The Inventivity Pod

Serial entrepreneur Randy Scott founded Novamin, a toothpaste using the bio-glass technology invented by Larry Hench (featured on “Glass that Grows,” 9/25/18).  Bio-glass is a ceramic that essentially fuses with bone and cartilage in your body.   Randy says the key to starting a biotech company is “to fall out of love with the science” and instead understand the economic model that makes the invention relevant.   His father, “a prototypical entrepreneur,” sometimes did well and sometimes did not, but his mother  successfully ran a small business.  Probably as a result,  Randy as a child was always “inventing fictional businesses in my head.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:20

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.

Richard Miles: 0:39

Glass that Grows part two. Welcome to another episode of Radio Cade in which for my guest today is Randy Scott, who’s the founder and CEO of a company called Novamin and also partner at Health Quest Capital. Welcome, Randy.

Randy Scott: 0:53

Thanks, Richard.

Richard Miles: 0:54

So listeners who have been with us for awhile will remember that we did a show with David Greenspan called Glass that Grows. It was the technology invented or discovered by Larry Hench, who was a material science researcher at the university forward back in the sixties and seventies. And there’ve been various applications of that. So David Greenspan talked about one application and Randy you are involved with another one. So before we get into anything else for maybe our listeners who didn’t catch the David Greenspan episode, if we could go back over, what was it that Larry Hench discovered kind of in real simple terms and then maybe just a little bit about why is there more than one way to use this core technology?

Randy Scott: 1:39

Yeah, sure. So the material that Larry Hench invented, was called bioactive glass or just bioglass for short. And the, the thing that makes us different than regular glass is we think of regular glasses, something that is sort of permanent and nonreactive and what have you, bioactive class is different in that it reacts in the presence of anything that’s aqueous, including body fluids. And it doesn’t stay permanent like window glass or you know, something you’d drink a beverage out of or whatever. It actually reacts and it releases calcium and phosphorus and some other things into the environment around it. And then it actually attracts those things back to itself. And it forms a crystal structure that is essentially the same as what bones and teeth are made out of and the body. And so you could imagine if this process takes place inside the body, then the resulting crystals that form to the body just looks like it’s part of the body. And that’s what made bioglass unique was that once it got put in the body and it went through this reaction, which happens very quickly then the body did not distinguish between its own tissue and this new material. So it became the first material that was not just invisible but was actually recognized by the body as this is part of myself.

Richard Miles: 3:11

Interesting. So when, when Larry Hench developed this, did he right away know that there was gonna be multiple ways in which this could be used or you know, at what point did Larry or other people say, hey, this can be used for a lot of different things. Cause there are several different applications where, when did that Aha moment come in terms of application of the technology?

Randy Scott: 3:31

Yeah. And that actually did come later. So when Larry first kind of started working on this, he was trying to solve the problem of how can we make new bones to put into the body. So replacing whole femurs or whatever, right? You know, the whole bones and it was all born out of a conversation that I think David referenced in his interview with a Vietnam War general that Larry met on a bus and said about all these, you know, soldiers that were victims of land mines and that kind of thing. And so that was the problem he set out to solve because you can’t just put a piece of metal in there or piece of plastic in the body or whatever. And that kind of large piece and expect it to be successful residing in the body for a long time. Didn’t really work out for that very well though, because glasses at the end of the day, one of the things we all know about glass is that it breaks easily. So you put it in a load bearing large situation like that, it’s going to break eventually. But somewhere later down the road, some other researchers also at University of Florida got the idea of what if we ground this up and to… you know, just kind of granules, think like salt or sugar or something like that. And could we put it into bony defects and have those have the material convert in such a way that the body would then heal around it as if they were bone chips or something that the body might normally remodel into new healthy bone. And sure enough, that worked. Uh, and so that really became the first viable commercial application for it. And then somewhere later down the road, a researcher at the University of Maryland who had done just some animal studies for Dave Greenspan and Larry Hanson and some of the other folks that were doing some work in the area, he got to thinking, he was a dentist by training, although he was to sort of pay his bills or whatever he was running animal studies, and he got to thinking, well, you know, teeth get these tiny little defects in them. And I wonder if we grounded up, instead of being, you know, the size of a salt crystal or a sugar crystal, what if we ground it up into super fine powder, then we put it into those defects somehow. Would it cause the teeth to also kind of regenerate themselves or heal or whatever. And so he experimented with that and sure enough it did work and there were some other challenges that came to using it in that way, but conceptually it did work in the laboratory at least. And that was more or less like I think where I came into the story, which was thinking about the kind of dental applications and in particular thinking about, you know, incorporating this into toothpaste and how might it improve the performance of toothpaste. Given that one of the things we want our toothpaste to do is to prevent us from getting, getting cavities or even better fill the cavity that has already happened in these kinds of things.

Richard Miles: 6:39

So Randy, so you said that this professor is the one who thought it might apply to teeth. And at that point you sort of got in the mix and you’ve had since then had a distinguished career in sort of identifying companies and helping entrepreneurs. So with all that you’ve learned now, you know, as you started Novamin, kind of walk us through what were some of the first things you had to figure out as you’ve got this, this technology that you believe works and believe has an application. And what was the first thing that you did? Did you call up your parents, say “I’m rich.” You know, “Hey, I’m buying your house and car. I’ve got it all figured out.” Or what are, what are kind of the first initial steps you took and then if you can sort of summarize what were those early years like in terms of, of getting a good idea into the marketplace and starting to grow that.

Randy Scott: 7:30

Yeah. So the key on any of these things is to fall out of love with the science and instead trying to understand the economic model that makes whatever the invention is or whatever relevant. And that’s one of the pitfalls I think a lot of inventors, and especially I would say academic inventors kind of fall into because they’re scientists by nature. And so they love the beauty and the elegance of the science. And I would say the early folks with what became Novamin with the bioactive glass had you know, some of those same kind of challenges of just trying to set the science and the beauty of the science aside and think about the economic part. So, um, you know, in our case it was figuring out that, okay, the really, the only way this was going to make a difference to the population as a whole but also to the business world was if we could figure out a way to incorporate it into something like toothpaste where he could use large volumes and it would touch lots of people. And so we, you know, kind of stopped spending time and energy and money on, on the science of the Novamin so much and started more figuring out on how to solve the problems of using this in a toothpaste formula and have it feel right and taste right and not go bad on the shelf and all those kinds of things. But anyway, to come back to your question for, you know, entrepreneurs, one of the biggest mistakes or whatever shortcomings that I see as a venture capitalist is that they are completely in love with the science and they’re not yet in love with the economic model because, you know, at the end of the day, investors like VCs want to invest in businesses not in science or an idea.

Richard Miles: 9:18

Interesting. We’re going to come back to that. I’m sort of fascinated by that initial stage and then, you know, even after that. Sort of how do you get to the next stage of attracting serious capital and getting it into big markets. But let’s, let’s circle back and talk a little bit about you, Randy. Sorta, what were you, let’s go back to pre success Randy. Right. Let’s go. What were you like as a kid? Did you already… were you four years old and you had the best damn lemonade stand on the block outselling all your competitors or what, at what point did you figure out you had some sort of skill or attraction to business or you know, making things work, that sort of thing?

Randy Scott: 10:00

Yeah. So I was kind of a business junky actually as a kid and that I was always inventing fictional businesses that I was running. I wasn’t so good at the follow through, maybe of…

Richard Miles: 10:16

Where were you in 1980s and tech. Okay. Alright.

Randy Scott: 10:20

But, yeah I would just, one week I’d be had to have my own newspaper and the next week I’d have my own boat dealership or something. It just kind of each week I kind of invented a new business idea in my head.

