The Inventivity Pod

It’s been a year since we last spoke with our vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Khoury. We discuss the different types of vaccines available, if there is a best one to take, if there are side effects or dangers to be worried about, and whether or not Covid 19 will be here for the long run. 

Dr. Peter Khoury, is the President and CEO of Ology Bioservices Inc.  He is an expert on vaccines and biologics and during his 30-year career, he has worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck, and Baxter International. Dr. Khoury has involved in international forums on vaccines, pandemic planning, and biodefense preparation, including working with the Olympic Committee.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

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

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Welcome to Radio Cade . I’m your host, James Di Virgilio. And today we are bringing you a special episode. It is part two of the, everything you need to know about vaccinations and COVID-19, it’s been almost a year since I last spoke with Dr. Peter Khoury, you can catch that episode anywhere you listen to this podcast. Dr. Peter Khoury is the president and CEO of Ology, Bioservices, he’s an expert on vaccines and biologics. And during his 30 year career, he’s worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Merck and Baxter International. Dr. Khoury has been involved in international forums on vaccines, pandemic planning, biodefense prep, including working with the Olympic Committee. Dr. Khoury, welcome back to the show.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 1:20

Thank you, James. And it’s unfortunate. We can’t do it in person. Certainly. I’m sure you, myself and others are so used to doing teleconferences and Zoom calls. So we’ll see how this goes. And hopefully you can hear me well.

James Di Virgilio: 1:35

Yes, we can. We’ll make this work last time. In our first episode, of course we were together. We were in a large room sitting far apart, but it is always great to have, of course, the person you’re talking with in front of you, like all of the listeners know and understand as well. So since the last time we spoke, a lot of things have changed, but really a lot of things that you had talked about on the first episode have essentially come to pass. You mentioned there’d be a potential small wave of infections followed later on by a much larger wave of illness that certainly happened. And then we got into the discussion, which is really going to be the crux of our discussion today of essentially game theory and viruses, which again, viruses are smart. They react, they change, they have different strands. I think a lot of the public across the world has learned about these things. And how do you deal with them? How do you stay one step ahead. So let’s open up now with that in the background and ask you sort of this big question, looking back now, what happened that maybe you didn’t foresee the first time we spoke?

Dr. Peter Khoury: 2:29

There’s a couple of things and they, I guess aren’t really biology related, but they really did make an impression on me and were something I did not foresee. The first really was the amount of compassion and caring that people show when they’re in uncertain circumstances. It did once again, show me that compassion is an inherent trait and caring helps ease the burden. A pandemic can cause think about the long hours and risks that healthcare workers put themselves in, especially at the beginning of COVID-19. And there was so much unknown in so many people being infected and to be an emergency room nurse or physician at that time, and having to put in those long hours and put yourself at risk and your family at risk and not really sure if one mask or two mask or a shield or what exactly was going to really protect you, but they came in for work day after day, policemen, firemen, emergency workers, all of them. It’s amazing for them to really take care of those who had severe cases of COVID-19. So I think that’s the first thing that I didn’t really foresee that there would be that kind of positive response. And so many people that really took up caring for others. The other thing that I didn’t foresee was the ability of people who may otherwise be intelligent to actively ignore the science and the data. And instead believe what I thought were ridiculous, conspiracy theories and false information generated by self-proclaimed experts whose credentials are measured by the number of people who follow them on social media. So I was surprised by that, that otherwise people that I thought were pretty intelligent would trust that for their information instead of the experts in the field. Actually, there is another thing, a third thing that I didn’t really foresee a year ago, and that’s really how different people’s tolerance for being inconvenienced and then their mental calculation of the risk and reward removing something that is inconvenient. So simply stated their reasoning for justifying doing something that increases their risk . I happen to live out towards one of the most populated Springs in the area. And it was amazing during the weekends of this past summer, the hundreds, if not thousands of people that would go to these Springs and no mask, no nothing, whole family. And they would put themselves at risk. And it’s hard for me because I wouldn’t do that to actually see that. And now here we have, I think at least two States, Texas, and Mississippi that are basically taking down everything, no mask, full restaurants, everything back to normal, and I’m afraid. We’re just going to see another huge wave from this. So people need to understand, yes, you’re going to be in convenience for awhile , but that’s the only way to stop spreading a virus like this. Or of course, get everyone vaccinated and protected at least to a number where you get protection of the movement of the virus amongst a population.

James Di Virgilio: 6:05

Yeah you mentioned an interesting narrative there with listening to experts and in my own field of investing, I like to tell people all the time, if you ask me questions about investing, I can speak as an expert in the past. This is why this strategy worked here are the data sizes and samples. Here’s the research done here. So we know it’s worked in the past. Here’s, what’s likely to work in the future, but if someone asked me six months from now, what exactly is going to happen in this market or this investment? The only right answer is, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. And there seems to be some confusion between experts that know how to speak on things that have occurred, that they’ve witnessed and people making prognostications, using whatever kind of modeling, either simple, or as you mentioned, an opinion that comes from your mind and gets put onto social media, prognostications are difficult, but the hard data, the data we’ve observed, the data we know to be true of course tells a different story. And that I think is what you’re looking for. Obviously in a free society for people to begin to clean to what is the truth are things that we’ve observed before. So let’s set the stage for vaccinations. In general, last time you had mentioned, there’s essentially five main ways that you can create a vaccine to overly simplify and with Corona virus with COVID, we have essentially not used all five of them. If you could kind of walk through the landscape right now for the vaccines, we have the ones that may be worked on, and then we’re going to walk through them because I know that’s a huge question area for most people. Should I get an mRNA vaccine? Should I wait? What’s the difference? Is it risky? So if you could set that landscape again, what these vaccines are, and then we’ll dive into each one and give everyone out there a good chance to grasp what the differences are.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 7:41

Sure. And I have to admit, I didn’t listen before this, to what I had said a year ago, but there are tried and true methods for making a vaccine, whether it’s a live attenuated vaccine, where they take either a virus or bacteria and they make it. So you have, what’s called a subclinical infection where you don’t really get sick from it, but your body responds as if you did. So you produce antibodies and an immune response to this modified bacteria or virus that’s been attenuated, or sometimes you just kill it and put it in hall in the person. An example is at the early days of vaccines, the very first one was a smallpox vaccine made with Cowpox. And they realize that milkmaids were not getting serious cases of smallpox it’s because they were infected with cowpox, which was a milder version. And that’s sort of like an attenuation in a sense. And so then they were able to take that and literally just bake it or whatever you want to do to kill the bacteria and use that. Then as a virus itself, you can also put it in a mixer and slice it up and you have a bunch of small pieces of a virus or a bacteria. And I say a mixer. It’s nothing like that, but you get the idea of slicing it up and in your body sees that as foreign. And it can develop an immune response to that. But the vaccines that are now on the market actually use newer technology, which really is ingenious. And unfortunately people fear mRNA’s or DNA and they think, Oh, this is genetic engineering. And they’re putting something into me and it’s integrating into my chromosomes. And I don’t know, the government can track me because of that. And it’s nothing like that. Really. If you look at it in the science behind cell biology is just amazing what each of your cells can actually do. And it’s really using that mechanism as a small factory in itself. So I think most people realize there’s a third vaccine that was just approved by the FDA, by a company. You know, them as Johnson and Johnson, they have a subsidiary called the Anson, which is out of the Netherlands, their vaccine portion of the company. And so this new vaccine just came on the market. It’s given us a single dose and the other two, which had been around now for a few months, the Pfizer in Moderna vaccines, those are really two dose vaccines. And so the Pfizer Moderna vaccine utilizes this manufacturing platform that you mentioned, which is mRNA or messenger RNA. What they do is they have this piece of genetic material that in a sense codes, it’s the recipe, for what’s called the spike protein or part of the spike protein, which is part of the Corona virus. And they encapsulate it in like this fatty particle. So it’s called a VLP. And so inside this, let’s say glob of fat, little glob of fat is this little piece of genetic code. Well you’re cells need energy. And so when they see that they use that for energy, this gets injected in your arm and your cells in your arm , see that those fatty particles and they start sort of sucking them in for energy use. And as they suck them in. And the middle is this little piece of genetic material, which is the messenger RNA once inside the cell . Well , your body has all the mechanisms to take that recipe, which is in a sense listed on this piece of messenger RNA and start producing the protein it’s encoded in it, which is that spike protein. So that spike protein is then released from yourselves and other cells. See, it may say, Hmm , that’s not part of our body that’s foreign to us. And so it generates immune response by your other cells, by your immune cells. In those remember seeing that particle after it eats it up or whatever. So it sees this spike, protein decides it’s foreign to your body. The immune cell then ingests that, but it remembers seeing it. So if you’re ever infected with a virus, your body immediately elicits an immune response. You don’t even know you were infected because antibodies instantly take up the Corona virus that you’ve been infected with. And that’s how you’re protected by that type of vaccine. Johnson and Johnson vaccine actually uses a different type of technology. They use what’s called a viral vector in what that is. It’s a virus, the one they use is called adenovirus, 26. It’s basically a virus that’s similar to what the common cold viruses is. They genetically engineer that. So it can infect cells, but it won’t replicate inside the cells. So it can’t spread throughout your body and give you any kind of infection or whatever, but it does have inside of it , the genetic instructions like that recipe again, to make that spike protein that is used to elicit an immune response. So instead of being carried in these little fat or lipid balls, the genetic instructions are injected by that weakened virus into the arm cells. And then they make that particle, which is the spike protein of the Corona virus. And that again is identified by your other cells as being foreign in your body. And it elicits the immune response. So that’s sort of the mechanisms for the three different viruses. Again, hearing that people consider that genetic engineering, you know , I just want to set the record straight. There is no modification of your genetics or of the virus genetics. So what is happening is, as I said, it’s truly amazing. If you think about that, the cells in your body, which have all the machinery to make any kind of protein, it has the recipe for that’s what’s included on your chromosomes are all these recipes for proteins that make your eyes a certain color and your hair, a certain color, et cetera, all it’s doing is simply introducing a new recipe, which either is delivered by a harmless virus that won’t replicate or that’s provided in like this little energy bar, these little lipid fat balls, and that recipe delivered uses the cell machinery to make the part of the spike protein that causes the immune response. Sorry, that’s a long-winded answer, James.

James Di Virgilio: 14:41

No, it’s a good start. So mRNA founded in 1990 or so essentially by a Hungarian scientist, she had this novel idea and then all the way up until COVID-19 was never used or approved. Should there be concern that it now for the first time is being used in a vaccination that is going to be used worldwide. If it’s never been used in the real world before.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 15:04

Now, it really should not be in the reason as is it does not modify your genetics at all. It literally is just, as I said, use the mechanism of your cell to produce a protein. I’m trying to think if there’s any other comparable in either veterinary medicine and nothing’s coming right to mind. But as I said, it’s not genetic engineering by any means. It’s literally putting a small piece of messenger RNA, which is normally in your body. So your chromosomes, which are DNA are transcribed into messenger RNA, which is read to make the proteins, this just skips the DNA part and goes right to the messenger RNA.

James Di Virgilio: 15:47

So we don’t have to worry as the public, as far as we can tell scientifically that this is going to turn into something that’s going to alter body chemistry cause sickness down the road have any longterm effects. As far as anyone can tell. There’s nothing about these MRNs current vaccines that we should be afraid of.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 16:03

Right. And it’s new technology. You really can’t tell the future. All indications are that it’s very safe in very efficacious. The amount of clinical studies that go behind products like this before they’re released is truly tremendous. I think that there would have been clear indications as they were either studying this technology early on or as it gets further on and goes through the phase one phase two and finally phase three clinical studies that there would have been warning signs that there were problems, but certainly none have arisen yet with this technology. And if you think about it, theoretically, there really is very little, if anything that could rise from having this done, but you never know until time’s passed.

James Di Virgilio: 16:55

Right? The famous French economist in the 1840s, Frederick [inaudible] would talk a lot about unintended consequences of whatever you put in place in society. There are always unintended consequences that you cannot foresee, but scientifically it is good to note like you’re mentioning as far as anyone can tell scientifically this is not injecting a large risk into your own body. It is not altering genetic code, as you mentioned. Um , and that that’s , that’s something to hang on. So now let’s talk about something more nuanced. So we have two mRNA vaccinations that are available. Obviously big advantages are it’s much faster to bring them to market logistically before we get into the other ones. Are there any hurdles with an mRNA vaccination logistically with regards to freezing or refrigeration or transport that maybe would give a more traditional vaccination at advantage and delivery and rollout ?

Dr. Peter Khoury: 17:41

Yeah, actually there is. I know with the mRNA vaccines, as far as the fats surrounding it, the VLP structured itself needs to be kept at low temperatures. So would that Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the storage in shipping was between minus 80 centigrade minus 60 centigrade. So that’s minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit to minus one 76 Fahrenheit. So that caused a lot of trouble at first for States or for injections sites and clinics because they didn’t have those special freezers. We have them because of the work we do here, but they’re just not readily available. People don’t keep these in physician offices , et cetera. But what they did do is immediately started looking at temperature changes and how long the vaccine in a sense could survive at regular refrigeration temperature or in a freezer, regular freezer. So the FDA did ease up on those requirements, but even now that vaccine still only can be held in a refrigerator for five days and then must be used within six hours of being thawed and diluted. So there is a small window, and it’s because of those VLP that ball of fatty acid , that carries, that, that makes it. So you have to have careful handling per both the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which uses the adenovirus actually can be kept at refrigerator temperatures for up to three months. So it’s far easier to store and ship because of that. Another difference between these one, as I mentioned is a one dose vaccine and that’s the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in the Pfizer and Moderna, the vaccines are both given as a two dose series. Obviously giving one dose is much easier since there’s no follow-up visits, which involves making sure the person in the vaccine are there at the right time for dose number two. So coordinating all of that goes away, where if you do have to come back for a second dose with the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine, you obviously have to coordinate it. So the person and the doses they’re at the appropriate time to administer at , but there are clinical studies were done a little differently. So when you look at the efficacy of Pfizer and Moderna, those vaccines had a rate of effectiveness during the clinical trials of 94 to 95%. So that means that they vaccinated people and they looked for antibodies production. In those people. It makes sense . Every hundred people that we vaccinated basically 95% over, I think it was four weeks had developed immunity by , in contrast with the Johnson and Johnson or the Yansen vaccine, they said it was 85% effective against severe disease and a 100% effective at preventing death. So during their clinical trials, not one person who got the vaccine. And I think there were 44,000 died from COVID-19. And I think 100% didn’t even go to a hospital. There were some people that did have severe disease about 15%, and there were people that had what they call moderate to severe illness. So that would be in a sense they were home, not feeling well, et cetera. So it’s hard to compare apples to oranges. In this case, since one was a two dose vaccine looking purely at efficacy and production of antibodies in the other was a one dose looking at severity of illness. So getting either vaccine is a great thing to do. If you get the one dose vaccine, you don’t have to go back for a second dose, but there is some chance that if you’re exposed to COVID, you may get a mild illness from COVID. And in fact, there’s a lower chance of only 15% that you could have a severe illness from that. We don’t know if you’ll die from it, but for the 44,000 people they had in their clinical studies, I think it was 44,000. None of them died from illness. So I think those really are the main differences. There’s a little difference as far as how quickly you’re protected that Johnson and Johnson vaccine works about two weeks after people get vaccinated with Madonna and Pfizer people don’t get full protection until about two weeks after the second dose. And the second dose is usually three to four weeks after the first dose. So from the very first dose, you’re talking five to six weeks after the first dose and you’re fully protected.

James Di Virgilio: 22:53

Let’s bring this down to the granular level now and get to a decision point. So let’s assume, and I’m going to throw a fourth one in here with Novavax, which may or may not come through, but it’s another different type vaccine just to give us the thought experiment of being, let’s say late August, you haven’t had a vaccination yet. And you have this choice in front of you. You essentially have the mRNA, which you’ve mentioned is Moderna and Pfizer. You have Johnson and Johnson, and then you have Novavax, which is going to be one of the most traditional and time-tested vaccinations. If it makes it again, we’re speculating here, just to give an idea of what this may look like, and you have a choice. Does it matter Dr. Khoury, which one you choose? Is it simply saying, you know, it doesn’t really matter. Take either one of these for convenience or one you can follow through on, or is there a more educated decision that needs to be made if you’re facing a choice between these let’s call them three different vaccine deployments,

Dr. Peter Khoury: 23:44

Right? Of course, a choice like that is personal on whether people want it to be vaccinated or not. I would say that the first hurdle is get vaccinated. There is no doubt that vaccination protects you when it comes to the choice. And there are so many people in videos, out of people, literally on their death bed, dying of COVID by themselves, in a hospital saying, I wish I had not gone to that party. I wish I had done this or that. You may think you’re otherwise healthy, but you’re playing Russian roulette with something that impacts people in very different ways. Even though they think that I’ve never been sick in my life, this couldn’t impact me. You would be surprised at the number of younger people and other people that get this disease and either suffer long-term consequences from that, or truly die within a few weeks of contracting the virus. The question is if you had the choice of vaccines, which one based on the technology used would be better. I always tell everyone if it’s been reviewed by the FDA in the United States or the other one is the Korean FDA. Korea has an incredibly competent FDA based really off the US FDA and both are very, very good at looking at the risk and rewards of every vaccine, European union, also very particular and conscientious about looking at the impact of vaccines. So I would say that if it’s been approved by the FDA in the United States, it’s a safe and effective product . So if Novavax does get approval, I would not hold back at all on getting that vaccine versus either Moderna Pfizer or the J&J products. All of them are winners. If you get at , if you’re needle shy, obviously you may want the one dose versus the two dose. So there may be some advantages mentally for you there. If you want to make sure the odds of being protected the best look at efficacy after two doses, it’s much higher than it would be after one dose. But again, all of them are safe, effective vaccines, and the technology makes very little difference in this case.

James Di Virgilio: 26:12

So the take home there is assuming that they all have FDA approval and you have that choice. The reality is you don’t need to spend a ton of time researching which one to get, because the odds are, all of them, of course are going to work for you. And there’s just different sort of personal mechanisms. Like you mentioned one dose or two things like that. But right now there’s not a significant difference that should have you necessarily favoring one over the other. If you’re looking to get a vaccine.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 26:37

Right. Just based on the last sentence you mentioned, I’m not sure what the composition is of the vaccine that may come out later on this year, but I know the Moderna, the Pfizer, the J&J vaccines do not have adjutants in them. So in they’re not produced like an egg. So if you have an allergy to eggs or egg protein, it’s no issue with these vaccines. If you have been issue , there’s what are called adjuvants, they help boost the immune system with certain vaccines. None of these have this. So they’re pretty pure vaccines. Some of the older technology you’ve had to use either a chicken, eggs, or hens eggs to produce the product. I think the one you had mentioned is a Viro cell product . So it is not produced in, in hens eggs, but some of that older technology does use adjutants and other things, which is that chemical treatment. So some people have had reactions to that in the past.

James Di Virgilio: 27:39

To look for individual things that maybe you yourself have an allergy to, or , or some reaction to, but all in all, if it gets FDA approval at this stage, it’s gone through the rigors. And if you want to get a vaccination again, no need to sparse out exactly which one to get. The differences are not going to be, as you mentioned significant, despite the fact that they are in fact different delivery mechanisms. Now let’s talk about different variants. This has obviously gotten a lot of news play here. When we first talked, we talked about how stable COVID-19 was. Uh , we also talked about, of course, the fact that virus has changed and that we could expect COVID-19 to change. We just didn’t know how yet, given what you’ve seen with the variants . And we know we’ve seen numbers, Johnson and Johnson is almost 70% effective against variants. Each one of these is a different number. What is this variant landscape look like to you? And I know you don’t see the future, but as of right now, if I get a vaccine tomorrow, do I have decent protection against the variants we’re aware of right now?

Dr. Peter Khoury: 28:32

Yeah . It’s important that people get vaccinated as quickly as possible because the quicker we can shut down the circulation of this, the chances of it mutating in doing what I had talked about is drifting and shifting gets eliminated. So through replication, that genetics change is virus adapt to their surroundings, just like humans do. If you look back at Neanderthals and us you realize that certain people are born with traits that allow them to survive better. In certain circumstances, that’s true with virus and bacteria. It just happens thousands and thousands of times faster than we replicate. So literally in 24 hours, virus have gone through 10,000 fold replications where humans takes nine months to birth out a baby. And it literally happens so fast that these genetic changes in that adaptation to your surrounding can happen very quickly. And as long as those changes have little impact on the spike protein, that’s a protein has been utilized by all manufacturers that I can think of as the target for the immune response, then really vaccinating now should protect you against most of the variants. The variants, it wouldn’t protect against would be ones that have totally shifted away from that current spike protein configuration. So if there’s a little drifting away that protection will go down a little bit. Some people won’t be protected as well, but if there’s a major shift, it doesn’t provide any protection. Now you don’t know if that’s going to happen. I talked to other people that are experts in the field, and some believe what’ll happen is this’ll become like the yearly flu vaccine that will be able to see the shifting happening in other parts of the world. And people will just change the messenger RNA or whatever it is that’s coding for the latest variant that’s circulating around the world. And then a few years later, if it changes again, you need to get another dose of vaccine against that. I’m hoping we don’t have to do that. I’m hoping that we’re able to shut this down as quickly as possible and make it just a one-time pandemic event and basically eliminate it from the world soon.

