The Inventivity Pod

Beloved by corporate HR departments and government agencies alike, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator measures personality types. Betsy Styron, board chairman of the Myers-Brigg Foundation, explains how the assessment works and what it should and shouldn’t be used for.  An introvert herself, Betsy powers through a great interview. *This episode was originally released on July 11, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles . We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace personality.

Richard Miles: 0:39It’s not just a song. It’s a test, specifically, a test called Myers Briggs type indicator. My name is Richard Miles, ENTJ. My guest today is Betsy Styron. INTP the President and CEO of the Center for Application of Psychological Type and chairman of the board of the Myers and Briggs Foundation. Welcome Betsy .

Betsy Styron: 0:57Thank you. Good to be here.

Richard Miles: 0:59So, the initials I rattled off after names are one of what? 16 Myers Briggs type indicator, I think. And I’ve taken that many times working for the federal government. And after 20 years, I just barely shifted from INTJ to ENTJ in fact, according to test , I have no personality at all. So I don’t know what it says about me working for the federal government or, or whatnot, but Betsy, why don’t we start out by educating our listeners for those who are not familiar? What exactly Myers-Briggs is tell us what does it measure and how does it measure it?

Betsy Styron: 1:31Okay, let’s call it the NBTI Myers Briggs Type Indicator. And the word indicator simply means it indicates a preference. So we’re looking at four scales and there are two opposite sides. So let’s start with introversion extroversion, which are opposite. So I happen to be an introvert. So when I took the NBTI and got my results, essentially it pointed to introversion as a preference. We don’t like to use the word test. We call it an indicator because there was really no right or wrong answer. We all do both. I couldn’t be talking with you without extroverting. It really is about two scales. And you just prefer one over the other. The analogy that is most often used is like being right handed or left handed. You have the preference that you lead with the preference, where you get more energy. You’re typically a little bit more accomplished with that one, but we all use both hands. There will be times like now, with me with a preference for introversion that I’m talking and I’m animated about it because the topic is very interesting to me and there are four scales. And we can talk about those a little bit later, if you would like.

Richard Miles: 2:46So let’s take that as an example, introversion, extroversion, what are some sample questions for instance, on the NBTI, in which you try to suss that out, whether somebody has a preference for introversion or extroversion.

Betsy Styron: 2:58There are multiple items that measure the different scales. And when you sit down and take it, they’re all integrated in a way that you can’t figure out, you know, am I doing the block of questions related to this or that, but essentially, a question might be, if you have a choice to want to go out tonight and be social, or would you rather prefer to stay at home? That’s not a direct question, but the whole idea of the items is to get at the essence of what the preference means. Introversion and extroversion really is about energy. And it’s not so much about talking, which is also misunderstood. So that introverts get energized by going inward. And if we’re put into a situation where like one time early in my life, I was a school teacher , I was talking a lot. You’ll come home at the end of the day. I didn’t want to talk to anybody at the end of the day. You know , I just needed a little bit of downtime and the opposite is true for an extrovert. They get energized by interacting and wanting to go out and do things and may work all day and have a spouse of an opposite preference. And one spouse says to the other, well, let’s go out and have dinner and then go over and see friends. And the introvert might say, just give me a little bit of time before we do that. We all do both, but you just get more energy from one of the other.

Richard Miles: 4:22The, the times that I took the NBTI and I , again, I probably took it at least four or five times in the state department. I think they weren’t quite sure who we were and they wanted to keep validating who we were. But I remember what followed after we took the test , er, I know, I know it’s not a test, but was these practical exercises in which they would divide us up into our personality types. And I was amazed at how accurately predicted our preferences when they gave us a practical exercise. For instance, I remember the one that we were given was you’re about to leave on vacation and you’ve got two days to get ready, write a list of all the things that you would do before you go on this trip. And the group I was in, came up with a list of like 25 things, cancel the paper, take the cat to the vet. And then there’s another group that basically like, get your passport out of the drawer and go to the airport. That was it. And it was really stunning. The difference. So there has been though a little bit of pushback, right? About the NBTI. What are some of the criticisms out there and how would you address them?

Betsy Styron: 5:18I think one of the biggest criticisms that isn’t really so, is that the assessment is not reliable or valid and that’s just not accurate. Last year, the global version in English was released throughout the world, and there were separate chapters in the manual, one on the validity, and then one the reliability as part of my role in the Myers and Briggs foundation. I read that whole manual. And I don’t know the reason why some people in the academic community have not really acknowledged the NBTI and the psychometrics associated with those in terms of it being sound. And it may simply have just been a carry over from an older time because the NBTI has been around for a long time. As a matter of fact, Isabel basically created it during the time of the second world war, because she wanted to see that people were satisfied or well-matched in the kinds of jobs that they were going into, especially because it was important for those people to do those jobs well. So that’s what gave her the idea to create the indicator.

Richard Miles: 6:22That’s a perfect segue in talking about the history of NBTI talking about Isabel , Isabel Myers, is that correct?

Betsy Styron: 6:28That’s right.

Richard Miles: 6:28So let’s go ahead and who was she? What was her background and how did it come together in the NBTI?

Betsy Styron: 6:34Okay. So she was the daughter of Lyman and Catherine Briggs. Lyman, Interesting enough. Her father was the head of the Bureau of standards under three presidents in the United States. So they lived in Washington, DC, I think not far from probably where you have a home up there, there’s a row of colonial beautiful homes up there. And so she grew up there. She was mostly homeschooled by her mother. She did have an occasional governess who came in and taught other topics,

Richard Miles: 7:05Betsy, what year are we talking about? Roughly what decade?

Betsy Styron: 7:08She was born in 1897,

Richard Miles: 7:09Ok, so turn of the last century.

Betsy Styron: 7:11So, yeah, and I think having read a number of things that her mother wrote in there are papers that are at the University of Florida. I don’t want to take us off track, but I think she saw Isabel in some ways as a development project of how to have Isabel be all that she could be. So, her mother was very observant and took notes of what she did and how she behaved and how she learned and all those things. So her mother’s fascination with the topic and her fascination with Carl Jung and his theory of psychological type had a lot of impact on how she developed, but she was mostly homeschooled.

Richard Miles: 7:52And the questions themselves and the NBTI. How have they evolved over time? I’m guessing that few years, is there sort of like a validation exercise where you decide, is that still a good question or not? Or how does that work?

Betsy Styron: 8:06Yes, there are revisions and the publisher, the Myers-Briggs company is responsible for those and yes, it’s periodic and it’s based on how a cultural terms change and things like that. Just to keep it current. The global version that was released last year, basically went through a reliability and validity studies in Europe people who might live in France or whatever it makes sure that it was still working in those places.

Richard Miles: 8:36Right. Okay. Let’s talk about the use of the NBTI. And I know there’s a distinction between what the recommendations are from, you know, Myers-Briggs foundation and then how companies , organization to actually use them. So let’s talk about what is sort of the most common way in which an organization, whether it’s a nonprofit or government entity or private corporation, if they administered this to their employees, what do they expect the employees to do with that information? What do they themselves organizations to do with it? And then as a comment, I think it’s not surprising that organizations often find they’re populated heavily by one particular type, right? Because there are certain aspects of that type that draw them to that profession in the first place.

Betsy Styron: 9:19Well, yeah, and I think profession is the key word, not to take us off track, but medicine and specialty selection is an perfect example of that. And who’s attracted to family practice versus surgery. But getting back to your question of how is it most often used term we use is how is it applied? So a company might decide, let’s say to take their leadership team and give them the indicator. And they might be focusing on communication. You know, how we communicate with one another. It might be focused on leadership development in larger companies. Sometimes it’s around specific tasks . A story that comes to mind for me is my nephew who lives here in Gainesville. He went to Vanderbilt, became a mechanical engineer. He went to a company where they put him into a design department. He is a sensing type, which is a concrete, factually based person. And when he was put into the design department, which really requires enjoying more, the intuitive, big idea perspective, he really decided the job that he had wasn’t for him. He came back home and decided to go to medical school, which he did. And now he’s a musculoskeletal radiologist. Perfect job for him. But the differences between what he enjoyed and how he was able to enact his job is a contrast. It’s , that’s why I think it’s a good story. Right. So when you think about college students, as well as the workplace it’s okay. So what is it about this job or this future that fits for you? Now? Something we always say is all types can do all things. It really doesn’t have anything to do with your intelligence, your ability, your skill, your interest, any of those things.

Richard Miles: 11:08Is it hard or does it come easy? Right?

Betsy Styron: 11:10Right. And so do you want to do it? And one of the reasons I brought up medicine is because Isabel Myers worked with our founding president at Cap, Dr. Mary McAuley, who was a clinical psychologist at the college of medicine at the time. And so they did a very large research study together on medical specialties and who self selected to go into those specialties. You really don’t want a surgeon who has a very clear preference for intuition saying, what do you do with this? I got an idea. That’s just not . So, so typically you find mostly sensing types in surgery who have a more concrete way of seeing the world.

Richard Miles: 11:55Do you know of any instances in which either organizations or individuals that use the NBTI where , you know, somebody said like, Oh wow. I’m not going to go into that field of study are not going to go into that profession cause it’s, I think probably totally unsuited for me. And it came maybe as a surprise or to organizations do be like, Oh , okay. We’re definitely not letting you know that the INTJ’s be the welcome greeters at the door. Cause they’re terrible at it. Anything like that?

Betsy Styron: 12:21Yeah . Our position is that you shouldn’t use it that way. I mean, this is a preference. You go to your preference first. It doesn’t mean that you don’t develop the non-preferred side of yourself as I’m an introvert. I love to talk about things I care about. You know, so you don’t want to be stereotypical, I guess is the best word to say.

Richard Miles: 12:39Put somebody in a box. These four letters define your future.

Betsy Styron: 12:39Yeah, no . And actually there are areas of misuse in the corporate world with type, this is a perfect example that, you know, you might be limited, you know, and that would be coming from above. But every time we have an opportunity, those of us who are leaders in this field say, no, that’s, that’s really not. You should not, you shouldn’t be using it that way because we all have the ability. I mean, it doesn’t measure intelligence. It doesn’t measure, experience, interests . Any of those things, all it is it’s , it’s a , it’s like being right handed or left handed. As I said, in the beginning, you have a preference to be one way, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t develop another side or that we can’t all do all things. We wouldn’t be well-developed if we didn’t.

Richard Miles: 13:25Let’s talk a little bit like, as I indicated earlier on, I actually changed. I tipped over from being slightly introverted to slightly extroverted. Is that just sort of a random nature of some of the questions in which if I answer one or two differently, it tips me over or is there somebody that shows that people actually can migrate over time in terms of their personality preferences and then linked to that is right . The intensity, the score, right? Cause on both my scores, I was only mildly introverted and then mildly extrovert . So was pretty much dead center. It just, I tipped over just enough to go into the other quadrant. What does your research tell you about migration? Right? From one type to another, what is the intensity indicate? You know, whether someone’s a strong introvert or mild extrovert, how does that factor in?

Betsy Styron: 14:11Okay, so there’s three different. What we call steps of the NBTI step one measures your basic type preferences. And it just means the form with the questions are different. There is step two, which measures 20 facets that have been identified through the scoring process. For example, I too am an introvert, but I am an expressive introvert. Okay. So expressive is an extroverted facet. So if, when I took step two, I found out I was of preference on two scales. I’m an expressive introvert and I’m a planful perceiving type. So planful is a facet that relates to the judging, perceiving, judging, being decisive and wanting closure on things and perceiving being spontaneous and flexible. I think in my role as a CEO being planful is quite helpful. So there, there are 20 different facets that you might be out of preference. And that’s a nuanced version of the NBTI.

Richard Miles: 15:29So Betsy, this show is primarily about inventors and entrepreneurs and having lived in Gaines with a long time. I know you interact with a lot of both categories and vendors, entrepreneurs. Have you noticed, is there a predominant NBTI type of person that is drawn to want to invent something or want to start a business? It seems to be a definite extraordinary willingness to take risks sometimes in the face of all available evidence.