Richard Miles: 10:37

And what age are we talking about roughly?

Randy Scott: 10:39

Oh, this would be pretty young. I mean, this would be elementary school kind of ages. And so I was always sort of daydreaming around these types of things.

Richard Miles: 10:49

But then that series A round for the boat never took off in the first… And so what were you like in high school. Did you join like the junior achievement or those sort of business type clubs or what were you drawn to it at that age?

Randy Scott: 11:06

Yeah, in high school I finally actually started paying a little bit of attention in class, which helped some later so I actually got into college and that kind of stuff. But yeah, you know, I was the editor of the newspaper. I was editor of the yearbook. I guess I was kind of a natural leader, you know, a couple of clubs. If I got in a club, I usually ended up being the president of the club or something like that. Not by design necessarily, but I think I’m by nature, you know, I’m pretty good at figuring out what needs to be done and then just going off and doing it as opposed to you know, waiting for instructions. And I think that’s one in the context of a club or something like that in high school that almost automatically makes you a leader. Cause most of the people aren’t there to do anything other then socialize I guess. But it’s also probably the traits of a good entrepreneur.

Richard Miles: 11:58

So any of this sort of genetic or from family background, do you have a long line of successful sort of business types in your family or what did, what did your folks do for instance?

Randy Scott: 12:07

Sure. Yeah. So my dad was very much… both of my parents were small business people. Well, my mom had a store now that she started from scratch that was successful in the little town we were in but then my dad was more of the sort of prototypical entrepreneur, which was, you know, every couple of years it was a different business. Sometimes they would not do very well and maybe we’d have to move into a smaller house or something like that and then of course something would do really well and we’d have new cars and all that kind of stuff for a year or two. And he was very active in the kind of environmental sort of stuff, which is interesting cause you don’t think about that so much back in the 70s or even late 60s, but he invented a device for recycling industrial wastewater for example, that was installed in the Maxwell House coffee plant up in Jacksonville. I remember as a kid, we always had to have Maxwell house coffee in the, in the household, which became awkward when my first job out of college was with Folgers coffee. Somehow my parents didn’t disown me despite that. But he was also into paper recycling, built the first municipal waste to energy plant in the United States up in Ohio. So, yeah, he was always doing something. Also built a lobster processing plant. So there was random stuff built in here in between all the other stuff too.

Richard Miles: 13:31

So it sounds like you kind of grew up in an environment where taking risk or sort of that sort of, it was not, at least not strange to you. I don’t know if it was pleasant, but it was not strange.

Randy Scott: 13:43

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the strange thing if anything was I got out of school and I went to work for Procter and Gamble, which was this big, you know, Fortune 15 company or whatever. And I think that was weird to my parents because they sort of just didn’t really understand the idea that you’re going to go work for a big company where you’re expected to work for your whole career and whatever. Of course, I didn’t work there for my whole career, obviously, but that was a bigger adjustment than the idea of starting a business and taking the kind of risk.

Richard Miles: 14:12

And if I remember correctly you had a stint in the Caribbean with a distributor ship, a beverage distributors, is that correct?

Randy Scott: 14:21

Yeah. Close. Yeah. So after P&G I worked for a brief time with Lenscrafters when it was a startup and left with one of the founders there and we went down to Grenada. Where you spent some time, Richard also might’ve even overlapped at the same time? I’m not sure if we figured that out and went down to Grenada, you know, a few years after the American invasion with the idea that we would, um, help, uh, you know, do the patriotic thing and help them build their economy and have a little fun at the same time. And we went down with the intention of buying a rum distillery that was for sale down there. And, uh, we actually got outbid on the distillery by some British rockstar. I don’t actually remember who it was. And so we just bought a bottle of the local rum at the store and went to the beach to drown our sorrows before flying out the next morning and we cracked open the bottle and we thought, “Wow, this stuff tastes better than anything we could have made ourselves anyway.” So the next day we delayed our flight. We went and we met with the old family that owned the distillery and had been there for, you know, a hundred years or 200 years. I have no idea. And I got the rights to it and we kind of created a new brand called Webster Hall Plantation Rum. And it was going to be the first super premium rum in the US it’s kind of mid eighties. And started importing it. And then I immediately went to my then girlfriend, now wife and told her that we were going to be multimillionaires cause I only needed half a percent of the US rum market to be rich.

Richard Miles: 15:53

It’s the oldest line in the book right now.

Randy Scott: 15:55

And I get reminded of it every day, almost. It didn’t work out.

Richard Miles: 16:00

But so it seems like our careers have had similar trajectories. We’ve done a lot of really different things, which means either we’re really good at a lot of stuff or were good at nothing. We got to keep finding a new job. So I’m a little ADHD perhaps.

Randy Scott: 16:14

Exactly.

Richard Miles: 16:14

So let’s come back to Novamin, and I remember you telling me a story that I still tell people about what it’s like to build a new company, a small company, and you’re starting to take on more employees. And you told me the story of how when you first started you thought it was sort of your duty to share every jot and tittle of information with all of your employees. You want to be transparent, let them know what’s going on. And finally at one point, one of them came to you and said, “Randy, stop! This is exhausting to know, you know, every, every twist and turn in the company’s history.” And then that’s when you learned, you know, maybe some things I need to keep to myself for a while as the CEO and founder. Can you describe a little bit what that’s like after you sort of pass through that initial valley of death in terms of you got your initial financing, you’re trying to grow the company to the next stage, but you still got a ways to go before you’ve developed a company DNA or a culture within that. What is that like?

Randy Scott: 17:14

Yeah. One of the things that that particular episode taught me was that not everybody is geared to ride the roller coaster of a startup and, you know, until a company gets to be, I would say maybe, you know, 20 or $30 million in revenue or something like that, the companies are very sensitive to any kind of little event feeling at least like an existential crisis. You know, one customer bailing out on you can be fatal in a lot of cases or whatever. So every piece of bad news tends to create a bad day and every piece of good news creates a giddy day. And so you really do end up with this, you know, big rollercoaster ride and you have to be able to, uh, kind of control that emotion if you will. And not everybody can do that. And you know, if you’re building a company, you’re going to have to hire people that are good at being in a startup and people that maybe aren’t good at being in a startup, but you need them anyway. And so you have to manage them differently. And you have to recognize that they’re not like you. They don’t necessarily feed off of that roller coaster. They actually get beat down by that roller coaster.

Richard Miles: 18:32

Now, Novamin had a successful exit. Right? It did well.

Randy Scott: 18:36

Yeah.

Richard Miles: 18:36

Does having taken part in that sort of life cycle of starting the company and extinct successfully, uh, I imagine that it helps you in your current job, right, where you’re trying to pick winners and losers. You’re evaluating companies every day or at least every week, I imagine. And you’re trying to decide where’s the best place to put your fund’s money. Um, do you recognize yourself in some of these business owners that you talk to? And if you could develop that a little bit and tell me, you know, what are you looking for without giving away your trade secrets? So I don’t start a fund of my own right. Um, what are the basic core elements that you’re looking for, you think to yourself, “This could be a good deal.” And, conversely, what are sort of the red flags where if you see him, it’s like “check please,” you know, “I’m done with this conversation.”