James Di Virgilio: 31:03

And that’s a great point. And that’s something again, that wisdom would say, no one knows the answer to that question, but certainly we hope that COVID is not here to stay like influenza or influenza has some mutation strains that become very famous, like the Hong Kong flu in the sixties, for example, right. That’s influenza just a different strand. It’s still here today. Obviously it’s just not that significant bumps. So that’s a , we’re all hoping for, as you mentioned, and of course, like you said, one of the best ways to make sure that happens is if everyone does get vaccinated faster than you’re going to give this virus less of a chance to make these game theory changes, to look at what humans are doing and respond and say, okay, well, I’ll do this to try to keep myself alive. Essentially you’re reducing its options. And if you’re doing this options further enough, it may just totally be gone. Of course, that is over simplification . So here’s a question for you. What happened to the flu in this flu season? The CDC records indicate that the flu is essentially non-existent despite about a million tests. You’ve had very few positive results at all. Hospital admissions are down to levels, never seen before. What does influenza and COVID have to do with each other? What does this mean for the future? Any thoughts on that?

Dr. Peter Khoury: 32:10

What we may be seeing is just impacted by the distance. People keep from each other and making sure they’re washing their hands, wearing masks, all of that impact flu also the transmission of flu. So I think flu is still here. There are cases, but people have become very conscientious about spreading viral diseases during this time. I think once the unmasking happens and people are back to what we consider a normal life, I think you’ll see dlu come back to the levels that it was before.

James Di Virgilio: 32:50

Yeah. It’s an interesting thing to follow, obviously, because one of the major fears was, you know, what if you had COVID and influenza stacked on top of each other, and we don’t know yet how much these things co-mingle. Do you get one and not the other, can you get both in States like Florida, which had been largely open, you still have extremely low or non-existent really statistically influenza cases. There’s just a lot that we will unpack obviously in the future. All right . Let’s ask you this big question before we talk about what you were working on to close up today’s episode. So let’s put you in hindsight mode a year ago. If you knowing what you know now had the power to implement one change to impact the outcome of what we’ve gone through in the past year or so, what would that change have been?

Dr. Peter Khoury: 33:30

Hmm , I think if truly there was a chance of getting all governments in the world together. I mean, that would potentially never happen. But I think in hindsight, if they were able to take a year and take a look at where we are now and the impact that it’s had on people’s lives. So the morbidity, the mortality, the impact on economics, all of that. And you could take all the decision-makers to this time and look back. I think all of them would agree that if we literally shut the world down for a week, made everyone stay home, put in very, very serious measures, whether it was a week or even two weeks that we could have stopped this right at the beginning, it literally wouldn’t have been able to become what it did. And if you look back at countries going to use Korea as an example where they did exactly that, or China or India, here’s a country with over a billion people and boy did an impact the number of cases they had much less than we have, but it’s an inconvenience obviously to do it. And if we had done something like that worldwide for a week or two, of course, people would have been inconvenience without knowing in the future of the impact or what that could prevent from happening. So looking back and having that hindsight now it’s nothing I could have done alone or whatever, but that would have been my advice to get as many people to stay home and watch Netflix or whatever you want to do for two weeks. Just get ready, implemented day that it starts in the day and the day it ends and enforce it .

James Di Virgilio: 35:10

Yeah. It’s so interesting that the topic for a whole different podcast, like you mentioned, the hindsight hindsight analysis is always undefeated because you have information you don’t have. And as you mentioned, the question then becomes, how many days is it? How long is it? What if it doesn’t work the way we think it works? So then what happens is there’s a lot of decision points, but that’s why it’s a hindsight question is knowing what we now know that it did spread, it was highly contagious. It was going to go all over the world. Of course, as with any virus, if you can isolate you reduce the spread, right? It’s like playing tag as a kid. If you’re too fast and they can’t touch you and tag you, then you’re not going to be it. And so , uh , that’s an oversimplification, but that’s a good point about potentially the future. What do you do the next time this happens and what happens if it does fade away and its own. Okay. Will you said we lost 14 days, 14 days, certainly a lot better than a year. So lots of interesting thoughts there, let’s bring this right back down to what you and your company are working on. Tell us a little bit about an update. Last time we spoke, you are working on something COVID related. Tell us what’s going on with that.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 36:07

Yeah, so we work with the US government on a couple projects, specifically with the department of defense to help protect military personnel and war fighters. And so we manufacture a vaccine for COVID-19 and we manufacture what are called monoclonal antibodies, which are also utilized to protect and treat, actually treat COVID infections. Both of these are in clinical studies. Currently we are expanding here in the Gainesville area. We’re in Alachua, we’re doubling our capacity . So the construction is underway for this. And I think it’s a great opportunity for this region because of University of Florida, some of the great research that goes on at that university in gene therapy and cell therapy, and in vaccines, it makes a lot of sense for us to make an investment, expand our workforce. So we’ve almost doubled our workforce. Since I last spoke to you, we’re over 300 employees during 2021, we expect to expand by over a hundred more employees. So there’s a lot happening here. All of that, very cutting edge science and all use to provide protection against infectious diseases.

James Di Virgilio: 37:34

And let me bridge a gap here, because this could be maybe the best way to end this podcast. You obviously are an established expert in this field. You’re an expert on viruses on vaccinations, on deliveries. You’ve done it for your whole career. If you saw something that you thought was risky or reckless or not good for society or the population I’m imagining you would be standing on the rooftop, shouting this out, don’t take this vaccination, don’t do this. This is not safe. That would be correct.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 38:01

It’s funny, James, because those that know me well, including our employees here, know that I speak the truth, I have great courage of conviction about what I say. My father was a United Methodist minister. My mom was a nurse that took care of some of the riskiest patients and both were just devoted people to what they did. And I think one of the most important things for any human being is their own dignity and not being able to stand up for what you think is right. And when you see something that, especially if you’re a professional and you know, information, not raising your hand saying that there’s an issue in something’s wrong is not good at all. So it’s not part of my being to ever cover anything up or whatever. And that’s a philosophy actually of our business here. I attend every one of our new employee orientations. And I tell them that everyone has the right to stop the process. If you see something being wrong done, or you’ve done something wrong immediately, we will stop. We’ll look at it, figure a fix and find a way of putting a parameter around it. So it never happens again. That’s all I care about. No one’s getting fired. You’re not going to be yelled at. We’re going to find a way. So it doesn’t happen again and fix what happened. That’s all there is to it.

James Di Virgilio: 39:27

Yeah. That’s such a great commitment. And I think that perhaps is something that’s really gotten lost during this pandemic, is that not everyone is on two sides of offense fighting with each other and not every expert one way or the other is out there just trying to run a political agenda. It’s safe to say that many people are doing exactly what you said. Hey, if I think this science looks good or this looks good, I’m going to say this is safe. And if it’s not, I would say the opposite. And perhaps that bridge, as we mentioned, is something to move forward as a free society in the future. We’re looking for truth via evidence and data. And recognizing, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of people with that, very commitment. You’re simply trying to follow the evidence and say, Hey, look, I think this is what’s best for you and your family. You’re my neighbor. I love you. I care for you. And this is why I’m saying that. So a wonderful stuff as always, thank you for being with us. He is Dr. Peter Khoury, the president and CEO of Ology, Bioservices. You can find them on the web with a quick Google search. And of course, as we mentioned before, your illustrious bio, an expert on vaccines and biologics, and certainly one of our favorite guests here on the Radio Cade podcast. Thank you for spending a considerable amount of time with us today, Dr. Khoury.

Dr. Peter Khoury: 40:29

Always my pleasure, James, thank you.

James Di Virgilio: 40:31

And for Radio Cade I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 40:35

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

The current COVID-19 tests are not perfectly accurate, which causes several issues with managing the viral spread.  Epidemiological data suggests that 1/4 of all COVID-19 transmission occurs through asymptomatic carriers, up to 14 days before any symptoms are shown. Dr. Vanaja Ragavan, Founder, President, and CEO of Aviana Molecular Technologies, LLC has developed a more accurate test that can lead to earlier detection as well as providing information on the viral load. Wide-scale testing and earlier detection can make a significant difference in achieving positive outcomes and saving lives.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

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

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Welcome to another edition of Radio Cade . I’m your host, James Di Virgilio. And today we’re going to talk about detecting Corona virus . All of us are familiar with the variety of tests that are being done right now, but none of them are able to detect very important things like viral load, which makes them less accurate than we’d like to see. My guest today is Dr. Vanaja Ragavan. She is the founder, president and CEO of Aviana Molecular technologies, and she’s working on something that could be very impactful for the world’s fight against coronavirus . Dr. Ragavan welcome to the show.

Vanaja Ragavan: 1:13

Thank you, James.

James Di Virgilio: 1:14

Now tell us what it is you’re working on and how it’s going to help us in the fight against curving Corona virus .

Vanaja Ragavan: 1:20

Thank you so much for having us on. We are developing a chip based diagnostic system to be able to detect Corona virus so we can detect a lot of different biomarkers and viruses and bacteria. However, at this point, we’ve pivoted to be able to use our technology to detect COVID-19. And the nature of our technology is based on a radio frequency chip, and it works like a radar system, really in a small little space. One of the advantages of our system is it’s called a mass detector it detects the amount of mass that’s sitting on top of the chip. And because of that, we have the unique ability to be able to actually distinguish the presence of the whole virus or would be called the infectious virus in a clinical sample. So most of the other diagnostic tests detect either the internal makeup of the virus called the RNA, the genetic makeup of the virus, or it detects one of the many proteins that are found in the virus. Most of them actually detect a protein that’s found inside the virus called a nuclear capsid protein. And we know a couple of tests that look at the spike protein as a detection, but those are small proteins compared to the whole virus. And although they can be good surrogates, they don’t give you a direct analysis of the infectious nature of the virus in a particular person or in a group of people or in a population. So we can do that. We can do that at an individual level and because our system is based on cellular communication, it’s in our DNA, so to speak. To be part of the cellular communication internet, we can actually add further data on tracing and population-based studies. So we’re hoping that this technology can help us at this time in detecting the whole virus, the infectious virus, and give us some idea of the viral load. And we’re working towards all that data.

James Di Virgilio: 3:14

Now, what is the advantage of having a more accurate coronavirus tests right now? It seems like a lot of people would think, well, look, I go get tested . I’m positive or I’m negative. What’s the advantage of your solution?

Vanaja Ragavan: 3:26

Well, let’s take an example. For instance, if one of our technicians actually developed coronavirus COVID 19 , and we wanted to know when she can come back to work, the current tests tell us whether this virus is present or a part of the virus is present, but it doesn’t tell us is she going to be able to transmit this virus? Because we don’t know the actual viral count that she possesses. So if we can detect that, we can have a much more accurate picture of when she has the virus and when she’s free of the virus. So that’s the position that we can bring to the marketplace. There are studies that have shown, for instance, at the RNA can hang around for several days, two weeks after the infection is no longer present, and those are correlated with actual culture of the virus, but that takes several days. And so if you rely purely on the RNA test , sometimes it can take a while to clear the body to clear it, but we can have a much more precise tool that tells us whether the person still has an infection or free of an infection. The other thing is that it’s been shown that this virus can live in the presence of the vaccine. It just doesn’t cause a severe disease. So shedding of the virus in somebody who has been vaccinated is still an open question and we believe we can add some real value in that particular circumstance too .

James Di Virgilio: 4:45

So now if you imagine you mentioned an employer, but perhaps a sports team, which has gotten a lot of press in the past year, they have 20 athletes on the team and they’re testing. And right now, if you test positive, you might be out for 14 days or they’ll test you every three days. Uh, but like you mentioned, you could keep showing positive test results and potentially not really have a viral load at all, or the opposite is also true. So in your solution, you would get a much more accurate result where you could then confidently send the employee or the athlete back into action, knowing this person is fine because of the heightened accuracy right?

Vanaja Ragavan: 5:17

Exactly. And we’re sort of focusing a lot on openings , um , colleges and doing the studies on students because they know if somebody’s positive, they quarantine for 14 days. And that’s pretty awful for a student on a campus to stay within their rooms for 14 days. So we can give a much precise estimate of when that person is no longer infectious or doesn’t need to be quarantined. So we can add some precision to this very qualitative world. And that’s kind of what we’re hoping to do.

James Di Virgilio: 5:46

Yeah. And that would obviously be welcome, I think for everyone and anyone who’s had to quarantine, as you mentioned, that kind of isolating experience, is this something that we can use now? Can I go use your test, your solution right now?

Vanaja Ragavan: 5:59

No, we’re not quite ready yet. We’re collecting all the data for the FTS approvals . So we’re working with some pretty important consultants and so on. So when we get the data together, we’ll be happy to let you know James and the Cade Museum. And we’ll be happy to let you know when we launch.

James Di Virgilio: 6:16

Do you have any loose timeframe. I know you can’t know for sure, obviously, but do you have any ideas like this year, next year, longer?

Vanaja Ragavan: 6:23

Well, we’re hoping to do it by the end of this quarter or the beginning of next quarter. We’ve solved a lot of the problems with the technology had, we’ve had some difficult situations. For instance, I need to measure the virus viral load, and it’s been really hard for us to get the inactive virus. Most of the methods used for inactivating the virus that we’ve tested, we’ve tested about six or seven of them seems to destroy the ability of the virus to bind to our system. It destroys the spike protein, which is kind of what we’re binding to our system. So it’s been a really difficult task to try and find this nag , the virus mostly because the whole aspect of the scientific basis of this virus is still in its early stages. And so we’re trying to work around that system with our consultants.

James Di Virgilio: 7:09

And at this point, given the science, you’ve done the research you’ve done. It sounds like you feel pretty confident that this solution, not only will it be released rather soon, but that you’ve gotten over the hurdle of proving the concept, right? It sounds like you feel like the concepts proven this is doing what you think is going to do. Now you’re at the one yard line about to kind of finish the task. Is that about an accurate summation of where you are ?

Vanaja Ragavan: 7:29

Yes, I think so. We’ve done a lot of studies on clinical samples and we’ve shown we can detect the virus. We’re going to dig into it further and do some more science on it because I think we want to be a very scientifically based company. And we’re working with some of our investigators to determine the correlation between our tests and actual viral culture in the lab. And so we’re going to be continuing to do some of that work for both publication and for the scientific community and the medical community. But our basic test shows that we are detecting the virus. And the way we know that is because our system, the one we’re using is based on an acoustic wave, detects a mass about the size of the virus. And we have not been able to detect the protein we’re detecting the virus. So we’re pretty shored and similar systems have been used to detect viruses successfully. And that’s in the public literature too.

James Di Virgilio: 8:22

And it’s your knowledge at this point in time, right? You would be the only, let’s say it’s a quarter now or two quarters from now in 2021, you would be the only solution out there that would be doing what you’re doing.

Vanaja Ragavan: 8:33

We believe so, James, you know, it’s really hard to know exactly who’s working on what, but we believe we are. Yes.

James Di Virgilio: 8:39

That’s exciting stuff. Now let’s take ourselves into the future. And imagine now that this is actually available and I’m able to use it, what does it look like? Am I going to my local doctor? Am I going to like a pharmacy nearby? Am I using it myself? How is this going to work in the real world once it’s launched?

Vanaja Ragavan: 8:53

Well , as I mentioned earlier, the first aspect of it will be in a laboratory, but while most of the other studies take many hours to a day to get the results back, once we get the sample into the laboratory, we can determine it within 15, 20 minutes and the results can be sent back electronically to your physician or your carrier. What we’ll do initially is how the nasal swab that’s done sent to a laboratory that can do the testing and send the results back to the provider or the patient. But eventually what we want to do is to do the clinical studies and the technical studies that are needed to become what’s called a clear waiver. And that allows us to take our system to the point of care. And so the test can be done and the patient notified within 15, 20 minutes. So that’s our ultimate aim though. That’ll be our second step in the process because according to the FDA, we need to do some more studies to show that the technology can be worked at a point of care. So we have to do some added studies and we’ll be doing that as soon as we launched the laboratory system, consultants have told us that it’s better to do it in a two-step process, even with the FDA. So the FDA gets familiar with our technology, and then we do the clear waiver studies afterwards. So they recommended a two-step process.

James Di Virgilio: 10:11

Okay. So right now it’s July, we’re imagining, and I go into my doctor’s office and this is just like a normal test. They’d give me and say, we’re going to run some tests. We’ll send it to the lab. We’ll give you your results. But in the next step, really the one I’m sure you’re most excited about is going to be the one where I go in my doctor or my physician’s assistant, or perhaps down the road, even someone else that has maybe no medical training, if we’re getting weighed on the road is able to immediately give me the test and then tell me my results before I even leave. Right. 10 or 15 minutes later.

Vanaja Ragavan: 10:39

That’s our aim. Yes.

James Di Virgilio: 10:41

Okay. So now that we have the idea, which obviously is very exciting, that’s something that I think we can all imagine would really help with getting a more accurate way to deal with Corona virus. But let’s dig a little bit into how you got here, the origin story. So you went to Harvard, you went to NYU, you’re a physician. How did you wind up spending five or six years or even 10 years? I think in your case researching this idea, how did that transition go from practicing physician to entrepreneur innovator, and then someone who’s on this path?

Vanaja Ragavan: 11:09

It’s an interesting life journey. So after I finished medical school and residency and fellowship and all that stuff, I actually ended up working at the food and drug administration. As a medical officer its completely serendipitous. I went to DC, I needed a job and I found one at the FDA and then ended up just loving the work that I did. I have a lot of respect for the FDA. I think they are a highly scientific organization that provide probably some of the best reviews in the world on drugs and devices and attracted they’re so well respected that many countries around the world base their entire approval process on the FDA. So it was really thrilling to be there, to be able to help large groups of people rather than an individual patient. And from there, I went on to work at a global pharmaceutical companies. I worked in three large ones. I worked at Wyatt, which is now part of Pfizer at the ventures , which is part of Sanofi-Aventis and Novartis, where I led the therapeutic areas globally. And then eventually I ended up going to a startup in Philadelphia and then I became, what’s called an angel investor. So I joined a group in New York called Golden Seeds. And I started a company before, which had exited. And so I was able to take some of that money and put it into angel investment. When I joined a group called Golden Seeds and our mission was to invest in women owned and women run companies. And I became part of their life science due diligence teams. And as part of that, I came across this technology. It was presented by one of the women that came to present to us. And I thought that the technology was really interesting. So I founded a company around it, very unusual technology didn’t really know much about it when I started at, of course, since then, I figured out that it isn’t in fact unusual it’s based on radio frequency chips, as I mentioned. So we tried for a few years in Philadelphia to make this technology work, but eventually found that the most advanced smart device technology was actually in Orlando. It had been developed at the University of Central Florida for NASA. And t hey put in about 10 years of work into it to develop what’s called a passive wireless system to go on the space shuttle. What we did is we licensed it from UCF and then we then further advanced it into a sensor for human diagnostics and animal diagnostics, and also other areas like r esearch b ased diagnostics. And so we’ve been working on that for about four or five years and through the work of some of our brilliant scientists, we were able to solve a lot of problems. As you know, w e’re based on r adio f requency chips, which are found in cellular communication. And they’re used as acoustic filters in those systems. Y ou probably got about 20 of them in your cell phone, but we had to adapt it to biological use. That’s not easy because as you know, electronics and liquids, don’t like each other very much, but we figured out how to adapt the system successfully. And we had done exploratory work on diseases like Lyme disease and Influenza. And then when Coronavirus hit, we thought we were an ideal system to detect the virus because we had already had some experience with Influenza. And so we decided to pivot to COVID. And so w e’ve been working on this since about October a nd now h ave shown a proof of concept that it works. And now we’re doing our studies to go to the FDA with our first product.

James Di Virgilio: 14:32

And so you’re pivoting. It’s not really a pivot in your case, actually, when you’re just deciding, Hey, our technology can also work for detecting Corona virus, perhaps walk us through at a very high level, what that looks like, how do you get a sample of the virus? How do you test something like that? Like what does that actually look like in the lab? Most of us hear these of this companies testing this , or they’re working on this vaccine, but take us behind the curtain here backstage to what it was like to have to try to apply your technology to the coronavirus .

