The Inventivity Pod

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.   

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is hard to detect, and is sometimes called the “invisible injury.” Nancy Denslow, a scientist at the McKnight brain institute and cofounder of Banyan Biomarkers has developed a blood based test that will make TBI detection and treatment easier and faster Daughter of diplomat, was born and raised overseas in Mexico and Ecuador, and Turkey. “Petrified by Science” growing up her interest was changed by a great high school.

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: 0:38

This morning we have Dr. Nancy Denslow from Banyan Biomarkers. Welcome, Nancy.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 0:43

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Richard Miles: 0:44

Nancy, tell us a little bit about yourself before we jump into asking you about the technology and its application. Just sort of where were you born? Were you raised to… How did you end up at the University of Florida?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 0:59

Well, my dad was a diplomat, so I was actually born in Mexico City while he was stationed there and I lived there six years and then after that I lived in Quito, Ecuador for six years and then in Istanbul, Turkey for three years. So I was a junior in high school before I came back to live in the United States. And from there I graduated from high school in Virginia, northern Virginia, and then went to college at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which at the time was an all girls school and majored in chemistry.

Richard Miles: 1:33

What made you decide to go into chemistry? Was this something from a little girl that you’re interested in or was it a good high school teacher? What formed that decision?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 1:43

Actually, I was petrified of science while I was growing up, but then I had an excellent teacher in high school and that’s what turned my mind about it. And so that just goes to show what good teachers could do.

Richard Miles: 1:55

So your undergraduate was in chemistry, is that correct?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 1:57

That’s right.

Richard Miles: 1:58

Okay. And then your graduate work, you continued in chemistry and biology, is that correct?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 2:03

No. So the last year in chemistry. I had a course in biochemistry and I thought it was just really interesting. So I continued biochemistry and molecular biology.

Richard Miles: 2:15

Got It. Okay. So let’s talk about the technology here that the thing that you invented, the company is called Banyan Biomarkers. Tell us a little bit what are biomarkers, but tell it to me as if I were a six year old who doesn’t know anything about anything and it’s not that hard for me to pretend, but really tell us how the technology works and what it does.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 2:41

Okay, so a biomarker is another method or is a method to identify an illness, let’s say. So in the case of traumatic brain injury, which is what our technology is about, we’ve identified proteins that actually make it into the bloodstream and these proteins can be detected by a specific assay that we’ve developed so that you can determine the extent of the brain damage by these biomarkers by measuring the proteins in the blood. So basically the technology is based on determining that these proteins are in the blood and we have antibodies that we’ve identified that are very specific to these proteins and so it’s a blood test and based on blood tests you could tell that a person has had traumatic brain injury.

Richard Miles: 3:32

So for example, a football player, a soccer player, whatever, someone involved in an accident, they just come in. They give a regular blood tests for anything else or a donation of blood and then you can run this through an assay and figure out if there are biomarkers. Is that correct?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 3:50

Right. So if we take a blood sample and then you would run it through the assay and it would tell you the extent of the damage and that there has been traumatic brain injury. So it’s a way that perhaps one can avoid going for an MRI which has a lot more expensive and has radiation associated with it and so instead you would get a value that says, “Well maybe you should stay in the hospital for more observation” or “No, you know, it’s not really too bad. You could go home.”

Richard Miles: 4:20

So is an MRI, is that the existing best technology or the most frequent one to identify traumatic brain injury?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 4:27

It is.

Richard Miles: 4:28

Okay. So this sounds like it would be a lot easier and a lot cheaper. Is that really the main benefit of the biomarkers?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 4:38

Well, I think it’s a lot cheaper and easier as you’ve mentioned, but also there’s a potential that you may be able to attract the recovery from the traumatic brain injury.

Richard Miles: 4:49

I see.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 4:50

No, we haven’t tested that totally, but it seems like it might be able to track recovery.

Richard Miles: 4:56

So in theory then or maybe in practice just somebody comes in multiple times over a given time period and it’s just much easier to see what’s going on.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 5:05

Yes.

Richard Miles: 5:05

Okay.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 5:05

So a person could maybe be in the emergency room and it could take a blood test over several hours and maybe you could get an idea of how stable that is or how stable the person is and whether they could go home.

Richard Miles: 5:19

So right now the application that you have hit upon is traumatic brain injury, does a biomarker… Or do they have the capacity to track other types of pathologies or illnesses?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 5:31

Well, so we’re looking into that now.

Richard Miles: 5:33

Okay.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 5:33

We haven’t established that yet.

Richard Miles: 5:35

Right.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 5:35

But there’s potential.

Richard Miles: 5:37

Nancy, tell us what was sort of the process. Was there an “Aha” moment or was it sort of a series of insights that got you to develop the biomarker?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 5:47

Well, actually this is a collaboration between three of us. Dr. Ron Hayes and Dr. Kevin Wang and myself. So Dr. Ron Hayes and Dr. Kevin Wang are neurobiologists that has been studying, traumatic brain injury for quite a while and my part was the proteomics part where it’s sort of a new science where you can study all of the proteins in a particular incidents and so we came together to figure out what was going on with traumatic brain injury and had the insight to look for these particular biomarkers in the blood. It was our idea that, well, if they were in the brain, they would probably get through the blood brain barrier and appear in the blood and if we could just attack them in the blood, then we would have a really good assay that could be beneficial to a lot of people.

Richard Miles: 6:38

So was there one particular moment in which you realized, “We’ve got it. This is it. We’ve done it” or kind of just a slow dawning of…

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 6:47

You know, we first could detect this, of course not in people, but in rats we could detect it and in the brain and the CNS fluids and so on, but it was thinking about whether they could be found also in the blood that spurred us to continue to try to develop this into develop antibodies that would be able to detect very minute amounts of the protein in the blood. So it was just a series of steps that got us to the point where we are now.

Richard Miles: 7:15

After you came through or developed the breakthrough, you formed the company, Banyan Biomarkers. Tell me a little bit about that. What is the market that you’re looking at? Who is going to be the primary customer of this technology?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 7:31

So I think there’d be a lot of people that might be interested in this technology. For example, the military would be one for sure because they have a lot of people out where they could get hurt and with blasts and so on. And so they have really spurred us to develop the technology because they thought it would be very useful for the military. And then of course football players and other people of that sort or people who are in car accidents that might’ve had some kind of a traumatic brain injury. Or people just falling downstairs. So I think that there’s quite a bit of a market for this.

Richard Miles: 8:06

So I’m assuming that there’s a real clinical advantage to having the ability to do this more quickly. So first of all, is it more rapid than an MRI? I’m assuming that it’s just a lot easier and faster to go in and get the blood, do the assay and come to your conclusion rather than an MRI, is that correct?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 8:25

That’s true. And right now we’re looking at various different partners that have platforms and hospitals and emergency rooms where they could put these antibodies on their platforms where everybody’s used to using those particular instruments already. And get a very quick readout. Right now, the assay is probably about an hour or so, but it’s possible that with different platforms that we could even shorten the time.

Richard Miles: 8:52

So yeah, I could see like in a battlefield or someplace where you obviously don’t have access to an MRI, you could get a pretty good reliable result to very, very fast.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 9:02

We want to develop a point of care instrument that wouldn’t even have to be in an emergency room or anything like that, that could be out with the medics in the battlefield.