Randy Scott: 19:22

Yeah. Right. Um, so I definitely do see myself and sort of the Novamin situation in a lot of the companies that we look at. So, uh, in that sense, it definitely plays into how I think about companies. I think that, uh, yeah, a couple of things that we look for. Uh, first off is, uh, you know, if I think about the Novamin experience, for example, one of the things that I think really worked for us in terms of being able to exit successfully was we had a technology that was going to be potentially very valuable to a, um, a relatively short list of, uh, of existing players in the space. So it was kind of an oligopoly if you will, of, you know, kind of four or five major toothpaste companies. And we knew more or less from the beginning that we were going to have to get one of them to buy the company. And, uh, but we also knew that we could create conditions where all of them could look at it as a real potential game changer, both up and down, meaning it could damage their business or really help their business and that would make it sort of irresistible, we believe, to get one of them to come in and buy, which is exactly what happened when glaxosmithkline bought it against bids from Procter and Gamble and Unilever and others. And so, um, you know, we’d love to find those kinds of situations because as investors ultimately just investing in a business keeps it successful and grows. But if it remains private and all that, it’s very difficult for us to then create returns for our investors, which are pension funds and that kind of stuff because we have to be able to exit our investment typically in three to five years for the economics of the whole situation to work out. And that means that there has to be an MNA event, somebody has to buy the company or it has to be an IPO or something like that. And if you look at it, IPOs are sexy, but there really aren’t very many IPOs relative to the number of venture investments that get made. So it’s going to have to be this MNA thing in most cases. So we spent a lot of time looking at that back end of the deal, coming into it. Um, and then I’d say, you know, it’s something that is the kind of the quick turn off as the entrepreneur. That’s in it for the CEO because it’s not always the original founder, but that’s in it for their deal. And so if they start negotiating their own deal before you’ve even made the commitment to invest, then you know, pretty much they’ve got the wrong mindset for this and it’s not going to be a pleasant relationship and that one will end it pretty quick.

Richard Miles: 22:01

So that sounds like the ones you’re looking for, are the ones really ready to let it go, negotiate a price and, and walk away from it. Or is there something else here that I’m missing? You’re saying negotiate their deal. What does that mean?

Randy Scott: 22:13

I mean negotiate their personal deal. Like, yeah they’re focused on their salary and all that kind of stuff at the early stages. You know, we, we are looking for, you know, the CEO’s and the entrepreneurs that, you know, their first priority is the success of the company. Uh, and that ideally believe that whatever they’re doing is actually important to the world, even if they didn’t make or nobody made money on it, that it’s still somehow important to the world. You know, we are, we’re focused exclusively on healthcare for a reason because, you know, we’re not just trying to come up with the next sort of fun, entertaining Chotsky or something like that. Uh, we’re, you know, doing all this work so that we can also have some residual benefits or, you know, additional benefits beyond the profits that are made.

Richard Miles: 22:56

So Randy, I usually offer all of my guests an opportunity to dispense wise sage advice. So, uh, if you want to end right here, we can, but… if you saw, you know, a young Randy Scott, uh, and there are plenty of those in Gainesville, sort of, you know, the type, right? We both seen them, they’ve got a great idea. They’re full of enthusiasm. Uh, you know they’re sleeping on somebody’s couch or somebody floor, and they are convinced they’re going to make it. And you have given advice to those folks, but what do you tell them, uh, what are the, you know, the three things you say, “Hey, here’s what you really need to be doing now.” And then are there things you say “And here are the things you need to quit doing?” How do those conversations go with sort of young entrepreneurs, uh, in Gainesville or anywhere where you deal?

Randy Scott: 23:48

Some of them are things we’ve already talked about. “Hey, you know, you’ve got to focus on the, you know, how’s this going to be a business as opposed to, uh, you know, this has great science or great idea that needs a home.” Uh, so, you know, really getting them to understand what I, what I described to them frequently as “follow the money.” And in fact, I do a little kind of a Jerry Maguire riff sometimes off of that that you may have seen before. But, uh, you know, it’s really about following the money and if you can follow the money all the way from, you know, both the ends of the entire business chain and you understand everybody that has to touch the product, touch an element of the product, pay for the product, sell the product, all that kind of stuff, and understand everybody’s economic motivation and the deal. And after thoroughly understanding that, then you’re going to be able to understand your place in that ecosystem, if you will. And a lot of things I think will come into focus, uh, at that point once you do that exercise. And it’s amazing the number of entrepreneurs that have never thought about it beyond, you know, the little sliver of the ecosystem so to speak, that they’re occupying. So I think that’s the main thing. Another thing is just being patient and recognizing that no matter how bad things might look at a given moment in time, they can turn around 180 degrees in a very short period of days or hours or whatever sometimes. That it can all happen very quickly in a positive way. And you’ve got to just kind of keep the faith and um, stick with it.

Richard Miles: 25:22

Sounds like good advice. So, Randy, thanks very much for joining me today. You know, reminding listeners that the companion episode to this one is Glass that Grows with David Greenspan, which we also talk about the same technology but a different application. But I’m glad that you could complete the picture for us today, man.

Randy Scott: 25:39

Great. Thanks, Richard. Great to be here.

Richard Miles: 25:41

Thanks for listening. I’m Richard Miles

Outro: 25:46

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor 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.

Stephanie Bailes is the executive director of the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention, the sponsor of Radio Cade.  In 2017, Stephanie was drawn to the Cade's mission of "inspiring and equipping visionaries, inventors and entrepreneurs."  A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Stephanie knew of Robert Cade and his invention of Gatorade, but didn't realize how transformative it had been.  As a girl, Stephanie considered becoming a pediatrician, but ended up with a degree in social work instead.   After seeing terrible cases of abuse, she "realized my heart was too soft to be on the front line."   But at age 22, she decided she could learn the skills "to make a difference" by running a non-profit.   Along the way she worked in the telecom industry in Atlanta and Washington D.C. before returning to Gainesville in 2010 with her family.  

"Smart Steward" is a web-based platform that helps doctors prescribe antibiotics with the goal of reducing antibiotic resistance.  The software helps track what other doctors have given a patient and makes custom recommendations for treatment.  Guest host Randy Scott interviews entrepreneur Guy LaTorre who grew up in West Orange New Jersey, site of Thomas Edison's lab.  Inspired by a museum dedicated to Edison's inventions, LaTorre says "I always had an inkling I would get involved in science somehow." 

Serial entrepreneur Randy Scott founded Novamin, a toothpaste using the bio-glass technology invented by Larry Hench (featured on "Glass that Grows," 9/25/18).  Bio-glass is a ceramic that essentially fuses with bone and cartilage in your body.   Randy says the key to starting a biotech company is "to fall out of love with the science" and instead understand the economic model that makes the invention relevant.   His father, "a prototypical entrepreneur," sometimes did well and sometimes did not, but his mother  successfully ran a small business.  Probably as a result,  Randy as a child was always "inventing fictional businesses in my head."

A native of Bogota, Colombia,  Dr. Juan Claudio Nino became infatuated with science and math as a young child. Gravitating to something “less nerdy” than physics, he chose to study mechanical engineering along with his best friend.  It was a line from his professor that solidified his choice of study,  “If you were to put a piece of steel into a grinding stone and paid attention to the sparks it generates, you could tell the amount of carbon content in that steel.”

Now delving into the land of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Nino helped invent a microchip that operates like a brain.  The chip consists of pathways that mimic electric pathways inside the actual brain.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:20

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.

Richard Miles: 0:39

This morning we’re going to be talking about the brain again and my guest today on Radio Cade, Dr. Juan Claudio Nino. Welcome, Juan. So Juan, you’re originally from Bogota, Colombia. So before we talk about your research and the company and how you’re doing, what was it like growing up in Columbia? What were you like as a kid? What were your interests and sort of how did you gravitate towards the research you’re doing now?