Vanaja Ragavan: 15:01

So we had to focus on getting the right reagents . We found out that one of the critical aspects of our system is that we need to add a binding agent to a chip basically. And it’s a very tiny little chip. Actually, the volumes needed are in the microliters. So we had to find the reagents that would work. We found out from our previous experience that this system works very well. When the affinity agents like an antibody has a very high affinity for its biomarker . In this case, it would be the SARS cov two virus. So we had to find the antibody. We had to figure out how to put it on the chip. So it bound what’s called covalently, which means that it’s a tight binding. And then we had to test it with the virus itself in order to determine the output. Now, our output is it’s really interesting. It’s an electronic readout because it’s an electronic readout. And because the affinity reaction is so rapid, our system reacts within seconds really to the binding of this antibody with its virus. And so we had to adapt our software in order to determine the best method to detect this particular reaction, the antibody and the virus. So, you know , we took a little bit of time doing that. We also had to prove that we could detect it many times. And so now we’ve collected clinical sample data. I would say with about, I don’t know , a hundred samples to show that we can determine. And then we had to tweak our software to be able to do the optimal determination. And so now what we have to do is we have to actually do the samples needed for the FDA approval. And that’s kind of what we’re launching on. So the way the system works is that you would take a sample in this case, it could be a swab of the nasal pharynx. I don’t know if your listeners have had a COVID tests , but there’s usually a very long stick with a swab at the end and they try to get it from the back of the throat. So we would take that in because it’s a dry swab, we need to put a liquid into our system . So we put that into a buffer of some kind. Then a small sample of the buffer is removed and added to our chip. And then we have a reader that actually reads what’s going on electronically. And so we will add a graphical user interface that gives instructions on what the user has to do to determine whether the virus is present or not. And in addition to that, what we’re trying to do in our first instance is to look at what we call a viral load. I mean, does the patient have a high, low, or medium viral load or no virus at all? So we’re trying to make those determinations at the same time. So really once a sample is put on the system, the whole system can do the detection in about 5 to 10 minutes, and then the readout will be provided on the reader on a screen. And then the data is provided to the provider or to the patient.

James Di Virgilio: 17:59

And you just described the process really well. Right? What was it like when you first had that moment that, Oh, this is working like we’ve made this happen? Like this is actually doing what we want it to do. What was that like for you and your team?

Vanaja Ragavan: 18:11

I think it was really thrilling. So we have a contract with the Air Force to develop this for the Air Force. And so we had to provide the Air Force with an early milestone where we repeated the sample several times. And when we put that report together, it was approved by the Air Force. That was a really big thrill for us. We were able to do repeated studies and send it to them. So it was an external validation that our system is working. And so we fulfilled our first milestone for the Air Force. And we also told the Air Force, we would ruggedized the system. That means that we take the reader and if we drop it from different levels and so on, it still survives. And we’ve just finished that. And so we’ve shown that the system is pretty rugged because if you’ve got a warfighter carrying something like this to the field, it needs to be rugged. And so now we’re doing our final studies to demonstrate how well it works against the standard laboratory tests . So it was a lot of work. We have a great team really, that is sort of half electronics, half biology. And I think it’s really interesting to combine these two totally very in fields into one system because we can take advantage of both fields of use the electronics part of it gives us incredible ability to do data analysis, data, distribution, artificial intelligence, and the biology aspect of it allows us to go into lots of different areas that probably could not have been done without a portable system like this. For instance, traumatic brain injury. Somebody has a problem in the field. We can take this and make the diagnosis at the time of the injury or other infections. And so we see a lot of potential for this technology because of the nice marriage of electronics and biology.

James Di Virgilio: 19:55

Yeah, its not a one-stop shop like we’re spending all of our time today talking about coronavirus, because that is obviously the topic of the day. But as you mentioned, this is going to have wide ranging effects. If it is in fact able to do what you want it to do, especially down the road. If you dream up a world where I could take my cell phone as a layman and potentially use a technology like this to detect things that would affect me and my family down the road, but let’s take this in a different direction for a second. So obviously your company has tremendous human capital. You have all sorts of smart people doing all sorts of collaborative things to come together, to create synergy, to craft what you’ve crafted. It’s one of the neatest things about a free idea marketplace, a place where we can come together and share expertise. On the other side of things, you have to have physical capital, you have to have money and resources. How were you able to maintain funding as you’re spending all this time researching and gathering ideas and testing ideas to get yourself to the point to you’re at now.

Vanaja Ragavan: 20:48

So we’ve done primarily private investors, mostly small investors. A lot of physicians have funded our company, which is good because they see value in it. And then most recently we received a large contract from the Air Force to do this work. So we’re still looking for funding. Money is always in need. And so we keep looking for further funding, but that’s kind of how we’ve been funded really at this point.

James Di Virgilio: 21:11

And if we imagine a rollout here, logistically, if you’re able to begin rolling things out, quarter one, quarter two, quarter three of 2021, whenever that is, what kind of distribution scale are we talking about? We’ll just a couple of hospitals or doctors have this. Are you going to be able to send this all over the place? I mean, how many units essentially are we thinking of being able to put out into the world?

Vanaja Ragavan: 21:29

Actually, the interesting part of it is the manufacturing, because these chips are made in the billions every year, literally about 2, 3 billion a year. We have a built-in system for expansion, which is really good. And the electronics, as you know, is something that can be done pretty much anywhere in the world. We happen to focus in on Germany because we found that a lot of our base technology is well-established there. So our fabrication system is in dressed in, and they’ll be doing all of our worldwide fabrication. They will probably use facilities elsewhere too , but they’ll coordinate that. And our electronics is also made in Germany, in Munich. That is the heart of the electronics, but the other electronic components will be designed and put together in the US so because both the chip is commonly available on the electronics is commonly available. That is not a rate limiting factor for us on the biology side. On the cartridge side, we’ve had to build some cartridges that work with the system because the system is sensitive to external pressures. That’s why it was developed for NASA to be able to detect external strain and stress on the spaceship and temperature. So we have to account for that with our cartridge and with our software. And so we are working with some pretty high level companies in the US to solve those problems. And I think at that point, then we’ll have to coordinate and put the entire manufacturing process together. So w e’re working on that now, and we’ll have a final solution by the time we launch. I think the system can be taken anywhere, maybe not in the first instance, but in the second instance, when we do a point of care, we’re hoping we can take advantage of the s cale-up available for the electronics industry and the biological industry to be able to provide what’s needed.

James Di Virgilio: 23:14

And you can imagine an incredible application for so much of the world, especially if you’re like me. And you’d like to travel around the world in places where the nearest hospital is not close to you at all right. And you’re traveling or you’re somewhere, or you’re in a third world country that just doesn’t have access to high level medical care, but they may have a cell phone. And again, this is in the future, but to have an ability to detect some of these things would certainly be a game changer. So let’s take us down to the end here and close the curtain on this with this question, why do this, why launch a company? Why leave a day-to-day practice with the FDA? Why take all this risk, spend all this time? What motivated you to do this?

Vanaja Ragavan: 23:52

I don’t know if I have a real answer except that I wanted to use my knowledge of business and medicine to create something that could help people. And I didn’t quite understand that technology when I started. So maybe it was a little [inaudible] when I started, but I think I’ve learned a lot and it’s just allowed me to get into an area that I would never even have an emission doing. Otherwise, the people I’ve met, the knowledge I’ve gained and the collaborations that I’ve been able to pull together has been a real thrill and the persistence to try and find the smartest technology, the best available, and the people that make it happen. It really is what keeps me motivated. And the ability to help people. We can truly help people with this. I think so.

James Di Virgilio: 24:36

And I think thats what’s interesting is we live in an ever fractured world at times, with how they feel about free market versus essentially planned market versus a bunch of other economic topics that interest me a lot in my daily life. But what you said is what I come across the most frequently and discussing things like these as entrepreneurs. And it’s almost always, I wanted to use my skillset , my knowledge, my expertise, to help others, to help my community, to help the world around me. And that’s often the origin of the idea, which is, I think so rewarding. So immensely deep, it’s connecting you to your fellow people and allowing you to obviously change the world for the better, which I think is one of the great things about what the Cade celebrates here. What I celebrate, what you’re celebrating in your daily life, not only as a founder of your company, but also as you mentioned, an angel investor funding, other ideas. So I wanted to thank you for coming on the show today. Obviously we’re very excited for what you’re doing and how you’re trying to help the world around us. Once again, our guest today was Dr. Vanaja Ragavan the founder, president and CEO of Avianna Molecular Technologies. You can find her on the web. You can find her on LinkedIn. Just thank you so much for being with us today. We really enjoyed having you.

Vanaja Ragavan: 25:40

Thank you, James. We’ve enjoyed learning more about the Cade Museum, and I think we were one of its awardees this year.

James Di Virgilio: 25:46

Indeed, you were. And congratulations on your success for that. For Radio Cade , I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 25:53

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

Dr. Bill Petty is the co-founder, former CEO and Chairman of Exactech, a company that makes orthopedic implants. Petty, an orthopedic surgeon and his co-founder Gary Miller, a biomechanics engineer, realized in 1985 that replacing shoulders, hips and knees would be a lot more effective if manufacturers talked more to surgeons to figure out what they really needed. Petty, along with his wife Betty, built up Exactech from a small Gainesville, Florida startup to a global company with 900 employees in 7 countries.

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker 1: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to radio Cade and podcast from the cave 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,

Speaker 2: 0:38

Shoulders, hips, and knees. Maybe you saying that as a kid and maybe you’re getting ready to replace them all. Welcome to radio Cade. I’m your host Richard Miles. And today I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Bill petty, the former CEO and chairman of Zack tech, a company that makes orthopedic implants. Welcome to radio Cade bill. Thank you . So bill, usually I save the personal questions for last, but I have to ask and only cause you look in great shape. Have you had any joints replaced yet? Are you still all original bill petty?

Speaker 3: 1:04

I am all original, but Betty Petty, my wife has had two exact technium plant , so we do have it in .

Speaker 2: 1:11

Okay, good. So you’re living the brand, you’re using your own product. So that’s good. What I want to do. I think most of our listeners are probably fairly familiar with orthopedic implants and what they do. But I do know that probably some particularly on the younger side are not exactly sure what that even means. It occurred to me that they’re probably not tracking this technology. Like guys say who were in their late fifties, purely hypothetical example. So why don’t we start by you explaining what an orthopedic implant actually is and what it does.

Speaker 3: 1:37

There are many different kinds of orthopedic implants. Perhaps the ones people are most familiar with are the ones that are used for fixing fractures or torn ligaments in actuates , but that’s not our business. Our business is orthopedic implants for treating arthritis and basically arthritis is a disease, hugely degenerative or osteoarthritis that the joint gets damaged. The cartilage is damaged, that comes painful, limitation of motion, those sorts of things. So what our orthopedic implants do, what the surgeons do with them rather is we go in and shave off a part of the bone and replace that part of the bone with on one side , usually a metal, a very high tech metal, such as cobalt, Chrome, or titanium. And the other side with ultra high molecular weight polyethylene makes a very low friction artificial joint , not quite as low friction is our normal cartilage that God gave us, but still very good. Now the implants or the ExacTech currently makes include total hip replacement, total knee replacement, total shoulder replacement and total ankle replacement. So basically that’s what they are. Uh , results are excellent. I would say in general, 95% are better. Good results. That’s not to say there aren’t potential complications as there can be with any surgery, but overall the results are very good. And in fact, it’s been stated rather kind of people have studied this sort of thing is total joint replacement or total joint. Arthroplasty is one of the best medical procedures developed over the last 50 years. So

Speaker 2: 3:14

That helps a lot, I think, to understand what these things do. You mentioned that primarily these are implants related to things like arthritis. So I’m guessing here that a typical patient for an orthopedic implant probably tends to be on the older side, but are there any other demographic characteristics of people who need or get orthopedic implants, background, occupation, that sort of thing, or is it sort of all over the map eventually? Do we all need orthopedic implants or does it tend to group itself? Demographically?

Speaker 3: 3:41

Let me first just answer the question back page, probably two thirds of patients you have, or TPD implants at this time are in the Medicare age or 65 are older, but that means one third are younger than that. So the most common as I’ve already mentioned is osteoarthritis or degenerative arthritis. And frankly, other than post-trauma or some deformity, we don’t really know why some people get that kind of arthritis. And don’t now rheumatoid arthritis, which is a less common cause of meeting on arthroplasty or replacement of a joint. We have learned a lot about, about the immune part of it, but even that, that we now have better medications for it. We still don’t know all the causes of this kind of our sprites.

Speaker 2: 4:28

So that’s really interesting. Cause I remember growing up that one of the causes of arthritis and I didn’t know if this was true to Smith was overused, right? So runners are skiers. I remember distinctly being told as a little kid, not to crack my knuckles because that would cause arthritis. Is that a myth or is there something to that that’s overused or extensive use or particularly joint is going to cause arthritis and some people under that age of say 65,

Speaker 3: 4:50

It’s mostly a myth. Actually one of my colleagues at the university of Florida was Rick Panish. He was rheumatologist . He was an avid runner as was, I still run some. He actually did a study and did an age matched and otherwise matched controls of different age groups, comparing runners to non-runners and he found no difference in the incidents of arthritis. One could even argue maybe not running, but at least aggressive walking. Our normal cartilage gets each nutrition by the fluids being pumped in and out or the cartilage as we use our joints. So it’s probably worse to not use the joint than to use it. Now, overused now become operative. People run a hundred miles and whatever I don’t know about that, I’ve never done that. I’ve run a few marathons, but that’s it for me and my joints are all still really good. So I think that’s mostly myth. On the other hand, let’s take a football player who plays for many, many years and may have some cartridge chairs and some ligament tears and those sorts of things that then sets up the joint to be not normal like it should be. And because of that, they may be more likely to get arthritis at a younger age.

Speaker 2: 6:03

That’s a huge relief because I’m a runner. And a couple of years ago, I actually started developing osteoarthritis and I thought, well, that’s it. I can’t run anymore and should have quit running a long time ago. And I was relieved to find the physical therapist said, no, some stretching and so on. You can get through this. And so now I’m back running again, not quite as much as I used to, but I’m glad that submit that makes me feel a lot better. And I can at least another 10 years for, I have to worry about this. So bill you , this technology of orthopedic implants has been around for a while and we’re going to hear more about how you started the company in just a minute, but first let’s peek into the future. What in your field, in the field of orthopedic implants, orthopedic surgery, what is the cutting edge or now under development? What will the next generation for instance, be able to expect or is likely to see coming out of the field

Speaker 3: 6:47

First to talk about joint replacement. There’s not already mentioned results over many, many years are better than 95% are in many series better than 98%. So when we talk about an improvement where you have to be very careful that an improvement is really an improvement or not just to change. And in fact that exact check , one of our mottoes was evolution, not revolution because sometimes it’s revolution, you may get some unintended consequences for total joint replacement. Actually there’ve been some conferences established by the NIH and the American Academy of orthopedic surgeons. And they actually came to the conclusion that improvement in surgical technique is one of the best ways. And there was a famous surgeon who said for a total joint replacement the best time to do it right as the first time. So there are some technological developments , particularly related to using digital means of being more accurate in the placement of the joint , exact tech . It’s worked on a , what we call a GPS system, which is a digitally control instrumentation system just to help the surgeons be more accurate. So I think that’s the area for total joint replacement. Now we can get into that , say more future risks. Are there some genetic things we can do to begin to curtail the incidence of arthritis? Are there some, let’s say biologic materials. If we had an artificial cartilage , wouldn’t that be wonderful if you were your joint out and you’d get the osteoarthritis. If we had a way to go in and replace the actual cartilage, that would be fantastic because then the body renews, it just like it does under the normal circumstances, there are some treatments like that, but currently they’re for small defection the cartilage . So let’s say you have a defect in your car. What’s the size of a dime or a size of a quarter. There are some biologic treatments that work for that , but not complete joint as we did with joint replacement . So those are just some of my thoughts about where we may be going in the both with joint replacement and with other more bottom line ,

Speaker 2: 8:59

That’s really exciting. And again, probably should emphasize for the younger listeners who would think like I’m not going to have a joint replaced for a long, long time. This is really can be life-changing for someone who has lost mobility, right? Who can no longer walk or lift or something to be able to get another 10, 20 years or more of a full use of their limb or their body. That’s a big deal, isn’t it

Speaker 3: 9:18

Sure is. And in fact, one of the things we’ve always said it exact tact . In fact, it’s part of our purpose. And I think inspirational to our employees that really our purpose as a company, to help people regain and then retain or maintain their activity and independence. And whether that activity named dependence means working so they can earn a living or maybe they’re retired and they just want to go out and do something with their grandchildren and kick the ball around. So it makes a huge difference. And I think also keeping people are off of crutches, out of wheelchairs, out of nursing home so they can have a more productive, active life .

Speaker 2: 9:56

So now we get to the part of the show. I always enjoy on radio Cade . We’d like to hear about origin stories and you’ve got a great one. You were trained as an orthopedic surgeon and you decided to form this company way back in 1985, along with your wife, Betty and Dr. Gary Miller, a biomedical engineer, and also has been on the show was a guest of radio K last may. And I have a little bit of experience with that on a much smaller level with the kid museum, working with my wife to found that. And so my obvious question is like, what on earth were you thinking and why? So take us back to 1985, you’re a surgeon. What made you decide you wanted to start a company? And what were your expectations? 36 years ago?

Speaker 3: 10:33

You may have gotten some addition , Gary, I don’t know what you talked to Gary about, but Gary is very integral in this as has been Betty and of course, many, many others. So Gary and I were both on the faculty in the medical school at university of Florida. I was just searching . There is an engineer, as you pointed out. And we did a fair amount of research related to joint replacement because they weren’t as good as they are today. They certainly were not perfect. It’s still not perfect . So we were doing research and one of the companies happened to be Johnson and Johnson ask us to do some work with them and develop an instrument system for a total knee system. They had developed basically Gary and I were having a conversation one day and he said, you know, if I were doing this kind of development, I would approach it differently. And I said, what do you mean? He says, it seems that that what we’re doing is we’re trying to touch up with your competitors. I said , makes good business sense. Of course, what would you do? And he said, you know, we have our own knowledge. We talked to surgeons, we go to conferences, we read the literature, we understand what some of the complications, some of the problems are. If I were leading this kind of development, I would look at those problems and say, let’s focus on one or two or three or whatever. Let’s try to find a solution or a partial short sheet that really a bell with me. And I started thinking about it because I was taking care of patients into your every day and began to study the industry. I studied entrepreneurship , uh, all those kinds of things and dairy was in my office. One day we were talking about some research and I said, do you remember that conversation with , he said, Oh sure. I actually don’t think he did. I think it was just said in passing by him . I said, I’ve really been thinking about it. And I think we should start a company and try to do what she, she just, and he looked at me and said, we’re going to compete with Stryker and Zimmer. And I said, sure. And he said, you’re crazy. So that kind of ended that conversation . So I went home and convinced Betty that this was a good idea. And we’d been talking about it for months. And actually our vacation time, I would sit on the beach and read these books and try to understand if this is early a feasible thing to do. So Betty , I actually went to Tallahassee, got the company incorporated, all that we had Gary over for lunch on a Saturday, showed him the corporate papers. And he said, Oh, you’re serious. And I said , yeah, I said , are you going to join us? And reluctantly he joined. So that was how it got started. I know this is often about invention. We didn’t have a product, we hadn’t invented anything. We just had a lot of knowledge and research related to orthopedic implants. So once we did this, we said, okay, how are we going to get a problem ? And we met some wonderful people up in the Northeast who are supportive of our idea and that’s how we got started.

Speaker 2: 13:23

Well, as I’m sure you’ve known bill , a lot of people are , you know , ideas , truly original, right? I , and ideas , really a formulation of other ideas that have pre-existed it all the way back to the Bible, there nothing new under the sun, but it’s fascinating how people do get these insights. And I want to go back just one minute to that insight or the comment that Gary May or may not have made about why just form a company to chase competitors. Because I think that was probably key right? To your longterm success is that from the very beginning, you weren’t just a, me too type of company making another type of widget. You were doing something at least different than the competitors. So you establish , I imagine a niche from the very beginning.

Speaker 3: 14:00

Just let me make one other comment about that in our work that we have really an engineer’s daring , an awful lot of others in the company. Now it’s absolutely essential that we work with surgeons because they’re the ones in ELR, they’re the ones samey issues in the, or they’re maybe the ones seeing an issue with the patient postoperatively may not be quite as good as either the patient or the surgeon wanted them to be. So we do that now. That’s not to say other companies don’t do that, but we have had surgeons that if we’ve put on what we call a surgeon design team , and they’ve said, you really want our input. You really showed it. You need it to get products better for our patients . And I think that’s a subtle nuance, but I think it’s been important to the surgeons we’ve worked with and also important to our success.

Speaker 2: 14:45

When you started this, you know, you had a good idea, you got Gary on board, but what were your actual expectations in 1985, fast forward 36 years. So on exact tech has over 900 employees in seven countries, annual sales of plus or minus $350 million . Did you imagine your company would do so well back then? Or were you just initial goal was like, you know, let’s just sell a few implants and see how we do, and maybe we can hire somebody. Well , what was your vision back then?

Speaker 3: 15:12

Before I answer that size question, our vision was to do just what Derek originally recommended, make a difference. You make a contribution, reduce complications and hopefully help surgeons get better results. Of course, if we don’t get on the market with it, it doesn’t do any good, no matter how smart we are, how great our products are, any of those things. But that was key to us from the standpoint of growth. Sure. We wanted to grow. I just gave the reason we can do the best. We can have the best for the surgeons, the best for the patients. But if nobody uses our product, we’ve not really done it. So did I expect exact tech to be East coast ? Largest city is now the answer’s yes. Maybe even larger. I don’t consider it where we are in any way, a lack of success, but sure. And I think if you’re going to be an entree for newer , if you don’t have that approach, you’re probably wasting your time. Now I’m more a developer and an operator, and that’s why we’ve stayed with exact tech because we know a little about serial entrepreneurs and how they do one thing and sell it in five years and go do it again. That’s great. And I’m all for that. It’s just not what we set up .