Richard Miles: 9:11

Wow. Amazing.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 9:12

We’re not there yet.

Richard Miles: 9:13

Not there yet. So tell me a little bit about the progress of the company. What would you say has been your biggest success to date and then if you want to share maybe your biggest setback to date in developing the technology.

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 9:28

Well, I think the biggest success was we went into partnership with some new people that are based in California. And in fact our CEO is in California right now. And the people in the company that have developed the assay as it stands now are totally amazing. So they were very particular and very specific about meeting quality standards and making sure that the assay was sensitive and not overselling the assay as to what it could do and just being really very specific about what the assay could do. And then we ran a clinical trial with 2000 different blood samples. Some were controls and some were traumatic brain injured people and the samples were then sent to two different laboratories to run the tests. So the company didn’t run the tests themselves but sent the assays out to two independent laboratories to run the assays. And then they came back with just fantastic results. And so this is what we took to the FDA and this is what the FDA approved. So I think that that was just amazing to me how well that worked in terms of setbacks. You know, you think in antibodies working really well as you’re developing it and then you find that it’s not quite what you need. So you have to go back and you have to make a new one. So there were always two steps forward, one step back. It’s not that you could just go in and have the idea and do it. You just have to have the hard work that goes with it.

Richard Miles: 10:56

So final question, somewhat similar. What has been your biggest surprise in all this as you develop the technology? Did you have people that you thought would love it and didn’t? Or vice versa? Did you, did you find people who were really interested in technology that you hadn’t thought about?

Dr. Nancy Denslow: 11:10

Well, I think that as we’re developing this technology, people are becoming more used to a traumatic brain injury and football and what that might cause longterm problems to football players that there’s just been this whole interest in the whole country about doing something about traumatic brain injury. And here we were doing it. So that was just amazing how well that’s worked out.

Richard Miles: 11:36

Nancy, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

Outro: 11:39

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.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is hard to detect, and is sometimes called the "invisible injury." Nancy Denslow, a scientist at the McKnight brain institute and cofounder of Banyan Biomarkers has developed a blood based test that will make TBI detection and treatment easier and faster Daughter of diplomat, was born and raised overseas in Mexico and Ecuador, and Turkey. "Petrified by Science" growing up her interest was changed by a great high school.

The engineering part of Augi Lye helped solve a problem for his musician self. How to speed up the aging of wooden violins, which enhances their tone? Augi not only came up with an invention, he formed a successful company that sells devices to all string players. Â Now Augi is using artificial intelligence to help vision processing. The son of immigrant parents, Augi was thought to have a learning disability as a young boy. His fourth-grade teacher told his parents, "I've seen this before. Augi will blossom in his junior year of high school." Spoiler alert: He did.

Making rechargeable batteries more powerful, cheaper, and longer-lasting benefits just about everyone. “Not a very good student in school,” Phil Bennett didn’t get into any of the major Florida universities but grew interested in science in community college and meeting Nobel laureates while working summers at the Miami Museum of Science. He helped develop Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries, and his company has pioneered the use of the next generation of Lithium-ion batteries. 

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: 0:40

This morning I have as my guest, Phil Bennett, who is a native Floridian and spent a lot of his career working in advanced rechargeable batteries. Welcome, Phil.

Phil Bennett: 0:49

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:49

So Phil, before we start talking about the heavy duty stuff on the technology, let’s talk about you a little bit. I understand you’re from Miami, born and raised there. What was it like growing up in Miami and sort of how did you end up in Gainesville?

Phil Bennett: 1:01

Well, I grew up in the southern part of Miami. I was about two miles from Biscayne Bay and maybe two or three miles from the everglades, so I had water everywhere and there were homes but not really close together. So I had a lot of opportunities to get out and see nature, which is now an important part of my life. I love the water, I love to fish and boat and I grew up there, went to elementary, middle school, high school there. I was not a very good student in public schools and I always had an interest in science, but as I was in my teenage years, science wasn’t cool and I always felt that the girls didn’t like science. So if the girls didn’t like science…

Richard Miles: 1:44

What’s the point, right?

Phil Bennett: 1:45

Right. I wasn’t going to show that I was interested in it, although there was always that deep feeling that I enjoyed it and I was not able actually to get into the University of Florida, Florida State, or the University of Miami because of my high school grades and the courses that I took. I actually had no intention of going on to college and ended up taking some courses at the community college in Miami called the junior college, Miami Dade Junior College. And I was working at a machine shop and it was a small family owned machine shop. The owners recommended that I start taking some engineering courses. I guess he saw some potential in me as an engineer and the first time I took a chemistry course or anything beyond Algebra was when I was at the community college. And I really started enjoying it and I was fascinated with science again. So it kind of rekindled that idea of how important science was to me.

Richard Miles: 2:38

Right. Let’s back up a little bit. So you’re in in Miami as a kid, you said close to water and so on and out and about. I assume your parents probably had no idea where you were right…

Phil Bennett: 2:49

That’s pretty much true. Yeah. My Dad had a small grocery store in a relatively low income part of town. He worked long hours and I didn’t see too much of him. My mother used to work with him also, so they didn’t really know a lot of what I was doing.

Richard Miles: 3:04

And so you were out just playing or were you the sort that was interested in discovering animals and building stuff or what was…

Phil Bennett: 3:12

Well, it was more, I had a lot of friends, so I used to ride my bicycle over to friend’s houses. And the fact that my parents weren’t around too much allowed me to get into some mischief and to get into a little bit of trouble I guess. But it gave me that opportunity to really explore, and I still to this day have that desire to go down a dirt road or something where I’ve never been before. Just to see where it goes.

Richard Miles: 3:36

So if I’m driving through Gainesville and I see you riding around on your bike, I need to be worried. Right. So let’s talk a little bit about batteries, which is where you spent a good chunk of your career. For the listeners who aren’t familiar with batteries, how they work and rechargeable batteries, walk us through some basics and why… kind of the latest generation of batteries, why are they a big deal?

Phil Bennett: 4:00

Let me start out by just explaining there are two general categories of batteries. One is the disposable kind that most people are familiar with that go into remote controls, are in toys, a variety of other things. And then there’s the rechargeable batteries what we call primary batteries, which are the disposable and the rechargeable batteries. The rechargeable batteries are very complicated actually because you want to have a battery that will be able to charge and discharge a thousand times. Otherwise it’s not very valuable. You want to be able to utilize it in different environments, different temperatures, different exposures. You want to be able to use it inverted and different positions. Not all rechargeable batteries can do those things and the chemistry that’s involved in a rechargeable battery has to be such that it can go in one direction to allow the use of the stored energy and then go in reverse. When you recharge it in the reversal process, the chemical reactions have to be almost 100% reversible.

Richard Miles: 5:06

Wow.

Phil Bennett: 5:07

Because if they’re not, if you lose, let’s say 1% each time, you’re only going to have a battery that will last about a hundred cycles. So it really has to be fine tuned in such a way that it can…

Richard Miles: 5:18

Both ways, 100%.

Phil Bennett: 5:19

Both ways, 100% and that’s pretty difficult. So there’s a lot of design factors that go into it.

Richard Miles: 5:25

And I know that it’s a big deal. Well for everyone, all manufacturers for the size and weight of batteries, is there a difference between chargeable rechargeable in terms of size and weight?