Dr. Juan: 1:00

Sure. Thank you for having me. I was born in Colombia, in Bogota, and it was a very nice environment that we had. Early on, I was very interested in how things worked, so I would sometimes be very social, but a lot of times I would actually be mesmerized by things and be absorbed by whatever I was playing with, and fairly quickly I became very interested in math and sciences. My father was an engineer, a mechanical engineer, so he was also a professor or a teacher and I would always help him grading and just adding up the different questions and get a total for his exams early on and in school I also became very, I guess, infatuated with sciences and math. Our big influence of that was that the school itself essentially highlighted or promoted those students that were actually good academically basically And this was your score in Bogota? I did all the way to high school in and then my bachelor’s in Colombia. So essentially the school was a big influence in the sense that I guess the popular or the important or highlighted students were those academically. So I said, well, okay, let’s be good academically. That’s basically it. And again, my, my mom and my father also very diligent and responsible and so on. And so the combination of those two fairly quickly pointed me towards stem type of fields and I was going to go to physics, back to high school, going to college, but my best friend at the time said now physics is too nerdy if you will. Um, why don’t we do mechanical engineering?

Richard Miles: 2:58

Oh that’s definitely not nerdy, right?

Dr. Juan: 3:00

Exactly. It was I guess a sidestep there. So I did, I took multiple classes in, in Columbia, a bachelors is a five year program, so you’d take a lot of credits and I took four courses in materials and I did well but not as good as in my other classes. So I said, well I want to stick to this because I’m not quite good at it I guess. And materials was amazing. I had a, an excellent professor, Professor Tovar and it was very interesting. What really captured me was one session, it was part of a book, but obviously I heard it first from the professor. He was saying that if you were to put a piece of steel into a grinding stone and you pay attention to the sparks that it would generate, you could tell the amount of carbon content in that steel.

Richard Miles: 3:53

Just from the sparks.

Dr. Juan: 3:54

Just from the spark, and to me to this day, it’s so amazing. So if this part’s brighter or it flies further away from the polishing stone, you can compare two different steels and essentially magically without any additional tool, you can tell, oh this is 10 40 or a 10 20 which are denominations of steels. And to me that was fantastic. You could see something in let’s say iron, natural, real life with our senses and infer something that is atomistically how much carbon is there in a material. And from there I was obsessed with that. I wanted to know more of in material science, what we call structure property relationships. And that’s exactly what this was. I can tell how much amount of element is there is something by looking at its properties, in this case the sparkle. And from there I decided that I wanted to do a PhD in material science. I applied for a PhD in the US, which is sort of a typical path, if you will. If you want to do a PhD, you look north. It’s easier than to look towards Europe. And I applied to the top schools at the time. Some rejected me obviously because who is this guy from Colombia? And then Penn state gave me the chance, Professor Randall, and from there on I’d finished my PhD and I knew I wanted to be a professor. In fact, that’s what I did my PhD for is to be a professor and then came to Florida.

Richard Miles: 5:27

So now you’re working in artificial intelligence and how the brain processes information. So a bit of a switch there from it seems like from material science, maybe not.

Dr. Juan: 5:38

Well, yes, artificial intelligence may seem a bit off from what I usually do, it is precisely because I’m always open to new ideas and new things that we ended up working in this area. But it is also very materials related because the basis of what we’re doing in artificial intelligence is creating a new architecture or hardware where we have a new material. It’s called a memristor. It’s just a material that changes its resistance depending on the current or voltage that it has experienced in the past. So it’s almost like a memory resistance and that’s why we call it memristor. So it is some material that enables this new way of connecting information, if you will, and then is not just the material itself but how we process it. So while most of the AI applications you see today are either run on the cloud or running on servers, they’re not in your device. So for example, if you tried to use Siri or any other type of application like that, if you don’t have internet, Siri can not necessarily process where you’re trying to do, cannot access the information it needs to connect to the servers. What we’re trying to do is to create an on device, artificial intelligence chip. And for that it needs to be much more efficient than what it currently is.

Richard Miles: 7:16

Juan you mentioned that what you’re working on is so much similar to traffic flowing through a city down roads for traffic lights tell me exactly how that works.

Dr. Juan: 7:24

Yeah, so it’s on the basis of network architectures if you will. So the way the brain works and intelligent networks work is by parallel distribution, by having hubs that take care of certain processes before they communicate to either a larger hub or other centers. So an analogy that I like to use to explain a little bit of what we are doing is that of traffic. So if you’re in a small town, you have small roads that can connect you from any point A to point B within that small city, let’s say. And you can have multiple ways of going around. You can take main avenue or first, second, going east, west, whatever, and everybody has their favorite path, if you will. If you need to go between one city to another city, then you need to take the highway. So that’s a dedicated avenue for, higher volume, higher speed, and limits the amount of pathways. If you want to go from Gainesville to Orlando, it’s highly unlikely, you know, you’re not going to take the interstate, right? So we’re trying to do something similar with trying to create a network of conductors, if you will, that has this sort of what we call small world connectivity. That very quickly allows you to go from point a from point B within a small hub, but then fairly quickly and efficiently connect to a distant hub. Say you take the highway, you don’t go through small town to small town, to small town to eventually get to Orlando, let’s say. So we’re doing something like that. Part of the uniqueness of what we do is that we have this ability of creating this network that connects information, if you will, along the same ways like the roads do. And that means that we need a different way of connecting information and processing, meaning cars going faster and more efficiently from point A to point B or connecting point A to point B.

Richard Miles: 9:32

So this is really revolutionary, if I understand this correctly, because it seems like the direction that we’ve been going steadily is this increased connectivity and the necessity, as you said, to connect to the Internet in order to be able to pull all of that processing power. But now it seems like we can do that from a hardware based or if what you’re describing works that would lessen our dependence on networks. So are we going to eventually go back the other direction where everything is hardware based or is it still going to be some sort of residual capacity to do say processing on a small piece of hardware or will it still requires some degree of connectivity to the Internet.

Dr. Juan: 10:11

So there’s an obvious benefit to being able to connect to the web, to do data information or accessing rather than to store that on a chip. But the example of face recognition to unlock your cell phone that works without Internet. So there is an internal processor just to take care of that process, right? So if you make that more easily accessible, faster, less power consumption and that doesn’t need the Internet for other applications, then your reliance on connecting to the web is lower. So one example could be a device, like a cell phone that could be at a medical point of care and takes a picture of let’s say a disease expressing itself on the skin or something like that. And instead of having to do connect to the web to analyze it or to check with a database to see what are the potential illnesses or diseases, he can do it on the device. So if you think of low resource environments where connectivity to the web is not there, this could be one application. The interesting thing is that if we have these new, more powerful architecture, then everything else that we’re doing right now in artificial intelligence that connects to the web can also be executed. So it is revolutionary, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can adapt everything that we do in connected to the cloud or to the web, change the algorithms of course and do it on a chip. But there will always be a benefit to connecting to the Internet.

Richard Miles: 11:54

So I’m just guessing here, this sounds like it’s got some commercial potential and as you know, as everyone knows, good ideas don’t just sell themselves. So you have formed a company along with the Jack Kendall, the co-inventor of Rain Neuromorphics. Tell us a bit about how that’s been just forming a company and running the company and about getting this idea to market or attracting investors, that sort of thing. How has that path been?

Dr. Juan: 12:21

It’s been very interesting, humbling and complex, let’s put it that way. This is I think my fourth or fifth set of patents, but this is sort of the first one that has true traction and it all started with the usual path of an invention disclosure within the University, the OTL, Office of Technology Licensing. They do very good marketing approach to reach out to potential investors or technical people interested in the different patents. And on this one we got a call from an Australian investor, Gabriele Govinda and he liked that idea at the time was Jack and I and he gave us initial angel type of funding to start doing some work and we were able to get our wheels running and then later on our current CEO Gordon Wilson came in and taught us how to do it properly. So learning how to do a company when I’m a professor fully dedicated to research and Jack was just graduating with the brains of the operation being the CTO, Chief Technology Officer. But once Gordon came in, then we restructured. We are doing very well. We completed our series A of funding. We have moved this company to California and we have done a number of prototypes. We are also part of the Y Combinator program in California and the future is bright.