Speaker 2: 16:20

So you really anticipated my next question and that is you’re trained as a surgeon and you did that successfully for a while , but then you started a company and obviously this sort of your to-do list every day , when you wake up and running a company is different than a to-do list of a surgeon who goes in and does surgery. So did you like that aspect of running and growing a company, the hiring people that doing the market research or did a part of you want to stay in surgery?

Speaker 3: 16:44

Correct . The answer is yes. And in fact, for many years I did stay in surgery. People often ask me the difference of the personal gratification and my kind of surgery, total joint replacement. I’ve already talked about the positive results and what it does for people. People do everything from come in and hug your neck to bring your stone crab claws because they’re fishermen over on the West coast of Florida to show that appreciation. So that’s a very direct one-on-one appreciation. However, being involved in the company and all of that involves if we can have our products used around the world and they benefit from those products to surge in juice , that’s also very gratifying. It’s not the personal, one-on-one that being a surgeon is , but still very gratifying in a more indirect way.

Speaker 2: 17:35

Yeah, that’s a great answer. And I think again, the limited experience I’ve had with starting organization, one big difference that I think people who don’t have the experiences to realize how many different things you have to worry about. Because I imagine the surgeon, obviously you’re working with a team in the, or, but yet you don’t have to sit there and worry how the hospital’s going to pay the light bill or who’s cleaning up at night or locking up the hospital at night. But when you start your organization, you do worry about those things you have to, and you have to use a much bigger part of your brain to solve a long and never ending list of issues. One thing that I’d like to ask specifically, bill, and again, only cause I’ve done a little bit of as well. I have to ask, what was it like working with your wife, especially starting your own company. Now you can take the fifth amendment on this if you’d like, but I want to see what I did wrong. So what was that like?

Speaker 3: 18:19

Yeah. We’re often asked that and sometimes we’re asked that in the way that, how do you spend all day with your husband at work and then go home and not Betty’s answer usually? Well, it works . I don’t sit on his lap. I’m doing what I do. And he doesn’t like he does . And of course is a company got bigger. We got more separated geographically within the facility. And there were plenty of days that I didn’t see value at all at work. We may see each other for 30 minutes or an hour and a meeting and then go about what we do. I think more deeply though, we were both very passionate about what we were doing and we want her to be successful. We want her to be helpful to surgeons and patients. So I think I can admit more driven than Betty is, but still we were both driven by this passion to be successful and to use our individual talents and competencies, as you well know, everybody’s different and everybody has a different talent and everybody has a different ability ready. For many, many years, I was in charge of our human resources department and was very passionate about hiring the people that would fit the values of exact tech . Later. She became more involved in facilities administration and was passionate about that because our facilities important to our employees, for sure, we have a lot of surgeons to visit from all around the country and all over the world. They want to see what we do and how we do it. For some people think of manufacturing machine it’s kind of dirty and all, all over the floor . We’ve often said you could eat off the floor. They check, check. It’s not quite like an LR , but we’ve tried to make it a little bit like that. So we’ve used our different talents to try to help the company succeed.

Speaker 2: 20:01

Phoebe and I have talked to other sort of husband, wife, teams, particularly ones who’ve run their own organizations. And there are definitely pros and cons, right? I mean the pro is, as you said, you both share the same emotional investment and passion in making this thing work. You don’t have to worry about separating those two parts of your life. But on the other hand, we found with the kid museum at a certain point, you have to draw a line in the day and go like, okay, we’re watching a movie or we’re going out to eat and we’re not talking about this project anymore. Cause otherwise you can go to midnight discussing various things for various aspects or organization. And there’s no end point, which doesn’t really happen. If your spouse has nothing to do with your work .

Speaker 3: 20:37

That’s a super important point. And we worked very hard to maintain a good family life. When our kids were still with us, coach basketball at the boys club, Betty was supportive of Judy’s ballet. In fact, she said she put in a lot of miles between the boys club in the ballet and we’d go to theater and after dinner and she’d say, and try to have a normal life and marriage. I won’t say that we’re never came up, but we certainly had a life beyond work .

Speaker 2: 21:03

So bill, I always ask each guest a little bit about their CRE professional selves. So take us back to a young bill petty. I know you were born and raised in little rock and your mom was a homemaker. Your dad was a salesman. What were you like as a kid? Were you a good student? Did you play sports? Did teachers love you? Or were you always in the principal’s office? Like I was, I know there’s a lot to unpack. So take your time.

Speaker 3: 21:24

I was a good student. I was never in the principal’s office except to get awards. My parents were very supportive, but also let me be somewhat independent. Obviously I was a normal kid. My sport was track . Maybe that’s where I’m still a runner. I was pretty good at it. Pretty good at it. They want to try to recruit me to the football team , but I didn’t want to get knocked around like that. So I feel about experience was when I was in the air force. We did flag football because there must be . And I was pretty good at that as well, but I didn’t get knocked around because it was flag football. I’ll tell you a very quick, interesting story. I don’t have a high school diploma. You’ve already noted that I’m from little rock Arkansas and you may or may not remember or have learned that little rock was one of the first school systems in the South to be integrated. And I went to little rock central high school, great school by the way still is. But that’s where her father was first close to schools and subsequently president Eisenhower since a hundred first hour born. And it was very interesting. So in the 10th grade I went to school with just soldiers. Everything was fine. This was a school of 2000 students. There were seven black kids that came obviously all good students. I mean, they’re going to pick them very carefully. Then it was the following year. The governor fathers closed the high schools in little rock that was bad for some, but kids do different things. They went to other cities. There was relatives, there were some private schools that were already there and open. I took correspondence courses from the university of Arkansas during the 11th grade. If the end of that, nobody knew what was going to happen. So the colleges in Arkansas said, if you have a certain number of credits and can make a certain grade on the sat or act or whatever, you can come on to college, even though you have not graduated from high school. I did that. I actually went to little rock university. That was an easy discovering and I’m still a pretty young kid. It’s now part of the university of Arkansas system, but that’s where I went. And two or three weeks after I was there, they opened this high schools and middle rock . So I had a decision to make, I should, I’m already here. I think I can do this till I stayed in college. So I have a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a medical degree. I do not have a high school diploma still. Don’t early in my life. I would get all these advertisements, finish your high school, get your over to fall in love with . And that went on for years and years and years. The other wonderful thing about that is they’ll allow you to be a 12th grader in college. Betty’s family had moved back to lower rock from another city in Arkansas because they knew they were doing that. She finished high school in a regular way . She did extra, got all the credits and graduate . So Betty and I met when we were 16 students at little rock university and you know, the rest of the story,

Speaker 2: 24:08

That’s a great story bill. And I imagine it gives you a , probably a fair amount of empathy for the students last year in high school who basically couldn’t finish or had to finish online or whatnot. And it makes me wonder all of a sudden, I wonder if they’re gonna be some future bill Petty’s out of that cohort because they had to do something similar. He sort of patched together the last year, their school, and maybe they started your early in college and so on. But that’s a great story. And I got to ask, is that like a trivia question at an exact tech dinner? Which one of our C-suite executives doesn’t have a high school degree ?

Speaker 3: 24:38

Yeah. When I was chairman of orthopedics at the university, they would make light of that in one time. One of the guys gave me a certificate to make up for not having a high school diploma back to your point. Yes. There probably are people that what’s happened over the last year. It worked out better. As we also know, there are a lot of people don’t have that kind of support. And so I’m sure they’ve been hurt by it. So we’ll have to see how we work through all of that

Speaker 2: 25:04

One particular moment in your early schooling where you thought that maybe one that you’d become a surgeon and two, that you would run your own company, you remembered liking the idea of that or thinking about it or did that come much?

Speaker 3: 25:16

Well, Betty always laughs . When people used to ask me in my youth, what I wanted to be, I said a charter boat captain. I still love voting . But in answer to your question, I started in college and business administration. So I had an interest in business. However, I also had a real interest in science and I was just talking before class one time with a girl who said a friend, but his girlfriend, actually, this girl is the one who had kind of introduced to me also, but she said, well, why don’t you try more science and think about medical school. That was really the first time I’ve thought about it. So that was kind of toward the end of my freshman year in college. So I kind of went that way. And then other than that early business experience, no, I had no plan. Once I got into medicine and eventually orthopedics to go into business that really came more from the work that Gary and I were doing and the conversations we had. And that’s when I more studied business. Now I will say one other thing about that. When I first moved to Gainesville, I got to read orthopedics all the time, you know, and that’s what I do. That’s who I am. I want to read something else. So I started taking a couple of business magazines, really just more as a diversion to read something outside of medicine and orthopedics. So over probably gosh, 15 or 20 years probably got a pretty good business education from reading those magazines, even though I don’t have any formal business degree or anything of that time . So, you know, you’re somewhat

Speaker 2: 26:44

Of an unusual combination because we talked to a lot of inventors, entrepreneurs, founders, and generally speaking, it’s rare that you have somebody say the inventor themselves, the researcher, the physician also start and run a successful company and a to start companies, but they quickly step aside because that’s not really their deal. So to have someone who is both trained as a surgeon, worked as a surgeon and then develop and run a company it’s not unheard of, but it’s fairly unusual. Yeah .

Speaker 3: 27:10

There are a few who have been very successful. I know one ophthalmologist was very successful and then much later, so this company out Johnson and Johnson, so there are some, I think for me it was, you cannot combine the, to make the kind of contribution for the treatment of arthritis that I would like to make way back in medical school. I became interested in arthritis and said in my career, I’m on developed a cure for arthritis. Well, I learned a lot along the way. There are a lot of different kinds of arthritis. I haven’t done that, but I would say that kind of where I’ve got to was a combination of orthopedic surgery and business has helped a lot of people with arthritis. So from that stoma, I did have that little thing in my brain very early in my medical career, even before I graduated from medical school, physicians are pretty smart people. First of all, just to get into medical school was extremely difficult. And then you work really hard. So it’s a matter of , do you have the desire and then are willing to apply yourself in another way? I think most of those shoes start companies that maybe eventually become very successful, but step aside, fairly early and remain on it as consultants, whatever, I think that’s what they want to do. And I totally respect that. I wanted to go a different route and be more involved in the whole situation. So I think that’s how we got where we got with exactly.

Speaker 2: 28:34

So bill final question, people in your position who’ve done really well, very successful, often get asked for advice. So I’d be really interested. What are the most common questions you get from people seeking advice and what are your answers?

Speaker 3: 28:47

It’s a straightforward question. How do you do what she did? I know a very, very successful surgeon in Arkansas, by the way, who sediment. I want to be bill petty. When I grow up, I mean, he’s a very successful renowned surgeon . He says that . So how do you do it? Study what you’re interested in it . Some people say, I want to make money. We’ve done okay financially. But that was never our goal. Our goal was to make a contribution, do something that we were passionate about. Perseverance don’t give up. I think it was Winston Churchill there . I’m sure many people have said never get up. It was back in world war two that Winston Churchill said we will never give up. So don’t give up because there are going to be obstacles things you’re going to run into, associate yourself with competent, passionate people of integrity who are positive and also want to make a contribution golden rule or platinum rule treat others as you would like to be treated. It’s actually Stephen Covey who developed the platinum rule, treat others as they would like to be treated. First of all, you have to figure out what that is and then you can treat them that way. And I’ll get you in a little bit , bit to exact text values and my own personal values. You have to build trust and exact X values are integrity. Number one, compassionate, teamwork, excellence and innovation. So work with the people and live there because there’s, I don’t see you doing that. They’re not going to do that communication skills, especially for me, I’m a very shot or there’s nothing. I hate more than a cocktail party because I don’t feel comfortable with that though. My wife now says, Betty says, you’re really very good at it . It doesn’t mean I like it. And then finally recognize your customers may know more than you do a whole lot of things. So be a great listener and in pay attention to them and work with them. So that’s kind of been my, our company’s philosophy. And I think that to what success we’ve had,

Speaker 2: 30:49

It’s all great advice, bill. I got a comment on the cocktail party. I don’t like cocktail parties. It didn’t come naturally to me for a while . And then finally I realized the secret to cocktail parties is you find the one person who looks like they’re having a worse time than you are. You go up and just say, how you doing? And they’re so happy to be saved. I actually was originally an introvert and then I joined the foreign service and I finally decided, you know, if the U S governments pay me to diplomat, I’d better get good at this. I got to talk to people,

Speaker 3: 31:15

Enjoy the same for me. I talked about listing, unless you can communicate with people, you’re not going to be a good listener . Right?

Speaker 2: 31:22

Well , thank you very much for being on radio Cade . It’s been a great conversation, strongly encouraged listeners to also listen to our interview with Gary Miller ILS co-founder of exact tag . That was from May, 2020, I think may of last year. Listen to those together, I think would be a great combination, but wish you all the best. Thank you for everything you’ve done. Particularly for people who now can probably walk or do things they couldn’t do before and look forward to having you back at some point.

Speaker 3: 31:44

Thanks a bunch. We have huge respect for the K kids can learn what they can do and they can be , I think it’s fantastic. Thank you. Thanks. A bunch.

Speaker 1: 31:55

Radio Cade is produced by the Kadan museum for creativity and invention located in Gainesville for Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie , Tom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded and Parkwood , soundstage, and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak radio. Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist Jacob Lawson.

One of four girls, Cara Negri’s favorite book growing up was about an amputee named Michelle who went on to do everything. Cara has helped develop video motion analysis to analyze how people move and how to help them walk. Her company, PnO Data Solutions has developed tools that are widely used in the rehab and physical therapy market. *This episode was originally released on October 24, 2018.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors 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. Video motion analysis of disabilities or anyone in motion. That’s what we’re going to talk about this morning on Radio Cade. I have with me Cara Negri, who is involved in a company that is taking this to market or is already in the market. So welcome Cara.

Cara Negri: 0:52Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:52So before we begin talking about you and about the company, why don’t you tell me exactly what the underlying technology is and what it does. We’ll come back and talk later about the applications and so on.

Cara Negri: 1:06Sure. Basically video is becoming the ultimate medium for us to communicate with people. It tells a story much broader than a image or a paragraph. And so with 2D motion analysis or video analysis, we can take our smartphone and take a video of someone moving and then we can actually measure some of the progress that a person is making. So let’s say you hurt your shoulder and you’re not able to lift it 100 percent up, we can take a video of you now doing the best that you can and we can measure that angle and then we can go through some rehab, maybe provide some intervention with a brace, and afterwards we can measure that intervention in the same way that we did by measuring that angle again and measure how well you’re doing. And that also gives you the person that is going through this process, the feedback to see how you’re doing in your progress of rehabilitation versus me just shouting feedback to you or you’re not doing good enough or that you need to lift higher. When you can actually see it, it actually connects to your brain a lot faster and you can actually improve your function through that bio feedback. Little to no response by me, I don’t have to intervene as much

Richard Miles: 2:20I see. And so Cara, just so I understand, is the technology here, do you use, for instance multiple cameras or is it a software solution which you’re taking video in theory from anywhere, like a smartphone and you’d simply analyzing it with that software?

Cara Negri: 2:34Yes. So you can take video in any way you want. So if you want to use a really high fancy camera, high definition camera, then you can or you can use your smartphone because smartphone cameras are actually pretty good these days. So it’s about the practicality of it.

Richard Miles: 2:51I see.

Cara Negri: 2:52Um, we all may have seen how Avatar is made with lots of pinpoints on the person and we’re tracking their motion and we can do lots of animation with it. And that is the 3D motion analysis that some people may have seen. And that’s great for research and for higher capture of what we need to find out about a person. But for the practical uses of physical therapy or prosthetics and orthotics, we don’t need that much information. We need one dimensional or two dimensional information for us to observe, so the reason that video is that ultimate solution is because our eyes are not very reliable. We make mistakes, we see things that aren’t really there. So using video to even just play something back and see that event again, as you see that we do with the World Cup going on, other sports, video playback is becoming a part of even professional athletics. So if we can just record a video and use that for playback, that’s the first step to seeing things that you may have missed in the real life event.

Richard Miles: 3:59So the name of the company is PnO? Correct. And that stands for

Cara Negri: 4:03Prosthetics and Orthotics.

Richard Miles: 4:05It’s associated or owned by a New Zealand firm, is that correct?

Cara Negri: 4:09The New Zealand firm is called the Tarn group and they create software solutions for a lot of motion analysis as well as learning management systems. So we all started as a group providing software solutions for athletic coaches. So thinking of golf or bike fittings, tennis, professional swimming, rugby, different athletic associations were using the software to provide feedback to their athletes. So that they could perform better.

Richard Miles: 4:40I see.

Cara Negri: 4:40So when I started using their products, I saw the opportunity for me to use it as an educational solution as well. So when I was trying to teach other practitioners what I was seeing in a video why I was making a clinical decision. I started to use video as that medium so I could slow things down and say that right there. That’s that moment of why I’m making this clinical decision here. And so I was using mostly their bike fitting software to do so. And it’s actually very similar bike fitting, if you think about it, the biomechanics, if you have a pedal that’s not correctly placed than it, it’s going to affect the performance. So if we can do the same for healthcare, we look at how something might be affecting someone’s performance and we can make adjustments biomechanically with interventions or therapy.

Richard Miles: 5:32Let’s talk about how you ended up doing this.Tell us what you were like, say as a kid, what sort of influences did you have and then maybe a little bit about your education.

Cara Negri: 5:42Sure. I grew up with a family of four girls total. So my dad didn’t really treat us like girls. It was just we are who we are. And…

Richard Miles: 5:54You’re the oldest Cara?

Cara Negri: 5:55No, I’m actually one of the youngest. I’m a twin and I’m one of the youngest and um, we were also athletes, so our family was very known in the area for being basketball players.

Richard Miles: 6:04Basketball, okay.

Cara Negri: 6:05So funny enough, I’m the one that did not play college basketball. I pursued engineering, so I don’t know exactly what it was. I used to tinker with things I used to play with things, take things apart. Used to compete in Odyssey of the mind competitions and things like that. But the real big moment for me was I read a book when I was in fourth grade about a girl with an amputation and I read it so many times that the librarian gave it to me at the end of the year.

Richard Miles: 6:31What was the name of the book, do you recall?

Cara Negri: 6:32Michelle.

Richard Miles: 6:33Michelle.

Cara Negri: 6:33And I still have it.

Richard Miles: 6:35You still have it. All right. And what was… thats sort of unusual, um, what was the storyline? Was it a true story?

Cara Negri: 6:40Yeah.

Richard Miles: 6:42Oh it was a true Story. Okay, got it.

Cara Negri: 6:42Yeah, and she was just this young girl who lost her leg from cancer and pursued skiing, horseback riding, all things that people told her she couldn’t do and I, I guess I found it incredibly motivational and inspiring and so I just read it and read it and read it.

Richard Miles: 7:00And the librarian gave you the book.

Cara Negri: 7:01Yeah, she gave it to me at the end of the year and said “No one else has checked this out and you’ve checked it out four times this year so you can have it.” And so, um, I kept it, but I didn’t know I wanted to be in biomechanical engineering or anything like that at that point. But I think it definitely planted a seed in my mind.

Richard Miles: 7:20And where did you go to school?

Cara Negri: 7:22I went to Michigan Tech for a few years. It’s an engineering school, but then I transferred to Kettering University…

Richard Miles: 7:29Okay.

Cara Negri: 7:29Which is a cooperative program, which is amazing if anyone’s looking into going into engineering programs specifically because it’s cooperative. You do three months of school, then three months of work and you do that for four and a half years about.

Richard Miles: 7:42Where is Kettering?

Cara Negri: 7:43It’s in Flint, Michigan.

Richard Miles: 7:45Flint, okay. So when you started your undergraduate, you knew you wanted to be an engineer of some sort, you already knew you wanted to be in biomedical. Okay. And so post college, did you go straight into the industry or what did you do?

Cara Negri: 7:58So my co op program was in biomedical engineering working for a prosthetics company and we did research on casting devices and ways that we could take better impressions of a person’s residual limb and so had a lot of hands on experience in the profession by that time and so I actually was accepted to a prosthetic certificate program two weeks after I graduated. So I went to Chicago to northwestern for that and then I was in patient care in prosthetics and orthotics for about two years. Maybe not even because I had the research bug or I had the inquisitive bug of some kind. Not that patient care isn’t inquisitive and it is very complicated. It’s very challenging because every patient is different, but for me I wanted to design. I wanted to invent I guess.

Richard Miles: 8:49Were either of your parents engineers or in the medical field at all?

Cara Negri: 8:52Um, my dad is a medical technologist.

Richard Miles: 8:54Okay. And do you remember going to his place at work or was it, did it have any role in wanting to steer in that direction?

Cara Negri: 9:02Yeah, I think that the measurement core, the core of being able to measure something is at the heart of that influence I guess because a measurement to me is very comforting. It’s something that you can rely on. If you can measure it, then you have something that’s objective versus…

Richard Miles: 9:20So you’ve always been kind of a numbers person.

Cara Negri: 9:22Yeah.

Richard Miles: 9:23And what did your sisters ended up doing? Are they all in the NBA now or…

Cara Negri: 9:27No, they’re also in healthcare. So two nurses and my other sister works for an insurance company. Healthcare insurance. Yep.