Phil Bennett: 5:35

Yes, there is. Um, to answer that very quickly. A lot of rechargeable batteries, the type of batteries that are in cell phones and other electronic devices, computers, when they started out having smaller cell phones and things like that, they were basically the same size as the disposable kind that the AA or AAA size. But since then we have these small flat phones and electronics. So the batteries are made differently, but the chemistry is pretty much the same as what was used in the small cylindrical, disposable kind. That’s one type of battery. Now if you look at a car battery, the kind that you use to start your car, that has a completely different footprint and they’re larger, they have a lot more energy stored and they have to deliver that energy in a very short period of time. So that means a lot of power.

Richard Miles: 6:23

So let’s talk about your specific contribution, I guess, to the field of batteries. I mean you’ve been talking about batteries in general and you were involved with the development of something called a nickel metal hydride rechargeable battery. What was the difference between that and batteries that came before and how is it a step forward?

Phil Bennett: 6:43

Well, when I was working on the nickel metal hydride batteries, so that was when nickel cadmium batteries were the primary rechargeable battery for consumer electronics and other types of portable devices. The problem with the nickel cadmium is the cadmium that’s in the nickel cadmium. It’s a toxic metal, just like lead is in the lead batteries that we use for our cars. But they were so pervasive that people, when you were finished with your battery or finished with the device, we would generally just throw the battery into the trash and then it would end up in a landfill and then possibly in the water supply. So companies who are looking for alternatives to cadmium and what was found was new types of metals that can absorb hydrogen gas. So this metal was used as one of the electrodes in storing energy. So the water, all batteries, almost all batteries, have a liquid in them, usually water, except for now the new lithium ions don’t. But when the battery would be recharged, the water that’s in the battery would decompose into hydrogen. And then another chemical, uh, which I won’t go into all the chemistry, but that hydrogen would then be absorbed by the metal that’s used to make the electrode. And a tremendous amount of hydrogen could be stored in that metal. So that was then used as the fuel for discharging the battery again. So that’s where the name metal hydride comes in. The nickel is the other electrode. All batteries have a positive electrode and a negative electrode.

Richard Miles: 8:10

So, uh, I didn’t know this until interviewing you, that Gainesville became the largest nickel metal hydride battery manufacturer in the world where we’re recording this podcast. Is that still true or…

Phil Bennett: 8:21

No, that’s not true anymore. No. In fact, at one time it was the largest nickel cadmium manufacturing facility in the world.

Richard Miles: 8:28

Really?

Phil Bennett: 8:28

Yeah. But it was when it was General Electric, and General Electric, from what I understand, didn’t want it publicized too much because of the cadmium issue. They didn’t want it recognized in the community as being a potential polluter.

Richard Miles: 8:41

And the nickel metal hydrate is still used in like hybrid electric, vehicles, right?

Phil Bennett: 8:45

Yes, absolutely because it’s a very safe battery system. Even though there’s hydrogen involved in it, it’s very safe.

Richard Miles: 8:53

So can you tell us a little bit about the future batteries? What’s the next step on the horizon? I’ve read a number of things about different types of batteries. I’m pretty sure I don’t fully understand what’s going down the pipe.

Phil Bennett: 9:04

Sure. Well, there’s always a drive for higher energy, what we call higher energy density. In other words, how much energy can you pack into a small package? High power, which means how quickly can you get that energy out? Cost is another issue or another question. Safety is a big concern. Environmental impact, things like that. So probably about 20 years ago, maybe a little bit longer, lithium ion batteries made the scene and those have a higher voltage about three times a higher voltage then nickel, cadmium or nickel metal hydride they don’t store as much energy per se or capacity is what we would call. Ultimately the package has higher energy than does a nickel metal hydride. In doing that it has to use a non water base system. The liquid that’s in there is a non-water base electrolyte, we call it electrolyte. Um, that brings some issues because it is flammable, can be flammable. So that introduces some safety aspects to it. But that was the direction there. That took a big leap forward in battery technology.

Richard Miles: 10:08

The lithium ion.

Phil Bennett: 10:09

The lithium ion. And that’s now used almost exclusively in most rechargeable battery applications.

Richard Miles: 10:15

Okay. So like a cell phone for instance.

Phil Bennett: 10:17

Cell phone has lithium ion, computers have lithium ion, a lot of biomedical applications have lithium ion. It’s not used for hybrid electric vehicles and it’s not used for starter batteries to start your car or other large scale batteries. Part of the issue with that is the cost because it is more expensive, but if you’re going to have a battery for a phone or for a computer, you’re willing to spend 20% more, 30% more to have a longer runtime and have it smaller and lightweight and not worry about the cost.

Richard Miles: 10:47

Right.

Phil Bennett: 10:47

The cost of the battery is considerably lower than the cost of the whole device. Now, then there’s a whole other class of batteries which are not portable type batteries that would be used for things like wind farms or solar farms. Those are batteries that you want to have low cost. You’re not so concerned with how much it weighs and how much volume it occupies, but you are concerned with how many cycles you can get out of it and the ultimate cost and safety. So those would be things like lead acid and there’s a whole other range of battery types, battery chemistries, that’s being developed for those applications. Those would be types of batteries that you would have a big solar farm that would cover several acres and associated with that acreage would be a building that holds the batteries. So the building would basically be just to hold the batteries.

Richard Miles: 11:38

So that’s a big deal, right? Cause at one of the upper limits of the use of solar power, right? It’s this ability to store the energy.

Phil Bennett: 11:45

Absolutely. Like it’s not generating any energy at night, so you have to have something to discharge to be able to store that energy during the day or when a cloud comes over. So there’s a dip in the amount of energy that’s being stored. So you want to have something that can store the energy while the light is available. That would be for solar. For wind, wind sometimes drops off. Sometimes you have a lot of wind, sometimes you don’t have much wind. So there’s always ups and downs in the cycling of the energy that’s being produced.

Richard Miles: 12:14

Phil, let’s move on to, and I ask this of all the inventors, entrepreneurs that we have on the show: you have a great idea, you know it’s a great idea, but then there’s sort of the next phase and that’s getting that great idea out there in terms of marketing it, selling it, packaging, whatever it takes, just move it into the marketplace. What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned about that phase of inventing, taking your good idea and actually getting it in a shape where somebody wants to buy it and will buy it.

Phil Bennett: 12:40

That’s a whole other part of commercializing the invention that you have or the product that you have. One of the things that I learned from being in this industry, in the battery industry, first of all, it takes more than one invention to make a commercial product. You might have the one good idea to get started and you try to cover as much ground in your invention, in your patent to make sure that nobody else can capitalize on that. However, there’s always other things that need to be done that you overlook in that first discovery. Those are the things that require other people. One of the things that I found is that it really takes a team of people to work with you on developing your product to the point where you have something that can be commercialized and then you need another team of people that will help you commercialize it, to market it. So that’s not just salespeople, that’s a lot of marketing. Identifying what the strengths and weaknesses of the product are and then identifying a strategy that you can use to go out into the public and convince the public that, hey, I have this new idea and you need it.

Richard Miles: 13:46

Tell me about uh, surprises, both good and bad. Is there anything that falls in the category of like, wow, I had no idea. Either, again, positive or negative as you either developed the idea itself or as you tried to take it to market?