Richard Miles: 14:00

Juan is there a particular sector or application that you think will be the first to use the technology or apply it or at this point have you not decided or has the market not really figured out exactly how this would be used. Initially we,

Dr. Juan: 14:14

We have a number of avenues and strategies. One that we are looking at is a network of sensors because we have a low powers system that can communicate as needed. So for example, you could have the chip that is collecting data all the time, but it can process the data in real time. Then decide what information is worth sending out either as an alarm or an interesting point to actually transmit instant transmitting all the time. So that makes it an intelligent network. Robotics is a big area as well. And for finance, market prediction is quite relevant at this stage of the different prototypes that we have. We’re looking heavily at serious prediction and initial prototypes that will come commercially available will be sort of the stage of developer kits such that the AI community and different companies can start working on our hardware. And the reason I say that is because this new hardware needs new sets of algorithms. So I was talking earlier about adapting what we’re currently doing to this new hardware. So for that we all really need the help from other companies that are already working with all technology. Let’s say this new technology hardware wise and then adapting or blending what they’re doing on the cloud to not do it on the chip.

Richard Miles: 15:46

Juan, is this a crowded field right now the field of sensors using AI Algorithms to collect and transmit data. How many people are out there or entities that are doing this that you’re racing against the clock to get to market.

Dr. Juan: 15:59

So of course AI is very hot right now. Most of the investment and big buzz is on applications. So essentially there’s plenty of companies writing codes and using AI to solve xyz problem. We can do that. But our differentiator is precisely that or a game changer is the hardware we have a radically different design and architecture that can do the same that everybody else can do. And the companies that run these algorithms and solutions based on machine learning and artificial intelligence can use, and we have in house programmers and algorithm developers that can also do that, but we’re the only ones that have this chip. So that is the differentiator. But yeah, the area’s certainly quite hot and there’s lots of startups, lots of interests and investors, but we have traction precisely because we have a different hardware.

Richard Miles: 17:01

So Juan, thanks very much for walking me through that. One of the things I like best about this podcast is I get to ask really smart people to explain really difficult things for me, I feel like I’ve had a private tutorial session here, but thanks very much for being on the podcast and hope to have you back.

Dr. Juan: 17:15

Thank you so much.

A native of Bogota, Colombia,  Dr. Juan Claudio Nino became infatuated with science and math as a young child. Gravitating to something “less nerdy” than physics, he chose to study mechanical engineering along with his best friend.  It was a line from his professor that solidified his choice of study,  “If you were to put a piece of steel into a grinding stone and paid attention to the sparks it generates, you could tell the amount of carbon content in that steel.”

Now delving into the land of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Nino helped invent a microchip that operates like a brain.  The chip consists of pathways that mimic electric pathways inside the actual brain."

How do you train people to talk to other people?  For some professions, like nursing, communicating with others is a critical part of the job.   Computer scientist Ben Lok developed software for nursing students to interview and examine a “virtual patient.”  The patients speak like actual people, have back stories, and don’t necessarily share information easily.  The son of a pipeline engineer and a nurse, Lok moved to the Tulsa from Malaysia when he was 5 years old.  He credits his father’s prescient interest in computers - and an Atari game - with his career path.  Lok’s company, Shadow Health, has plans to develop applications for other occupations that rely on face -to-face communication.  

For most people, mosquitoes are very unwelcome.  They can also carry dangerous diseases like the zika virus and malaria.   Dr. Roberto Perreira has invented a simple mosquito water trap that doesn’t contain pesticides.  Born and raised in Brazil, Pereira had no interest in insects as a kid.  He went into entomology “through the back door” in graduate school by focusing on diseases that kill insects.  Naturally he was drawn to swampy Florida where he specializes in “urban entomology.”   

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors 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: 0:38

Getting rid of mosquitoes, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t get those damn bugs from biting our legs. Help may be on the way. My guest today is Dr. Roberto Perreira a research scientist in urban entomology who has developed simple mosquito traps for which I at least would spend a lot of money on. So welcome, Dr. Perreira

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 0:56

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:57

So let’s start by having you explain exactly how these traps work. A mosquito trap. What do you do with it and how does it work?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 1:05

Well, the mosquitoes that we’re targeting here are what we call container breeding mosquitoes. So they are used to breeding tree holes but in the urban areas they just look for any container of water to lay their eggs. So the females are looking for these containers to lay their eggs. So what we have is just a bottle, is a dark bottle and it will have some water in the bottom so it will attract the female mosquitoes and we are talking about the 80s mosquitoes, that ones that are transmitting Zika and other diseases and because we treat this bottle internally with the pesticide, the female mosquitoes will end up dying. If by any chance some mosquito eggs get laid inside that bottle, we also have a second pesticide that targets the larvae and they don’t allow the larvae to develop into adults. It’s a simple item.

Richard Miles: 2:03

Is there anything in the water itself in the bottle that attracts them or is it just simply water? We actually put like a tea bag that has some ground leaves inside that tea bag and that basically conditions the water gives a little smell that it makes it more attractive for the mosquitoes. The bottle is a dark container and it has water. So that’s exactly what these mosquitoes are looking for.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 2:30

And if you had a small yard or medium sized yard, how many of these would you have to put around your yard? Well, we always recommend not putting less than two. It doesn’t matter how small your yard is, but actually a normal yard, uh, say in Gainesville would probably want to have three or four or five of these containers around just so that you offer enough competition in relation to whatever other containers or water containers are there in that yard.

Richard Miles: 2:59

And so based on how you’ve described this, I’m guessing is the advantage here that you don’t have to do any spraying of the yard with a pesticide that presumably goes all over the place. Is that kind of the advantage here?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 3:10

Exactly. The idea is that you can prevent a large scale application of pesticide by just not breading the mosquitoes there. The problem with these mosquitoes is that they can find very small containers of water. These mosquitoes can actually breed in a cap full of water, like the one that on a water bottle. So even a turned leaf will actually allow these mosquitoes to breed.

Richard Miles: 3:34

There doesn’t have to be a big bucket or anything. It’d be just a very small…

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 3:38

Very, very small tablespoon full of water will allow these mosquitoes to breed. So it’s impossible to eliminate every single container that would allow these mosquitoes to breed. So what you want to do is provide some competition for these things and attract the mosquitoes to these containers, these traps and kill them there.

Richard Miles: 3:59

Okay. So I think I understand the technology and how it works. And this is obviously not the only technology that you’ve worked on with relationship to insects and bugs. This is kind of your career here, but before we talk about the academic side and your additional research, tell me a little bit about your personal story. You’re from Brazil. Did you grow up there? When did you move to the United States? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 4:21

I was born in Brazil. But as a kid, I moved to Brasilia, which is the capital of Brazil in the central part of Brazil. Lived there for a number of years and eventually we moved to São Paulo city, which is the biggest city in South America. So I’ve been an urban person for quite some time. I couldn’t say that I was really interested in insects at all as a kid. I had other things to find, I guess. And uh, eventually I went to college in agriculture. So it was an agricultural college and I started working originally in the genetics department, but then I found a job in the entomology department and I start working there. So that’s how I got involved in bugs, I guess. I always say that I went into entomology through the back door because I wasn’t really working with the bugs themselves. I was working with a professor that works with diseases of insects and the idea is to use these diseases to kill insects that you don’t want. So it’s an area that’s called insect pathology.