Betsy Styron: 15:53Well, that’s a , that’s a good question. I think if we stick with the principle that anybody, regardless of their type can do anything they want to do. I think the only preference that I would say that might relate to entrepreneurs would be intuition, intuition in terms of ideas, you know, people who have a preference for intuition or just like a lot of different ideas, like to explore a lot of different things. But does that mean that the opposite preference of that sensing in which is concrete and someone who’s who it see , it’s even hard for me as an intuitive to describe it. It’s always interesting to me because you have to put your mind around what, you know, versus how it feels because I’m not very concrete. So I can think of different professions that maybe relate to science where the specific detail of the research is so very important. And so there may be something else fueling their desire to stick with it. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Richard Miles: 16:54So in the NBTI as sensing and intuition are kind of opposite. And so in, in the kind of stereotypical idea of the S person that would be somebody who is very much going to go by the book, or very much, depending on the known facts , and the intuition side is like, Hey, anything’s possible. And we’ll just see what happens.

Betsy Styron: 17:17Okay. Yeah. That’s true. So let’s just quickly go through the four scales because you get a four letter type. Right? Okay. So the first scale is introversion and extroversion. And essentially that is where your energy comes from. If you are an introvert. Um, and you’ve been talking all day, which is extroverted, you’re going to want to go inside at some point to reenergize yourself and vice versa.

Richard Miles: 17:44Now is that first because you consider that sort of the most important framework in which to look at the other aspects or is that just, is it random the order in which those types,

Betsy Styron: 17:52So when you get your type, so , um , you said you’re an INTJ?

Richard Miles: 17:56ENTJ

Betsy Styron: 17:56ENTJ. Okay, so that I couldn’t remember where they, okay, lets just take ENTJ. You know, you can either extrovert all day and that energizes you, but there will come a time during that day where you need to introvert. It could be because of a project , uh , you know, you have to solve a problem or simply, you know, whatever you’re doing demands or you want to, you know, we have to look at it as being right-handed and left-handed just for the general public to think about it, got to do both. And we would be really one sided if we didn’t. The next scale is how you gather information and that’s either through sensing or intuition. So sensing being, you like to gather information in a concrete way, sometimes thinking about things sequentially, and if you have a preference for intuition, then you’re using things that maybe just can’t put your finger quite on, a hunch, or it could be that you have read something or learn something that inspired you to think about another idea.

Richard Miles: 19:03Got it .

Betsy Styron: 19:03So you can be creative with that and always keeping in mind that we have to do both. Otherwise we wouldn’t be effective as a person.

Richard Miles: 19:12Yeah, well I wouldn’t be alive.

Betsy Styron: 19:14Well, we prefer it . We’re better at it. And you can get stuck in going into that side. You prefer more. And I mean, I am famous when driving with directions cause I have a preference for intuition going , Oh , you know, it’s a mile or two away. then like you’re 15 miles later. It’s like, okay, I didn’t get that right because I think you’re not quite as good and as accurate with you’re non preferential side.

Richard Miles: 19:41So Google maps has ruined your world, you know?

Betsy Styron: 19:43Oh no, actually I love Google maps if it talks to me, but yeah.

Richard Miles: 19:48As long as that’s encouraging, right?

Betsy Styron: 19:49Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Richard Miles: 19:51So that we’ve done the first two letters and then the what’s the third?

Betsy Styron: 19:55Okay. So thinking and feeling,

Richard Miles: 19:56Thinking and feeling. Got it.

Betsy Styron: 19:57Okay. So yeah. So people who have a preference for thinking and feeling, this is how you judge and decide is if you have a preference for feeling, you’re going to care more about how you feel about someone else feels it’s a values based decision making, thinking on the other side is based on logical decision making. And do you use that word is a little difficult because it implies that you might not be logical if you’re feeling type and that’s not true. I remember it, it always comes back to both, but you just go to your strength. So as a thinking decision maker that I am in, you are too. So I really want to go learn more about something I want to, as much as I can find out about it, ask questions to learn more. I have to work at, especially because I’m in a leadership position, if I say something, I want to be careful how I say it. Right. You know, and my humor might sneak in there and say something that could be hurtful to somebody and come across as sarcastic when I wouldn’t mean it that way. So your non-preferred side is just not as easy and facile.

Richard Miles: 21:15Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me that people who are tilt towards that T side, a lot of academics, a lot of writers, you know , a lot of people in the chattering class right? Where they’re , they’re mostly, they love, they’re drawn to kind of the information based nature of a , of a problem. And as you said, they might not be quite as strong in the communication with an organization.

Betsy Styron: 21:35Yeah. And for me, with my type, I’m a dominant, introverted thinking type. My mind, continuously solving problems quietly inside. So if I’m working on writing a paper or something like that, I can be driving home and be analyzing it in my head, what I’m doing. And it’s easier to describe what we do personally than it is what other people are doing it, but each of us, but each of us has a dominant. And so you lead with that, but like, I can go back to that left hand, right. Hand analogy. We all do both. And with age type development is really important. I am much different from when I was in my twenties. As a matter of fact, as a leader , uh , in my twenties, I might not even think about how somebody might respond to something I said, or I was critical in a way that wasn’t as considerate is it might have been. So the good news is with type as a lifelong developmental model that as we age, we become more effective in our non preferred side.

Richard Miles: 22:44Where there too many things that are universal. I think one universal thing is everyone who’s in their fifties, cringes at their self, in their twenties,

Betsy Styron: 22:50Oh absolutely, oh yes.

Richard Miles: 22:50Looking back on the things you said or did and then thought and like, Oh my God .

Betsy Styron: 22:56Yes, how many times did you want to put those words back in your mouth? Right?

Richard Miles: 22:59So that leaves us with one final letter, right? What’s the , the final dimension?

Betsy Styron: 23:03It’s your orientation to life, basically how you go about , uh , so some people are spontaneous and want to, this is the JP scale judging, perceiving scale, people who are perceiving don’t mind a plan necessarily, but tend to want to just be spontaneous and do something that’s right in the moment. And they might be more flexible and adaptable than a person who has a preference for judging. So if you have a preference for judging, you tend to be planful. Um, you know, the famous example of that is who makes lists and who doesn’t typically people with a preference for judging will make lists about things they have to accomplish that day. That week, that month, that year perceiving types are much less likely to do that. They want to say, okay, I’ve got one or two things that I know that I’m going to do today. The third, fourth, and fifth things that could be today, that could be tomorrow. I might not ever get around to it. And it’s really interesting. I think in couples, this is one of the areas that there’s, it creates more problems because , uh, you know, for example, my husband is , has a preference for judging and I have a preference for perceiving. I’m much more laid back about whether it gets done or it doesn’t. And then sometimes he’ll say, but we said we were going to do that. So he gets his mind focused on that, which well, and I did say that, but somewhere along the line, I changed my mind, which I am sure.

Richard Miles: 24:35You forgot to tell him you changed your mind.

Betsy Styron: 24:37Exactly, exactly. Which you know,

Richard Miles: 24:39I assure you’re the only married couple to which that’s ever happened. It doesn’t happen to anybody.

Betsy Styron: 24:42Yeah. Right, right, exactly. But it’s good to know. As a matter of fact, sometimes people want to give the NBTI as a wedding present to couples that are getting ready to get married. That whoever’s doing the feedback, which by the way is required when you take the assessment, did you have a feedback on all four scales with your results, one on one with somebody who’s been trained to do that, Because the verification process is really important. If you see the results and you say, well, that’s who I am. If you didn’t say explain it to the person in that feedback process and there’s a whole protocol for that, that we don’t need to get into here, but it’s very important for people to understand it’s their life, their type. And maybe they’re not real clear about a preference. So then they can work on that over time. Although the research does show the older that you get, the more clear you are in your head, that it’s the right preference.

Richard Miles: 25:40So that actually sets up my final question Betsy and basically, if somebody who’s already in a job they’re already in a profession, maybe they’ve been in it for several years. If they take the NBTI and find out like, oops, I’m not really suited for my current position. What is generally the advice given to them? I mean, change their jobs or do they work on changing themselves?

Betsy Styron: 25:59I don’t think either choice really, unless they want to change jobs. I mean, we don’t really want our type preferences to dictate us. We want to think about what makes us happy, what our skills are and all of those sorts of things. I think that we probably naturally tend if we’re in positions that allow us to do it, is to focus on the kinds of things we do well. And maybe either delegate to people who are , you know, might do the thing that you’re not thinking you’re doing so well, or figure out another kind of solution with that. I think that for me, if something doesn’t quite fit, then I looking for somebody in the organization that say, would you help me with this? Or are you willing to take responsibility and just delegate it? Or if you’re working with a peer and this is really important and teamwork, as a matter of fact , uh , cat publishes a leadership and team assessment where it integrates the NBTI with leadership. And so then within the team, as the leader, you can say, okay, this is what needs to be done. Who would like to volunteer for this? Or would you like to partner with somebody? I think the overall message is understanding type enriches, how effective you can be if you know yourself. But if you know each other’s types, it really is helpful just knowing your type. It gave me some information and not in a stereotypical kind of way about what might be important in terms of getting to the heart of what you’re asking. Does that make sense to you?

Richard Miles: 27:41Well, on that note, I’m Betsy sincere a self identified introvert, and I tend towards introversion. This conversation has exhausted us, right? It’s your time to bring it to a close, we’re going to go home and take a nap and recover . Well , we can deal with the rest of the world, but Betsy, thank you very much for being on Radio Cade, it’s a fascinating subject. I find it fascinating at least. I know you do, best of luck with the center and with the foundation and look forward to having you back on the show.

Betsy Styron: 28:03Thank you so very much.

Richard Miles: 28:05I am Richard Miles.

Outro: 28:07Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcast and music theme, Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist , Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Microbiologist Phillip Furman is the inventor of AZT, an anti-HIV drug, and other antiviral drugs for Herpes and Hepatitis B and C. He talks about his breakthrough moments, the difficulties of taking “miracle” drugs to market, and the culture shock of moving from New York to Florida as a teenager. Furman’s interest in science was fueled at age 8 with the gifts of a microscope from an uncle and a chemistry set from his parents. His advice to researchers: “Follow the data. Negative results give you as much information as positive results." *This episode was originally released on October 23, 2019.*

Microbiologist Phillip Furman is the inventor of AZT, an anti-HIV drug, and other antiviral drugs for Herpes and Hepatitis B and C. He talks about his breakthrough moments, the difficulties of taking “miracle” drugs to market, and the culture shock of moving from New York to Florida as a teenager. Furman’s interest in science was fueled at age 8 with the gifts of a microscope from an uncle and a chemistry set from his parents. His advice to researchers: “Follow the data. Negative results give you as much information as positive results.” *This episode was originally released on October 23, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:36Treating viral diseases is hard, but not as hard as it used to be, thanks to the development of antiviral drugs. Welcome to Radio Cade, I’m your host, Richard Miles and today my guest is Phillip Furman, a microbiologist and the holder of 20 U.S. Patents. The inventor of AZT an anti-HIV drug, and a 2018 inductee into the Florida inventors hall of fame. Welcome to show Phillip and congratulations.

Phillip Furman: 1:00Thank you very much, Richard.

Richard Miles: 1:01So, the problem with interviewing super inventors like you is trying to focus on just one thing, but you have 20 patents, you’ve done a lot of things and you’ve developed antiviral drugs for herpes, HIV, hepatitis B and C. And we could talk about each one of those probably for a long time, but then we’d have to order in lunch, dinner, and probably sleeping bags for this session. So let’s start though with a basic definition of viruses for listeners who may not be microbiologists , how viruses act in the body and how they can be treated.

Phillip Furman: 1:33Well, viruses, some people think are very simple. They are an intracellular parasite. They have to infect a cell in order to be able to reproduce themselves and their basic components are there genetic information, a virus capsid, which surrounds them. It’s a protein coat that protects them once they get into the cell. And some of them have a membrane, which they pick up when they are released from the cell, but viruses aren’t quite that simple.

Richard Miles: 2:07Spoiler alert, it’s not that simple.

Phillip Furman: 2:08They, a lot of them contain or code for proteins or enzymes, which function in the replication of the virus. Everybody thinks that well, once the virus gets into the cell, it requires the cell to produce enzymes and proteins that are essential for virus replication. And the buyer system takes that over and doesn’t have any of its own proteins or enzymes to replicate itself, but indeed they do.

Richard Miles: 2:34So you’ve been working on this for quite a long time. Right? You got your undergraduate degree in microbiology?

Phillip Furman: 2:40In microbiology. Yes.

Richard Miles: 2:42What was your big breakthrough? Which one of the antiviral drugs came first?

Phillip Furman: 2:46Acyclovir was the first one I worked on.

Richard Miles: 2:49And that’s treatment for herpes viruses?

Phillip Furman: 2:52Yes.

Richard Miles: 2:52Do you remember the path, the conceptual path that got you there. What was the first thing that you noticed or discovered that made that possible?