Richard Miles: 9:35Let’s talk about PnO. You’ve said that one of the things that has surprised you has been kind of an objection by the market or reluctance by the market. And is that because you think people don’t really understand the applications the potential applications or what is behind that?

Cara Negri: 9:54There are a large majority of professionals that are a little bit older and that is not to say that people that are older do not embrace technology. It just sometimes does go hand in hand. But I actually see all spectrums of people who are older that embrace technology and people that are younger that don’t embrace technology. The biggest hurdle for me and in PnO data is that it’s not a part of their regular day workflow. So taking out the camera as much as it seems like it might be a very small thing is not always second nature to people. So it’s asking them to…

Richard Miles: 10:33So like an afterthought, okay.

Cara Negri: 10:33Yeah. And then also unfortunately they don’t have a billing code for the service. So when they do it, it’s because it’s for the greater good of the patient or to properly communicate to the physician or the physical therapist or the insurance company. So there is a great part about PnO data that helps people collaborate. And that is the bigger picture that I hope to spread through the technologies that we have people let’s say in New Zealand who have a rare case of fibular Hem Amelia and cannot get a professional in their area because it’s just so rare. Whereas if you use our video analysis platform, you can actually connect to people from Canada, from Australia, from the US, and get them to look at your videos and provide expert analysis on it as well.

Richard Miles: 11:24Are there any cases in which the video analysis actually brings you a new insight into the patient’s condition as opposed to simply being confirmation or an adjustment that they able to look at the video and go, oh, x or y is going on and I had no ideas. Do you have examples like that?

Cara Negri: 11:40So when I first started using video, I started using apps that helped me take video and I could then show a patient, here’s how you’re doing. But when I started using the group product silicon coach, I actually had that moment of going through a process of looking at someone’s gait and how they were walking. And not only did I find things that I could then show the patient that they had improved on, I found mistakes that I had made. And so that was the biggest light bulb moment for me was I’m a better clinician because I use this video, I found the mistakes that I made in my patient care versus just verifying that I had done the right thing. I actually was able to improve.

Richard Miles: 12:20To correct your own mistakes.

Cara Negri: 12:22Yeah.

Richard Miles: 12:22Right. So it seems in principal that it would be relatively easy to make the compelling point with the utility of this, but if I understand correctly, a lot of healthcare professionals, since they can’t necessarily recoup the cost right away because there’s no billing code. Right. And it’s something yet another thing they’ve got to do that they just are not interested.

Cara Negri: 12:41Yeah. They really have to weigh the value of the time spent on it. Even if it is only 10 minutes and they’re not getting paid for it, that extra 10 minutes could be spent with another patient. And unfortunately healthcare is getting squeezed and squeezed because of things that… and they’re having to weigh those options.

Richard Miles: 12:58Is there a future at all in telemedicine and could conceivably you have a few years from now, patients at home with their spouse or parent or whatever, takes a video of them and they send it in and then you analyze it. Is that a model that’s out there? Is this something that for the retail home market is still useful?

Cara Negri: 13:16We’ve definitely done a little bit of that already, so we support mobility clinics where we’ll take video of people trying to run for the first time or attempting to run for the first time in PnO data. It’s a web based software, so you basically just invite people to your area, your community on the web based software, and so we invited all of the patients to take a look at their videos that we captured of them that day and so then they can feasibly take a video of themselves six months later and compare the two on their own if they wanted to and also just reflect back on, oh, look how far I’ve come.

Richard Miles: 13:53Oh, I see.

Cara Negri: 13:53Yeah.

Richard Miles: 13:54I’ve seen some of these sports jams now. Sometimes they’ll also have a rehab clinic as part of the gym. Are they potential customers or are they already buying your product?

Cara Negri: 14:02Yeah, absolutely. And so they are potentials and there are people that are doing that right now as well.

Richard Miles: 14:08You’re still a small operation right? Here in the US.

Cara Negri: 14:11Um, I actually am responsible globally for all of prosthetics and orthotics and then our entire team in New Zealand helps support PT or rehab facilities just really depends on their need or their want. And we do have a couple physical therapists on staff over in New Zealand as well. So we kind of match the clinic or the organization with whoever’s going to be the best person to train them. And it also sometimes depends on time zones.

Richard Miles: 14:40Right, right. Now you’ve chosen to locate here in Gainesville. Was there a specific reason because there’s number research hospitals here or tell me the decision tree that led to Gainesville.

Cara Negri: 14:48Well that was my husband.

Richard Miles: 14:51Pretty simple.

Cara Negri: 14:52I used to live on the beach in California and he somehow drew me away.

Richard Miles: 14:56Wow, so you must really love his company. Well that’s great. I know you’ve been at this a few years, so you’re still sort of in the beginning stages of trying to get this technology now and if you saw somebody in a similar situation say yourself 10 years ago for instance, or and they were trying to get a technology out there, what words of advice would you have for them in terms of what they should definitely do and definitely not do.

Cara Negri: 15:22So I did a lot of market research. My only mistake… Well, my big mistake I guess with the market research is that I contacted forward thinkers, people that I thought were at the forefront of best clinical care and of course they all thought it was a great idea.

Richard Miles: 15:41A little bit too forward thinking. Right?

Cara Negri: 15:42Right. So you number one should always do market research and make sure that your asking

Richard Miles: 15:48Talking to actual customers or potential customers. Right?

Cara Negri: 15:51Right. And not just about whether they think it’s a good idea, how much are they willing to pay for it and make sure that you get a diverse group of individuals that are in your market place, not just the forward thinkers, because with a product life cycle, you’ll always have those people in the beginning that will create the hype because they are interested in the best and new technology that’s available. But you really want to see a steady influx of the main majority of people that are in your profession or industry. So definitely make sure that you gather market research on every single person that represents the industry. And I guess number two was to consider the workflow of the people and make sure that this is not going to be asking them to change their current methods too much. Because if it is and it’s going to be a harder sale than if it’s something that just helps them do their job better and they already have something in place or they already have time spent on that.

Richard Miles: 16:55So you’ve had to spend probably a lot more time with health care professionals to see exactly what that workflow is and how to integrate this into that.

Cara Negri: 17:03Being in the profession. I knew the workflow and and I do think that I took that into consideration, but I didn’t take it into consideration that even 10 minutes could be a lot.

Richard Miles: 17:14Too much, right. Good point. You made a good point earlier as well about the feedback that you get. I’ve seen this happen with other companies and then building the Cade Museum as well. You know, until you have paying customers, you get seduced by that positive feedback loop. Almost. No one will say, well that’s a terrible crappy idea, but the minute you start putting a price tag on it, then well, you know, we’re not quite sure. And that’s I think the first cold dose of reality and how scalable your product is.

Cara Negri: 17:38Yeah, I’ve spent a majority of what I do as far as educating the profession on how to use video analysis. So it’s not just a turnkey solution like, here you go have it. I was really actually quite surprised at how much people didn’t know what to do with it. They, they needed to be sort of handheld every single step of the way, and so we do have outcome measures built into our software, which is actually a great measurement to use. Instead of just saying here, watch the video, draw some angles and take some measurements on it. They actually have a systematic workflow of what they’re supposed to be looking for. And so that’s really, really helpful to help guide people. I do think that education, no matter what technology is, you’ve got to think about that from the very beginning of how you’re going to get education to new users. Um, I started off doing webinars with every single person and it was very time consuming. So I created a youtube channel and I created all the videos that would show them how they need to do just about anything.

Richard Miles: 18:39So you really had to think about sort of creative marketing tools, it seems like to get, again, that core idea, which seems to be a recurring theme that I’ve heard a lot. It’s a lot of times it’s not really the quality of the idea itself, it’s actually educating and informing people that the idea exists and that it actually can help them.

Cara Negri: 18:55Yeah, and one of my main marketing agendas is to present at meetings in a scientific manner, so I’m not promoting my software, but I’m promoting the use of video and so I actually speak at international conferences on the use of video, in patient care and trying to get people to wrap their heads around that idea first and not promoting my business necessarily.

Richard Miles: 19:21Well what seems also with it now, the constant improvement in smartphone technology and smartphone cameras that you might be opening up potential avenues of people who wouldn’t even have thought to use their phone for instance before to do analysis like that. Well, I’m certain that after this podcast episode is released, your server’s gonna crash from all the new orders and what is your website by the way? Cara?

Cara Negri: 19:41It is a pnodata.com. So it’s P as in prosthetics, n as in Nancy, O as an orthotics. data.com

Richard Miles: 19:52And on there they can see videos and other examples… good.

Cara Negri: 19:55Yup, and you can check out our youtube channel as well as PnO Data Solutions.

Richard Miles: 20:00Okay. Great. Cara, thank you very much for joining us this morning. I’ve certainly learned a lot and wish you all the best.

Cara Negri: 20:05Thank you.

Outro: 20:10Radio 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.

Cars that can talk to traffic signs. It’s not science fiction, it’s a company. Dr. Enes Karaaslan is a civil engineering scientist and the co-founder of Connected Wise, a 2020 Cade Prize Finalist. The Orlando start-up is developing technology that connects autonomous vehicles to safety infrastructure, especially in rural areas. Initial data shows that such devices can prevent thousands of accidents per year and save many lives.

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: 0:38

Cars that can talk to traffic signs. It’s not science fiction, it’s a company . Welcome to Radio Cade, I’m your host Richard Miles. Today, I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Enes Karaaslan a civil engineering scientists and the co-founder of Connected Wise an Orlando startup . That is developing technology that connects autonomous vehicles with traffic signs. The company was also a 2020 Cade Prize finalist. Welcome to Radio Cade Enes.

Enes Karaaslan: 1:01

Thank you very much, Richard beautiful introduction.

Richard Miles: 1:04

So let’s start by defining terms. I think probably most of our listeners are pretty familiar with the notion of driverless cars and network vehicles, but just so we’re sure. What do you mean when you say connected and autonomous vehicle?

Enes Karaaslan: 1:17

Absolutely. We hear a lot about self-driving cars. There are a lot of companies who are actually commercializing marketing very well. The self-driving technology, but more accurate term will be, I guess, for autonomous vehicles. The objective is to give some automated features to the vehicle, to provide safety of the drivers initially. And hopefully in the future, maybe we can replace the driver. There are five levels of automation. What we see currently in the traffic Tesla is one of the pioneer companies and marketing the self-driving. We actually define those vehicles as level two, level three automation. When we reached a level five, we don’t need driver on the driver’s seat. There are companies who are testing, even doing pilot projects in certain areas in California. In the other States, we have a company who’s doing autonomous shuttles in Florida as well. One of the important technologies that will support these vehicles is the connectivity connected vehicle technology, simply aims to provide communication between vehicles and between the vehicle and the traffic infrastructure. They call these technologies V2, I and V2V if it is communicating with the pedestrian, they name it B2X. Now we have a more broader term, which is connected and autonomous vehicle. We would like to provide some connectivity and some autonomous functionality is in the vehicle. So that’s how we define it. We are solving a unique problem about these connected and autonomous vehicles.

Richard Miles: 2:58

So just so clear on this Enes, an autonomous vehicle that is not connected is something that has, you know, I’ve , I’ve noticed recently when I have a rental car, there are these features now where for instance, on the cruise control function, I can set a certain trailing distance, right? When it’ll break automatically, as it gets to a certain distance that I can define from the car ahead of me it’s features like that. Right? But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s talking to the other cards, it’s onboard computer that is performing some of the functions that I would perform, right. And then a connected cars , as you said, more like Tesla, where the car is actually communicating with other cars. In addition to maybe performing some of its functions.

Enes Karaaslan: 3:36

I would distinguish vehicle communication from the vehicle automation vehicle automation will give you a features like changing a lane automatically, or stopping at a stop sign or understanding the traffic light color and acting accordingly. The vehicle of communication is a supporting technology that will make a lot of the things easy for autonomous vehicles, such as recognizing a traffic light can be difficult at times. So the traffic light can send a message as real time signal about the status of the traffic light. So before the vehicle arrives to an intersection, it can actually understand what color is going to be when the vehicle reaches that intersection. So the ultimate goal is simply to remove all the traffic control devices that is designed for human drivers that will give us maybe a smooth operation in an intersection. We may not even have to stop in the future. This is the ultimate goal. There are a lot of safety benefits that disconnect vehicle communication can actually provide . They estimate that just intersection crashes, that one single safety application can prevent more than a thousand lives per year. Just one single safety application in an intersection can save a lot of lives. It has enormous benefits for the traffic congestion and the associated costs . So this technology can save us about $170 billion per year, just from the total congestion time.

Richard Miles: 5:11

That’s a big number. And that was a very important clarification. At least for me, that you made in terms of autonomous versus connected in that these autonomous vehicles are getting more and more sophisticated with their AI so they can recognize a stop sign, or they can recognize a stop light , but they’re not actually talking to it . The connected is one level further where the computer on your car is literally talking to the piece of infrastructure and communicating valuable information. It’s not just depending on a recognition algorithm, right?

Enes Karaaslan: 5:39

We are trying to simply provide as much redundancy as possible to those vehicles. There will be times in a work zone area where there’s going to be detour and in this detour, or it will be very difficult to navigate safely because the lane lines disappear. Sometimes maybe a flagger is simply rotting the traffic. So in complicated scenarios, the vehicular communication can be very helpful. We can send real-time signals, wireless signals to those vehicles about what they are supposed to do and how they should act in a traffic situation like this.

Richard Miles: 6:15

So Enes let’s talk specifics of your company and what you’re developing. And I think that would be useful for listeners to understand that a lot of this depends on infrastructure investments by a given city or municipality. And from what I understand, there’s a big difference. Now there’s a big gap between the smart infrastructure that you’ve seen urban areas versus rural areas. So could you give us sort of an idea how big is that gap? And then what sort of timeline are we looking at to catch up a small town in Ohio versus large city like LA or Washington DC in terms of the infrastructure to support smart technologies or connected technologies.

Enes Karaaslan: 6:51

This is a very good question. This is the actual problem we are hoping to solve this vehicle communication technology that I just explained uses wireless signals, and it requires fiber optic infrastructure. And a lot of the times, especially in the rural areas, we don’t have any of those. So bringing this technology to the areas, we actually will need the most because rural areas experienced higher traffic fatalities than the urban, our countries roads are actually 97% in the rural. So we have large rural areas that we want to bring safety. The main problem is going to be very expensive and not practical to deploy this technology in these areas. So we approached the U.S. Department of Transportation with this idea of using traffic science. We told them we could use simply these science , smart science to allow communication from the infrastructure to the vehicle. And we can help support the existing communication and as well as we can help autonomous vehicles in traveling in the rural later, the U.S. DOT, liked this idea very much. And they awarded us Small Business Innovation Research award , and we’ve been putting effort for the last three years, doing a lot of outside testing in the challenging climates , challenging conditions, sometimes different speeds. So we reached to a point that we can reliably use a smart sign like ours. They look like colorful cue QR codes, but they are designed specifically for this purpose. It doesn’t require any wireless communication. It simply sends a message and information that we need to send through the vision-based communication. There is a camera inside the vehicle. It recognizes the sign and decodes this message.

Richard Miles: 8:44

Let me see if I understand this correctly. I saw a demo video or one of your devices, and this looks like something like, like a very large transponder that people are used to putting in their car for like ETolls and stuff like that. Does it visually recognize, say a code on a, say a stop sign or any other traffic sign. And is that how it works or is there an active signal that is being sent out?

Enes Karaaslan: 9:09

It’s a visual identify a visual code that is linking to a message. When this visual code is identified as an encrypted code, only the device can understand what it means. So a third party cannot alter the message, but we decided to make also a device that is not just giving this capability, communicating between the sign and the vehicle, but also give the driver some of the advanced driver assistance features. So when you put this device on your windshield, it’s not just going to recognize those signs, but it will also give you a lot of the features you will see in Tesla. It will recognize the traffic signs and act accordingly. If your vehicle support automation, you can optionally use those automation features too . So your vehicle will stop when there is a red light detected. So we give all those features on top of we provide this vehicle of communication between the smart sign and the device. So U.S. DOT need was the actually, how can we move this connected vehicle technology to rural areas, but we also needed to consider some commercial aspects of it. How can we market this device to the current drivers? So we thought if this device could also give some advanced driver features, the drivers will definitely benefit from it. We are aware that it’s going to take some years until we deploy these signs to the locations where the DOT is going to need until that time our customers will be able to use those devices to benefit from some of the emerging technology features.

Richard Miles: 10:50

I’m guessing though, that the device requires some sort of software interface for the vehicle itself, right? So is that relatively easy to do? Is it something like an Apple play feature where you just plug it in or communicates wirelessly and then it takes the information that it’s getting from say a sign. And what does it do with that information? Would the car, for instance, automatically slow down as it’s approaching a stop sign? Or is that how it works?

Enes Karaaslan: 11:11

Yes. If your vehicle supports some automation, usually 2016 and about models have that capability, then it can simply send the vehicles control system, a signal, a message about a traffic situation. But if your vehicle doesn’t support any of it, it will simply warn the driver. We are the visual audio warning. So it’s going to tell you and navigate you on this complicated work zone. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Florida, but we have a big construction project going on I-4. And when I try to use my Google maps, it always fails. The road is changing constantly. So if we could put one of these signs are for the, these devices will simply relay the correct information about the road construction and the navigation system in that screen, you will see will guide you on the accurate route. We also made a lot of useful applications, scenarios, not just in the rural areas, but also in the urban areas. We were demonstrating in this automated vehicles summit in Florida, it was in Miami downtime . One of the applications was a garage parking application for handicap people, transportation challenge people. We simply put up one of our signs in front of this garage, very big garage. And it was even very difficult for us to find a handicap parking. So as soon as the sign is recognized, the device simply navigates the driver to the closest handicap parking area. We do a similar application for electric vehicles. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a charging station. So it navigates the driver to the closest charging station in the garage. One of the good application for urban areas was a lot of the times the navigation apps fail to give you the accurate route because those high rise buildings, block the GPS signal. However, the smart signs can actually be helpful in machine vision mapping. What it is doing is when the sign is recognized, it can navigate you on the accurate rod, even though you don’t have any GPS signal.

Richard Miles: 13:20

I see. And one of the things I like about doing this podcast is I think I understand the technology. Then I talk to the inventor and then I really understand it cause I didn’t focus or I didn’t get the fact that this differs from say, Google maps or GPS function in that one, depending on GPS, obviously. But two , those are maps that might be out of date the next day after they’re uploaded or you get your new software. Whereas the Connected Wise devices, depending on either recognition or current stimuli, I mean it’s information, it’s their current at the moment, right? It’s never out of date really, right? Because it’s reading what’s in front of it in a sense.

Enes Karaaslan: 13:54

Yes, there is a dynamic condition like work zones. And if there’s a road closure, simply the construction company puts up one of our smart signs and relaying the updated road chemistry message to these devices. So then your vehicle sees the sign. It will learn the accurate route and it can navigate safely on the detour. And it can understand the situation about that road closure. There was even one interesting application with demonstrated for the urban area to Google maps was actually routing the traffic and telling the driver to make a left in this intersection, but there was a no left turn sign there. So the route was an updated of course, about this traffic situation. What we did was stood up one of our signs and we rather the traffic on the accurate route by giving the updated roads, government tree and the traffic condition in that area. So we are trying to build something that traffic operators can actually help these connected automated vehicles and let them navigate safely in the challenging traffic conditions or in dynamic scenarios like work zones. It’s building communication between the traffic infrastructure and the drivers.

Richard Miles: 15:04

I see. So really the most advantageous in situations that you have to depend on real-time information, because there’s been some change like a work zone, as you said, or for some reason the GPS driven database might be out of date or there’s no other infrastructure to support smart technology.

Enes Karaaslan: 15:20

And also this message we are sending is not just a smart sign is not simply saying what type of sign is going to be. It’s saying a lot more than a normal traffic sign can say. So it’s not saying just no left turn. It’s actually giving the whole road geometric data of that intersection, which is very valuable for autonomous vehicle because intersection situation, the current sensors on the autonomous vehicle can be challenged sometimes to understand the road geometric history is happening there. A LIDAR may not see the other side of the road in a lot of situations. So if he could send the road geometric data, to autonomous vehicle via a visual input, that will be very helpful for those vehicles and help them localize their position in terms of a non road geometry data, right? So we are doing different products, different market for different market segments. We have different products feel about autonomous vehicle. We are simply aiming to sell a software solution since your vehicle will be accurate with all those sensors we need. So your camera will be available, et cetera. It will be as simple as a software solution. Then the vehicles subscribes to that software, it can start recognizing those signs. If you have a conventional way called that is not a be any sensor, any camera, then we simply sell these devices. They are very affordable. They cost under 500 bucks and it gives you a lot of automated vehicle features. It uses state of the art, artificial intelligence models. What we achieved is really great. We were able to put all those complicated competitions in a very small affordable device. And so that’s what we are hoping to achieve in this project we have in the company.

Richard Miles: 17:07

So Enes, as I always like to hear about the kind of the aha moment from inventors or founders. So tell me a little bit about how, when and where did you, and I don’t know if you have co-founders, but did you come up with this idea? Was it just sort of a flash of inspiration or did it slowly dawn on you as a iterative process?

