natural disease in people.

At the end of the day, we have tremendous financial savings for the pharmaceutical industry, as well. We’re really unique because we've taken something that is almost inherently inhumane, animal testing, and made it so that everybody benefits and we actually heal the sick patients in our trials.

Welcome to the PwC-KWHS Podcast Series for High School Educators on Business & Financial Responsibility. I'm Diana Drake, managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton High School, and today we are talking about the economic value of higher education and how to help students manage college costs and debt. During our discussion, we will […]

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Welcome to the PwC-KWHS Podcast Series for High School Educators on Business & Financial Responsibility.

I'm Diana Drake, managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton High School, and today we are talking about the economic value of higher education and how to help students manage college costs and debt. During our discussion, we will traverse the rugged landscape that surrounds higher education. Students are faced with ever-rising tuition costs, staggering student-loan debt, a difficult job market and the inevitable question: Is college worth the investment? I’m here today with two experts who will help us sort through these important issues, and offer high school educators some practical insights and advice to help their students make more informed decisions about their financial lives after high school and on college campuses.

This is part four of our four-part discussion on the value of higher education with Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and retired PwC Partner Michael Deniszczuk. Here, we explore whether college is worth the investment. Will it pay off?

Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton High School: In this perfect storm over the past several years of soaring costs, rising student debt and shrinking job prospects, is college worth the investment?

Michael Deniszczuk: Certainly, from my standpoint as a partner in a large accounting firm, we would only hire college students and we generally only hire college students from colleges that are well-known for graduating good accounting students.

I believe college is a worthwhile investment, with the appropriate planning at the front end. We talked about the fact that millennials with college degrees make an average of $17,000 or so more per year than peers with high school diplomas. Part of that might be again the fact that they've gone four more years. But I think that it's important to note that this education pay gap has actually widened since Generation X. And you talked, Peter, about maybe that reversing. I don't know. When you think about this being less of a manufacturing economy and more of a service economy, I wonder whether it will reverse and whether that pay gap will continue to widen.

There was a study done by The College Board, a non-profit organization, that showed that in general within 11 years, higher earnings and lower unemployment rates made up the cost of that education. And according to a report by Georgetown University, nearly two-thirds of job openings for workers will require some college or better going forward.

There's going to be more and more demand for college graduates. It's going to be important. You think about money and you think about getting jobs. But people with college degrees tend to keep their jobs during recessions, and tend to have lower unemployment rates over time than those with just a high school degree. Furthermore, it's important to look beyond the financial compensation to measure the benefits of a college education.

Studies show that people with more education are in better health, their children are in better health, their marriages are more stable relative to people with less education. Those are factors that go beyond the financial piece that you might want to consider.

Peter Cappelli: I'm not as sanguine as Mike on this. I don't think there's any guarantee, there's nothing written up that says college has to pay off. There's also the problem of the difference between causation and correlation. We know that college graduates do better on all kinds of things than high school graduates do. There's strong reason to believe that would have been true even if they didn't go to college because they come from families that have more assets. They come from a different social strata in society. They come to college with a different set of values.

It's pretty hard to know why it is that college graduates do better than high school graduates.

Welcome to the PwC-KWHS Podcast Series for High School Educators on Business & Financial Responsibility. I’m Diana Drake, managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton High School, and today we are talking about the economic value of higher education and how to help students prepare to manage college costs and debt. During our discussion, we […]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the PwC-KWHS Podcast Series for High School Educators on Business & Financial Responsibility.

I’m Diana Drake, managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton High School, and today we are talking about the economic value of higher education and how to help students prepare to manage college costs and debt. During our discussion, we will traverse the rugged financial landscape that surrounds higher education. Students are faced with ever-rising tuition costs, staggering student-loan debt, a difficult job market and the inevitable question: Is college worth the investment? I’m here today with two experts who will help us sort through these important issues, and offer high school educators some practical insights and advice to help their students make more informed decisions about their financial lives after high school and on college campuses.

This is part three of our four-part discussion on the value of higher education with Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and retired PwC Partner Michael Deniszczuk. Here, we look at helping students manage post-college debt.

Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton High School: Let's move on to helping students manage post-college debt. I'd like to start with the example of Zina Kumok, who's a regular contributor to the Knowledge@Wharton High School business journal. Zina graduated from college a few years ago with thousands of dollars in debt. She vowed to become debt-free in three years and was successful in doing so. She has said many times that she had no idea what she was getting into when she signed on the dotted line. For instance, she didn't know that interest was increasing the size of her debt burden while she was in school for four years.

The easy answer is to give high school students more financial knowledge. That's why we're all here. But more deeply, how can we help our students be better prepared and possibly even avoid taking on too much debt? Where does the responsibility lie?