Phillip Furman: 3:00Well, the compound at the time was already discovered and patented. That happened in 1974 and I was a postdoc at Duke University and the department had at Burroughs Wellcome, Dr. Trudy Elion, who became a Nobel Laureate, was looking for a virologist to establish a virology laboratory within the company. And so I was hired to do that. My job was to work on the drug to try to find out how it worked, how it inhibited the virus.

Richard Miles: 3:32So describe for us how long that takes. I mean, I think there’s a popular conception out there with a lot of inventions, including miracle drugs that you have a brilliant researcher has an insight developmental breakthrough. And few months, years later, we’ve got a wonder drug, but I’m guessing it’s not that simple.

Phillip Furman: 3:51Are you referring to time of discovery to time of marketing?

Richard Miles: 3:55Well, yeah, something like that or at what point are you certain of your results? How long did that take for instance, the herpes antiviral drug? Was it a matter of months or a matter of years? How much followup research and testing before you kind of knew this?

Phillip Furman: 4:07Well, it really is a matter of years. I mean from time of discovery to getting it to the market takes roughly 12 to 18 years.

Richard Miles: 4:15Wow.

Phillip Furman: 4:16Now you really don’t know how effective a drug is going to be until you test it in humans for the very first time. And that can take from time of discovery to actually, first in humans, maybe five years.

Richard Miles: 4:31Cause you start out with animals first. Right?

Phillip Furman: 4:34Well, if you’re looking at efficacy, it depends on whether or not there is an animal model available to test its efficacy . If not, well, then you’ve got to, and of course you do any way to get a drug approved, show primarily that it is safe. That is the main criteria that the FDA is looking for, that the drug is safe. And there’s a lot of tests that go on between the discovery and putting it into humans to show that it’s safe, both in vitro or in cell culture essays to show that it’s not toxic to cells all the way to animals and doing in vivo toxicology studies.

Richard Miles: 5:16So after you’ve completed animal trials, of course, the next big thing is to start conducting human trials, which I understand is one, very expensive, right?

Phillip Furman: 5:24It is.

Richard Miles: 5:25And then two, fairly lengthy because you have to have, I presume a big enough sample size, which requires drawing in appropriate humans to do the study, make sure that you’re demographically balanced, et cetera, et cetera. And then of course there’s a safety angle, right? It’s not going to let you do this and start experimenting in humans with experimental drug, unless you’ve given them some assurances that this is not going to kill people, right?

Phillip Furman: 5:48That’s correct. The first studies in humans are a short trial with a small population of volunteers.

Richard Miles: 5:54And how small roughly are we talking about maybe?

Phillip Furman: 5:57Um, 50 to 100. And what they do is they agree to take the drug for a certain amount of time and then are followed by physicians to look for any adverse reaction to the drug. And that’s called the phase one study.

Richard Miles: 6:13And that can take a couple years?

Phillip Furman: 6:15No, that can take a year. Now the phase one study is primarily to show safety.

Richard Miles: 6:23Okay. No negative effects. So you’re not even looking to see does the drug work, does it not harm people?

Phillip Furman: 6:30Now, that has changed a little bit in that the human volunteers can also be people who are infected with the virus. And that’s what was done with AZT. That’s what was done with drugs for hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The investigators were able to do these short term studies to show safety, but they were able to do them in volunteers who were infected with the virus. So they got a quick handle on whether or not there was any efficacy for the drug.

Richard Miles: 7:01I see. So it’s beneficial, I guess, from both sides, right? Because from the investigator side, you now get to jump to, I’m actually treating someone who has this condition. And from the patient side, they’re getting access to potentially a lifesaving drug, presumably a lot earlier than they might.

Phillip Furman: 7:18Not really, no. You still have to follow the protocol that the FDA requires. And that is to do the phase one study, which is primarily a safety study. Then if you show safety, you can go to phase two, which is where the bigger population of patients. And those are generally patients who are infected by the virus. So that’s really your first real look at efficacy. The phase one study that’s done in human volunteers shows you some efficacy. It helps you to determine what dose you might want to use in your next studies

Richard Miles: 7:57In phase two studies. How many people does that involve?

Phillip Furman: 8:01Oh geez, that’s several hundred.

Richard Miles: 8:03Several hundred. Okay . And they have to be presumably recruited and screened so that, you know, you’re going to get some pretty representative results .

Phillip Furman: 8:11That’s right, that’s right.

Richard Miles: 8:12Those take several years or how long did this take?

Phillip Furman: 8:15The study probably will go on six months to a year. A lot of it depends upon what the FDA is going to require. After the phase one study, you meet with the FDA with a proposal for phase two and they can have you adjust your study , uh , according to what they want to see.

Richard Miles: 8:33Let’s talk about efficacy. How does the world look different now for someone with HIV or hepatitis B or C with the development of these antiviral drugs? What was it before in terms of quality of life, life expectancy, that sort of thing. And what does it look like now?

Phillip Furman: 8:47Well, for any of these chronic infections, we won’t talk about herpes because that’s really, although it’s a chronic infection wasn’t necessarily life threatening, but with HIV, it progressed dramatically from AZT to other drugs and combinations of drugs with AZT, there was some efficacy involved, but it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t the best. And we knew that from the start, that AZT would be well, if you will, the breakthrough to show that you can treat HIV much, like you treat heart conditions, diabetes, cancer, as a chronic disease, it wouldn’t be a cure, but you could hopefully extend the life expectancy of the patients. There was some positive effects with AZT , but as I said, it wasn’t the best, but it opened the door to other pharmaceutical companies to come in and develop other drugs. And some of these drugs were put into combination with AZT. And now the life expectancy with the new drugs that have come out, people can live a normal life.

Richard Miles: 9:53Wow. That’s stunning. Really. I mean, if you think about HIV/AIDS was I guess, first discovered in the eighties, right?

Phillip Furman: 9:59Yes.

Richard Miles: 9:59And at that time effectively was a death sentence, right?

Phillip Furman: 10:02Yeah, it was.

Richard Miles: 10:02It was basically some matter of time. And now, like you said, it’s in the same category as having heart disease or kidney disease or something that it’s a serious condition, but yet it can be managed effectively. In combination with these drugs.

Phillip Furman: 10:16Now hepatitis C on the other hand is totally different. It is a chronic disease, but it’s curable. And the work that we did at Pharmaset, the discovery is Sofosbuvir showed that you can cure hepatitis C patients up to 99% of them, as opposed to the combination of Interferon and Ribavirin, which was able to cure maybe at the most 50% of the patients that were treated. A lot of them failed. A lot of them quit because the Interferon / Ribavirin in combination was actually like having the flu for as long as you were on the combination, people were just miserable.

Richard Miles: 10:58Right, right. And taking it, it’s a bit of a double edged sword when you have these incredible breakthroughs, like with HIV and AZT, do people begin to think that this is an easier process than it actually is because on hand, people say, well, look, once we throw enough money at this, then boom, we come up with a pretty good solution or does it spur maybe more funding, more research, more resources devoted to other diseases? Sometimes success is more problematic than failure, right? It brings new problems that you didn’t even think of before has that also to some extent happened in the drug discovery world?

Phillip Furman: 11:33Oh absolutely, I will refer back to Acyclovir. Prior to the discovery of Acyclovir, there was very little work going on in antivirals. The focus of antiviral drug discovery from 1960s forward to Acyclovir was minimal. Few companies were dabbling in. It all focused on herpes viruses and the drugs that they were coming up with all came from anticancer programs. So they were very toxic and could not be used systemically, but Acyclovir was really the game changer because, it was found to be not only specific for herpes virus, but very selective in that it was relatively nontoxic. And so it was consequently the first approved antiviral for herpes or antiviral drug that could be used systemically.

Richard Miles: 12:27Wow.

Phillip Furman: 12:27The others were all used topically.

Richard Miles: 12:28So Phillip, you’re uniquely, I think qualified to sort of look at the whole drug discovery process from the beginning to a successful conclusion. And this is something that constantly has the attention of politicians and society at large healthcare , particularly diseases. Are there things that from a policy perspective, say the government or even private foundations when they make their decisions about how to spend money, are there changes in that process? Again, starting out with the researcher, the investigator through to getting the drug or the treatment on market that government should be doing, whether it’s national state local, or that foundations that support research should be doing that would make this process easier, that isn’t getting attention? Only easy questions on this show Phillip, we don’t go for hard ones. Or if you want to focus on any one segment of that, is there a policy change that would make some of this a little bit easier and faster?

Phillip Furman: 13:22Well, there was a policy change in the FDA that occurred because of the approval of AZT and what it allowed the FDA to do was to approve certain drugs for diseases that were serious diseases, basically like AZT where the outcome was obviously you are going to die, right? And the approval of AZT did help the speed up the approval process in that the FDA shortened, the approval process for drugs that met an unmet medical need. And that was for patients who were dying from a disease, that there was no drug available. And so they actually changed the regulations so that in situations where there is an unmet medical need and it was life threatening, that they would allow drugs to be approved more rapidly with less data.

Richard Miles: 14:22Okay. So if you were to compare this, to say some new drug or procedure that aided in heart disease, the FDA could say, well, look, there are other available treatments for heart disease. So we need to go slower on this. Cause we’re not sure if it’s better, et cetera, et cetera. But in this case in HIV, there was no alternate treatment,

Phillip Furman: 14:38That’s absolutely right.

Richard Miles: 14:39And people are dying l eft a nd right. So i n those cases, that’s a pretty solid contribution I think, as a lay person, what I would hear and continue to hear to some extent i s t hat, well, gosh, if only the FDA, w e’re not as slow, we’re more efficient t han we’d have more of these drugs on the market. And it sounds like the development of A ZT in particular helped shorten that cycle for those cases, in which,

Phillip Furman: 15:00There was an unmet medical need.

Richard Miles: 15:03Right, there’s no other option on the table. Phillip let’s talk about you for a little bit. And like a lot of people in Florida, you’re from New York. You’re not from Florida lets put it that way, you came to Florida as a teenager to Tarpon Springs.

Phillip Furman: 15:16That’s correct.

Richard Miles: 15:17So what was that like? Was that a bit of a culture shock?

Phillip Furman: 15:19Oh it was.

Richard Miles: 15:20To come down to Tarpon Springs, first of all, why did you move? Did your parents get a new job down here?

Phillip Furman: 15:25My dad took a job that required him to travel. He worked for a refrigeration company and he was given the state of Florida, Georgia and,

Richard Miles: 15:36Kind of as his territory?

Phillip Furman: 15:37Yeah. It was his territory. And so felt that moving to Florida and centralizing in Florida would be the thing to do.

Richard Miles: 15:46And so you were kind of drawn to science at an early age, right? I mean you fairly were a good student. Is there a particular teacher or class in particular where you thought this is great? I love this.

Phillip Furman: 15:56Well, yes. I mean, when you said that I was drawn at an early age, I was, probably about eight years old. My uncle gave me a microscope. That was his, when he was a kid. And I was just absolutely fascinated with what you could see with a microscope.

Richard Miles: 16:12Do you remember some of the first things that you would try putting in the ,

Phillip Furman: 16:15Just water from, out in the driveway or leaves or onion skins? Oh , you know, a lot of the same things that most people would probably look at, but it opened a whole new world for me. And then, well then after that probably a year or two later, my folks gave me a chemistry set. One of those big Gilbert chemistry sets. If you ever seen one of those. And I would work in the garage in the summertime with that chemistry set, there was a bench out there and I’d have that set up in the winter when it was snowing, I would go down in the basement and there was a work bench there that I put it up .

Richard Miles: 16:51Were your parents ever worried about the garage blowing up?

Phillip Furman: 16:53No, no.

Richard Miles: 16:53So between the microscope and the chemistry set,

Phillip Furman: 16:59That got me.

Richard Miles: 17:00That got you, kind of hooked.

Phillip Furman: 17:01I think there was always interested in exploring. And I think that opened up the whole idea of wanting to discover things, because the next thing, when I was 12 years old, my dad came home. He was taking flying lessons at the airport up in New York. And he came home and said that some people found arrowheads down along the river bank there where they plowed the fields, plant corn right next to the airport. Oh boy, I want to do that. So I went down and I actually , uh , been interested in archeology ever since and have done site surveys for the state of North Carolina.

Richard Miles: 17:41Oh wow, okay . This is more than just a hobby?

Phillip Furman: 17:43I was living in North Carolina. Well, I thought about that as a career, but I enjoy this too much. This is too much like fun. This is my relaxation.