Phil Bennett: 14:02

I think the biggest surprise to me in looking back at all of the work that I’ve done in the battery industry is something that I just said. It takes a team of people to really bring something to fruition. It’s not one person and it takes a lot of coordination and a lot of interpersonal skills to get people that have different ideas to work together and to generate the ideas that are needed to take it to the next step. Probably the most surprising thing was the amount of communication skills that are required and the amount of willingness to accept other people’s ideas and to be able to bring them into the groups so that they feel comfortable expressing their ideas and willingness to work together as a team.

Richard Miles: 14:51

You’re familiar with sort of both the world of research and development and academia and also the business side of it. Is there a huge difference in sort of the way people think in those respective worlds. I know I’m grossly oversimplifying this, but you could sort of caricature academics as ivory tower types and they spend all their time, their labs and they don’t really know how the business world works and then the other side of the business folks who really don’t care about ideas and they don’t really understand them. I know that’s a gross simplification, but is there a barrier between those two communities that is difficult to cross?

Phil Bennett: 15:24

Yeah, I can answer that from a personal perspective. I’ve spent many years in the area of science and developing the way that I think as a scientist, and as an engineer, solving problems just naturally using a scientific approach and everything that I do My wife on the other hand is very business oriented, very driven to “this is what we’ve got to do and this is how we’re going to do it.” And her thought processes are very different than my thought processes.

Richard Miles: 15:52

Who knew?

Phil Bennett: 15:52

And there are oftentimes big clashes in the way that we think and the way that we communicate. And I think the communication part is probably the one of the biggest parts of it because when I try to describe something I just naturally try to describe it in a way where it’s not very ambiguous. There’s very little room for uncertainty and the way that I describe it, whereas my wife on the other hand doesn’t use very many words and is just right to the point with what she wants to do. So sometimes there’s a communication problem.

Richard Miles: 16:21

Does your wife work with you together in business or is this…

Phil Bennett: 16:24

Oh, in business now we do. Yeah.

Richard Miles: 16:26

Right. So that’s interesting. I mean my wife and I founded the Cade Museum and worked together for a number of years and we were surprised by the number of husband-wife teams that we’ve come across. And usually they compliment each other in exactly the way you described someone once maybe the vision person, others the implementer. But our architects are husband and wife. We have some designers, husband and wife. So anyway, uh, I understand exactly what you’re talking about. Um, final question Phil, and this is one we ask of most everyone on the show. If you had a young researcher coming to you or any researcher, you don’t have to be young, but they want to follow a similar trajectory. They’ve got a great idea and they’re thinking about taking it to market. What words of wisdom would you give to that person about things they need to look out for things they need to avoid things they need to do, that sort of thing?

Phil Bennett: 17:15

Probably one of the most important things is the determination to continue pursuing what you feel that you’ve invented and make sure that you don’t give up hope and keep going. There will always be things that will get in the way and you just can’t let those bother you. You, you just can’t even think that it’s an obstruction. You just have to think, okay, well this is just another problem that I have to get over. That’s one of the most important things. I think the other thing is recognize that this is probably not going to be the final invention of your product or your idea that there’s going to be other things that are going to come along that will supplement and compliment the product that you have so that it makes it better and it puts it in a position where it can then be sold. Put it in a position where people are going to want your product. And in order to do that, you need to have other people around that have good ideas. You have to be able to be open to their ideas. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to always use their ideas, but you have to be able to bring them in and make them feel comfortable enough to generate the ideas that you want to hear. And that takes a lot of skill. That takes a lot of effort and a lot of communication. So communication skills are critically important in making this happen.

Richard Miles: 18:36

So one point you brought up, Phil, I think is fascinating insight and that is an inventor has to kind of exist in this state of not knowing, right. You don’t know exactly if it’s going to work out and you don’t know exactly how it’s going to work out.

Phil Bennett: 18:50

Yeah.

Richard Miles: 18:51

And since you don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s why you need to depend on other people.

Phil Bennett: 18:55

Yeah. I never really thought of it that way, but yes, I think that’s absolutely right. There’s always going to be something that will get in your way and you just have to overcome that and you may not know how you’re going to do it and that’s when you need to bring other people in that you can trust, that you can rely on, that you can feel comfortable talking to them and saying “Hey, we’ve got this problem. We’ve got to get over it. Tell me what you think.”

Richard Miles: 19:18

Excellent Advice Phil and I really appreciate your time this morning and when the next great battery technology comes out, I’m going to give you a call and have you explain it to me.

Phil Bennett: 19:26

Oh I’d love to do it.

Richard Miles: 19:27

Thanks very much for being on the show. Okay, thank you for having me.

Outro: 19:33

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.

Making rechargeable batteries more powerful, cheaper, and longer-lasting benefits just about everyone. "Not a very good student in school," Phil Bennett didn't get into any of the major Florida universities but grew interested in science in community college and meeting Nobel laureates while working summers at the Miami Museum of Science. He helped develop Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries, and his company has pioneered the use of the next generation of Lithium-ion batteries. 

Imagine a brain on a computer chip. Jack Kendall, founder of Rain Neuromorphics has figured out how to connect artificial neurons in “neuromorphic hardware,” a brain scaffolding useful for artificial intelligence. He hopes it will make A.I. cheaper and faster for all types of applications. A fan of the Crocodile Hunter, Jack grew up in the tiny town of Belleview, Florida. 

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.

Richard Miles: 0:01

A brain on a chip. That is what we are going to be talking about today on Radio Cade and today on the phone I have as my guest Jack Kendall. Welcome, Jack.

Jack Kendall: 0:47

Hey, how are you?

Richard Miles: 0:48

So Jack, normally how we start this is if you could just tell the listeners what the technology is that you’re working on and what it does and we’ll talk later about the applications and the business model. So just tell us what is it that you’re working on, what does it do?

Jack Kendall: 1:02

Yeah, we’re building a new type of processor for artificial intelligence that’s inspired by the brain.

Richard Miles: 1:08

Okay. So let me ask a clarifying question just for listeners who sort of aren’t familiar with the AI world or the very concept of artificial intelligence, what’s a useful thumbnail description of artificial intelligence.

Jack Kendall: 1:20

So AI powers a lot of things these days. I’m sure you’ve all heard of Siri. So Siri is powered by a type of artificial intelligence called neural networks. Google’s reverse image search, a lot of really powerful recommendation engines, just like Amazon and Netflix that help you find similar products also use AI.

Richard Miles: 1:38

So AI is sort of the direction the IT industry is going in terms of making everything easier to use. Is that more or less fair?

Jack Kendall: 1:45

Absolutely.

Richard Miles: 1:45

Okay. So we’re going to come back later in the show and talk about what you’re doing with Rain and the overall business model, but first let me get some information about you. You know, what were you like as a kid, where did you grow up, that sort of stuff. And then maybe if you want to share about your formal education before getting into your current business. So let’s start with where are you from and how would you describe yourself or how would others have described you as a kid?

Jack Kendall: 2:10

So I grew up in a small town called Belleview, Florida. It’s about an hour south of Gainesville. Lot of cows and horses there.

Richard Miles: 2:17

Were either of your parents in a technical field or information technology or anything like that?

Jack Kendall: 2:22

Uh, no. My Dad was a mason. He actually started his own business doing masonry, and that sort of inspired me to create my own business as well. But he had a lot of tools in his garage and I spent a lot of time as a kid building things and playing in the garage.