Enes Karaaslan: 17:24

So the idea of using signs to send a message has been around for a decade. The challenge was they tried matrixx barcode kind of system, similar to QR codes. There were big companies who attempted to use these kinds of technologies. The problem with the QR code base technology was sometimes they are designed for laser scanners. And if you want to use a camera, it’s not going to be working as robustly as we hope , even with ourselves is very common QR code applications in our mobile phones. But when it comes to a traffic environment, there are so many challenges, dark time, nighttime condition , bright sunlight. A lot of the times only a small portion of the sign is visible to the camera. But in the QR code based systems, when you cover a small portion of the message of the barcode, the whole message is running . We put a lot of thoughts to solve this challenge. We need to use the power of image recognition because this barcode systems are simply encoding decoding methodology. If you simply trying to understand the black and white areas, and if the sign is partially covered or not visible, then it won’t happen. This is a real common application in the internet forums. You will see when you sign up in a forum website, you will see a default avatar in terms of shapes. They call it identity cons . They are automated . They generated images unique to your IP address. So that was our aha moment. Okay. This is a unique image generated automatically. And it’s this thing to a V IP address every user on the internet. So we decided to generate unique images for sign messages. Every time we put up a sign, it’s very distinct and the other sign we built , they are not a barcode system, but they are actually unique images that is simply a visual identifier for a message. So this gave us so much capability in terms of even 90% of the sign is not visible. It can still safely distinguish the sign from the other signs and activate the correct message. Now, we were able to use conveyor affordable camera system to operate safely and high vehicle speeds, or even in challenging elimination condition. When the sign is not very visible, even when a tree branch is covering the sign or snow is covering the sign, it can still pick up the message robot slate . So that was our a home moment . I was, I guess, cruising on a forum website and realized that, okay, this is an automatically generated that I could actually use to solve this problem. And U.S. DOT really liked this idea. It was very different, very unique than other ideas. That main focus on to our QR code, bar code kind of systems.

Richard Miles: 20:25

Right? That’s fascinating, but I’m sure you’ve discovered that great ideas don’t sell themselves. So tell me a bit about where you are in terms of a company you form Connected Wise. Tell us when you did that. And then where are you in terms of the development of your technology in terms of funding or employees or path to market, what does that look like for you?

Enes Karaaslan: 20:45

We started the company in 2018. When we received the grant from the Department of Transportation, we were a very small team of three to five people all founding members for PhD graduates from my University in Orlando, the University of Central Florida. We did an extra ordinary performance. We did a lot of testing outside, we’re using our own vehicles. So we did a prototype that was ready for demonstration. After phase one U.S. DOT really like our performance decided to award a phase two award, which was a major grant for us. We of course grew our team. And now we have 12 people in the team and two big offices trying to commercialize the technology. Now we made a lot of progress in the technology side, but making the technology ready for a commercial product takes a lot of time. You have to think of a lot of marketing commercialization. You have to think of advertising. And our go to market strategy took some time for us to figure out who our initial customers are going to be. The majority consumer. We decided to first target the city and counties started from Florida’s rural counties and our simply approach to that. Um , for pilot projects, we asked if you could put up these signs and deploy some of our devices in the vehicles and do a pilot project and see how much safety benefit we can bring to the county vehicles. And in the continuation of this pilot project, we can distribute some of these devices to the volunteer residents of the County and measure a broader scale benefits of the technology. So we have done a lot of communications with Florida county here, they are transportation departments. We are hoping to start a pilot project in Florida and very soon. So those are our initial customers. However, in the future , we are going to be targeting fleet customers who have a fleet of vehicles that we can simply provide advanced driver assistance futures . By that time, we are hopefully going to build some science in several locations in Florida. And these fleets also can benefit from this vehicle communication futures as well. But the main goal will be for fleet customers, helping them to collect data from their roadway . Sometimes for road infrastructure operators, our devices can collect a lot of data from the roadway about the work zones or the traffic congestions , et cetera, even the asphalt condition in the late maturity , we are hoping to target automakers who will agree to integrate the technology natively in the advanced driver assistance technology, we’ll be able to support our system and it can recognize our signs in the future. Hopefully this is a multi-faceted market. So in the other side of the business, we are to license the sign technology to the sign manufacturers because they are also interested in connected vehicle applications. And there are billions of signs in the world and the placing those signs is a huge market for the sign manufacturers. So that’s the other phase of the market. We are hoping to target. We are aiming to make $50 million by the year 2025 selling around 50,000 devices. So that’s our objective in the near future.

Richard Miles: 24:15

So it’s a very interesting point. You mentioned earlier about data and data collection. I didn’t understand how valuable that is until my daughter who an actuary for a major insurance company explained to me that getting really high quality data, especially in automobiles is of enormous value in particular to insurance companies who are very, very interested in all of those details. So I didn’t realize just to have valuable that is, and it’s in terms of investment. Now you mentioned the Department of Transportation a nd that grant, are you also raising money from private investors? Or how does that work?

Enes Karaaslan: 24:45

So we are now seeking seed stage funding that will be in the form of matching contribution. U.S. DOT Is hopefully going to award another round of funding for commercialization efforts solely, and its seed stage funding will be simply matching that contribution from the government. It’s going to be a safe investment for the investors saying that you’re only going to invest if the government is interested in the technology and decides to invest for commercialization right then by the end of 2022, we are hoping to raise series a around funding.

Richard Miles: 25:20

So that’s a pretty rapid timeline. It sounds like you’re well on your way. And it’s one final question. I always like to hear about the personal background of inventors and entrepreneurs. Tell us, what were you like as a kid? Were you one of those kids on the playground that made the rest of us feel stupid because you were building suspension, bridges out of twigs and the rest of us were just playing with our toys, or what point did you want to be an engineer or what was the path to your current career when you were a kid?

Enes Karaaslan: 25:43

So I always known that I would be an engineer even when I was a child. So I guess that’s something I was very sure about. I was always creative building things was always hands-on, but my major is civil engineers , but I always wanted to be a computer engineers . However, if you’re an engineer, you do a lot of the things. You can be a great computer scientist. It doesn’t matter which engineering discipline you are in. We are all using the same tools, same knowledge in our fields. What I was good at, how I both, I was good at knowing a lot of things, rather than being best at one engineering discipline. My uniqueness was I was able to connect different things with each other. Computer science expect with a civil engineering practice. And even in this case, it was an IP address future to a transportation application. So that was something I was good at. It’s sometimes a PhD students. They usually have this hardship and explaining complicated things to the public. And I believe I was better at compared to my peers explaining the complicated concepts in a simpler rehearse to my colleagues or to my friends. So I have been always an entrepreneurial person than fans in my class. I started company when I was still a student. So I finished got my doctorate degree, but my talent I guess, was to be able to connect different things that are in different disciplines.

Richard Miles: 27:10

Enes, telling me, does this run in the family were either of your parents, engineers, or business people or any of your siblings?

Enes Karaaslan: 27:16

My father is a great engineer. I guess I got it from him because he was an electronics engineer, but people expect them to do even a good job in changing electrical system in household, but it’s not his expertise. But what he was good at is even though something is not his expertise, he still think that is his responsibility to be good at things that public will expect from it. So he was able to fix any electronic equipment in the house. He was able to build his own furniture. He was able to do a lot of the things by himself. And that’s something that I admired , I guess I wanted to be in the same way. I was a civil engineer, but I never said a climbing job is not my expertise, even though public think that it could be associated to my field.

Richard Miles: 28:04

Right.

Enes Karaaslan: 28:04

But I try to learn as much as possible from different things. And I guess what is unique is sometimes is if you connect in a different field, something you’re good at to another field that you’re also good at, you can achieve a really great thing by communicating these two, right? And a lot of the emissions in science happen in that way, when you get different disciplines together.

Richard Miles: 28:27

Right? That’s something we’d talk about all the time at the Cade Museum is how invention is really making connections between a fact over in this field with a factor in that field or an insight, and a lot of different inventors have a lot of different interests and they connect a field that they know to another one. And one final question. I usually ask this earlier, where did you grow up?

Enes Karaaslan: 28:46

I grew up in Turkey. I moved to United States to study my PhD six years ago. I had been here before, during my undergrad education as an exchange student. And I guess during this exchange semester, I made a lot of good friends who later visited me back in Turkey. So that was, I guess, helpful to my decision of coming back here to continue my education. I also admire the competition here in the higher education, millions of people from so many different countries competing something greater. So that really attracted me. And I really enjoyed that competition here .

Richard Miles: 29:22

Well, I have to say you probably couldn’t have picked a better city than Orlando. I’m not from Orlando, but I’ve been there quite a bit. And in terms of cities there’s growing that is developing, that is trying out new things. Orlando certainly has a lot going in that direction.

Enes Karaaslan: 29:35

For entrepreneurs is growing really fast, especially Florida is trying to become an autonomous vehicle hub.

Richard Miles: 29:42

You couldn’t be in a better location and it’s thank you very much for joining us today and Radio Cade, fascinating discussion and your company’s doing well. You’re doing well and wish you the best of luck.

Enes Karaaslan: 29:50

Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this podcast.

Richard Miles: 29:53

Great. Thanks for coming on.

Outro: 29:55

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

What can we learn from the brain about learning itself? Based on the latest findings of neuroscience about how the brain learns best, Noel Foy offers training to teachers, parents, students, athletes, and coaches. For instance, improving executive function helps master impulsive behavior and reduce anxiety, both valuable traits for students and athletes. Noel also talks about how her son’s experience with concussions influenced her journey from school teacher to “neuro-educator.” *This episode was originally released on May 20, 2020.*

TRANSCRIPT:

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

Richard Miles: 0:39What can we learn from the brain about learning itself? I’m your host, Richard Miles. Today my guest Noel Foy, founder of a company called Ammpe – A M M P E, which offers training to teachers, parents, students, athletes, and coaches based on neuroscience findings about how the brain learns best. She’s also the author of a children’s book called “ABC Worry Free”. Welcome to Radio Cade, Noel.

Noel Foy: 1:03Thank you Richard , for having me.

Richard Miles: 1:04Noel, one of the reasons you wrote your book “ABC Free” was to help students, teachers, and parents manage anxiety. So this has gotta be a golden moment for you, right? I mean, now we have an entire country of anxious households, and so I’m guessing for you, an opportunity.

Noel Foy: 1:18Well, I am not responsible for the pandemic. Let me just put that out there, I certainly am seeing an increase in anxiety. I’m hearing from more students and parents about a little uptick. Certainly something like this would trigger more anxiety and I’m working with more teachers remotely doing some lessons in their classrooms to help their students manage their anxiety. So, I think it’s a timely experience for folks to take a closer look at what kind of coping skills they have in their pocket. And if they don’t, this is a great opportunity to develop some coping skills, not just for a pandemic, but for just how to manage anxiety-provoking moments in our lives. Anxiety pops up all the time. Something that is to be expected, it’s normal from time to time. When we’re worrying too much, then it’s something that we want to really have some strategies for. So I think really helping kids develop into adults have some strategies that they can rely on in these times is really important.

Richard Miles: 2:20Right. So were chatting before the show, you’re from Boston but you’re actually in Martha’s vineyard right now. So I assume that meant nothing but Netflix and Chardonnay.

Noel Foy: 2:27Believe it or not, it’s been a great opportunity for me to get some things done that I haven’t had much time to do. So, for example, I made some videos, I figured if ever a time to help parents and teachers and coaches and students with anxiety and coping skills, It’s now. So I have been working on some videos I put up on YouTube and writing a lot of articles on how to cope in parenting. What are some things we can do in our parenting that can help bring the anxiety down, can we do in our parenting language in our modeling that can help these stressful times go a little bit better.

Richard Miles: 3:04So as I mentioned, the top of the show, your model is based on findings of neuroscience and that’s been a field in which there has been tremendous growth and research in the last 10 to 20 years. We know things now that we had really no clue at the turn of the new century. So, why don’t we start there, what are some of the key findings of neuroscience that have informed your work and inform your teaching and your coaching model?

Noel Foy: 3:27So as you said, there’s a lot of exciting findings in the last 10 to 20 years. We’re learning so much about the brain. Uh , some of the things are these neuro myths that we used to believe to be true, such as that we only use 10% of the brain or that the brain is set at childhood. So now knowing about neuroplasticity and this process of our brain being malleable and that it continues to grow and change throughout our lives based on how we use it is really exciting information and learning a lot about emotion and the connection of emotion to learning has been really, really powerful. So as a neuro educator, I’m bringing in findings from neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology and education, and taking those findings and turning them into practical applications for teachers, coaches, parents and students. And that piece about the emotions has been really, really powerful. Judy Willis’s work out at the University of Santa Barbara has been really instrumental in helping us learn about what happens when we’re in states of fear, frustration, anger, boredom, or lack of relevance to what we’re learning and how that can kind of create this virtual stop sign in our brain and block learning from happening. We’re not receptive to learning in those states. So I’ve spent a lot of time in that space helping teachers and students and coaches and athletes decrease the stress. Since we know that this emotional piece is connected to learning, whether you’re learning how to do a math problem or how to write a paper or how to make a speech or how to execute a play, we’re learning. We’re learning in our jobs every day and stresses and anxiety can get in the way. And the emotional piece with Daniel Goldman’s work with social and emotional learning has been really powerful. He has found that EQ so that emotional quotient is twice as important than IQ and technical ability and driving performance. And we’re seeing now in schools that they’re paying a lot more attention to social and emotional learning and developing competencies and standards in those areas. And then the research in cognitive science has been really exciting about how we learn how we process and apply and remember information and Russell Barkley’s work on executive function. Executive function, emotional social skills are on every list of employers skills they’re seeking in their candidates. Yet we don’t typically, explicitly teach these in school. So I’m really excited to see that we’re seeing more attention given to these, seeing that they’re are so important to success in school relationships, sports, jobs and life. Carol Dweck’s work on mindset is really exciting. Fixed and growth mindset are two terms that she coined about really exploring our attitudes about intelligence and ability and how we praise our students, how we praise our kids, what feedback we get and our thoughts about effort and motivation and how that connects to achievement and how it connects to how we face challenges or do not face them. That work has been really powerful for me, as has been John Kabat-Zinn’s work on mindfulness and research on cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness are two of the most effective treatments for anxiety. So I’ve incorporated those into the ABC strategy from the book “ABC Worry Free”. So I’ve come up with a strategy to help people decrease that stress so that they can be in that sweet spot. We need a little bit of stress, right? To get up every day and to compete. But when we have too much stress, we’re not receptive to learning and we’re not going to remember what we learned and we’re not going to be able to execute. So helping folks have that strategy has been one thing that I’ve developed from a lot of that research.

Richard Miles: 7:25So Noel, “ABC Worry Free” it’s targeted for a younger child. What is the general age range for that book?

Noel Foy: 7:31Well, that’s interesting. It is targeted, it’s geared towards kids. So I have used that book as young as preschool through adulthood. Although it’s written as a children’s book, I find it just an approachable way to tackle a topic that some people feel embarrassed about or insecure about. And through the character we can learn about the patterns of anxiety. We can learn what happens in our mind, in our bodies when we get anxious and we can start to see how we avoid things when we’re anxious or we step away from challenges. So everybody has a bee’s nest in the book. The character Max is afraid of bees and then decides he’s never going to go outside and play again. And he’s excessively worrying that every time he’s going to go outside he’s going to get stung . So when I’m working with older kids and with adults, we talk about, well, what’s your bees nest ? What’s your trigger? And we can learn from the character about the patterns and then we can learn the ABC strategy, relative to that person’s trigger. So I have used it with all ages and the first time I used it with high school aged students, I thought I was going to be booed off the stage. And I was probably halfway through the reading and one student just yelled out randomly “relatable!” So, the stress response works the same for kids and adults. So I feel it’s for anybody.

Richard Miles: 8:55So Noel, now tell me a little bit about how the methodology, how it works when a student or a parent comes to you and says, “Hey, my child is anxious and learning this particular subject” or a teacher comes and says, “my students are anxious.” Do you walk them through a series of practical oral exercises or written exercises or what is it that they do to overcome or work through that anxiety in that particular subject?

Noel Foy: 9:15Usually one of the first places I start is with teaching kids about their brain or teaching teachers and coaches about the brain. We are required to learn every muscle and bone in our body as kids, but we don’t really learn about the brain in practical ways that we can understand it in real time. So if my thoughts are getting into a worried place, I have to start to pay attention to that. And I was never taught about that as a kid. And to this day, most teachers are not trained in how to help kids with anxiety or are teaching them about the stress response and what you can do in real time when you notice worry thoughts and when you notice those physiological changes in your body. So I start there usually, is start to teach them about their brain and I teach them about neuroplasticity because for some kids they really love that it’s based on science, but for others they just need that sense of hope that you can change. And a lot of folks have a mindset that they don’t think they can change, that this is something that they might be stuck with for the rest of their lives. They have this sense of permanence.

Richard Miles: 10:23If I could interrupt, neuroplasticity is this idea or this finding that we know is true, that the brain is such, it can be rewired. And I think one of the best examples that I’ve heard is, for instance, people who lose a limb that let’s say they lose their left arm in an accident, the brain can actually train itself to use rewire said now that the right arm for instance, is much more effective. Is that what we’re talking about with neuroplasticity?

Noel Foy: 10:46

That’s an example. So when you start doing something new, whether it’s just thinking in a new way or feeling in a new way or doing something in a new way, that’s basically neuroplasticity in action. So the neurons start talking to each other and you might be starting to carve new roads and new pathways in the brain because you’re doing things in a different way. And at first it’s hard because you’re teaching the brain something new and you may be thinking in a way that’s different. Well , let’s say I was an anxious kid and I might be thinking that I can’t do science, right? And I might have certain behaviors and certain thoughts that are kind of bundled together when I go into that science class. And if that happens habitually over a year or more, maybe several years, that becomes my default. My brain is thinking, Oh , that’s how you roll, when you go into science class. But when I start to teach it new ways of thinking, so mindsets would be one thing I’d be working on. Back to your earlier question, I’d be teaching them about their brain, about neuroplasticity, about the stress response. They need to pay attention to their worried thoughts and the physiological changes in their body. And then I teach them the strategy. ABC strategy is one strategy I would teach them. I basically incorporated research about mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy as well as some executive function and mindset shift in that strategy. So that A is about accept how you feel. So that’s about mindfulness, accepting how you feel and in moments of stress instead of denying it or dismissing it or let’s say judging yourself, just accepting that. And that can bring down the anxiety and notch right there. And the B is about breathe slow and deep. And we know that slow, deep breaths , send a message to the nervous system to slow the game down so you can get your legs back under you and reset. So you can think clearly again. And then the C step is change your thinking. And that’s about making that cognitive shift in your thought process and your perspective and think in a new way so that you can step into problem solving mode and move forward. So those three steps come together as a result of my research on mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and Carol Dweck’s work on mindset. So those are some of the things I do and then I also spend a lot of time helping kids build their executive function skills and their social and emotional skills.

Richard Miles: 13:18And by executive function, Noel , it’s basically the ability to step outside yourself and judge your own actions. Like, that’s a good idea or not a good idea.

Noel Foy: 13:26So that what you’re describing there is really metacognitive thinking, where you have that ability to kind of step back and say, okay, is this a good approach? What would be the best approach to use in this moment? Or for this task.

Richard Miles: 13:38Young kids are not famous for executive function. Correct?

Noel Foy: 13:41Right. So executive function is something that develops over time. Our executive functions reside in our prefrontal cortex and it’s the last part of our brain to develop. They can be built and taught, but it’s something that through a lot of practice and training we become better at executive function, or those who don’t get a lot of practice and training or good quality instruction, they may not develop the executive function skills as well as we’d like them to be successful in school or in their jobs. So your executive functions are basically like the CEO of your brain and there are a set of skills that include attention, memory, planning and organizing, self regulating your emotions, having that ability to make a cognitive shift in your mind and having cognitive flexibility and self monitoring, being able to see how I’m doing, make some adjustments if necessary. These are a set of skills that we need to produce. Task initiation is another big one. So if I’m having trouble getting started on a task, that’s an underdeveloped skill that I would need to work on. So, I spend a lot of time in that place with students because these are underdeveloped skills for a lot of kids and they can be built and taught. We do a lot of activities to help them develop those skills. Kids who have weak executive function are usually missing like a mental schema in their mind of what it looks like, like what the finished product looks like or what the set of steps look like of how I would approach this task and so they need some practice with activities that would help them build those skills.

Richard Miles: 15:19Just as a comment, at The Cade Museum, we also have as we design exhibits and the programs, try to incorporate a lot of neuroscience findings in there as shorthand called it the head, heart and hands. Now idea behind is that it’s much easier to remember a fact, let’s say a scientific fact or something in chemistry, if at the same time you’re learning about it, you’re actually doing it. A Hands-on experiment or somebody’s telling you about it in an interesting way is much more effective long term or even short term, as opposed to simply reading it in a book or in a fact sheet or whatever. And there seems to have been a lot of studies that validate that, that you’re much more likely to remember something if you can associate it with another experience, particularly if it’s engaged as one of your other senses, much more likely to retain it.

Noel Foy: 16:00Yeah. I love one of The Cade Museum’s missions about teaching and inspiring and not through just one discipline, but connecting it to daily life and making it relevant. When I mentioned Judy Willis’s work earlier, when you’re doing something that’s not relevant, that can be stressful, right? So you have a lot of kids that are in school saying, why do we have to do this? I’m never going to use this, and helping them find ways to make it meaningful and see the relevance of this can definitely boost the motivation.