Richard Miles: 17:51Ok right, you didn’t want to make it, you didn’t want to ruin it by making it work.

Phillip Furman: 17:55But getting back to the question of who, when I was in college, I took a microbiology course and became very interested in microbiology. And I happened to be myself and my suite mate. I happened to be very fortunate to have a very good relationship with the chairman of the department. And he kind of took us under our wing and under his wing, sorry, he kind of pushed me towards medical microbiology. I thought that’s what I wanted to be. It was a medical microbiologist and working in the hospital laboratory and doing,

Richard Miles: 18:32And that was here at University of South Florida, right?

Phillip Furman: 18:34No, this was at Piedmont College. Yeah. Where I got my bachelor’s , but then when I graduated, I thought, you know, I really probably need more education and I should probably get a master’s . And so I applied to USF and got into the master’s program and was very fortunate again, to have another tremendous mentor , uh , Dr. John Betts , who passed away a few years ago. And I did my dissertation research with him and it was amazing. I mean, I worked on a phenomenon called the auto plaque phenomenon. This particular type of bacteria kind of kills itself. And we tried to figure out why I did all sorts of experiments, played around with bacteria phage, which is a bacteria virus that infects bacteria and kills them and did a lot of work on electron microscope. And I thought , wow, this is terrific. And so when I finished up everything, I went and talked to him about what I ought to do for a career. Should I do anything more? And he said, you should go on and get your PhD. I said, well, I’d like to do the same things I’m doing with you. And he says , no, you ought to consider animal viruses their up and coming thing. And that was actually back in 1970. So animal viruses were beginning to become very popular to work with. And so I went on to Tulane and got my PhD in microbiology with an emphasis in virology.

Richard Miles: 20:07That’s a perfect segue into my next question, in which I imagine now roles are reversed in which you have graduate students coming to you, or you have other people maybe in the industry coming to you, seeking advice, if you could meet your 21 or 22 year old self, or maybe 21 or 22 year olds seek your advice, what sort of advice do you generally give them? And then I guess I’ll tack on one question. What sort of questions do you normally get? Are they all sort of very specific? Do I go to this program or that program? Are they more general? Like what do I do as a career type of questions?

Phillip Furman: 20:38I think it’s more, what should I do for a career? Basically tell them to follow their heart. What did they love? And once they find what they’re looking for to not just focus on that one specific thing. You know, don’t focus in on virology, learn everything that you possibly can. If it includes other disciplines, learn that you’re bound to find something in a totally different discipline that might be applied to what you are really interested in focusing on. And then I would probably tell them as Jim Valvano, the basketball coach that died of cancer, who was a coach at North Carolina State University, don’t give up, don’t ever give up. One last thing is with regard to their own personal research as to keep an open mind, follow the data, that negative results to give you as much information as a positive result. Well, that is all great advice. I think you need to write a book or something about something you said jumped out at me and something I’ve heard from a lot of inventors and that is while you’re focused on one area, nevertheless, bring in insights from other disciplines or other areas because that’s, I think truly where the invention part happens, right? Because if you’re just staring at your data all day long, that’s all you see. But if you’re able to bring in other models, other paradigms from totally different fields or dissimilar fields, that’s often where you’re able to now look at the same data and just come away with different conclusions or insights . I’ve heard that from a lot of inventors. I’m guessing there’s something there. I think there is.

Richard Miles: 22:18I think there’s something there. Thank you very much for being on this episode of Radio Cade, I neglected to mention we’re recording this and the Palatial Studios of University of South Florida in Tampa with the assistance of the Ford Inventors Hall of Fame with whom the Cade Museum has a partnership. So we’re very happy that USF and Ford Inventors Hall of fame connection and Phillip thank you very much for being on the show.

Phillip Furman: 22:38Thank you.

Outro: 22:40Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme, Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Can video games be used for education? Co-host James Di Virgilio puts that question to Lindsey Tropf, founder and CEO of Immersed Games. Unlike other educational software, Immersed Games uses online, multi-player experiences to teach things like STEM skills to middle-schoolers. Eventually, the programs can be customized by individual teachers to achieve their specific learning goals. A gamer herself, Lindsey became an “accidental” entrepreneur while earning her PhD in education. *This episode was originally released on July 31, 2019.*

Can video games be used for education? Co-host James Di Virgilio puts that question to Lindsey Tropf, founder and CEO of Immersed Games. Unlike other educational software, Immersed Games uses online, multi-player experiences to teach things like STEM skills to middle-schoolers. Eventually, the programs can be customized by individual teachers to achieve their specific learning goals. A gamer herself, Lindsey became an “accidental” entrepreneur while earning her PhD in education. *This episode was originally released on July 31, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade and podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:36

Video games are the most popular form of entertainment, but can they be used for education? I’m James Di Virgilio. One of the cohost of Radio Cade, and with me today is Lindsey Tropf, the founder and CEO of Immersed Games. Lindsey , thanks for joining us.

Lindsey Tropf: 0:51

Thanks for having me, I’m excited to be able to chat.

James Di Virgilio: 0:53

So Immersed Games, the first thing somebody might think of, if they don’t know what it is you do is that you’re creating video games, which is only partly true. Tell us what you’re working on and why that’s different.

Lindsey Tropf: 1:02

So, we are focusing on video games that really empower people to do deep learning and problem-solving. Right now, we’re really focusing around middle school science. We chose this because middle school is generally the time that students either really solidify their love of STEM or it drops off. And so it’s a really critical time point for students when they’re trying to engage around STEM and science topics. And so, our games really focus on bringing that love of problem solving and understanding of the importance of it to the forefront so that students are engaging in exploring a coral reef that has a problem to figure out how climate change is affecting it, or building an ecosystem from scratch to learn how to balance it. And so they’re engaging these really hands-on problem-solving experiences that are really kind of an authentic experience of maybe something as scientists would do or think about.

James Di Virgilio: 1:52

The game itself is not like a typical game somebody might think of when it comes to education. I have a friend, he home schools his children, they use a lot of educational games , uh , very successfully , but they tend to be one player games that navigate you through a course or a curriculum. Yours is entirely different, it’s an online player based interactive multi-player game. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Lindsey Tropf: 2:12

Yeah, so the inspiration behind it came from playing a lot of those types of games when I was in high school, I played something called, Star Wars Galaxies, where you actually made player cities together and did all sorts of really cool emerging, creative things out of that. And then a lot of World of Warcraft and things. So when I was working on my PhD in education at the University of Florida, as we talked about what ideal learning and ideal learning communities looked like, it really always reminded me of these gameplay experiences. And so for me, it was about not wanting only kind of the single player experience that delivers content, but there’s a lot of richer things you can do if you have a community around it, if you’re problem solving together, if you’re collaborating and you’re building those skills. And so we’re actually working on a grant with the National Science Foundation right now, where we’re adding an entire piece where groups of students work together to figure out what’s wrong and an ecosystem and test engineering solutions together. And you can’t really do that as well on a single player game.

James Di Virgilio: 3:05

When you’re creating this massive, online, learning world, it seems like you’re trying to create a game that can be tailored. Is that right? So if the school board in New York wants to be able to have your game achieve XYZ , you can create an online environment that mimics that or helps achieve that goal, right? It’s not just a static world. It’s one that you can adapt and customize?

Lindsey Tropf: 3:23

That’s something we could do in the future, right now we’re really just working on a very strong core, but yes, we have a whole set of content, authoring tools and part of our longterm goals are to let people start customizing with those. And some of the sooner ways that we’ll be addressing that are actually with this NSF project that I just mentioned, the National Science Foundation, that we are going to be making some early versions where teachers can start customizing and saying like, okay, I want students to work together and solve a problem, but actually use some tools to say, well, in our area, maybe bees dying are a really big issue or pollution in the water is a really big issue and so they could choose different things they want to turn on or off and start customizing. So in addition to that, we have had some conversations with local departments of education or different groups about maybe making some custom content for them. Yes. As well. So in Washington state, forest fires are really big for climate change over there. While on the east coast, they might be more concerned about flooding, but the local context of those problems is really important. And that’s something we definitely want to be able to address more as well as we keep growing.

James Di Virgilio: 4:26

Now when I think about my educational background, Lindsey , I think of going to public school in Sarasota, discovering Oregon Trail, discovering Tank Wars, discovering these games that were very entertaining. I can’t recall really many of the games I played that were educational. I also remember growing up hearing that educational TV would be a big thing, but PBS survives, but is it really accomplishing its goal? Video gaming and the video gaming industry, significantly dwarfs Hollywood, do you believe now is the right time for educational video games to actually take hold? Will it be different than my childhood? Where I would look at anything educational and say, that’s not a game. I don’t care what I’m doing in it. It’s not this.

Lindsey Tropf: 5:02

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of tech reasons, obviously just it’s easier and faster for us to make games than it used to be. We’re better at doing it, I mean, we’ve learned a lot. We have better communities, but one of the most important is really on the learning side as well. We have, for instance, a new set of science standards called the next generation science standards that are being adopted across the country. About 80% of students in the U.S. are now on these science standards. And what they say is, we don’t want people to just know content anymore. These new science standards say our goal is to really develop scientific literacy, where people are solving their own problems and figuring it out themselves and actually doing hands on science experiences. And so it’s a really great timing for us because that’s what a good game looks like. A good game looks like me going in and solving a problem. And I know that might seem counterintuitive, when I say it that way, but if you’re even playing Angry Birds, you are trying to figure out the best strategy for using the birds you have and how many you have to knock down the structure on the other side of the screen, every video game at its core is a learning process for you. And if I’m just trying to deliver content, I don’t really have a good opportunity to engage in a real game play experience. But if I’m trying to, and the teachers are aligned with me now, and the teachers want experiences where the kids are problem solving and figuring out content on their own. That’s what makes a perfect video game. And so that’s why the timing is really nice right now that everyone’s kind of shifting and trying to figure out what resources help us do this better in a classroom and the meetings I have are just so much excitement with educators right now.

James Di Virgilio: 6:29

And you’re absolutely right that every game involves a core element of problem solving. I mean, Super Mario Brothers, right? One of the most popular games that came out when we were kids in the eighties, that game is entirely about problem solving, memorizing, where certain things are, beating the levels , learning the bosses and people loved it. I loved it. I mean, there’s so many other games that I play that are just like that, including games I play today. But kids seem to know this is supposed to teach me something. Are you finding when you’re testing out your game, when people are going on title align, that they are not having that experience, does it feel like Angry Birds to them or does it feel like Super Mario Brothers? Does it feel like they get lost in the world? Just like they would playing Fortnite or something else.

Lindsey Tropf: 7:06

I’m going to kind of challenge the assumption of the question that kids shouldn’t realize they’re learning in order for it to feel like a great video game. If you’re actually learning and you’re in the state of challenge, you’re not bored, you’re having fun. And so generally when I talk to kids, I say we’re a video game that’s based on science. And they say, cool. You know, it’s really about the gameplay itself to them. And so they can tell their learning if they’re in our video game. I mean, it’s kind of hard to be trying to figure out how to breed the coolest dragon you can using genetic principles and not realize you’re learning genetic principles. And for me, it’s not about hiding that. It’s about making that something worthwhile and fully engaging and fascinating for a kid to solve that problem, because I want to make this great dragon. And because the problem itself is interesting, which maybe I’m just a total nerd, cause that’s my perspective. And maybe kids don’t realize that their perspective when they first started the game, but that’s what we see. They know they’re learning, but it’s not a negative necessarily. If the context of what they’re doing is intriguing enough to them that they really want to do that. If that makes sense,

James Di Virgilio: 8:08

It does make sense, and in fact, that’s a big mission of the Cade Museum, is to take science and engineering and make it accessible, make it something that is fun to learn and learning obviously should be fun. And I think video games are public educational television. It’s sort of had a stigma and it’s interesting, and then in 10 years, I think you’re right. A lot of that has changed and I think people are more open to playing all sorts of games regardless of how they’re tied. And the fun factor is the key. So, How do you go about designing a fun game that’s around education? Is it exactly the same? If you, all of a sudden we’re using Immerse Games to develop a recreational game, would you employ a lot of the same tactics? Is it basically the same thing only now you’re putting science in verse something different?