Richard Miles: 2:36

And you said that one of your role models was Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, is that correct?

Jack Kendall: 2:43

I was a huge fan of Steve Irwin.

Richard Miles: 2:45

So between masonry and hunting for crocodiles, sort of your… that was your zone, right?

Jack Kendall: 2:49

Yeah, that’s a pretty good description.

Richard Miles: 2:50

How old were you when you first got interested in the brain? When did that sort of jump out as a subject matter or concept that you wanted to know more about?

Jack Kendall: 2:58

Um, it’s kind of funny. Most of my life I was interested in things like physics and chemistry, rigorous kind of deep science fields. It wasn’t until I was pretty far into college that I really got interested in the brain and sort of wanted to apply the way of thinking of engineering and physics to understanding the brain. So probably about when I was around 21, 22 years old.

Richard Miles: 3:21

So what did you start out studying in college? We’re you a Physics major. An Engineering major?

Jack Kendall: 3:26

Yeah, I majored in Chemical Engineering and Physics.

Richard Miles: 3:30

Okay. And so was it sort of a breakthrough moment in a particular class or a particular instructor in which you started getting curious about the brain or did this come from some other influence?

Jack Kendall: 3:40

So a good friend of mine was studying neuroscience and I had always been passively interested in the brain, but it wasn’t until I read a book by somebody named Jeff Hawkins, actually the inventor of the palm pilot, called On Intelligence that I really got really, really interested in the brain.

Richard Miles: 3:58

In what timeframe are we talking about Jack? Roughly?

Jack Kendall: 4:01

Yeah, this was now about six years ago.

Richard Miles: 4:05

Six years ago, okay. So neuroscience has one of those fields that has really changed or just continues to change very, very rapidly. Is it a little bit disorienting being in a field that seems to be moving at such a fast clip in terms of what we know about the brain now is sort of multiples what we knew even probably six or seven years ago.

Jack Kendall: 4:24

Yeah. When I first started learning about the brain, there was so much information, you didn’t even really know where to start. As I’ve studied it more and more over the years, things are beginning to make more sense and you can see that there’s this broad framework that’s emerging to understand the brain. So things are making a lot more sense now and I think that we’re actually pretty close to a cohesive understanding of the brain.

Richard Miles: 4:48

So from the outside people who are not specialists in artificial intelligence, you seem to get one of two reactions. Either this techno enthusiasm for this is going to make everything easier and the world’s going to be great because of AI and then on the other hand you get this technophobia or tech dystopia where AI going to take over everyone’s job and it’s going to dehumanize and depersonalize. So knowing what you do about the actual development of AI, are we closer to one of those two poles than the other one or is it like most things are just kind of right in the middle?

Jack Kendall: 5:21

This is a point at which really we have a choice collectively about how we use these technologies. There are many, many, many applications of AI that have the potential to make human life much better, especially in healthcare and preventing diseases and creating new cures for things like cancer. But at the same time facial recognition, especially in mass surveillance, has the potential to create a somewhat dystopian type reality that we may live in. So I think it really depends on what we do right now to prepare for the advent of true real AI.

Richard Miles: 5:58

So you started a company Rain Neuromorphics. First thing, tell me about the name itself, Rain Neuromorphics. What does that signify?

Jack Kendall: 6:05

So Rain, it’s a play on sort of our core technology, which we’re very brain inspired and we try and overcome some of the scaling problems with other AI chips by making these random networks. So Rain stands for Random Artificial Intelligence Networks and then Neuromorphics is a combination of “neuro,” which means “brain,” and “morphic,” which means “in the shape of.” So we’re building things that are in the shape of the brain.

Richard Miles: 6:31

So Jack, for lay people, how would you explain, I guess the competitive advantage of the type of work you’re doing versus other folks working on AI?

Jack Kendall: 6:39

Basically, we can build larger networks, larger brains than any of our competitors and train them faster. So right now a big problem with neural networks is that it’s very difficult to train them because the amount of time that it takes to train scales as you make the network larger and larger. Right now that scaling is very poor, but we have an architecture that scales more like the brain does, so it’s much better in terms of as you make the network larger and more powerful, it still is easy to train.

Richard Miles: 7:12

And is there something distinctive about the type of network, that is explainable, that gives you this advantage.

Jack Kendall: 7:19

In conventional architectures, what you see a lot is you see… basically in AI right now it’s all about neural networks and in particular something called deep neural networks and these are computational algorithms that work in a way that we think is really similar to what the brain is doing and they’re powerful as a function of the number of neurons that you can really fit into the network. And so conventional algorithms and hardware, you grade these really dense, they call them fully connected, networks. So every neuron in a layer is connected to every other neuron in another layer. But the brain isn’t like this. The brain doesn’t have these fully connected grid-like networks. In the brain, things are very sparsely connected. So a neuron might only connect to maybe less than one percent of its neighbors. So this is called sparse connectivity. It’s really hard to implement in hardware, but we have found a way to implement this sparsity in hardware and that is what allows us to scale.

Richard Miles: 8:18

What are the applications of Rain Neurmorphics and who are your clients and what are you working on for applications?

Jack Kendall: 8:25

Yeah, so what we want to do is replace a lot of the compute devices that companies like Google and Amazon are using right now for their AI. Most people right now are using graphics processing units or GPUs, because GPUs were the best solution that already existed when neural networks became really popular. So what we’re trying to do is replace a lot of those devices with special purpose hardware for neural networks, for very large companies that do a lot of AI.

Richard Miles: 8:53

Are you licensing this for someone else or do you own the patent to this?

Jack Kendall: 8:56

Yes, so the University of Florida, it was developed at UF. So UF owns the patent and we have a full exclusive license from UF.

Richard Miles: 9:04

And is the idea to do a sub-license to what these other companies or… to get acquired by them or what is your thinking in terms of…

Jack Kendall: 9:11

We want to build chips. So we want to really build the chips and sell them to the end user.

Richard Miles: 9:17

Okay. Um, how big is your company now, Jack?

Jack Kendall: 9:20

We’re pretty small. We’re still an early stage company. We just recently raised our seed round. We’re hiring pretty fast right now, but right now we’re at about five people.

Richard Miles: 9:28

So as you set out to explain this technology to your clients or potential clients, was it a bit frustrating? Did you have people not quite get it or maybe they understood how the technology worked but they didn’t really see the value proposition in the application? Or has this been one and done you make your pitch and they sign up?

Jack Kendall: 9:44

At first people were skeptical. Um, we’re doing something that’s very different from traditional silicon design, traditional processor design. So they should have been skeptical. But pretty rapidly we built up a very good list of people who really know the technology very deeply and can vouch for it. And once we had some big name people that were on board, convincing others became much, much easier.

Richard Miles: 10:10

So you talked about one sort of very useful “bad experience” you had in the sense that apparently you’re applying for a grant and one of the reviewers said they liked the idea but you didn’t have any useful learning algorithms then and it was essentially like a brain that didn’t know how to learn and you said you took that rejection pretty hard, but it sounded like out of that rejection came something good. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jack Kendall: 10:32

Yeah, definitely. So I remember this very well. I was doing research at UF under a professor Dr. Juan, you know, at the time and he’s a material science professor and this is where I came up with the idea and we submitted the patent and we needed funding. So we were applying to all these grants and it was multiple rejections in a row and that is kind of demoralizing and I really did take the feedback from the reviewers close to heart. And one of the things that was obvious was that this was really just a framework architecture. We didn’t have any algorithms, so it was like we had built this hardware, but there was no software for it to run. So after I got that feedback, I was like “All right, this is not gonna go anywhere unless I can build really the software for it.” And so I became kind of obsessed with this problem and really just thought hard and long enough that I came up with something that worked and after that that’s when things really started to take off.