Richard Miles: 16:31That comment that you made earlier was what triggered me because one of the things that we decided from the beginning was we thought if we teach science to inventions, right? You’re basically telling them the answer. At the beginning you’re saying this is what this technology can produce, this thing that you have in your hand, whether it’s an iPhone or it’s anything really, you’re telling them the relevance upfront of why the chemistry and the biology and the physics that went into developing that particular technology are important because it produces this whatever this is, and we seem to have found that for kids in particular who don’t think that they’re really interested in those subjects, they become interested if they understand the connection, as you said, the relevance to technologies that they use or experience or are affected by every day.

Noel Foy: 17:12If there’s that little hook, then that usually will boost their motivation and then that will usually increase, let’s say more positive emotions associated with this. Then you have more dopamine going in the learning process, which makes for happier moods. You start to associate that whole experience in a more positive way. So that whole piece about emotions and learning being linked I think starts to come to play through just that one example.

Richard Miles: 17:38Noel, some of your work is with athletes and coaches, which I think is fascinating to a lot of people because in sports mental engagement is key, right, to success, particularly at a certain level it’s already given that whether it’s a young kid or professional athlete that physically they’ve got what it takes to be participate in that level. But a lot of it comes down to the mental executive function, discipline and so on. Give me an example, for instance of your clients and without naming any names, but when they come to you, let’s say a coach or an athlete, what is a typical problem that they’re dealing with and how do you help them?

Noel Foy: 18:10Sure. So most of my work with athletes has been at the high school level and what coaches are noticing is that their athletes are having harder time paying attention. So attention is something that’s coming up a lot. Lacking self-direction and self-awareness is coming up a lot and self-regulation issues is coming up as well. The coaches are feeling like they’ve taught the plays, but they’re feeling frustrated that the students aren’t executing them, so they’re trying to figure out ‘what am I doing wrong?’. We go through a lot of the things we’ve chatted about so far, but one of the things I try to teach them about is the brain. Again, how we can build these executive function skills cause a lot of those challenges that they’re dealing with are related to executive function. When, let’s say you’re feeling very stressed, your executive function skills can be blocked, so it’s like a virtual stop sign could be going up in the brain. Now is that coming from a place of fear? Is it coming from a place of anger? So if you have some athletes that are, let’s say, not self-regulating, their executive functions could go offline, but we need those to be in place for them to execute the play because they’re not going to really remember it. If those executive functions aren’t online, they won’t be able to execute. We do a lot of activities with self-regulation, self-awareness, teamwork, collaboration, all those things will be enhanced when kids executive function skills are online. But when the stress response is activated, those executive function skills will go offline, helping them understand what’s happening there, and then they can hopefully interrupt their stress response. For example, we’re seeing a lot of kids in chronic stress these days and the brain does not discern the difference between, let’s say, a real or a perceived threat. So let’s just say for an athlete, the perceived threat might be, I’m going to get yelled at by the coach, or I’m going to be taken out of the game if I make a mistake, right? So if that’s the perceived threat, it could be enough to trigger that athlete’s stress response to activate. So if that’s happening, their body’s feeling all sorts of physiological changes, which is going to get in their way, and then they’re going to go to fight, flight, or freeze, then they’re basically not going to be effective to execute the play. So I try to help them discern and really pay attention to your thought process. And you can interrupt that stress response cycle. If you start to notice those worried thoughts and you start to notice that your body starting to feel different. Those are two great warning signs for you to pay attention to. And then let’s now implement one of the strategies, that we’ve been practicing to help you reset and get yourself back into a receptive state so you can execute the play.

Richard Miles: 20:50Is there a particular sport that those athletes or coaches come to you and if so, even a particular position or do you see all sorts of different sports and all sorts of different positions?

Noel Foy: 20:59The coaches that have approached me most have been basketball coaches. I have worked with AD’s though, I’ve done presentations for all of their captains and then train the captains and then the captains go back and train their student athlete peers. And then those coaches are relying a lot on those captains to train the kids. So I’ve worked with whole teams, I’ve worked with just captains. I work with the coaches of course too , cause it really needs to start from the top down. You need to really model it and live it. If a coach, say for example is let’s say going after a ref for a bad call and not self-regulating, of course there’s going to be stress and of course they’re going to be upset, but if it’s done in a way that that coach gets kicked out of the game or has gone into that out of the sweet spot stress zone, then that’s not going to be a great model for those athletes. So I really believe that the coaches have to be trained and then the athletes, you kind of have to live it and model it in practice. And a lot of the athletes are feeling afraid to make mistakes. A lot of the athletes are having trouble rebounding, no pun intended there with the basketball, but rebounding from mistakes and showing resiliency, they’re getting stuck in that negative place that they made a mistake and then they’re having a hard time moving on. So we do a lot of practice with how to build resilience and how to come back from a mistake and how to face the next challenge, embrace it instead of fearing it and how to keep your mind and your body in that sweet spot. So a lot of the strategies I’m doing, whether I’m working with athletes or teachers or parents, is I am giving them key information and proven strategies that appeal to how the brain learns best. You can think of them as if they’re mental Gatorade for the brain and they’re helping decrease stress and sync the social, emotional, and cognitive parts of the brain so that you can boost your learning, boost your metacognition, boost your executive function, boost your execution and your performance.

Richard Miles: 23:00Noel, how do you validate your results? Do you do surveys afterwards of the teams, for instance, the classrooms that you work with or do you look at their test scores or even in the case of an athletic team, how are they doing it and season and so on? How do you hold yourself accountable to make sure that your methods are on the right track?

Noel Foy: 23:17So with teachers, I will have them answer some evaluations. And there’s one school that I was working specifically with two teachers for about a two month period, and I was in there just about every day. So first before I started, we had all the information about how often kids were participating in class, how often were they having behavior issues in class, I had all their grades. So we started to track after they were trained, were the kids participating? So that was very measurable. Typically, we’re seeing in most classrooms about the same four to five kids. Let’s say you have a class of 20 to 25 kids, you’re seeing about the same four kids raising their hands on a regular basis. So what about the other 20 kids? We don’t know what they’re thinking and those four kids are getting continual practice, but the others, we don’t really know what they’re thinking. So we saw an increase in participation that was very measurable. You could now see 15 hands going up at the same time in the classroom. We could certainly see a decrease in behavior issues, less times going to the principal’s office or less times having to leave the class. We are seeing an increase in anxiety over about the past decade, about 17% increase in anxiety in kids, which is going to make it harder for teachers and for coaches. Right? And if they’re not trained and have some knowledge about the brain and some strategies and the stress response, I think it’s going to make their jobs really more challenging than they need to be. So we’re seeing more kids putting their head down on the desk, spacing out, acting out, freaking out, wanting to go to the nurse, going to the bathroom multiple times in a class. So we saw those numbers go down, way down. We saw the performance go up. So teachers would say that they were able to cover more content, that they could go deeper with the learning, get into critical thinking more. Kids were cooperating with each other more. They were taking more academic risks, they were feeling more comfortable. That’s something I should mention, psychological safety is absolutely critical. It’s connecting back to that emotions. And cognition being interwoven. A lot of kids aren’t feeling safe. Not that the teacher’s going to hurt them of course, but just emotionally, not feeling safe, afraid they’re going to be made fun of if they make a mistake or afraid to put themselves out there. Now you have other kids coming in with all sorts of other issues too. Could be trauma, or situations going on at home, but when they’re in the classroom, there could be things that we could cultivate to make the kids feel safer and the same on a team. The kids aren’t feeling like this doesn’t mean that we can’t be rigorous and can’t be demanding of course, but they need to feel that they can make a mistake, own it, learn from it, and not be, let’s say judged for it. So we saw kids definitely self-regulating better. What was really fun to watch when they were in games that were really close when the stakes got higher and the stress got higher, they were able to self regulate and when let’s say a ref made a call they didn’t like, they were able to process it, accept it and move forward. And same thing if they made a mistake, they made some kind of execution error with the play. They were able to come back and just put in more effort on that next play, either rebounding more or trying to make a great block or just be there for their teammates emotionally, physically in ways that they were kind of checking out before they were getting more wins. So that’s very measurable. They were winning more and less, let’s say, tension on the team, a lot more collaboration, greater teamwork, and teachers basically said a lot of the same things.

Richard Miles: 26:56That’s fascinating. So you started out as a teacher and then you got interested in neuroscience and then from there you developed this role as an educator dealing with the neuroscience concept . Tell us a little bit about that, your career path. What did you start out teaching in what level, what grade, and then how did you first hear or get interested in neuroscience?

Noel Foy: 27:14So I have been teaching on my gosh, close to 40 years as an educator now. I started out teaching dyslexic students, at a school called Landmark School and then I was a learning specialist at the Roxbury Latin school for about 25 years and then at the same time I was also a teacher trainer, worked for a company called Keys to Literacy, doing teacher trainings. I slowly evolved into being a consultant and a neuro-educator from an unfortunate situation with one of my sons, so one of our boys had multiple concussions that got me to neuroscience conferences because I wanted to learn more about the brain and how this was going to impact his life, how it was going to impact school and his ability to concentrate, pay attention. Going to those neuroscience conferences were just like eyeopening . And then that got me to conferences called learning and the brain conferences. That was my first encounter with Judy Willis. Where started to just have like one aha moment after another. It really started with learning about the impact of stress on learning, and I started to have these aha moments that, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s why I had such a hard time in science’, or ‘Oh, this helps explain why my kids love learning, but they hate school’. They were, and I was in those states of stress, the fear, the anxiety, the lack of relevance, sometimes anger and the frustration, those stressful moments were getting in the way of learning. So that just really inspired me to do something about this lack of information that most teachers weren’t getting trained in. That was not part of my teacher preparation and to this day, it’s something that still is in need of a lot of work. Thankfully there’s an organization called Deans for Impact, that is working on trying to change this. But right now I’d say the majority of teacher preparation programs might have a class or two on some kind of educational psychology. But teachers are not being trained in how to prepare adequately for the real time kinds of problems that we’re experiencing in the classroom and setting them up for, I think the best success we could about the knowledge that we have related to emotions and learning and how they’re interwoven and how to deal with the 17% increase in anxiety and the increase in depression and how are we going to manage all of this in the classroom. So I decided I needed to come up with trainings that would help empower teachers to build these skills kids and to build these skills in the teachers themselves. So if we think about teacher prep programs, the professors themselves would need to learn this new information in order to train the teachers. So that’s something that’s ongoing, but still a long way to go.

Richard Miles: 29:57So I imagine as you talk to teachers, you probably have a fair degree of credibility having been one yourself. Right? So you’re not just some consultant parachuting in telling them, well here’s what science says. The fact that you have been in their shoes, helps you understand what they’re looking for and what they’re going through.

Noel Foy: 30:13It absolutely does. Being a classroom teacher, a former classroom teacher, does give me some street cred and I still try to keep myself real by working with students to this day. So even though I’m a consultant, I still have my own students. I use all of the strategies on my students as well to make sure that I can be able to say, here’s how the student responded. Here are the results, here’s about how long it might take for you to start to see results. Here’s typical feedback I might get from students about this strategy. So yes, it definitely helps.

Richard Miles: 30:48So obviously in addition to being a teacher, you’ve also been a student. Tell us about you growing up. What were you like as a student? Were you a good one, a bad one where you’re curious, not so curious? And then any indicators that you can remember as a young child being interested in the brain.

Noel Foy: 31:03So I was a good student. I loved school. I will say that the healthy understanding of failure and I would put myself in situations that I knew I’d succeed in. So I wish I had a little bit more of understanding about mindset. I didn’t have any strategies so, I was that kid that got anxious in science class. I was that child that just walking to science class activated my stress response. So I went in on high alert and instead of listening to the teacher and taking in the science, I was just thinking, ‘Please don’t call on me. I have no idea what you’re talking about’. So that’s what I remember about that class instead of the science. That class, I can say I lived that experience about the connection of emotion to learning. I was in a state of fear and it blocked my ability to learn in that class and the way it was taught at that time period. It was not relevant to me at all. I had no idea that I would ever use science. So, I am very grateful that a point came in my life, unfortunately through my son’s concussion, I started to see the relevance of science and the applications just seem limitless for the classroom, for sports, for relationships, for the corporate world. There’s just so many applications.

Richard Miles: 32:17So the other fascinating part of your story, one that we’d like to talk about at The Cade museum, it’s an entrepreneurial aspect. When you went from being a teacher, I assume in a public school or even a private institution, but essentially then became an entrepreneur running your own business, what sort of advice would you give? Because it’s something that a lot of people dream of, right? They think, well, I’m going to leave my first job and I’m gonna start a second career in own business. And that generally is a little bit harder than it sounds. Tell us about that experience of becoming your own boss and running your own organization.

Noel Foy: 32:48Well, it’s really fun. It’s really challenging and it’s about something I really care about. I’m obviously passionate about it. It’s certainly something that requires a lot of persistence and resilience. There’s definitely times where I’m thinking, wow, I’ve worked really hard on this, am I making the progress that I feel I should be making or you certainly make a lot of mistakes and certainly have a lot of failures. For example, the book ‘ABC, Worry Free’, I had written a children’s book when my first of four sons was born years ago. I think I just thought I was going to put it out there and bang, somebody was just going to pick it up. Well that didn’t happen, but at that time period of my life I didn’t really have a growth mindset and understand the power of failure and that, okay, maybe take a look at your approach. There’s something to be learned here, so that ability to shift my mindset and really look at failure in a new way and have a healthy understanding of it, has really helped my work a lot to put myself out there and teachers and coaches have been very receptive. I’d say one of the biggest hurdles is time. Many teachers are feeling that, Oh man, I have a lot on my plate already, now I have this one more thing. That’s how they’re thinking about it is how am I going to add these strategies when I’m already feeling I don’t have enough time to cover my content. So you run into challenges throughout this process, but it’s so worth it and so fulfilling, especially when you start to see results.

Richard Miles: 34:14I love that phrase and well, a healthy understanding of failure. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and inventors that we talked to describe something very similar. It’s not if you fail, it’s when you fail because you will have failures along the path and obviously even for athletes and so on, it’s how do you use those failures, learn from them, and then leverage them into your next achievement. But not to be surprised when they happen. Noel, this has been great conversation and at this moment you don’t look like you’re failing to me, so keep it up . Of course in the Epic we’re in now, maybe we’ll all just sit around, like I said, Netflix and Chardonnay, and that’s what the next three years are gonna look like. But hopefully not.

Noel Foy: 34:50You’re probably going to learn something new, so you’re keeping that neuroplasticity going through this period.

Richard Miles: 34:56Thanks very much for joining me on Radio Cade today and wish you the best.

Noel Foy: 34:59So thank you so much for having me. It was great.

Outro: 35:02Radio Cade is produced by The Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida . Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews. Podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak . The Radio Cade theme song is produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Where does creativity live in the brain, and why does it matter?  We talk to Rex Jung, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network, and a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jung talks about how standard measurements of creativity correlate with the structure of the brain, and how the brain can “rewire” itself to take on challenging or unfamiliar tasks. This is especially important in our early years, but still effective as we grow older.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:02

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

Where does creativity live in the brain and why does it matter? Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host Richard Miles today, I’m talking to Rex Jung, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network and a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Dr. Jung studies, both brain disease and what the brain does well, a field of research known as positive neuroscience. Welcome to Radio Cade , Rex .

Rex Jung: 1:09

Thanks for having me.

Richard Miles: 1:10

So you have done a lot of fascinating research and a lot of very interesting areas, including traumatic brain injury, lupus, schizophrenia, intelligence, and creativity. So Rex, we can either make this the first of 18 episodes on your work, or we can pick one. So I say, let’s talk about creativity if that’s okay with you.

Rex Jung: 1:27

Sounds good.

Richard Miles: 1:29

So I took a look at some of your recent research on creativity. And one thing that jumped out to me as a layman, I don’t have any special expertise in the background was your use of tests to determine baseline levels of creativity. I noticed that you mentioned something called the creative achievement questionnaire, and you also use something called a musical creativity questionnaire. So we can start with what your working definition of creativity is, which I assume these things measure these tests measure, and then tell us, how were those tests developed? How do you know they’re accurate? And then how do they differ from other tests that have been around for instance, to test on divergent thinking?

Rex Jung: 2:07

So at the onset, I should say that as a neuropsychologist, I’m very keenly aware of test reliability and validity. And the tests in creative cognition are universally somewhat crappy. That’s not a technical term, but it is a term that kind of captures the fact that we’ve only been trying to capture this construct in the last 50, 70 years, and only really aggressively trying to study this in the last 10 or 15. So we inherited measures that came to us from the past and the creative achievement questionnaire, as you mentioned, first is perhaps one of the better of these that it just measures your achievements in 10 different domains. It was a test created by Dr. Carson at Harvard, I believe and it really quantifies or attempts to quantify creative cognition across things from most generally in the sciences and the arts more specifically in things like inventions versus culinary arts. So it really quantifies things across those domains to answer a different part of your question. The definition is not one of mine of creativity, but one inherited from Dr. Stein in the 1950s who defined creativity as the production of something novel and useful. And that dichotomy is really interesting looking at novelty on the one hand utility on the other. And there arises from that brain mechanisms that could tap novelty versus utility. And finally you’re mentioned of divergent thinking is one of the measures of novelty generation that has been used since the 1950s. And that is okay, but not the only measure I’m hopeful as we move forward in this field, that we can develop better metrics and measures of creative cognition.

Richard Miles: 4:06

Well, that helps a lot Rex and creativity on one hand, it’s very popular in that people like to talk about creativity in terms of musicians and artists and what makes them tick. But it seems like there are also a lot of fairly common misconceptions about how creativity actually works in the brain like, Oh, well, creative people, they’re using their right brain and it’s uncreative people using their left brain and that sort of stuff. How definitively does the research show that those conceptions misconceptions are either serious or inaccurate or flat out wrong? The way it works in the brain for most people sort of a black box, right? They just think something happens in there . Some of us are creative, some are not. What does the research show in terms of how it actually is working neurologically?

Rex Jung: 4:49

I’ll correct a misconception that just arose in your description of that. Some of us are creative and some of us are not. I think, in my research and did my hypothesizing about creativity. It is clear to me and research our research and other research supports this, that creativity is a type of problem solving. And so everyone has to have that at some level. It’s either more or less of it. And if creativity is a type of problem solving for very low incident problems, it is valuable in the fact that we are able to think outside the box and come up with something novel and useful, that would address problem. That is less prevalent in our day-to-day life. I like to think about creativity as being somewhat dichotomous, but overlapping with a construct of intelligence where it’s also a type of problem solving, but it’s problem solving for things that happen on a more regular basis, as opposed to once in a hundred years with a hundred year flood, for example, what am I going to do? My house is going to be underwater. I need to figure out something really novel and useful to get out of this particular. So there are a number of what we call neuro mythologies about creativity. And you mentioned one of them that creativity resides in the right brain or right hemisphere. This arises from work with neurosurgeon theory, I believe, and a neuroscientist who looked at patients that had epilepsy and they separate the corpus callosum, which is the central connecting structures between the left and right hemisphere. And they discovered that the left and right brains function somewhat differently. The left is more logical and linear and reading and math tend to be localized in that have a hemisphere. And then the right hemisphere is more synthetic and adaptive and some artistic capabilities might reside more over there. So that is where this neural mythology of left brain right brain or right brain locus of creativity emerged from our research has found that, and others have found that it takes nearly your whole brain to be effectively creative. And it doesn’t reside in one hemisphere or one lobe of the brain, but it’s an integration of different parts of the brain that are critical to creative success. Another myth is that you have to be extremely intelligent to be creative. A genius, Einstein and Newton, Picasso, and Michael Jordan are particular examples of genius in their particular domains. But as I tried to dispel the myth that you somewhat articulated earlier, everyone has creative capacity. It’s, it’s a matter of more or less than how you use it, what domain you use it, but creativity in my conceptualization is a critical problem solving capacity. Another myth is that you have to be kind of crazy to be creative, that there has to be some sort of neuro pathology in order to express creativity. And , and we have every number of examples of the mad genius from Vincent van Gogh to John Nash, who won the Nobel prize in economics. The movie A Beautiful Mind was formed after there is an equal number and greater number of the averse that no hint of neuropathology is associated with the creativity of Michelangelo or Edison. So these neuro myths prevail because we continue to view creativity as somehow elusive and a capacity that is given to us from the gods when actually it is a critical component of everyday thinking.

Richard Miles: 8:26

So a lot of progress has been made generally in the field of neuroscience, particularly since the development of the functional MRI. What in particular strikes you say from the last couple of years in the field of creativity in neuroscience, that you’re excited about, that points to deeper or higher levels of understanding of how creativity operates in the brain, this sort of stuff that hasn’t made it yet into the popularized science articles.