Lindsey Tropf: 8:43

In a way, yes, because all game design has constraints. And so normally if I’m designing a game, maybe the constraints are less because if I’m not doing an educational game, maybe my constraints are around who I’m trying to target what their demographics are, what the kind of purpose and story of the game is what my budget is, and you have all of these things. We have all the same constraints. We just have a few extra ones which are while we’re doing it, our goal rather than only being a goal of designing around, maybe a certain theme is okay, well, our theme is we’re trying to teach a certain topic . So we want to design a system that allows for exploration of that. But that is very similar to any other idea that somebody generates for a commercial game. It’s just that our ideas is that let’s engaged with this scientific concept instead, some of the constraints we have that are more challenging might be that for instance, we don’t want to introduce incorrect concepts. So sometimes someone has a really funny, especially gameplay idea that we think would be really great to include, but it could lead to a misconception being introduced. So we have to be careful around that. Another constraint challenge when making a good educational game by far, is the actual realities of classroom usage. So we have to recognize that teachers might want to engage in our content in a variety of ways, time periods. They might want to teach it in a different order than we intended and so, that’s by far our bigger constraints , if we didn’t have to worry about that, it would actually be a lot easier to make it just feel exactly like a normal commercial game that just happens to be science.

James Di Virgilio: 10:09

So, you’re in ABD, which I love that term and all, but dissertation and education, right? So you’re almost a PhD maybe that never happens, maybe it doesn’t, I’m sure that you didn’t dream of becoming an entrepreneur when you started your PhD. Right?

Lindsey Tropf: 10:22

Correct.

James Di Virgilio: 10:22

And then this comes upon you and you get into it. What has life been like for you Lindsey as an entrepreneur? This has been, I think a five now, maybe on year six for you ride, you’ve won several pitch competitions. You move to Buffalo after winning a $500,000 prize and a very prestigious competition last year. A lot of great things have happened for Immerse. Walk me through the beginning of when you actually started to form this company and then bring me up to present day.

Lindsey Tropf: 10:46

Yeah, so I started looking into educational games for my dissertation. I obviously had been a gamer myself personally, so I saw a lot of passion around educational games. When I entered my PhD program, I think I was maybe going to be a practitioner for a bit and school psychology in schools, and then become a professor or maybe straight to being a professor and doing research and creating things that way. But when I really started looking at what existed for educational games, cause I wanted to pick something to study for my dissertation, as an educator, I saw a few problems first, that mostly educational games are really shallow out there. And then you found a really good educational game that was this fragmented experience. And so I kind of accidentally had developed a mental model of what a great educational game should look like by linking all of my learning around what schools need and what the learning theory is to my experiences gaming. And so when I realized that didn’t exist, it was really, well, I guess it needs to exist. So I was an educator, I had run another business before, just a small business doing photography and I did that from undergrad to during grad school as well. And that gave me a lot of skills as well, to feel like I can solve problems, but running a service business is very different than creating a high tech startup, making an intense educational video games . So, I had some skills I had to learn a lot more. And so I started recruiting co-founders at first, we actually put up an internship program. I didn’t really know how to get started on making a video game . So we just joined a game making club on campus and then sort of recruiting people to be interns found some co-founders out of that process instead that were just too phenomenal just to be interns. And so started building things. We first, in 2014, ran a Kickstarter to just support making an initial beta version of it. And that got our first couple of people paid, not me. I was kind of working on my dissertation, but not really doing that for a , for that kind of year, while I was still enrolled in school. And then 2015, we got our first round of funding after what we had built from the Kickstarter and kind of showing that as a prototype, getting some initial validation there and started building out from there. The first thing we did is we realized that we needed to make things a little smaller for our first project to really get feedback on the game , play how fun it was, what those cycles were like. So we made a small version of some of the gameplay that it’s been a big game title online. We made something called, Tideway Ecology First, and we sold that on STEAM to not just educators, in fact, mainly millennials, just people who wanted to play a fun science nerdy game . So now we’re probably at about 30,000 people who have purchased that with a 43% upsell rate for expansion packs. And that got us a lot of early experience, some initial revenues of validation, and then we’ve gotten grants with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education for some more funding. And then that kind of brings us to today, which is where we are. We’re really starting to just commercialize out of betas and pilots and actually getting the full school product sold to people to really use at a wider scale of XDR . So it’s been a long journey to get there. Things like this definitely takes some time.

James Di Virgilio: 13:45

Absolutely. And if you could go back and give yourself advice, what are a couple of words of wisdom you would have given yourself a here’s what the next five or six years are going to look like, focus on these things, or don’t worry so much about these things. What would be some of those nuggets of wisdom?

Lindsey Tropf: 13:59

I think a lot of it are things that I’ve just learned about maybe our customers and our niche originally, I was actually thinking that we would start by selling to consumers and then switch to schools later. And then we realized that the reverse made more sense, but there’s a lot of kind of unique things to our company and why that is the education market and stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be that useful as just general advice. So, there’s a lot that we’ve just learned about our customer segments . So I suppose I could have done a lot more customer discovery interviews from the very beginning to maybe figure some of that out a little faster and stuff so that, because we’ve had to make a lot of changes to the product since we started with a consumer focus and we switched to a school focus and I thought, okay, we’ll make some teacher tools, but it’s ended up being a lot more changes than we originally realized that to make that transition for how we were originally thinking of it. And that’s my very applicable advice, even though I, you know, an education person with tons of experience and thought I knew enough about it still going out and doing a lot of customer discovery interviews. And I had mainly focused on parents actually thought we were going to sell to consumers at first and schools later, I , I should have interviewed school people even earlier in the process. And maybe we would have figured some of that out and could have cut a few iterative cycles that have taken us some time out of the process and gotten here faster.

James Di Virgilio: 15:11

Yeah, I think flexibility is definitely one of the most important things for an entrepreneur is you undertake a task, you have a plan of action and you recognize that maybe I need to make some alterations to this plan and that sort of a lifelong adjustment as we look into the future, we look into this year, right? Your first time being commercially available to schools, so to speak, you’ve obviously been available in other formats. There are lots of competitors in the space. Are there any competitors trying to do a massive online player game like yours?

Lindsey Tropf: 15:36

Not really. And there was something that got released recently from the people who made ABC Mouse. So they did actually release a multiplayer and for the gamer lingo and MMO RPG is the same type of game here, but they’re targeting younger students starting at about eight years old and more towards consumers. I imagine that they will do some for schools, but our design is just very different too , in terms of our focus on inquiry, exploration based problem solving. But I just very rarely see other people have, there are a few competitors that are maybe targeting similar demographics in terms of middle school science and meeting the science standards that we all have very different approaches, but I definitely respect the work they’re doing too. So I think our competitors are more along that line. Like other people who are maybe making platforms, either pulling in different games to make it easier for teachers to use 20 or 30 different games in their classrooms on a single platform or things like that that are work. Other people are doing too,` so regularly talk to the founders of those competitors, which is always interesting because we’re also just trying to move the whole industry forward together too , because there’s so much potential that we all see for what educational games can do and offer teachers that it’s nice to even share with your competitors.

James Di Virgilio: 16:49

Yeah. It’s interesting to be in one of the largest industries in the world, and yet you really are in a frontier market, but you’re trailblazing. You’re doing something that has not really been done, which is obviously very exciting. And looking into the future, what has to go right in the next couple of years for this to become what you want it to become for you to say, this is exactly what I envisioned, what needs to happen.

Lindsey Tropf: 17:07

We’re not going to reach my full vision in the next couple of years, but our next steps that we’re really focused on are really the live implementations in schools, because we have people purchasing for next year right now. So we have some larger deployments and some smaller ones scheduled for this coming year from working with an educational service agency that serves 59 school districts in Washington state to small private schools here in Buffalo. And so, really for us right now, it’s about making sure that that implementation process is as smooth as possible. So that just the realities of when kids in a classroom with a teacher are using it, that it doesn’t have a lot of friction for them. And that there’s just not a bunch of unforeseen issues coming up and I’m sure there will be. So we really need to knock those out and prove it as quickly as possible when we hear feedback or anything that’s frustrating people around the process, unless it’s frustrating, just because it’s good learning sometimes that happens. But really, that’s what I’m really focused on right now is we need that to go really well. And then we’ll start taking our next steps on kind of the full vision of what this company is going to be is not only a video game or we’re making science content, but partnering with third parties to use this as an experiential learning platform, that people can start putting their own content on and remixing it in a variety of ways. And that’s not going to be the next couple of years. So, we’re never going to get there unless the next couple years work and go strongly. We prove out our use case with science teachers in the country right now and then we can start building out to some of those longer term visions that we have.

James Di Virgilio: 18:29

No that’s right. The greatest journeys, the beginning continue one step at a time, right? As a last closing thought, what is some advice you would give to some aspiring entrepreneurs regardless of their age, whether they’re starting a second career or third career, or if they’re middle schoolers , what would you tell them, hey, if you’re going to become an entrepreneur view life this way or pursue things this way?

Lindsey Tropf: 18:46

I think there’s probably two things that I often see that I think would be helpful for people to understand better. The first is really perspective taking. When you think about things like customer discovery and having these conversations with customers, there’s so many people that are still in love with their own idea, and certainly I am in love with what we’re building, but actually being able to take the perspective of customers, of partners and using that to design something and having empathy for their experiences. And I think that, that is something that has been immensely helpful for us, just my understanding of those individuals that we’re interacting with and how we can make their lives easier. And I really enjoy the authentic relationships that I have with educators because of that. And I just see a lot of entrepreneurs that are trying that classic sense, create this reality distortion field around themselves and just push this thing through, regardless of these other people’s needs. And that’s not really the way most businesses actually succeed. You need to have that empathy and perspective taking of the people that you’re trying to fill a need for in a true sense, not just trying to shoe horn, what you want to do into their world. And so I think that’s just a really important perspective to take when you’re doing that. And then I guess on the other side of things is also just focusing on creating something of value and learning some of those skills yourself to make things happen. I just talked to a lot of people who are super excited about an idea and don’t necessarily have any skillsets brings us able to make that happen, and they’re trying to get co-founders to come join or people to work for them. And that’s really challenging unless you have something really strong to bring to the table. And so, generally I have to help people kind of explore that a little bit or push back on what you can bring to the table and that may be the business sales side, but make sure that you understand what that really means in early stage startup too. Which is going to be again, a lot of perspective, taking a customer discovery and that it’s actually moving you forward in a significant way that it’s worth everyone’s time. It’s working on a team with you.

James Di Virgilio: 20:39

She is Lindsey Tropf, the founder and CEO of Immerse Games, ABD and education Lindsay , thanks so much for joining us, fascinating to learn all about what you’re doing and what you’re working on. And we certainly here at Radio Cade wish you nothing but success here in the future.

Lindsey Tropf: 20:52

Thanks so much. I hope to make it back to Gainesville soon and see what’s going on at Cade, I’m glad I got to experience some of the new buildings before we left.

James Di Virgilio: 20:59

Things are going really well and we love to have you back for the listeners out there that don’t know, Lindsey has been immensely helpful with our educational programming, and we’re certainly thankful for that Lindsey and we miss you. We know you’re in Buffalo, enjoying the lovely summer weather up there, but we look forward to seeing when you come back.

Lindsey Tropf: 21:11

Thanks so much, have a wonderful afternoon.

James Di Virgilio: 21:14

You too, for Radio Cade I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 21:18

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support, Liz, Jist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme, Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Dr. Rich Patton, MD, grew up in the small town of Wahoo, Nebraska where the town doctor clearly had a better life than he did as a child farm hand. That inspired Rich to eventually go to medical school and to become a pathologist. From there he saw how many patients got treated unnecessarily for sepsis – blood infection – and he was pretty sure he knew why. So, he invented the SteriPath, a device that virtually eliminates false positive diagnoses in blood cultures. *This episode was originally released on April 26, 2019.*

Dr. Rich Patton, MD, grew up in the small town of Wahoo, Nebraska where the town doctor clearly had a better life than he did as a child farm hand. That inspired Rich to eventually go to medical school and to become a pathologist. From there he saw how many patients got treated unnecessarily for sepsis – blood infection – and he was pretty sure he knew why. So, he invented the SteriPath, a device that virtually eliminates false positive diagnoses in blood cultures. *This episode was originally released on April 26, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Randy Scott: 0:38Hello, for those of you expecting the velvet voice of Richard Miles, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is Randy Scott, your guest host today for Radio Cade. I’m here today with Dr. Rich Patton , MD out in Seattle. And he’s the inventor of the SteriPath blood collection device. Hi, Rich, are you doing today?

Dr. Rich Patton: 0:59As pleased to say, life has been very good to me and continues to do so.

Randy Scott: 1:06I appreciate you making some time here. So just to start things off, why don’t we take a minute or two for our listeners if you can explain the SteriPath, you know, pretty basic terms, what the SteriPath does and how it benefits patients.