Richard Miles: 11:27

So this brings up an interesting question because for a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs, there’s a certain amount of criticism that you kind of have to ignore, right? Because if you took into account every piece of criticism, you just stop, but at the same time there’s criticism you have to pay attention to because otherwise you’re never really going to progress. Was there something about this way, this advice or criticism was delivered that you realize that this is the type of stuff I need to listen to and not ignore?

Jack Kendall: 11:51

Yeah. This has happened a few times, but it’s always the criticism that makes you deeply uncomfortable. Because you know that it’s true.

Richard Miles: 12:01

I see.

Jack Kendall: 12:01

The things that you know are irrelevant and doesn’t do anything to you emotionally, that’s usually the type of criticism that you can ignore.

Richard Miles: 12:09

Yeah.

Jack Kendall: 12:09

But the ones that really make you think and question what you’re doing, that’s the criticism you have to pay attention to.

Richard Miles: 12:16

Right, because they’ve gotten at a root problem that you… you acknowledged, you just didn’t want to fully acknowledge, I guess.

Jack Kendall: 12:20

Exactly, yeah.

Richard Miles: 12:22

Interesting. I had another guest recently. I asked for advice and he said, always tell yourself the truth because if you don’t, you’ll sail a long boat, believing all the very good press as they say. So what are your immediate next steps, Jack, aside from cutting a huge deal with Google or Apple or something, are there immediate hurdles that you’re trying to overcome? Either regulatory hurdles or financial hurdles or whatnot.

Jack Kendall: 12:45

There’s not much regulation that we’ve run into just yet. Financially we’re doing okay right now. So our main challenge is actually putting out our alpha chip. So we’re scheduled to have that out in about 9 to 12 months. So, we’re starting our design process. We’re hiring all the engineers that we need to do that, but it’s going to be a long journey, but we think it’ll be worth it.

Richard Miles: 13:06

And does rain have a website that people can go to if they’re looking for more information or…

Jack Kendall: 13:10

We’re actually in the process of setting that up right now. We have a landing page. It’s rain-neuromorphics.com. We’ll have some more stuff up there very soon.

Richard Miles: 13:19

Well, great. Jack. Thank you very much for joining us today and we look forward hopefully to getting updates and then having you back on the show.

Outro: 13:28

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.

Imagine a brain on a computer chip. Jack Kendall, founder of Rain Neuromorphics has figured out how to connect artificial neurons in “neuromorphic hardware,” a brain scaffolding useful for artificial intelligence. He hopes it will make A.I. cheaper and faster for all types of applications. A fan of the Crocodile Hunter, Jack grew up in the tiny town of Belleview, Florida. 

EEG’s are great for diagnosing all sorts of conditions, including head injuries and seizures. But they’re hard to administer and thus don’t get used as often as they should. Elena Fraser and Duncan Kabinu, work with EncephaloDynamics a company that has developed a cap that makes EEG’s much easier to use. A born adventurer, Elena grew up one of four girls with a single mom. Duncan, a notable in Gainesville’s start-up scene, is no stranger to challenges. 

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

All right. This morning we’re going to be talking about brainwaves. I’m Richard Miles from Radio Cade and I have with me today, two guests, Elena Fraser and Duncan Kabinu welcome, Elena and Duncan.

Duncan Kabinu: 0:49

Thank you.

Elena Fraser: 0:49

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:50

Before we talk about your individual backgrounds and how you came to this project, Elena, I was wondering if you could just for our listeners, explain to me sort of the core technology, the core idea behind this invention in as simple terms as possible. I say this is for the listeners, but it’s really just for me because I have a hard time understanding really technical stuff. So what exactly are we talking about? What is the core technology behind your business model?

Elena Fraser: 1:13

Sure. Okay we’ve invented a cap that acquires brainwave patterns to find problems that are related to electrical activity in the brain. The procedure itself is called an electroencephalogram or EEG, and through an EEG, doctors can look for abnormal patterns that indicate specific seizures or different brain problems. So what our product does is it simplified this procedure that has used kind of an antiquated technology for decades and we’ve simplified it so that a 20 minute – 25 minute procedure now only takes a matter of minutes because what happens when a patient has a brain injury, it’s important to be able to do an EEG quickly because time loss equals brain loss and if you can make that happen, you can make that diagnosis happen faster and you can also bring about better outcomes for the patient.

Richard Miles: 2:08

So an EEG essentially measures brainwaves and doctors know what sort of normal brain waves look like. So when they see an abnormal pattern in the brain waves they know that something may be up like a seizure or concussion. Is that more or less accurate?

Elena Fraser: 2:23

That’s correct.

Richard Miles: 2:24

All right, good. Good. I think I understand. Duncan, how did you jump into this project and what stage was the project when you jumped into it and what is your job?

Duncan Kabinu: 2:33

Sure, so I was introduced to a couple other inventors in this project by a local entrepreneur who knew my background as a person that loves to tinker with stuff and build stuff, and so they asked me to come in and help with prototyping this product and so I met Dr. Sackalleres and Scott Bearden, who both, at the time, had a semblance of what they were trying to put together and I was there to basically come up with a fresh idea fresh set of eyes look into this and see how I could make it work. The challenge was being able to create the EEG cap that could essentially be put on a person’s head without having to shave their head because typical EEG setups usually require shavings a person’s head so you can get as close to the scalp as possible so that the ability to create a cap that essentially could get through any hair without having to shave a person’s head. That was a challenge on its own and how to make it easy enough for anybody if I had to package this and mail it to you, to your house to be able to put it on yourself in about two to three minutes.

Richard Miles: 3:36

Okay. So I think I get the technology, I understand how this is easier than what’s currently available. So before we talk about the potential applications, the additional applications, and sort of where you are in terms of market, I wanted to ask both of you separately, you know, you’ve chosen a field, the sort of startup field, which to put it mildly is a bit risky in terms of startups. A lot of them fail probably I’d say most of them fail and so you’re not in safe industries like insurance for instance. And I can say that because my daughter’s in the insurance so… She’s got a great job and it’s very secure. And then I’ve got a son in the military also not about to go out of business. Both of you were drawn individually to a sector, an area that’s actually fairly risky in terms of career. So Elena, were you a risk taker when you’re a child? What did your parents do? What sort of inspired you to end up in a profession in which you’re taking ideas that may not make it and you’re trying to help them succeed?

Elena Fraser: 4:33

Well, I’ll tell you, I grew up in a small town in the midwest and as you can imagine, adventure and that type of thing doesn’t happen a lot in a small town in the Midwest. So I was always looking for that adventure. I was fighting every stream and running down and planning little expeditions out into the countryside. Anything to kind of get you out of that boring midwest atmosphere. So when I started talking with our good friend Richard Allen about getting involved in different startups, to me that’s an adventure because you don’t know what’s going to happen next and it kind of takes you outside of that comfort zone that you have. I worked at the University of Florida myself for 17 years and I loved every minute, but this is so much more exciting because you really get to take something that is particularly, like with this product, something that’s very purposeful and take it from this idea stage and moving into something that can be commercialized and that can really help people.