Michael Deniszczuk: I want to congratulate Zina, who set a goal of becoming debt-free and achieved it. I'm sure it took a lot of hard work to do that but it paid off, literally. Again, I'm going to go back to the planning piece of this thing because I think that is extraordinarily important. You need to first decide what college is right for the student based upon the career they're planning.

Not everyone knows the career they're getting into. But they may know an area that they want to go into. For myself, I was very interested in math and chemistry and so forth. I ended up being an accountant, which I guess is somewhat close to the math piece. You may need to say that, ‘Hey, I don't know what I want to do, so I need to pick a college based upon the fact that it gives me a wide variety of majors where I don't have to be switching colleges.’

Second, look for ways to avoid borrowing before you even get into college. … There are lots of scholarships that go unclaimed each year. You've probably heard stories about that. Then you've heard stories about outstanding students who can't get scholarships. But in fact there are lots of scholarships out there and some of them have very specific eligibility criteria. You need to research your scholarship opportunities early and try to determine what's out there and what you have to do to get it.

Think about working during college to help offset costs. While it may not pay your tuition, maybe it'll pay for books or other incidentals for college. Working in an area related to your career choice can also help make you a more desirable candidate when you're looking for a job after college. My view is that any work you do during college will at least show employers your drive and work ethic, which are very important traits for any job.

Finally, family resources. It may be cheaper and less of a hassle -- although maybe it would be more of a hassle...

Welcome to the PwC-KWHS Podcast Series for High School Educators on Business & Financial Responsibility. I’m Diana Drake, managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton High School, and today we are talking about the economic value of higher education and how to help students prepare to manage college costs and debt. During our discussion, we […]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the PwC-KWHS Podcast Series for High School Educators on Business & Financial Responsibility.

I’m Diana Drake, managing editor of Knowledge@Wharton High School, and today we are talking about the economic value of higher education and how to help students prepare to manage college costs and debt. During our discussion, we will traverse the rugged financial landscape that surrounds higher education. Students are faced with ever-rising tuition costs, staggering student-loan debt, a difficult job market and the inevitable question: Is college worth the investment? I’m here today with two experts who will help us sort through these important issues, and offer high school educators some practical insights and advice to help their students make more informed decisions about their financial lives after high school and on college campuses.

This is part two of our four-part discussion on the value of higher education with Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and retired PwC Partner Michael Deniszczuk. In the context of rising college costs, we look at issues and strategies related to paying for college, as well as ways students can avoid too much debt. (Note: Michael Deniszczuk has retired since the taping of this podcast.)

Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton High School: Let's focus now on paying for college. Yes, the cost of college is on the rise. Students have a dizzying array of options to help them pay, from applying for financial aid to pursuing grants and scholarships and more. In general, how should students tackle this process and prospect of paying for college?

Michael Deniszczuk: I have three pieces of advice -- plan, plan and plan. When you stop and think about it, college is one of the biggest decisions students will make in their early lives. You’ve got financial aid, school loans, borrowing from family -- they're all viable and responsible options. But if the details aren't thoroughly understood then the step to advanced education can be economically detrimental. The key is advanced preparation and planning -- taking a long term, thoughtful approach to the education you'll need to achieve your professional goal can help eliminate surprises and guide students, parents and guardians to the right course of action.

I don't think you have to pick the most expensive option to get the best education. As Peter [Cappelli] said, it may be that the sticker price might not be the best way to look at a college either. You've got to get in and do some research, find out what kind of financial aid is available at certain private universities, for profit and not-for-profit, and compare that against the career that you're looking for and in the state that you're in.

Based on the students’ view of what type of career they want to pursue, try to determine what the best colleges or other higher education options are to help them achieve this. Research the schools and where employers in the profession hire from. There's a wealth of information out there if you take the time to do the research.

Let's go back to high school now. Grades matter and they play a factor in financial aid options. While colleges use admission tests like SAT or ACT to compare students, they're also very interested in the student's grade and the grade point average and how much they've challenged themselves in school.

The important thing to remember here is that this is something the student has control over because if they work hard, challenge themselves in high school with course work beyond the basics -- for example, honors or AP course work -- and make good grades early on, say starting in the ninth grade, and sustain those good grades their senior year, it can make a difference. Strong grades and GPA can translate into more scholarship or financial aid opportunities, both through the school and from private scholarship programs.

Now, I mention ACT and SAT.

In part one of our four-part discussion on the value of higher education with Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and retired PwC partner Michael Deniszczuk, we provide an overview of the price of college today and discuss the changing landscape of rising college costs.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In part one of our four-part discussion on the value of higher education with Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and retired PwC partner Michael Deniszczuk, we provide an overview of the price of college today and discuss the changing landscape of rising college costs.

According to researchers, 8 million tons of plastic are dumped in the oceans each year. This is a huge environmental threat, and one that people are addressing in different ways. Take, for instance, some cool news out of Dana Point, Calif., this week. Students at Dana Hills High School are […]

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