Dr. Rich Patton: 1:21The SteriPath, instrument essentially replaces and does away with false-positive blood cultures. How does it do this? The process is to use on needle, which goes into a vein and a vein then are a conduit for putting blood into a culture vial, and that’s the way it has been for 50 years. You know what goes into, in most cases, a vein which then directs blood into a bottle with medium, and that process passes a skin biopsy into the culture bottle and that is where our large portion of the contamination occurs. What SteriPath does is divert very first portion of blood from a vein and sequesters it, and that being done, the blood is directed past that sequester and into the bile of medium. So it’s a very simple process and simple to understand, and that’s, what’s the beauty of it is. It’s something that is very doable, should be done worldwide. A lot of expenses and patient success and the patient safety is, has moved greatly ahead was this type of blood culture procedure.

Randy Scott: 2:45So Rich, that’s interesting. So you’re trying to avoid these false positives in blood cultures, maybe a little bit more background for me and the listeners on what are the medical uses for a blood culture? Why would a blood culture be taken in the first place?

Dr. Rich Patton: 3:00Blood cultures are taken when people have high fevers or maybe become systemic and ill with not only a high fevers, but increased heart rate, and no symptoms are present than a blood culture is ordered and it takes about 24 to 48 hours to get result. And that result is something that hides the therapy, antibiotic treatment, part of this. So that’s the way it begins. And that’s taking it to the point where our culture, our shows and our organism that is a pathogen and it needs to be taken care of.

Randy Scott: 3:37A false positive means that they’ve detected what they think is an infection and there’s not really an infection there, I guess. And so then they’re going to administer antibiotics when the antibiotics aren’t actually needed. Is that kind of how it goes?

Dr. Rich Patton: 3:50Yes, that’s right prior to the use of the SteriPath, about half of the blood cultures that show positive are false positives and that results in unnecessary antibiotics and increase in blood tests increase in images. And all of this is not good for the patients who are put in the health care system. Unnecessary antibiotics are ended up being a different issue and America and the world.

Randy Scott: 4:18And so how does a false positive come to happen and take place? I mean, why, why would that occur? It seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out if, you know, worked in a hospital lab or something, but obviously it happens a lot. So how does that actually occur?

Dr. Rich Patton: 4:33What we have discovered is that a false positive results from small scan piece being dislodged from the skin, the blood drawn is obtained. And if using the SteriPath, that scan piece is diverted into a sequester area. I’m just not going to enter the bloodstream. That is a very simple approach. And that’s a simple solution to the problem. And I have been told by a lot of people that, you know , why didn’t I think of that? It simply gets rid of the piece of tissue, which has defending a skin residing organisms. That’s once the sterile pads in place, the antibiotics therapy is started right after the blood culture has been drawn . And physicians can be positive about being treating aggressively on the case. Without this diversion technique, about half of the blood cultures that are, could grow some organisms, those are getting residing organisms that are normal and need, no , no treatment, but it takes a while beyond that to make a, to make a , a , uh , a blood culture result known takes off in 48 hours. Before the true nature of that infection is understood.

Randy Scott: 6:05Okay. So I think I can kind of picture this in my mind. So normally they go, they take the blood sample, the needle goes in, and of course the needle is a circle of metal that kind of cat captures the, like the little tiny miniature pipe. And it captures a little chunk of skin before it gets to the blood and that skin then has the bacteria on it. So that makes sense. So the SteriPath then it sounds like is taking that little plug of skin and it’s setting it off to the side and only the blood then flows instead of the blood plus that little piece of skin is that right?

Dr. Rich Patton: 6:40That’s right on.

Randy Scott: 6:42Great. So yeah , you are practicing doctor and you came up with this idea about maybe let’s step back in time, a little bit curious, just how you came, be a doctor, you know , where did you grow up and what led you down the path of being a physician?

Dr. Rich Patton: 6:58Oh , that’s , that’s a good one. I grew up in a small town in Eastern Nebraska about 3,500 people from the best farm plan in the world. And one person that got my pension , which was a physician there. His name was Dr. French. And I found him to be someone who was articulate, who was calm, who was well dressed and was very, very kind person. And I’d have to admit that appeared to be prosperous. So it was a combination of all those things that made me look at medicine as a good career for me. So I would say yes, he was the biggest influence on me. And I had a lot of experience with being a farm hand and a ranch hand. And I certainly didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. So I ended up going to undergraduate school and eventually medical school.

Randy Scott: 8:00Okay. So is this Dr. French? Was he like your family doctor?

Dr. Rich Patton: 8:04Yes, he was, yeah .

Randy Scott: 8:06Okay. Nebraska probably didn’t have very many doctors I’m guessing.

Dr. Rich Patton: 8:10There were two doctors there that were physicians . I think you mentioned that one of the things that you thought I should let you know about is what other people influenced me in that town . And I have to tell you this, that person that I looked up who beyond this position was my mother. And she was born in a sod house in Nebraska. Became to first of a large family to go to college and she was just a super professional with grade school kids. With first grade. Um, she was somebody who I was pleased with students that did well, and she had great empathy for those that struggled . And my mother died and there was a funeral and an older man than me came up to me and said, gee, I was in shock when your mother died. I knew her as a beautiful woman. And indeed she was, and then recently, maybe a year ago, a woman about 45 years old introduces me , she was living in Omaha at that time. And she asked me, are you in relationship to mrs. Patton ? And I told her that I’m her son. And she told me of families , that she knew that my mother was teahcing and she told me that she was a beloved person in a small town. So I think of her often. And I’m trying to think about how she handled her life.

Randy Scott: 9:29Oh yeah . So from a sod house to a prosperous doctor in one generation, that’s pretty good. That’s great. So you obviously went to medical school, but you’re now a pathologist, right? So I know what a pathologist is, but I’m not sure if our listeners will . So why don’t you describe for us what a pathologist is and why a pathologist would be the type of doctor that would invent a device like the SteriPath?

Dr. Rich Patton: 9:54Well , first of all, pathologists are in general, considered a doctors , doctor. Doctors see patients and to treat them, they know they have to get tests done from blood tests to sometimes obtaining small pieces of tissue for analysis. For example, if someone has a lump in the breast, a needle might be put into that lump and then given to a pathologist to make a diagnosis of benign or malignant. And the pathologist handle all that type of work pending receiving, not just biopsies from breasts, but also many biopsies of the GI tract and so on. And then additionally, the clinical side of the pathology work is to make sure that laboratory work is accurate and up to date. So that is the relationship that it was always just have with clinical areas when they need this kind of help. Also, the relationship becomes one that now there are pathologists who are experts with liver disease, somewhat gastrointestinal disease, somewhat skin disease, skin , tumors, and so on. All those have been , become the system, whereas handling systems becoming more and more specialized. In other words, doctors, as I just mentioned, concentrate in these various areas. Again, liver, lung, brain, GI tract, on and on , there are specialists in pathologists that are confined their practices, those specialized areas.

Randy Scott: 11:32So I guess if you’re used to dealing with needle biopsies than you’re used to the idea of pieces of tissue stuck in a needle. So I guess this idea made sense to you that way, too, that you were perhaps sensitized to think in that direction?

Dr. Rich Patton: 11:45The fact that when needle biopsies go through skin or sampling tissue, for example, liver or thyroid. What happens with that needle is that when the skin is punctured , the needle actually cuts off a small portion of skin, which ends up in the specimen that is submitted for examination. So a common thing that would happen is just say that someone was doing needle procedure and the thyroid gland, what I might see or another pathologist is not only a piece of your thyroid, but also a small piece of skin that would have been dislodged by any needle, puncture and thyroid .

Randy Scott: 12:26Okay. So anyway going back, I guess the way this kind of played out. So you kind of recognize this issue about the little piece of skin that gets caught in there. It causes these false positives and therefore the unnecessary use of antibiotics. So you’d identified the problem and the source of the problem, I guess I’d say. And then the actual product itself, how far along did you take that on your own? And at some point, obviously you’ve partnered up with someone to help commercialize the products, or how did that part of the story play out?

Dr. Rich Patton: 12:58Well, what happened initially was not as I’m serving these fragments and checking to see if these pieces of tissue that , uh , contained in. And that was something that initiated in my laboratory and showing the test of getting rid of the skin piece , decreased our contamination rate by 50%, which was astonishing because over time, small increments, terminated tests improving, and nobody had come on anything at all in that range. So what I did initially after that was to encourage another pathologist in Seattle area to run the same test that I had done in his result was the same contamination rate decreased by 50%. So at that point, we knew that we had a new procedure that was going to affect blood culture globally. And at that point I started up a business with our CEO and other people, to build advice that would capture these skin pieces and not them get into the vessels that have culture medium in them. And that took a lot of engineering, a lot of testing. And that’s where we are now is we’ve shown that using that approach is revolutionary for the blood culture test and is something that we’re working on beyond the stage , but also kind of a lot of intellectual property to cover our device. Not only to use all around the world, Canada, Europe, Japan, on and on and on.

Randy Scott: 14:37Great. So products actually being used in hospitals right now and basically saving lives today, right?

Dr. Rich Patton: 14:44That’s right. And saving a lot of money for hospitals and the healthcare system. Hospitals save money by fewer tests. It’s very good for patients since cultures that are contaminated often result in unnecessary antibiotics and increased stays in the hospital and puts them at risk for developing hospital acquired infection .

Randy Scott: 15:09Tell me some more about that. So I would, it’s just a layman. I would think that obviously, if I run a blood culture, I get a false negative. In other words, I, blood culture says there’s no infection, but there really is. So I don’t treat the patient. Obviously I understand how that’s bad for the patient. It seems to me like a , just a layman that a false positive wouldn’t be a big deal. So maybe somebody gets antibiotics and there’s probably some expense associated with the antibiotic, but how does inappropriate antibiotic use actually harm patients?

Dr. Rich Patton: 15:42What happens is patients end up with unnecessary antibiotics, unnecessary blood and fluid tests, fewer imaging procedures, both positive can increase hospital stays, and there’s potential there for acquiring the hospital infections. Overall expenses go up just because of the involvement of medical staff and so on. It’s a big issue to let this go on. I feel like it’s not going hard as , as fast as it is growing because it’s sloppy medicine to let this blood culture contamination go on in our country and worldwide.

Randy Scott: 16:20So basically the idea is that they’re getting the antibiotic treatment, they’re going to spend an extra couple of days in the hospital and other bad things might happen to them during that time. Great. So obviously you’re a physician. You come up with this idea for this new product. You’re not a marketer or whatever, but you’ve, I think remained involved with the company as it’s gone to market with the product some . So what’s been maybe the most surprising thing to you as a physician inventor . And what’s been the most surprising thing to you about the business and commercial side of things.

Dr. Rich Patton: 16:54What has struck me is that this product that we have works very well and as a level of improvement compared to the previous way of doing things is quite encouraging and pleased to see that this has done regularly now, but I have been very disappointed that it’s not catching on sooner because of the reason, so we’ve already discussed. Everybody should have this done tests, not just locally or in United States, but it should be something done and this blood culture test worldwide.

Randy Scott: 17:26So why wouldn’t every hospital just adopt it immediately? It seems like it’s much better for the patients. So is there some particular reason it’s not obvious that this is a harder decision for a hospital.

Dr. Rich Patton: 17:40There are a number of reasons why this has gone not as quickly as we hoped. You have to understand that the blood culture procedure has not in 50 years and not change in a significant way for five decades. And when we start talking about this, a lot of people think, Oh, we don’t really have to deal with this in a hurry, but we’ll probably take care of it, someday. There reason for that is part of this reason I should say is that the test change involves multiple individuals and on healthcare chain all the way from the chief executive officer to the person who investigates the tests and in a way that how it’s going to cost them. And it turns out that any institution this has been successful has been one individual who’s taken the leadership, getting it done and getting this right and changing procedures all the way from the emergency department to the critical care area. All of those individuals that are involved need to be trained. And it’s just a big job to get that done. So those are some of the reasons why it’s been slower to be adopted than we had hoped for.

Randy Scott: 18:56There’s a author you may be familiar with, Nicholas Taleb that written a couple of books, “Black Swan Antifragile.” He actually makes a point that we hear echoed through the voices of inventors like you all the time, but he makes the point that the things that have been unchanged the longest are in fact, the hardest things to change. So an example, he gives us that if you tried to innovate around the fork and spoon, it would probably be very difficult to get people to change because the fork and spoon have been the same for generations and generations. On the other hand, to get people to accept innovation around their smartphone is really easy because they expect it to change all the time. And they’re already kind of preprogrammed per change. That sounds like the dairy path, a little bit victim of that, but the way the blood cultures have been taken and process has been the same for so long. It’s maybe not an area where the clinicians and hospitals are that interested in even considering change.