Richard Miles: 5:30

And Elena you said you were one of four girls, right?

Elena Fraser: 5:33

Yeah, so I was one of four girls growing up to a single mother and she instilled in all of us, this attitude of getting it done and really when you’re working with a startup, you have to get it done. You can’t let personalities get in the way. You can’t let situations get in the way. You’ve got to figure out a way to make everything work. And I think as far as inspiration is concerned, my mother really inspired me to be that kind of a person that really looks around every corner, looks outside of the box and tries to figure out a solution to a problem.

Richard Miles: 6:03

And Duncan, how about you, were you sort of kid your mom just said “Duncan get the hell out of the house” or…

Duncan Kabinu: 6:08

Actually, that’s true. My parents, um, being old school and all, there was no video games and all that stuff. It was pretty much first thing in the morning was get out the house and stay out the house as long as possible. “You’re thirsty, there’s a hose out back”, that kind of thing, right? Um, but I was a kid that… I wouldn’t say we were poor or anything, but I didn’t get a lot of toys for one thing, like if I got a toy, I play with that toy, like until it was completely worn out. And the tinkering part comes from me… like my dad buys me this train toy set and I think after the first week, the first thing I did was tear the whole thing apart, took it completely apart and then figure out how to put it back together completely. Always the, the extra screws. I’m like, “Oh gosh.” And so…

Richard Miles: 6:53

That was the last Christmas gift you ever got.

Duncan Kabinu: 6:54

And so I started taking down the stereo systems. Exactly. And so I guess I was always a tinkerer, like even with video games, I mean, uh, computers, uh, I do a lot of computer programing. But even with video games I’d watch my friends play. But when I played, I was more intrigued by how the game worked more than how to win at the game and I was more intrigued by like, “How does this work?” You know, I got to figure this out. And so I tinkered a lot in terms of a startup businesses, what I like about them is the fact that they’re based around anything that’s around disruption and changing status quo and going to the next level because I believe this is after listening to Ray Kurzweil, who for me is like the most phenomenal inventor ever. He shows this trajectory with pretty much everything out there that reaches a peak. And when it peaks, what happens? He says, “You have a paradigm shift.” That’s disruption basically. And so looking at this EEG thing the idea was, I believe it’s 80 years of the same technology that has never been disrupted it’s like, why is that? You know, it’s like, it’s got to get better. Now mind you, I used to work for state of Florida where nothing gets disrupted. So it drove me nuts and it’s like, oh my God…

Richard Miles: 8:08

The taxpayers wallet gets disrupted, right?

Duncan Kabinu: 8:09

Exactly. And so for me, getting out into a startup community was awesome. What’s interesting is I found that I’m more attracted to chaos only because I can see order coming in it. It’s like I can see beyond the current chaos. And that’s what’s exciting about it. It’s like, oh my gosh, we were like creating something amazing that’s going to change people’s lives for that matter. And so that is the fascination for me behind startups and I try and get involved with as many as possible.

Richard Miles: 8:37

So let me ask about your formal education, your academic training. Elena, do you have a background in business or engineering or how were you trained?

Elena Fraser: 8:44

Yeah, I do have a background in business. I actually took to get an MBA rather late in life about seven years ago. I went back to school and got an executive MBA from Northwestern and it’s funny why I did it was that I felt like in order to keep the startups that I was working with moving forward, I needed to have more information and be able to work at a higher level than I was working. So went back to school, got my MBA and it’s really been helpful and in some ways it’s been interesting because there are some things that an MBA will never teach you when you work with a startup. They never prepare you for the fact that not only are you going to be the chief operating officer, but you’re going to be the director of IT and you’re going to be the chief bottle washer and some days you’re going to be the model for, uh, an EEG cap going on your head. And that’s the thing that I think when it goes back to background too, that, if you feel the ability that you can put your ego aside and you can do it all at the beginning, you can really make a go of it. It’s one of those things. You’ve got to be able to let go of the ego, do everything from soup to nuts. And then you can make something really fly.

Richard Miles: 9:56

I remember when Phoebe and I were first starting the Cade Museum and we had a meeting and somebody said, well, just have your IT people contact us. And I was like, dude, I am my IT people. So I’m still going to be contacting you. Elena, what about your undergraduate degree? What did you study first in college?

Elena Fraser: 10:09

I studied Finance.

Richard Miles: 10:10

Finance, okay. Alright. Dunkin. How about you?

Duncan Kabinu: 10:13

Computer Engineering and talking about IT, right? It’s pretty much like Elena said, what you learn in college and applying it to real life or most times there’s a disconnect. It’s like when you get into the real world, it’s like, oh my gosh, this… nobody told me about this. Nobody prepared me for this. And so not to plug but will plug Gainesville Dev Academy, which is a software bootcamp. Hands on the purpose behind them, which is something I started with was to actually help connect what you didn’t learn when you were doing Computer Engineering or Computer Science to what really happens in the real world so that your a lot more ready for your job. But everything Elena talked about with the bottle washer and everything else, I don’t know whether it’s for everybody. It’s like a certain type of people that thrive for that and if you’re into having a very super structured way of doing things that probably would never be in your wheelhouse of things to do. It’s like I don’t know what’s going on at any moment because you really have to have this ability to manage a million things all at the same time and make it work somehow. That’s not something you learn in college. I mean you do learn time management. I’m not knocking college. That’s a huge plus that you get out of college is how to figure out and create lists and manage that kind of stuff in life. I found that those lists end up getting thrown out after the first five minutes and like “Well nevermind that. Just start all over.”

Richard Miles: 11:33

So talking about a plan. Let’s get back to the EEG and as you both said, EEGs had been around awhile, so the core technology is not new, but you have an application of that core technology that makes it faster, simpler, puts it in more hands of a wider brand of practitioners. Walk me through how is that going to change the world as we know it, the fact that let’s say you were a big success. Who is going to be able to get EEGs or administer EEGs that does not already have access to them now?

Elena Fraser: 12:04

Today, there are a few studies that have been out talking about EEG technology and how underused it is. About 20 million people in the US annually need to have an EEG, but only 3 million people in the US actually get an EEG and that’s because of again, talking about the difficulty of getting an EEG done, but also there’s a critical shortage of EEG technicians. So what we did when we designed the EEG now was to design it so that any healthcare professional would be able to use our product. That you wouldn’t have to have an EEG tech there to use it. So that would help bring forth more demand in that product. People in the ICU and in the operating room are really calling for a product like this. And again, even our local VA, there’s one EEG tech right now. And considering that we’ve got the brain institute right next door, when you have access to maybe one or two EEG techs and that’s your bread and butter, that’s kind of a difficult thing to see. So getting this product out in the market, of course it’s going to make EEGs available to more people over time, but also there’s a real breadth to this market. There are a lot of people doing experiments right now with that computer brain interface. They’re using it now for video games where you put on a headset and you can actually derive the video game with your brainwaves. So using a device like ours that has so many different channels for use in the brain, you’ll be able to make that interface work a lot more efficiently. Also, it’s kind of interesting. They’re using EEGs in advertising right now. Somebody is looking at an advertisement and they’re looking at what points of the brain we’re actually lighting up and are they the right places that need to be lighting up. So there’s kind of an interesting breadth into that area. But also, I think one of the biggest places we want to go into, again, is into emergency medicine Can you imagine that somebody on a battlefield has a head injury. Put the cap on, that information gets sent to a neurologist, so the minute that soldier gets to their hospital, they’re going to know what’s wrong and they’re going to be able to treat them. Another place that’s a good market for us too is on the sports side lines. Concussions and head injuries with football players has been such a big part of the public conversation lately and again, if you can on the sideline, somebody gets a hard ding on that football field and you can put our cap right on them right there on the sideline. Send that information out to a neurologist. You can know has this person got a concussion. You’re going to have that information so that you’re not sending a concussed football player back out onto the field. And we know for short term that’s really important, but also more and more concussions over time, that can affect somebody for the rest of their life. So this could be a big deal for the sports industry.