Richard Miles: 5:32

So, let me make sure I have this correct. So it’s not diseases and insects carry, it’s diseases that actually affect the insects themselves.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 5:39

Yes, exactly. So it’s called insect pathology because you’re causing a disease among these insects. And actually, uh, people are fairly familiar with some of these. There is the product BT Bacillus Thuringiensis, that’s a bacteria that will kill a lot of caterpillars most people may have used in the garden, the product called Dipel, which is one of these pathogens that will kill insects. So my initial career was actually working this area of insect pathology and microbial control of insects. And that’s what brought me to Florida eventually. Before I came to Florida, I actually did my master’s degree in Cornell University up in New York. It’s a bit too cold for a Brazilian up there.

Richard Miles: 6:29

And not enough mosquitoes. You had to come to the mosquito capital of the world.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 6:30

And at the time I wasn’t working with mosquitos at all. But anyway, I came to Florida to actually work with another one of these fun insects, the fire ant. So we had a project here at the University of Florida that we were using a fungus to kill fire ants.

Richard Miles: 6:50

Interesting. Let me ask, did either one of your parents, were they research scientists at all or how did you get involved in the research feel?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 6:58

My father was a college professor, more a college instructor, but that was his second job. His first job was as a bureaucrat in the Brazilian government. That’s why we ended up in Brasilia, because when the capital changed from Rio to Brasilia, he went over there. He always taught either high school or college or a university courses as a second job.

Richard Miles: 7:25

What was his subject, what did he teach?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 7:28

Mathematics and statistics, so nothing to do with what I do nowadays, but the idea of science and higher learning was always present.

Richard Miles: 7:39

Now you’ve done a lot of research on other types of insects and developed other technologies. You mentioned the fire ant. When you go to work in the morning, you’re obviously not just focused on mosquitoes or fire ants. Tell us a little bit about some of that other research. What are some of your findings and are there any other interventions out there that you think have some sort of market potentially?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 7:59

Yes. I work in a lab that’s called Urban Entomology lab. So Urban Entomology is preoccupied, is worrying about the insects that we find in our urban environment and those are insects that people usually don’t like to have around them. So in our lab for instance, we have 17 different species of cockroaches that we rear and we do tests on them. We also have 12 or so different species of ants that we are rearing in the lab.

Richard Miles: 8:30

Are these cockroaches and ants native to Florida or are they from all over?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 8:33

Most of these are not native to Florida. As you may know, most of the pests that we have are not native. The native insects usually get overwhelmed by the presence of these exotic species that come over and become pests. So most of the cockroaches, for instance, that we consider to be pests, including the American cockroach, the American cockroach is not American.

Richard Miles: 9:01

What a disappointment.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 9:03

The German cockroaches are another species of cockroaches that we have, especially in college towns like Gainesville, you’ll have a lot of student housing, maybe places that don’t get as clean as possible most of the time. So you do have a lot of cockroaches that occur in these types of residences. But during a variety of bugs we work with. Another one is the bedbug. You’ve probably have heard about the bed bugs, they’re blood sucking insects that may occur in residents, hotels, all those areas. We have colonies in the lab too that we keep them and try to find ways to control them.

Richard Miles: 9:42

So you studied these bugs or insects that are in primarily cities or urban areas. It’s a primary objective to figure out how to get rid of them. Or are there other research goals that you have just to figure out how they what? Reproduce, or what else is involved?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 9:55

Yeah, we do a variety of research. Um, the ultimate goal is usually get rid of insects we don’t like and maybe increase the number of insects that we like. That’s basically as simple as that. So we may do some research, for instance, on killing cockroaches, on ants using pesticides, chemicals, but we may also look at their behavior and try to find other ways to get rid of them or limit the ablation because of their behavior or something else. For instance, for bedbugs, we had a student that worked with what colors bed bugs are attracted to and we can say, well, what is important in that type of research? And basically if you can find something that is very attractive to these bugs in terms of color or odor or something else, you can trap them. You can get rid of them from the environment.

Richard Miles: 10:52

Are there any surprising facts about cockroaches that your average person doesn’t know that have surprised you or that we should know about? Do they have a secret life that we need to be aware of?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 11:02

I think every insect probably has a secret life that we don’t know much about. Most of these insects, including the ones that we considered to be very nasty and not very nice to have around, do have a function in nature. So the only reason they are pests is because we probably created conditions for them to be bothering us when we accumulate garbage and things like that, that brings cockroaches, also brings rats and other things, but we created those conditions for that. So it’s important for people to understand that what we considered insect pests, they were just another species with a niche out there in nature and we built our houses and our cities around those things or we brought them from another country into this country and then they become a pest.

Richard Miles: 11:58

Right.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 11:59

They wouldn’t be a pest if humans were not around.

Richard Miles: 12:01

Right. Exactly. Let’s go back to the mosquito trap now. You’re taking this to market right there. This is a commercial invention. Tell me a little bit about that process. Has it been difficult? Is it easy? What are some of the challenges from a business perspective in trying to market a technology like this?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 12:18

Oh, our approach is never for us to take it to market. So the university has the technology hub and the people that work with finding buyers for these technology and they do a tremendous job. So we have a partner, a company, and the head of that company is a guy from Italy that found us somehow got interested, acquired the technology from the university and is now trying to make that a commercial product. Because he’s not a very large company if things don’t work overnight, he has to find funding and has to sell the technology to potential investors and so on and so forth. So it has taken time to get to the right condition. We think, or he thinks that he has a large partner now to actually use these traps and in accounts all over the world. And if that really happens, then you’ll have the technology taking hold into commercial arena and being used. As you probably know, most of the patents that college professors and others come up with never get to be a commercial product. So it’s rare that these things actually happen. I always give the example that I probably have now 18 or 20 patents or something in that neighborhood and not a single product that people are actually buying.

Richard Miles: 13:44

Is there anything else like this on the market already in terms of a simple trap that doesn’t involve spraying pesticides?

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 13:50

There are traps in the market, some of them are being sold in Walmarts and other places like that. They get used, but they don’t get used in large enough scale. So hopefully we can come up with something that’s more efficient that’s really needed and that is really going to help the public in general. Once we deliver this technology to a company, we kind of lose a little bit of the control over what is really going to happen with the technology and their adjustments that need to be made sometimes in terms of marketability and costs and this and that. So it’s like you’ll see your daughter grow up and somebody else takes over there and you lose control. So this is a similar thing.

Richard Miles: 14:36

You kind of have to sort of bless and release, almost watch it go. Yeah.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 14:40

Yeah. As academics, we really don’t understand what the market needs, what the market is able to afford, and all of this. And sometimes we have this of an ideal product that is not something that the market can accept.

Richard Miles: 14:58

Right, right. Dr. Perreira, thank you very much for being on the show today. I feel like I learned a lot about mosquitoes and bugs and urban entomology. I wish you all the success in the development of this trap and hope we can have you back for an update.

Dr. Roberto Perreira: 15:09

Okay. Thank you.

Outro: 15:12

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor 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.

For most people, mosquitoes are very unwelcome.  They can also carry dangerous diseases like the zika virus and malaria.   Dr. Roberto Perreira has invented a simple mosquito water trap that doesn’t contain pesticides.  Born and raised in Brazil, Pereira had no interest in insects as a kid.  He went into entomology “through the back door” in graduate school by focusing on diseases that kill insects.  Naturally he was drawn to swampy Florida where he specializes in “urban entomology.”   

Nine billion chickens are hatched every year in the U.S. Roy Curtiss and his colleagues came up with the idea of spray vaccinations, virtually eliminating the threat of salmonella for about one penny a chick.  Always interested in genetics, Curtiss began became fascinated with pathogens and and has taught about them in various fields, including biology and dentistry.   He eventually became a professor of veterinary science at the University of Florida and holds almost 50 patents.   