Dr. Rich Patton: 19:56Yeah, absolutely. You hit that right on the nail. I think what is waiting for this to suddenly become an improvement that will be overwhelming in terms of the obviousness very significant primarily on a patient’s safety level, more than anything else. We don’t know how many patients end up being killed by a false positive . I’m sure it’s probably in the hundreds and maybe even thousands annually in the U.S. and as I say, that part of that has never really been studied in a way, and it’s very difficult to do that, but even if it’s one person in the whole United States, everybody’s saving money. And if you have a straight path, a pathway on taking care of patients, you’re doing a good service, good patient safety that we all should, we all should be, acutely aware of it.

Randy Scott: 20:45You didn’t set out in life, it doesn’t sound like to be an inventor, but you became one. Any thoughts for other folks, maybe like you, that don’t think of themselves as inventors, but they have a great idea to make the world better. Any parting ideas or words of wisdom for somebody like that?

Dr. Rich Patton: 21:03I was thinking about this and what would I do to describe someone who let’s say that we’re talking about physicians. The best physicians that I know were, and are truly interested in their jobs. As I mentioned earlier, life has been good to me and part of which was being a pathologist and these days there are great options of medicine that are mind -bending, a number of specialties, researchers, educators, executives , just unlimited possibilities for people to work in medicine. And I would tell anybody who is interested in medicine, that you should find your niche in medicine, where you belong and you’ll do well.

Randy Scott: 21:52Great. Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time here today. I appreciate it. And if people want to learn more about SteriPath, they can just go to www.SteriPath.com to learn more.

Outro: 22:06Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme, Tracy Columns for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

All sorts of organizations, big and small, are attempting to create a vaccine for COVID-19.  While big pharma has access to seemingly endless resources, even small organizations are obtaining funding for their vaccine ideas. Alan Joslyn Ph.D. President and CEO of Oragenics Inc, has spent 20 years in Big Pharma and has been the CEO and Director of several privately held companies. Join us as we discuss COVID-19 vaccine challenges and explore Oragenics journey from idea generation to COVID-19 vaccine testing. 

All sorts of organizations, big and small, are attempting to create a vaccine for COVID-19.  While big pharma has access to seemingly endless resources, even small organizations are obtaining funding for their vaccine ideas. Alan Joslyn Ph.D. President and CEO of Oragenics Inc, has spent 20 years in Big Pharma and has been the CEO and Director of several privately held companies. Join us as we discuss COVID-19 vaccine challenges and explore Oragenics journey from idea generation to COVID-19 vaccine testing. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Welcome to another edition of Radio Cade . I’m your host, James Di Virgilio. Today. We revisit vaccinations, but last time while we took a broad lens look at what is a vaccine and how does it work. This time our guest Alan Joslyn , who has a PhD in biomedical pharmacology is going to walk us through what it’s actually like to be working on a vaccination, what it takes to get it to market the hurdles that you face. And really just how much goes into finding a successful vaccine. Alan Joslyn is the president and CEO of Oragenics Incorporated. He spent 20 years in Big Pharma and has been the CEO and director of several privately held companies during his career. Alan , welcome to the program.

Alan Joslyn: 1:19

Hi James, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

James Di Virgilio: 1:22

So last I spoke about vaccines, we had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Peter Corey of Ology, and I know today is going to be yet another one of those. Tell us a little bit about Oragenics and i t’s rather recent shift a nd what i ts core portfolio is.

Alan Joslyn: 1:37

Well, Oragenics is actually originally a spin out of the University of Florida back in the mid 1990s, working primarily in the areas of oral health development of probiotics, and also developing a brand new class of antibiotics called Lanta Biotics that we’ve been working on for upwards of 20 years. And recently we had the opportunity presented to us to take on a vaccine candidate that was originated actually from the national Institute of Health and a private company in the Gainesville area. Noachis Terra was fortunate enough to license that product in and we moved forward and acquired Noachis Terra just a month ago to jumpstart development of this COVID-19 vaccine.

James Di Virgilio: 2:25

Now, why get into the game seemingly this late? Right? I read today that Moderna is going to reach its final stage of testing. I learned from Dr. Peter Corey that really only 16% of vaccinations even make it to the end of their trials with any sort of success. So of course one could argue that that’s probably what you’re doing, but when you were looking at this, why take on this challenge now, are you late to the game or is this the right time?

Alan Joslyn: 2:48

Well, it’s really important to understand that, especially in vaccine development, it’s not necessarily the fastest to the endpoint . It’s those vaccines that produce the greatest immunogenic response coupled with safety. This particular vaccine that we’ve in licensed is much more of a traditional approach to vaccine development in that it takes and creates an antigen to that spike protein that we read about and see on the nightly news. And that spike protein is what’s key to how we go about developing this more traditional approach to a vaccine, create an antigen, supplement it with an edge event and deliver it the way we normally develop vaccine candidates. It takes longer to do that. The technologies, for example, that you read about with Moderna , those are very, very new ways to try and create vaccines with both on proven safety and efficacy as a measure of neutralizing antibodies. And so we don’t really know yet what’s going to work and not work in the longer term. And so having a variety of different approaches to vaccine development is where we need to go as a society. Having said that there are so many patients on this planet that are going to require this treatment, that more than one vaccine is going to be required to cover everybody. And I don’t really think it’s too late at this point to try and get into the game. It’s more important to make sure that there are options in the event that is Peter Corey inferred, that very, very many vaccines never make it farther than early testing. And hopefully ours is one that’s able to survive that gamut.

James Di Virgilio: 4:41

You bring up a really important point, whether you are a creative or an artist or an entrepreneur or an innovator, the reality as a human is you have to find the right question to ask, and then you have to try a lot of different solutions to figure out what is the best one that is essentially what you just described for us. What makes a successful vaccine? We’re all reading all the time about vaccination is really important against the battle with COVID, but what would actually be success? Is it 50% of people that get treated response 70%? Is there some number out there as you’re thinking about Oragenics developing this vaccination, that would say if we got to this level, we could feel good about this really impacting the world.

Alan Joslyn: 5:20

Well, that’s a fantastic question because there’s no hard and fast number that we put on what some measure of success. So, for example, one measure of success is being able to inoculate vast, vast portions of a population in an area and looking at what is the incidence of a particular infection in that area. And have you damped it down enough to be able to manage those few patients that may actually develop the condition. So think of chickenpox is an example. We inoculate everybody. Then you hope that there’s only a few cases each year, smallpox, even the same way. We’ve all gotten inoculated against smallpox . It’s effectively eradicated. You may look at this particular situation a little bit different for COVID-19. If you’re willing to take the notion that if I get vaccinated and I might only get mildly sick, that might be considered a success as opposed to never having any symptoms at all. So as we, as a society kind of move through this vaccine situation, there will be different measures of success based on what we, as a society determine will be success. I might be willing to go ahead and get a little bit sick, like get the flu, but I don’t want to be hospitalized. So you can see where based on what society is after with these vaccines, we’ll have different measures of clinical success.

James Di Virgilio: 6:56

All right, so the free market is, in my opinion, the most effective tool at solving problems. Of course, nowadays, that topic is oddly controversial. We’ll leave that for another time, but I’m imagining hundreds, if not thousands of labs across the world, working on solving this problem in order to solve this problem, you need resources, those resources start off by needing funding, needing money. So Oragenics looks at this and says, Hey, I think that we can open our lab up to this. We’re going to use our resources to solve this problem. How do you go about raising money for something like this when there’s so much competition?

Alan Joslyn: 7:30

Well, in this particular instance, when we acquired Noachis Terra, we also acquired their grant applications for non-diluted funding. And what I mean by that is there are government agencies and nonprofits like the Gates Foundation that are making money available to companies, whether they be Big Pharma or small, like, Oragenics to be able to advance good ideas, such as some of these vaccines. And so part of that was applying for grants through part of the Department of Defense called Barta . And in our case, we’ve asked for a sizeable grant to help with development through that agency. And of course there’s the national Institute of health where this original technology came from. They also have grant programs to help support the development of these programs. We’re trying to work also through the state of Florida and also international agencies, including the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization. But having said that, it also as a public company, I have access to, for example, hedge funds and other life science, investment funds, family offices that are willing to take that financial risk with the idea that my stock price would go up after that investment meets milestones. And for example, over the last of days, I’ve been at a virtual investor conference, doing exactly that, presenting to potential investment funds that would look in a financing to provide millions of dollars to, Oragenics to advance not only the antibiotics, but also the vaccine with the idea that as these products mature, my stock price would go up and they would be able to realize a profit.

James Di Virgilio: 9:21

All right, so what’s the pitch? What is leading these investors to believe that investing with you is better than investing their dollars somewhere else? What’s the difference? What is essentially influencing them to want to invest with Oragenics?

Alan Joslyn: 9:33

Well, in the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, I think that speed is critical and the ability to raise non-dilutive funding because non-dilutive funding what it ends up doing for me is essentially reimbursing me for the money that I’m spending today, that the investor’s willing to give me today. So in this particular case, investors like the story of COVID-19, they liked the fact that the National Institute of Health was essentially the inventor. So there’s this built in credibility that, wow, this is coming out of the NIH. And so therefore it must be pretty good if this company bought that license and the government is standing behind it. So you have this aura around the science that helps to sell the story. And as long as I’m very clear in not only the timeline that it’s going to take me to meet certain milestones, I can accurately project my budget, that investors willing to go along for that ride.

James Di Virgilio: 10:40

So why the bad rap for Big Pharma, and now you’re on, let’s call it a smaller pharma, right? Or biotech. You spent a lot of your career in Big Pharma. Why does the public give Big Pharma such a bad rap? If they’re trying to solve some of the most important health problems, the world faces.

Alan Joslyn: 10:55

If you remembered before the COVID-19 pandemic, pharma was getting, Big Pharma was getting a bad rep primarily because of how they’ve handled situations like the opioid crisis and how Big Pharma has managed some of the other side effects and the top part powder with J and J. And they seem to get dragged into these situations. They have clearly the financial and people resources in times like COVID-19 to bring together very, very focused, large teams of people that are very, very competent to doing their job and manage through a situation like this. When you look at government task forces, for example, active, you see the vast majority of the Big Pharma companies sit on that task force because not only do they have expertise, scientifically they have the pockets and the manpower to be able to pull a particular situation through like development of drugs, like REMS Denavir, or a new vaccine, whereas small biotech, we can make decisions very quickly, but we don’t have the deep pockets or necessarily the manpower to be able to do a Big Pharma’s capable of doing when they get aligned.

James Di Virgilio: 12:21

So a criticism of what’s even happening now of those that don’t favor market based solutions. They would say, Hey, Alan , this is nice. This is great. But essentially these companies are really only investing in the COVID-19 vaccine because it’s going to make them really rich. It’s going to make them excessively rich. Is there not a better way to do this? What if we just had the government searching for solutions? And if they found a vaccine, they wouldn’t get excessively rich. What do you say to a challenge like that?

Alan Joslyn: 12:46

Well, I think in this particular case, it’s important that everybody realize that all of our businesses have been negatively impacted by this COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s inclusive of big pharma. So I’ll give you examples. If their sales reps can’t effectively go in and detail their products and hospitals, their supply chains have been disrupted. Their research with universities has to some degree, been what’s more difficult because of the lack of ability to get into labs, et cetera. So we need to understand that they, as a group have also been negatively impacted by this pandemic and the sooner that we’re able to develop solutions and come out of this pandemic as a general society, we’re all going to be better off. They happen to have both the scientific and resource capabilities, both human and financial to drive improvements that the rest of us can’t and the sooner that happens, the sooner our lives become much more normal than they are right now.

James Di Virgilio: 13:53

Yeah . And I think when you’re looking at problem solving, you always have to look at what is the most efficient way to solve a problem. I think if you look throughout history, if you look at a nationalized solution where you have a government committee, just government actors attempting to solve problems, it certainly is slower, oftentimes much slower than something that free market could do. And there there’s always a trade off between what’s profit and accepted profit, but what’s risk and reward. And that’s a topic for another day, but you mentioned disruption and you mentioned the changing situation in the world. I know that right now you’re working from your home, which is not anywhere near where your company is based in Florida. And you’ve been doing this for a couple of months. How difficult has it been to run a company of your scope and scale during this kind of time remotely?