Richard Miles: 14:57

So how far away are we from a future in which say a mom at home could use this on a kid who fell off the swing set in the backyard or anyone in the general public and then they hook up the, uh, presumably a device to their smartphone… is that years off? Are we right around the corner from that?

Elena Fraser: 15:14

I think we’re a few years off from that. The cap technology itself is really, like I said, pretty easy to use and someone could use it right away, but it’s that transitionary, the cell phone design. There are some small handheld devices and one area that we would like to go into in the near future would be into telemedicine where someone could be at a rural facility where they might have a small handheld device that can be transmitted to a neurologist in a big city. So that’s something we are looking at now. I would see that happening sometime in the next few years, but then moving it beyond to the next level is going to take a little bit more technology, a few more algorithms. One thing we’d like to see is if you did have it on a cell phone, wouldn’t it be great for that parent to be able to put it on them and say this is a knower, they’ve got a concussion or they don’t. And so bringing it down to that algorithm is going to take some time and some production.

Richard Miles: 16:07

So Duncan, you’ve worked with a lot of companies that have been in a similar situation before and that the core technology is good, it’s worked, but yet it needs to break into a broader market. Describe for us what are the pitfalls or what does a company like this need to make it to the next level and what are the things that you are watching out for as potential danger areas. And then after you tell me, sell me some stock, right?

Duncan Kabinu: 16:32

I wish I knew the recipe to all this. Yeah, it’s actually so unpredictable even though you do a lot of research before you get into anything, but clearly I have noticed a lot in the market, especially from Silicone Valley standpoint. You’ll have people that have a great product but no business model or a great business model and no product and they essentially always fail and so it’s trying to find that balance. I mean that’s actually a lot more complicated than it seems because I know from talking like we mentioned Richard Allen, some of the things that I’ve learned from him is that when you’re looking at the market cap and trying to figure out what portion of that, you know, is it worth going into that market if it’s all about money and all this other stuff, so maybe there’s two sides to building a business. Are you doing it philanthropically because you’re trying to solve a problem? Hopefully, yes. Everything that we do is to solve a problem, but at the same time you got to be sustainable and make money and so how do you make money out of it. And so I find a lot of companies that struggle with those, especially from the sales standpoint, that’s where most end up failing because they don’t have a great sales strategy from what I’ve seen. And that typically requires a whole bunch of work creating channel partners and getting involved with different organizations to help promote you because you can’t do it by yourself by no means. And just the ability to understand how to scale yourself. That’s so critical because that’s what will make or break you. And most people, honestly, I believe with great ideas, don’t fail because it was a bad idea, but they fail because it ran out of money. And so if you can raise tons of money to keep you going for awhile until you break the market, you probably will be successful. But that’s typically what I’ve seen in every… pretty much, almost every startup.

Richard Miles: 18:13

Elena, as you’ve gone around talking about this idea, who has been the easiest group to convince and who has been the hardest group to convince in terms of the potential of the technology?

Elena Fraser: 18:23

At this point, we haven’t really gotten a lot of pushback from people that we consider our core audience. The one thing you have to realize is that EEG now was invented by a neurologist and an EEG tech. So they were trying to solve a problem that they were having and it’s a classic problem across the field. So when you talk to other neurologist about it, they’re like, “When can I get it? Can we do a study?” You’re talking two EEG techs, they’re like, “This would save so much time. We’d be able to do so many more procedures if this was something we had.” So far we’ve really been talking to our friends. But on the other hand, that’s who we’re selling to. We’re really fortunate. We’ve got Dr. Chris Sackalleres as one of the inventors because he is so well known in the neurology community. We put together an advisory board of absolutely… people that are tops in the neurology field that are going to help us negotiate different problems and areas that we need to go through. But when you’ve got somebody like Dr. Sackalleres on your team and he’s the group that you’re going to sell to, you’re in a pretty good position.

Richard Miles: 19:26

What about pushback or skepticism? Are there any sort of entrenched interests? Is Big EEG out there about ready to shut you down because you’re gonna totally disrupt their market, or are you taking the bread out of somebody else’s mouth in terms of an industry? Or is this simply an idea that just needs to get a little bit more exposure and currency?

Elena Fraser: 19:43

I think it’s an idea that just needs a little bit more exposure and no, actually we won’t be taking bread out of anyone’s mouth. The reason being is that if we could do more procedures than all those wonderful EEG companies out there that are…

Richard Miles: 19:56

They’ll be making more money.

Elena Fraser: 19:57

They’ll be making more money.

Richard Miles: 19:59

So you’re actually expanding their market, not limiting it.

Elena Fraser: 20:02

Exactly.

Duncan Kabinu: 20:03

Yeah, just wanted to add from earlier that my understanding was usually between the hours of midnight and 6:00 in the morning you typically do not have a technician that does EEG. So if you are in a car accident and you have some brain injury, it’s not going to be diagnosed until the following day, which is not a good thing. And most people that end up in a car accident you don’t even know you have brain damage or it may be not significant, but it becomes significant as you get older and so it’s important to have every single incident diagnosis as soon as possible and so having a cap that’s readily available, that means a paramedic… slap it on you and get that information adopted immediately and somebody can tell you what’s going on.

Elena Fraser: 20:45

Yeah, Duncan you brought up a really good point there because one of the things about a concussion is that after about 15 minutes, a concussion can actually start to not show up on an EEG anymore. The brainwaves start to level out again after about 15 minutes. So if you’re doing a regular EEG on somebody, even if you’re a right there on the scene, you would never capture it because it’s just too far away in time. So if you can capture it right then and there, EMS gets on the scene, they do it, they can capture that concussion right away.

Richard Miles: 21:19

Elena and Duncan, if people want more information about this technology, where do they go? Is there a website?

Elena Fraser: 21:23

There is a website. It’s EEG-now.com

Richard Miles: 21:28

EEG-now.com. Okay. So if they want to send their check in for a million dollars…

Elena Fraser: 21:33

Absolutely, absolutely.

Duncan Kabinu: 21:34

She’ll just give you a cell phone number. You can call her directly for that.

Richard Miles: 21:38

Yeah, you’ll be on call for that, okay. Well Elena, Duncan, thank you very much for joining me this morning. It’s been a fascinating discussion and I wish you all well and hope to have you back on the show after you’ve made it big and you’re in Silicon Valley dispensing wisdom and everything else. So…

Duncan Kabinu: 21:53

Thanks for having us.

Richard Miles: 21:53

Thanks for joining.

Elena Fraser: 21:54

Thank you so much.

Outro: 21:58

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.