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:20

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.

Richard Miles: 0:37

Vaccinating chickens. No, that’s not the name of some new indie band, but it is what may be keeping us from getting sick and here to explain this morning is Dr. Roy Curtis, a professor at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine. Welcome, Dr. Curtis.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 0:51

Glad to be here.

Richard Miles: 0:52

Okay, so it makes total sense, but I never actually have thought about giving vaccines to chickens before and I know it’s, it’s been around a while. It’s not exactly a new thing, but tell us doctor, how does it work? Giving vaccines to chickens? Do they get a lollipop afterwards and a superhero bandaid or what is going on there?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 1:09

Afraid not. There’s no reward other than staying healthy, which of course is a pretty good reward. But chickens get immunized actually before they hatch against a virus that causes cancer, which can be devastating and that’s totally controlled. And then after they come out of the shell, they’re sprayed with a vaccine that protects them against bedbugs, like salmonella or viruses like bronchitis that cause devastating problems and inhibit the growth of the chickens. So before they get to the farm, they’re already immunized and vaccinated.

Richard Miles: 1:41

Yes. How did this idea come about? What’s sort of the history of figuring this out? I mean it seems obvious now, but all good inventions later on seem obvious. But before they were invented, they weren’t so obvious. So that’s why their inventions,

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 1:53

That’s true. You recognize that you have viruses and bacteria that caused disease. Thirty – forty years ago. We didn’t understand what the mechanism was. So the first thing to do is to figure out how do they cause disease, how do they infect, whether it’s a chicken or us and what do they do to cause the symptoms that we get, whether it’s diarrhea or a runny nose or whatever. Once we know that we can then begin if we understand something about the genetics to modify the virus or modify the bacteria so that it no longer causes disease, but it can still invade into a host animal like a chicken or us and cause the production of an immune response. Just like kids get vaccinated against measles, mumps, they get an inactivated virus and after a few months they develop a response so that they’re no longer susceptible to infection and they’re protected for life. Which is wonderful.

Richard Miles: 2:50

Let’s talk about the practical application, I guess. It’s one thing to vaccinate, say a single chicken or a couple of chickens, but how did the problem gets solved? How do you do this on a mass scale? It’s obviously doable, but who came up with this idea of doing it on a mass scale so that you’ve got chickens everywhere getting vaccines?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 3:06

One of my colleagues came up with one of the ideas of inoculating the egg before the chick hatches, what they call Inovo immunization. And my group came up with this idea of spray vaccination against the Salmonella. You have to realize we raised 9 billion chickens in the United States every year. And when they come out of the hatchery, they go into a tray of a hundred chicks and you can spray that whole box in one and a half seconds and it just goes down to like a roller thing and that each box, it goes under the spray cabinet like that, those moves on. And the next one they load them all on the truck, take them to the farm. And they do this for millions and millions of birds.

Richard Miles: 3:43

So essentially an assembly line.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 3:45

It’s an assembly line and the birds are never handled by a human being. It’s all mechanical and robotics and things of this sort. And that’s why we can now raise billions of chickens. When I was a kid, if you had 10,000 chickens, you were a big operator. And nowadays if you don’t have 10 million you’re a small potato.

Richard Miles: 4:04

So it sounds like this isn’t terribly expensive system to implement or is it, is this a huge investment?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 4:09

No, no. The cost of immunization of a chick by spray and then they give a second booster immunization in the drinking water at the broiler farm. After 10 days, it’s less than a penny a chick and the chicken marketed by the rotor producer is worth about a dollar 25 cents less than 1% of the cost of the final product.

Richard Miles: 4:29

Tell us about how your research group came up with this idea, was there a key insight or was it just an inner process where you sort of arrived at the best solution.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 4:37

In my case, it was a situation of going to a scientific meeting in immunology and learning something about how Polio vaccine worked and then knowing some things about Salmonella, which I’d worked on for many years and then realizing I could do something with chickens, which I started to raise as a kid and put all these things together as a unified concept of figuring out how to tame the Salmonella so that could no longer cause disease but could be a safe and efficacious vaccine that would protect chickens or us from future infections with Salmonella.

Richard Miles: 5:13

What was the initial reaction when you came up with this idea? Did people go, “That’s a wonderful idea,” or did people say “That’s ridiculous, it’s never gonna work?”

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 5:19

Yeah, I mean, I came up with the idea and I tried to get to the research funded three different ways through the government. Fortunately through one route it worked, and from there it went on to be accepted and being worked on by many people over the world.

Richard Miles: 5:34

Now you have a very creative mind, you’ve got something like 49 patents, correct?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 5:39

Yeah. That’s just the US. Several hundred in Europe and other places, Japan, China, etc.

Richard Miles: 5:47

So let’s talk a little bit about, you have also a fascinating pedigree that includes a signer of the declaration of dependence, a symphony conductor, and a saloon owner. And finally you a doctor, a research doctor. So tell me about growing up in your family and what ultimately attracted you to medical research. What were your influences, or did you have role models or why did you end up the way you did?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 6:09

Well, I think it’s one of these fortuitous things. My parents decided that maybe I should get out of New York City and go upstate New York to get educated so I wouldn’t become a gang member or something. And I learned how to grow vegetables. And then that led to an interest in why tomatoes were different shapes or yellow or red or whatever. And then I got interested in chickens and started raising chickens. And at the same time I was failing as an athlete because of repetitive injuries to my ankles and whatnot.

Richard Miles: 6:38

What kind of athlete?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 6:40

Well, I did football and I did skiing and I did track and I even messed up in volleyball.

Richard Miles: 6:46

Where in upstate New York, were you?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 6:47

Outside of Albany in a town called Delmar, New York. And I was, had a lot of interaction with many of my grandparents and great grandparents who were mostly in the New York, Connecticut, New Jersey area. So I saw them on frequent occasion and were stimulated by their stories of their progress and that of their fathers and grandfathers and grandmothers and whatnot. Resource of a very rich family life and lots of experiences.

Richard Miles: 7:13

Any other scientists in the family at all? Researchers?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 7:17

Uh, the only researcher in the family was my oldest son who had developed remote sensing when he was at Caltech, when the total spectrum of the landsat satellites and whatnot. So anyway…

Richard Miles: 7:30

You have a patent competition going on. I see.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 7:33

No, he’s established a company and he’s now retired. He’s the main science advisor of it, but they started a company and they’ve got a lot of hardware up in the heavens there. So he’s doing well, having fun.

Richard Miles: 7:45

So you’re up state New York. You’re learning about agriculture. And then how did you end up in Florida?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 7:50

As many people remark, I’ve been all over. All over Cornell and I started going to Cornell when I was in seventh grade visiting, and it was a slam dunk that that was where I was going to go. Although all the male members of my family went to Columbia where I was born. And then I went from Cornell to Brookhaven national lab to University of Chicago to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to University, Tennessee, then University of Alabama, Birmingham, then Washington University in Saint Louis, and then Arizona State University, and then three years ago or four years ago, somebody from Florida called me up and said, Roy, what’s the chance that we could move you and your wife to Florida? I said, what you got in mind? And so two months later we’re out of here and looking around and we’d been here many times before and loved the environment, liked all the colleagues here and move again.

Richard Miles: 8:39

And so in all those places, was it veterinary science, or what was your focus.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 8:44

Oh no, I’ve been in the arts and sciences. I mean I chaired the Biology Department at Washington University. I’ve been at two national laboratories, were basic science departments. I’ve been in a medical school, I’ve been at a dental school and as I say in three arts and sciences, a sanction now a vet school. And I’ve been doing veterinary research for 30 some odd years. So this is great. I feel very much at home.