Alan Joslyn: 14:35

That’s a great question. I must say that there’s eight people in the company and we’ve just taken on a couple of more with the acquisition of Noachis Terra, our corporate offices are in Tampa, Florida. We have laboratories actually just outside of Gainesville in the Sid Martin Biotech Center in Alachua. And then we have other office space in Gainesville . So for the few number of people we have in the company, we’re actually pretty far spread out. As I mentioned earlier on in our conversation, I actually live just outside of Philadelphia. The head of my clinical research operations group lives in Pittsburgh. And what we do is we effectively use laptops and cell phones and scheduled meetings to really run the company. And of course, in my role, as a CEO, I’m traveling to all of those places on a pretty regular basis. Obviously over the last three months, I really haven’t been able to do much traveling or any traveling that didn’t involve just driving a car. And as a result, you rely much more on technology, but there is clearly a place for face to face interaction. And I expect that to start happening actually next week. But in the meantime we do the best we can working remotely. And we haven’t missed very many beats because in a sense, we’ve been a virtual company for literally the last four years that I’ve been the CEO and continue to work that way, even through this pandemic,

James Di Virgilio: 16:05

Here at the Cade we 1like to talk a lot about how inventors problem solvers , engineers, creatives, all the different terms we can use to apply to people that are out there trying to make the world a better place. They view problems and disruptions in life, not as hurdles to be negatively concerned with or affected by, but as opportunities to learn, grow, do something different. Essentially flexibility becomes the term, right? If we’re saying, Hey, I’m going to solve this problem, Alan, you and I are going to get together and we’re going to solve this problem. We know we’re going to face hurdles, no matter what those hurdles are, we’re going to find solutions. You’ve spent so much time leading companies. Do you feel like that is part of your mindset? Is that, Hey, I know life has hurdles and I’m going to find ways to solve and improve the problems in the world around me.

Alan Joslyn: 16:48

I would absolutely agree with that. And I think that our acquisition of Noachis Terra speaks to that straight away. We were first introduced to that company and the opportunity on April 15th and by May 1st, we had essentially closed the transaction to acquire that company. I think it’s really important when you’re in a role like I’m in is to make sure that you’re aware of the right opportunities and the right strategic fit and not be afraid to go after something that makes sense for the company. It makes financial sense is a strategic fit. And you have the support of both in my case, as a public company, my board of directors and my key investors, and in this particular case, or sitting in the middle of a pandemic for COVID-19 and when someone puts a very scientifically credible opportunity in front of me for a vaccine, even though I’ve never developed a vaccine ever before, it is worth the risk to go down that path, because not only is there the opportunity for the company, it’s clearly improving mankind, should I be successful here.

James Di Virgilio: 17:59

Yeah. And you’re looking at things on a probabilistic curve, right? I’m an investor. I was a professional trade and everything I do is based upon what’s the probability of this working. And if I can do this enough times, how often will this work and then you make decisions. And I think increasingly in our society, we’re struggling to understand the role of science, the role of problem solving. It is not something that, you know, ahead of time, it is not something that you can predict. In fact, you really have to dive into it and try things and understand that failure is what gives you information to eventually build out a probability curve that says, Hey, if I do this action this many times, the result will likely be good. And that’s kind of what you’re describing now with your company, Hey, we haven’t done this before we have the resources. I think the odds of this and the reward that exist and what it does for society, make it worth it. And I also know that failure is high. There’s a real chance that this doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t embark on this journey right?

Alan Joslyn: 18:56

That’s absolutely true. As a matter of fact, we have a program attempting to try and prevent oral mucositis. The name of that drug was AGO13, and we just completed a clinical trial. And the results from that clinical trial were we were not able to separate on our primary end point from placebo. And as a result, we spent probably the last six weeks calling that data set to try and understand what happened better. We actually think now that we understand how that drug works better after all of these analyses. And in hindsight, we would probably do some things different within our clinical trial design for the next clinical trial. And this is all part of the learning with science. I mean, you can’t be afraid to fail cause it’s going to happen and hopefully your investors are forgiving and that they understand that. And in this particular case, it may not be the best time for us to advance AGO13, given everything else that we have going on. But that clinical trial taught us a lot about how treatments in oral mucositis, in patients receiving cancer chemotherapy , how that particular condition evolves and what are some of the best ways to try and manage that condition in cancer patients. But you’re right. You have to be willing to accept the challenge. And in the event that you fail, it’s kind of part of our landscape and biotech to have this happen from time to time.

James Di Virgilio: 20:28

Yeah, absolutely. If you ask the right questions and you go about trying to answer those questions in the right way, failure just means that your proposed solution didn’t work, but you learned a great deal about what may work next. So let’s imagine that your vaccine works. We get down the road, this works, this is great. How do you get this to the people? I’m reading a lot about how difficult it’s going to be with regards to supply and demand because there’s going to be virtually unlimited demand and there’s not enough glass files and there’s not enough things you need to distribute a vaccine. How would you overcome a hurdle like that?

Alan Joslyn: 21:02

Well, it’s really important to realize that in the event that this vaccine works the likelihood, and this is again where Big Pharma comes in, the likelihood is, is that I would need to partner this and share in the wealth with companies that have the capability for production and distribution. It will be virtually impossible for a company, the size of Oragenics to pull that off without either extensive government resources through the Barden Network or some sort of a licensing deal with a Big Pharma company that has the capacity for a vaccine that works. Cause remember, as Peter Corey had mentioned, the likelihood is high, that many of these vaccines will not produce the clinical profile that allows them to move forward. And we also know that many of these vaccines are partnered right now with Big Pharma. Our vaccine is not yet partnered, but that doesn’t mean that with success down the road, that it would become partnered. And we have to look at the benefits of Big Pharma and that notion of manufacturing and distribution is clearly one of the big benefits for Big Pharma that also holds true for our Lanta Biotics, right? I’m developing a compound to treat Clostridium difficile infection, and it would not be unreasonable for me to reach out to bigger companies that have the capacity to be able to manufacture and distribute those types of products down the road.

James Di Virgilio: 22:37

There’s a famous illustration that Milton Friedman gives with the humble pencil. And nowadays no one really even uses a pencil much to write on anything, right? But during it, he talks about how the pencil itself has all these components and it comes from all over the world. And the reason for this is not because of complexity, it’s actually simplicity. You can make the pencil much cheaper and much more efficiently made. If you’re able to leverage everyone else’s resources, essentially specialization. I think what you just laid out there as a nice example of that, Hey Oragenics is going to fulfill this role. And then we’re going to have to use others that fulfill their roles and together we create a synergistic solution, which betters the world. Now here’s an interesting thing. One third, one third Alan of American people say that if a vaccine existed today for COVID, they wouldn’t take it. How do you overcome the skepticism or the growing skepticism? The public has towards vaccinations in general?

Alan Joslyn: 23:30

I didn’t know that that that survey had been done. And in some respects, I’m not quite sure how to respond to that because I can tell you that if a vaccine allowed me to re-enter society from the standpoint of feeling better, to go into a restaurant and be able to sit down for a meal, which up here in Pennsylvania, we still can’t do. And I can return to flying on an airplane and not having to wear a mask while I’m sitting on that airplane because I’ve had a vaccine and these are normal components of my life. I’d be willing to take that vaccine. What’s incumbent as we move through, this is that companies not take shortcuts. And that companies make sure that they’re completely transparent with their reporting out of the safety and the magnitude of the efficacy that can be reached with some of these vaccines. We’ve all had our polio vaccines and our smallpox vaccines. And the vast majority of us have had chicken pox vaccines. And so we’ve not really had to deal with some of the bad viruses that could really cripple our lives. And Coronavirus may fall into that category. We don’t know it’s not been around for very long, but just a few months, if this keeps recurring in society, hopefully attitudes change. And that vaccine becomes one of those ways to quickly reintroduce some degree of normalcy in our lives.

James Di Virgilio: 25:01

Yeah. When dr. Peter Corey was on, he spoke at length about the risk of vaccines, and he’s obviously very well informed on the topic, especially having worked for the Gates Foundation. And it’s interesting to note that he had said that essentially, there are very, very few examples of vaccines, even trialed ones that make it through and are early onstage . That’s kind of the fear, right? Well, Hey, if we release a COVID vaccine, it’s not going to be tested for five to seven years. There are very few that wind up being worse than what the vaccine is trying to treat itself yet. It seems like the public thinks that the average vaccine is probably worse than getting the flu or getting COVID or getting whatever it is. It’s an interesting scenario that raises a big question about why in general is society not trusting information that maybe we do know to be true, right? This stuff’s not predictive. We can look at the data sets. We know these things, aren’t your you’ve spent 20 years. You have a PhD in biological pharmacology, you are looking at the data, you know, what is good and bad? Why is there this disconnect in your opinion, why are people so unwilling to believe some of these things that could be good for us are so bad for us?

Alan Joslyn: 26:11

I think that part of it is the level of information flow and transparency from the vaccine manufacturers and distributors to the public. And one thing that we don’t do particularly well is inform society in general, is on an ongoing basis. And this goes across the board as to what is really happening with respect to safety. What are the types of side effects that we see with a particular and how frequently do they occur? And is there a special group of patients are subjects that are more prone to a side effect than another group. And I think that if we did a better job of laying that out to a population like the U.S. population, they could make a better informed decision. You’re absolutely right. I look at data all day every day, and I have an educated view on things such as the side effect profile of a vaccine, but the general public doesn’t have access to that level of information to make a more informed decision. And that’s incumbent on us to do a better job of communicating what we are seeing and what are those limitations, because we may find that you could have six different technologies for COVID-19 vaccines that are available in the marketplace, and they may actually be better each one of those six for different populations of patients and having individuals go ahead and be better informed as to which particular vaccine fits their profile. Maybe it’s pediatrics for one elderly for another by race for a third. So we have to do a better job in the industry of making sure that we’re providing the proper information to the folks who have to make a decision, whether to go ahead and be inoculated. And I don’t believe that we’ve done that particularly well.

James Di Virgilio: 28:13

Yeah. One of the most important lessons I learned in my own life was to stop reading articles was to stop what I call end of the chain knowledge learning, but go up to the top, start with academic studies that have been done. And don’t just read one that supports your own thesis, read all the ones that exist and get an idea. What do we know or not know about this? And then from there read the people like yourself that have maybe written books and they spent their lives doing the things and read the ones that disagree with each other, because you can have the same set of data, but you can interpret it differently. And if you really want to learn something, you gotta start up top, not down at the bottom, again, no disrespect to any journalists , but you’re just getting a little piece of the puzzle and you can form some opinions that are really not so great. So what I want to ask you about here to conclude today’s episode is this, Looking back and let’s imagine yourself now you’re working on your PhD, right? And you’re working towards your future. What are some words of wisdom that you would give yourself? If you could go back in time and say, Alan , here’s what I want you to know about what your future is going to look like. Here are some things to focus on and here are some things not really to get stressed about.

Alan Joslyn: 29:18

One, I think that probably throughout my career, one thing that that I’ve learned is that failure is going to happen and it will happen from time to time, especially in science. And the failure is educational as well as the successes. And I think our recent clinical trial is the most recent example of that within Oragenics. And as you had mentioned earlier, the notion that failure can create opportunity is exactly that. And if I was young and doing this again, I’d get less stressed out about the failures because you just kind of take that education and apply it. And in our case, being able to quickly pivot and become a new kind of company was success that emanated from failure. And this, especially in science, is going to happen with a certain degree of regularity and has for me over the last 35 years. And there’s no getting around it. So probably stressing less about the failures. That would probably be my one key take away message that I’ve learned having done this for as long as I have.

James Di Virgilio: 30:28

That’s a great takeaway. He is Alan Joslyn, the president and CEO of Oragenics. Also a very experienced gentlemen with regards to all things pharma, Alan , thanks so much for joining us today. Really a great conversation.

Alan Joslyn: 30:41

I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to it in the future.

James Di Virgilio: 30:44

For Radio Cade, I’m James de Virgilio.

Outro: 30:47

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. This podcast episodes host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Hardwood Soundstage, and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song is produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Gainesville, Florida, home to the Cade Museum, is a university town famous for being the home of nine members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Thanks to technology to harness their creativity, a fresh crop of Gainesville musicians are using their music to bring comfort and joy during troubled times. This is the story of 25 musicians with Gainesville connections, collectively known as Band Together, and their collaboration on a music video that has brought relief to thousands of music lovers and ordinary people during the COVID-19 pandemic.