Richard Miles: 9:05

Right. This is very interesting cause it’s kind of a lot of adventures that we see and that we know of have these very wide range of interests. So they’re usually highly proficient or experts in at least one field. But then beyond that they have a lot of very well developed interests. It sounds like you just studied or started teaching things that interested you and developed an expertise. Was there sort of a a grand master plan when you started out or did you just see a topic and the feeling and go that sounds interesting, I’m going to learn about it. And how did that develop?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 9:36

Two things. One, you have to be a risk taker. You have to ask questions and when you’ve come across something you know nothing about, go ahead and study it. Try to figure out a little bit more. I mean learn more. And so I moved around. I mean it was one of the first people working on modes of antibiotic resistance transmission back in the early sixties for many years I studied how bacteria exchange genetic information, how they evolve, how they establish in various ecologies. And then got interested in pathogens and the genetics of how pathogens cause disease. And then once I learned that I wanted to make vaccines to prevent the infection. So it’s a transition over many years of how you use your knowledge that you acquire and that imparted by others and put it to practical use.

Richard Miles: 10:20

Ah, let’s develop that a little bit more because it’s often very good inventions or breakthrough inventions are when somebody takes an idea or an insight developed in one field of study and applies it in a different field, or they understand that it has implications in a different field. Did that ever happen in your career in which something, an insight or a lesson that you acquired in one field, you looked over at a, at another and go, “oh my gosh, I can use that same insight and this is related but different field?”

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 10:46

Well, I think that my background in genetics, which goes all the way back to junior high school was key. Very few people saw the insight in how to understand various bacterial and viral pathogens from a genetic point of view. Trying to understand the expression of genetic information to lead to production of toxins or means by which a pathogen colonized, invaded was deceased. And so I asked a lot of questions and because of this, my lab discovered some of the key attributes of bacterial pathogenicity and means by which Salmonella invades, for example, temperature regulation and Shigella. We made the first gene clone bank of a pathogen, one causing dental caries tooth decay, streptococcus Mutans, which is one of the most prevalent pathogens in the world, affects maybe 95% of us. And we made fundamental studies on how that caused disease. Yeah. So dentistry has gone from pediatric dentistry to geriatric dentistry because we’ve eliminated a lot of the problems that the kids get because of the knowledge we learned about how these bacteria that cause tooth decay do so, and then we can intervene and develop strategies to prevent that.

Richard Miles: 11:55

So it sounds like this fundamental understanding of pathogens and genetics really informed your approach to all sorts of…

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 12:01

Everything. Everything.

Richard Miles: 12:02

Fascinating. Let’s talk about the business angle. You know, we talked about this earlier, great ideas. Unfortunately don’t just sell themselves. Right. They gotta be packaged in a business model and application. That makes sense for somebody. Either retail, consumer, a business consumer or so on. Describe for me your experience with that, knowing both worlds, sort of at the research end, at the genesis of the idea, but then also as it goes to market, what are the insights you’ve gained about that process? What are some of the successes and tell us about some of the setbacks or frustrations you’ve had in that.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 12:35

Well, as we developed some of the key technologies in the late 1980s I commenced to be invited to go give talks at various universities and science meetings. But then during the next four years, I started visiting pharmaceutical companies and new biotech startup companies. Gene X, Seedis, Molecular Genetics, Genentech, etc. But also Eli Lilly and Upjohn and Smithkline, companies that don’t exist anymore actually and did so in Europe as well. And so I gave my dog and pony show. And finally in 1992 it was a race between Smithkline and Upjohn. And Upjohn got there first with a about $3 million to let us set up a company called Megan Health, which we did, in St Louis, and established it finally in 1993 and that enabled us to develop three vaccines that are out there that are now commercially marketed by either Allanco or Merck to control salmonella in chickens and swine.

Richard Miles: 13:35

Did you encounter any skepticism or did you just present them with the information about what this was going to do? And they were like, “we’re on board here.”

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 13:43

Well, every time you give a talk, people ask you questions. Sometimes you’ve never thought of them, and many of them dealt with safety. “You tell me you’re going to develop a vaccine and you’re gonna give this to my newborn baby.” “Yes.” Now that’s a tough sell. Sure. And so we had to do things and now the newer technologies we have, we have the salmonella on a string so that they die and explode. They lyse after about 10 days so that there’s no survivors. So it becomes totally safe. But originally there was concern that spray a lot of salmonella around. Well, how doesn’t that contaminate the environment. And what’s the impact going to be on other animals? And good questions concerned with the integrity of the environment, the safety of other animals and people who might get immunized who didn’t elect to get immunized, which is a no, no. From an ethical point of view. Right.

Richard Miles: 14:36

So once you figured out the answer to those questions, as you said, all good questions, you went back and said, here’s why it’s safe and here’s why it’s not going to…

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 14:45

Yes, yes. And then eventually after four years of talking to all these people, I convinced a couple of companies to say, well, okay, there may be a risk, but this is a good investment. This is a good possibility that we could enhance the safety of food if we could control salmonella in poultry.

Richard Miles: 15:02

So we mentioned earlier that you’ve got something like 50 us patents and sounds like a lot more overseas. What are you working on at the moment? What is your research pointing towards?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 15:11

Well, there are two areas. One is in the area of animal health. We’re developing several other vaccines for poultry, wanting to control a disease called necrotic inner riotous, which causes a devastating disease in chickens. For years they supplied low level antibiotics to promote the growth of chickens. This is now sort of a, no, no, we’re trying to decrease that, but in so doing, we’re now getting a disease caused by clostridium perfringens. This is a bacteria that causes gangrene, which was a big problem in the first world war and our military troops and this bacteria causes real damage in the intestinal track and the chickens don’t grow well and a lot of them die. And so we got a vaccine against that, which is going through a process to be marketed in about two, three years. Hopefully. We’re making another vaccine against campylobacter jejuni, which is another diarrheal pathogen that’s transmitted from chickens to humans. And it turns out the chickens get infected with a strain of e coli that is very similar, if not identical to those that cause urinary tract infections in humans. And so we’re trying to control that. So at four different areas we’re trying to make the poultry products and other farm animal products have a safer for human consumption. But on the other hand, I work on some vaccines against human disease. My wife and I work on a vaccine against tuberculosis. We worked one on bacterial pneumonia. The vaccine for newborns that the Gates Foundation has helped to fund and a variety of other things.

Richard Miles: 16:39

Do you ever sleep?

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 16:41

Well, yeah. Then I wake up in the middle of the night and then I started thinking, you know, I love science.

Richard Miles: 16:45

I’m feeling lazier by the minute just listening to you talk, I had no idea that eating chicken could be such as dicey proposition, but I know now that every time I eat chicken and I don’t get sick, I’m going to thank you.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 16:55

No, no. It could be that you handle the chicken properly. You know, you use clean cutting board should cook things thoroughly and we don’t eat sashimi chicken and there’s a good reason for it.

Richard Miles: 17:05

But I think it’s safe to say that the work of you and your colleagues has greatly reduced the risk of serious diseases, serious conditions affecting a lot of people.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 17:14

No, actually I think there’s very little salmonella infection that comes from eggs anymore because almost every laying hen in the United States is immunized and so that’s been pretty much eliminated the last five years.

Richard Miles: 17:27

Dr. Curtiss, thank you very much for joining us on the show today and I look forward to seeing your future research, sounds very promising. Glad you could be here to talk.

Dr. Roy Curtiss: 17:35

Well thank you, Richard. I enjoyed it very much.

Richard Miles: 17:37

Thank you.

Outro: 17:39

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor 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.