Rex Jung: 8:49

I’m most excited, perhaps about this studies of interplay between intelligence and creativity. There have been issues in neuro-psychology and one coming out in the journal of intelligence, which explore the interplay or overlap between intelligence and creativity, because my hypothesis is centered around these both being problem solving capacities. It’s important to understand where there’s overlap and where there is different . So I’m most excited about neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies, which look at brain networks that underlie intelligent problem solving as opposed to, or in addition to brain networks that are involved in creative problem solving. And I think that will really give us some insight into whether these problem solving capacities are rather similar. If one is hierarchically located above the other, like intelligence is very important and creativity comes from intelligence, or if they’re rather disparate or different from each other. I think that is exciting research.

Richard Miles: 9:52

I’m guessing that a lot of people are looking at research or your type of research that you’re doing and seeing, does this have useful implication for, for instance, educators in particular at the preschool and primary school levels, or what are your preliminary conclusions or findings in terms of, are there ways that kids learn that perhaps should be changed with an eye towards enhancing their ability to learn more creatively or be more creative?

Rex Jung: 10:17

I do have some preliminary ideas about this. It is very hard to translate neuroscientific research to actual life, but I think that there are some preliminary indications that there are things that we might consider doing differently. One thing that I usually recommend is adequate time for downtime that lets your brain meander or cogitate or think about ideas in a very non-linear way. And so the best example I have for this is for my own life where I think one of the most valuable classes for me in elementary school was recess. And so recess, what is it just play or is there something else going on? And I think there’s something very important going on where people are taking the knowledge that they’ve learned in the classroom in their life and being more playful with it and more nonlinear with it. And so that downtime, I think is incredibly important. I know caring stories from the students and teachers, our pre COVID educational paradigm was centered around a lot of homework and a lot of knowledge acquisition, which is an important aspect of creativity and intelligence and learning, but not the only one. There has to be time to put ideas together in novel and useful ways that requires a different approach and requires a more relaxed approach than is provided by just drilling towards knowledge, acquisition and testing.

Richard Miles: 11:52

So may be an example of actually where popular consumption gets it , right. When you think about these stories of the Eureka, you know, Archimedes in the bathtub where after a period of relaxation, or like you said, the mind wandering and meandering, they hit upon, or the circuits come together and they have this insight, but obviously based on knowledge, they already possessed, right? Most of the people have these insights are happen to be experts in the field.

Rex Jung: 12:13

Yeah, you have to have some thing in your brain to put together in a novel and useful way. So there is a knowledge acquisition part that is critically important to gather the raw materials necessary to be creative. But then Archimedes is perhaps the best example of sitting in the bathtub and figuring out how you would measure the amount of gold and a crown and water dispersion and Eureka. I have it where you have figured out a way to measure something in a very non-intuitive way. And so that downtime, and oftentimes people describe this arising from taking a bath or a long walk or run or doing something that is very non-cognitive where ideas are jumbling around and merging in unique ways and even sleep where they can come up with an idea that otherwise would have been elusive.

Richard Miles: 13:02

So one problem I face is that my wife has all of her creative ideas, right I’m about to go to sleep. And she wants to tell me about them. And then we’ve learned how to solve that problem. I say, no, tell me in the morning, because I can’t deal with your creative idea right now.

Rex Jung: 13:15

It’s interesting because she is telling you those ideas right before she falls asleep. When her mind is in a very relaxed state, when the day’s tasks are behind her, frankly, a perfect time to explore those. But perhaps she should explore those on her own because there’s no one size fits all.

Richard Miles: 13:35

Yeah. The unfair thing is she can tell me the idea and fall asleep and I solved the problem in my head and I can’t fall asleep.

Rex Jung: 13:40

Yeah. You’ll take up that idea and really start working it and then not be able to go to sleep. So, and that’s an important thing to consider too, is that there are different creative styles and some people really want to offload if you will, those creative ideas before she falls asleep, but then other people really want to work them and form them and look at them from different angles. And that’s a creative process too, is to really be deliberative about that creative process. And there’s a major theories that talk about spontaneous versus more deliberate creativity. And it sounds like you and your wife are matched well and that you have complimentary styles, but she should perhaps write those down and then you can start working on them in the morning.

Richard Miles: 14:26

Well , I was going to say that most of my creative thoughts used to happen when I’d go running and an idea would pop in my head, but it just occurred to me that for the last year or so, I listened to podcasts instead while I run and I actually don’t have as many creative ideas. Right. Cause my mind is distracted listening to the story or two people talk.

Rex Jung: 14:42

It’s working on information. Yeah. And on your internal process.

Richard Miles: 14:47

So Rex , one thing I think you can probably say about Americans in general is that there’s this tremendous thirst for anything related to self-improvement and self-health so in the realm of creativity, sometimes h ere versions of this, particularly people my age mid to late fifties, I know you can rewire your brain. You can teach yourself new things, you stave off dementia and so on. And again, I’m not asking you to speculate too much, but is there anything in your findings that provide ammunition for those who say, Hey, we can all rewire our brains, become Picasso, or is it more i n the direction of, sorry about a year or two old and s et i n your age. So just keep playing golf and watching reruns. Is there any way for those later in life, let’s say m iddle-aged and beyond, do they still have a significant ability to increase their level of creativity?

Rex Jung: 15:32

Yeah. So I think neither of those things are true in their extreme. You can neither massively rewire your brain to be something that it has not developed to be over decades, nor is it hopeless on the other side of the spectrum. But I think some middle ground is probably appropriate. I mean, we know that the brain is incredibly plastic when we are infants and learning things and acquiring new information and forming neural networks that underlie language, visual process as motor processing that decreases over the lifespan and it decreases in known way is the capacity to change your brain by changing your mind. And while you can modulate your brain function through concerted effort, that becomes harder over time. So if you are making a decision to make a major change in your life in your fifties and you and I sound like we’re the same age, although you’re quite a bit less gray than I, I would say it’s going to take a bit more effort and a concerted effort to do that. And that while the fantasy or hype about neuro-plasticity would imply that we can completely change our brain by doing this different thing. That’s probably more a factor of one to 3% change in terms of cognitive capacity. So I would encourage people at any age. And I think as our brains change in our fifties and up there is more of an opportunity to make more disparate connections than we would when we were younger. And we had many more tasks in front of us. You were talking about listening to podcasts on your runs and yeah, that changes your run from a free-wheeling kind of associative process to a knowledge acquisition process. And it’s going to be significantly harder to do that creative thing when you are consuming the creative product of other people and learning. So it’s important to do both learning and creative expression simultaneously, but that has to be balanced. And in older people like you and me , I think that’s really critical to set aside time to do nothing or do less or not acquire knowledge anymore . But extrapolate that be my best advice.

Richard Miles: 17:50

I’ve read a couple of good articles in the popular press . I’m sure you’ve probably seen them too. Hypothesizing the connection between boredom and creativity and particularly in young kids, right? When your bored is where you think of perhaps a fantasy game, or you tell a story to yourself or make up a story because you just want occupy your mind. But if your mind is occupied, as you said, with a TV show or a video game or whatnot, you’re probably less likely to find the need to create something in your own head .

Rex Jung: 18:16

Yeah. Boredom is kind of the bane of our modern existence. People talk about it as a bad thing, but it actually is an important aspect of our lives that force us, or invite us to use our brains in ways that can transcend our current experience. We can imagine. I mean, I can go anywhere in my mind’s eye from countries that I visited in the past to traveling to different planets in the galaxy. I can imagine just about anything and boredom invites us to use our imaginative ability to create different realities and create different ideas that might not have existed before.

Richard Miles: 18:57

So I guess I have to be careful how far I take this example because then of course people go, well, I’m not gonna listen to your podcast because then you’re going to distract me from thinking great thoughts . So we’ve got to keep this within reason.

Rex Jung: 19:08

Well, it’s a both thing. Like I said, I listened to the podcast to acquire knowledge, but then find some recess time to do your own thing and to put those ideas that you’ve acquired together in novel and useful ways. And I think that is the correct balance as far as the literature would suggest.

Richard Miles: 19:25

So Rex, I like to ask all my guests a little bit about themselves and their background. And you’re originally from Boulder, Colorado, your mother was a technical writer. Your dad was a hospital administrator. So first question, what was it like to grow up in Boulder? I’ve only been once or maybe twice. And what was your first clue that you’d be spending your career studying the brain?

Rex Jung: 19:43

Well, that’s a big question, but I loved growing up in Boulder. Boulder was a fantastic rich environment of very diverse kind of experiences from Buddhism and the Naropa Institute high-tech centers of engineering and NCAR is their National Center for Atmospheric Research. I mean just a real smorgasbord, if you will, of opportunities to see different ways that one might want to spend one’s intellectual life. Unfortunately, I chose as my undergraduate degree. Well , I don’t know if it’s unfortunate. It’s hard to say I’d studied finance business and got a degree and went into the business world and was not super happy about the intellectual opportunities for me in the world that I had chosen. So I quit that job started volunteering for Special Olympics with friends of mine, and really became interested in bringing structure and function in brains that work well and brains that work differently and really started to pursue the path of, well , you know, what’s going on in these brains and what is happening to create an individual who is intellectually disabled, but has incredible artistic capabilities. And I’m not talking about the art that your children produce that you put up on the refrigerator, but Alonzo Clemons, who is an autistic savant, creating just massively, technically detailed representations of animals that will sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. These brains are fascinating in their variability. And I wanted to go into studies and a career that looked at that. And that’s kind of what brought me here all these many years later,

Richard Miles: 21:29

Growing up in Colorado, where you outdoorsy, were you a ski bum? Did you do a lot of hiking or how has that sort of influenced you?

Rex Jung: 21:35

I wasn’t in anything bum, but I really enjoy camping and going out on my own and camping on the continental divide in Colorado and did a lot of that. So a lot of time to think I would bring, I have this somewhat embarrassing book , uh , memory of bringing Dante’s Inferno to read while I was camping on the continental divide. And then this lightning storm almost killed me and I thought I was going to go straight to hell. So , uh , I mean really a lot of time to be by myself, to look at the stars to revel in natural beauty of Colorado. I skied, I hiked, I ran , I did all of the things, but I wasn’t a bum of any of those. I wasn’t an expert in really any of those, but I just really loved growing up in Colorado and a very fun memories. Now that I’ve brought to New Mexico, a lot of natural beauty here, fewer people, I’m an outdoors guy, I guess, at my root .

Richard Miles: 22:31

Yeah. One thing we always tell foreign friends for visitors, you really have not experienced the United States unless you’ve had a chance to drive out West long distances for long periods of time. And then you really appreciate the profound nature of our country in terms of physical beauty and so on.

Rex Jung: 22:46

I totally agree. And most people who visit us from foreign countries spend time in LA or New York, or maybe Florida at Disney World, but there’s a vast opportunity to explore something on a more meandering route through the middle parts of the country. And the West is certainly got a big place in my heart.

Richard Miles: 23:04

So Rex final question that will allow you to be a little bit philosophical here, a lot philosophical if you’d like, but being a pioneer researcher sounds really cool to most people, but by definition people in your field or people like you are studying things that haven’t been studied very much and reaching conclusions that may seriously undermine conventional wisdom. So you’re at the age, as you said, where you start getting asked for advice by younger researchers or students or so on, and who may be in the process of picking a career or picking a field, what do you say about that subject or that potential obstacle? That there are a lot of fields now, which they’re going to probably encounter particularly research fields and kind of resistance or criticism of some sort. How do you prepare them for that? That it’s not just all pulling down awards and citations and accolades. Some of it can be serious resistance or criticism.

Rex Jung: 23:53

It’s a very good point. And I can’t say that my journey has been peaches and cream throughout the way. I mean, I was told by my graduate advisor, I was studying intelligence at the time that that would destroy my career. I should stop that immediately and pick something more conventional. Otherwise I would not be a successful researcher. I’m glad I didn’t take that advice. It’s good advice. There’s two paths that I’ve seen in being a successful researcher. One is a very deliberate and somewhat obsessive path of just hammering out the details of a concept that has been discovered previously. This is called normal science. And I think a lot of good work comes out of that. And it depends on your personality style. If you’re a very conscientious and somewhat agreeable person, you will do very well in writing grant. After grant, after grant, that gets rejected until the one gets accepted and you can do very good work in that area, but you have to be extremely conscientious and extremely agreeable because it is a field that rewards conformity. There’s another path. And I think it’s the path that I’ve chosen. I may be deluding myself, but it is a path where you really identify what you feel passionate about and what you feel excited about studying. And these are more paradigm shifting ideas or revolutionary ideas from the Thomas Kuhn nomenclature. And it can be very rewarding, but it’s a less successful path. You will always have to fight against opposition and granting and funding agencies that are not willing to take risks. But if you have excitement and passionate about your work and less conscientiousness and agreeable is frankly, you can succeed. And I think I’ve had some measure of success in my career that has been rather unconventional. You should always have in your back pocket studying something conventionally . And you talked about my studies in traumatic brain injury and lupus and schizophrenia, but there should be some passionate involvement with these issues that allow you to go back and forth between your true passion and something that keeps you funded. So I think those are the two major paths for researchers. Neither of them are right or wrong. Both of them involve incredible amounts of work, but one involves something that you really get excited to wake up every day and do. And the other involves being extremely persistent over long periods of time.

Richard Miles: 26:29

So your secret is to be unpleasant and annoying.

Rex Jung: 26:34

I’m sticking with that. Your words, not mine.

Richard Miles: 26:37

I’m sorry. I , I, that was a cheap shot. No, I was going to say Rex. So the way you described it, we interview a lot inventors and entrepreneurs on the show. And when we ask them, like, why did you stick with this idea or this business? And a lot of times they say a version of, you know, if I didn’t believe in it, it would be too hard at a certain point in their journey. They could objectively say or have said to them, this isn’t worth it. And so the number of said across different types of fields that, you know, it’s just resilience. It’s the ability to just hang in there and keep going is what explains my success. Now they’re all a bunch of other factors, obviously that contribute, but at that’s refusal to give up, but not be delusional about it, right?

Rex Jung: 27:16

I started to have a trickle of success. And then I had a stream of success. And then I had a flood of success by identifying this area that hadn’t been explored before creative neuroscience and really starting to work the problem. And I felt really passionate about it and no NIH funding out there for that. There’s very little NSF funding. I found the Templeton Foundation, which was willing to fund this crazy idea that I had, and it yielded dozens of publications and other grants. And now a new generation is taking the mantle and really starting to explore the limits of creativity, neuroscience. And I couldn’t be more pleased with my stubbornness.

Richard Miles: 27:57

Well, and it really points to the importance of seed funding, right? Again, you see similar parallels in the business world. If one person can manage to make significant progress, then they themselves might not reap all the rewards or the riches, but they have taken the knowledge or taken the research to another level so that other people can then capitalize on that. We had one of our inventors say, you know, the most important thing about a patent is not that you’re going to be able to cash in the patent and get rich, but you have added to the body of knowledge. So you’ve made things in a sense, easier for people coming after you because you’ve solved a piece of the puzzle and they can now use your research to maybe go on and carry that down the road. And once they put it like that, I go, yeah , that makes total sense. Because most researchers who get patents, don’t get rich.

Rex Jung: 28:44

I have a patent, I’m not rich.

Richard Miles: 28:46

There you go. But yet they know that they have solidly advanced their field of knowledge and that other people can use this in a constructive way, may use in a constructive way.

Rex Jung: 28:54

It couldn’t be better said you really are carving out an idea space that you know, that you can’t solve yourself. And that will rely on others to take up the mantle . And I’m very happy in this field and both intelligence and creativity, that a number of people will become excited about this area of research and find it to be productive in terms of their grant applications and scholarly activity. And it’s enormously rewarding to know that I and other people was a part in starting this process.

Richard Miles: 29:27

Well, Rex , it’s a great note to end on. And as I said, this is actually just part one of an 18 part series in the lifetimes of Rex Jung, really enjoyed having on the show. I hope we can have you back at some point, I learned a lot and I hope this was fun for you.

Rex Jung: 29:39

It was great. Thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoy talking to you in this audience is particularly important with entrepreneurs and idea generators. I think it’s a perfect opportunity. Thanks.

Richard Miles: 29:50

Thank you.

Outro: 29:52

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

Contact tracing for COVID. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Is there a better way?  Serial entrepreneur Richard Allen is the co-founder of Alert Trace, a wearable electronic contact tracing system. Operating via Bluetooth, the device doesn’t need GPS, meaning fewer privacy concerns and less battery power.  The system will soon be implemented by the US Navy, US Air Force, and NASA.  One-time electrician, mechanic, sound director, record store owner and accountant, Allen has done a bit of everything. He also has launched four companies onto the NASDAQ, and with his wife runs a non-profit that helps rural villages in Cambodia “create a sustainable quality of life."

Contact tracing for COVID. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Is there a better way?  Serial entrepreneur Richard Allen is the co-founder of Alert Trace, a wearable electronic contact tracing system. Operating via Bluetooth, the device doesn’t need GPS, meaning fewer privacy concerns and less battery power.  The system will soon be implemented by the US Navy, US Air Force, and NASA.  One-time electrician, mechanic, sound director, record store owner and accountant, Allen has done a bit of everything. He also has launched four companies onto the NASDAQ, and with his wife runs a non-profit that helps rural villages in Cambodia “create a sustainable quality of life.”

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: 0:39

Contact tracing for COVID. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Is there a better way? Welcome to Radio Cade . I’m your host Richard Miles. And today I’m talking to Richard Allen entrepreneur par excellent. And Co – Founder of Alert, Trace a wearable electronic contract contact tracing system . Sorry, welcome to the show, Richard.

Richard Allen: 0:58

Thanks. Great to be here.

Richard Miles: 0:59

So first things first, have you always gone by Richard? Cause as one Richard to another, you know, people always want a short it into Rich, Rick or even worse, but this is a family show, but you’ve always gone by Richard.

Richard Allen: 1:09

Yeah. I’ve gone by a lot of names, but yeah, Richard’s fine.

Richard Miles: 1:13

Good and full disclosure for our listeners. Richard is on the board of the Cade Museum and his company is also a tenant in a commercial property. My wife and I own. And that’s what it’s like to live in a small college town. You just can’t get away from each other. So just putting that out there for everyone. So Richard, like a lot of entrepreneurs, it seems you’ve done a little bit of everything and we’ll talk about that in detail later on. But before we get into that, let’s focus on Alert Trace your current endeavor. If I understand it, it’s specifically for COVID contact tracing, but now we know there’s already a lot of stuff out there, including our own smartphones that can be used also to do this. So why don’t we start by how is Alert. Trace different than those other existing devices that are out there to do contact tracing?

Richard Allen: 1:53

Yeah. So Alert Trace is a standalone system that involves small devices. So we build the small devices, the small alert trace devices, which are using Bluetooth to determine the distance between one device and another device and individuals in a work environment of some sort or an organizational environment would all be AltEd with the devices. And it basically just keeps track over time. How close have they been to other people on the team so that if anybody on the team winds up contracting COVID or any other infectious disease, at some point you can go back over any time period that you wish a week, two weeks, whatever. At that time the CDC is saying as the infectious disease cycle, and you can find everybody that they were in close contact with and the duration of that close contact. So it basically helps you then with quarantining or whatever. But the difference between that and say a smartphone app is number one, a smartphone app. Everybody’s got a different smartphone, so everybody’s gotta be running the same app. Everybody would have to opt in and say, yes, I would like to use that system. And then there’s this question of privacy smartphones obviously have just about, about us. All of our social media contacts, all of our contacts, all of our communications, all that is private information that you might not want to share with everybody. So the advantage of using a system like alert trace is that number one, it’s much more affordable than a smartphone, very inexpensive devices. They have no personal identifying information stored in them or around them. So they’re totally privacy centric and they provide very robust information for being able to do the contact tracing that you would like to do. It’s much more affordable than trying to do it manually and certainly much more effective than trying to do contact tracing manually.

Richard Miles: 3:34

So I remember when you showed me, I think it was an early version or even a prototype. And one thing I didn’t fully understand until you showed it to me, was it it’s Bluetooth only, right? It doesn’t use GPS, which means you don’t have the same power requirements.

Richard Allen: 3:46

Yeah, that’s correct because we don’t have GPS in it. We’re not able to track anybody’s location when you leave the work environment or whatever. It’s not tracking you and tracing you, so again, it’s privacy centric in that sense, but that also really helps us on the power side that basically we have a single, if you will kind of wristwatch type battery that’s in it, that battery will last six months or more. And it’s super easy for them to change out that battery later. It’s not helpful to have a device that you have to charge every day for contact tracing because people will forget to charge it. And what good does it, do you, if people aren’t walking around with an enabled device,

Richard Miles: 4:20

I guess the other thing too, is that physically it can be much smaller and lighter, right? Because again, without that GPS and battery supply, this is something that , uh , you can clip on your clothes or put on your belt or where do people wear it?

Richard Allen: 4:32

Exactly. Yeah. It can go in a number of different locations. It’s got a little wristband that you can attach it to the wristband . In which case it basically looks like a very small flat face wristwatch, but it also comes with little alligator clips and you can clip it to a belt to clip it to a shirt to comes with a little double-sided tape. So you can put it on top of a hard fat if you’re working in that environment. So it can be used in a lot of different places. It weighs so little that you just don’t even notice it, it weighs less than a wristwatch with weigh.

Richard Miles: 4:59

So Richard, I’ve heard you say before, he can come up with the best idea in the world, but ultimately someone’s going to want to buy it. So tell us about what is the ideal organization side, cause this is really geared toward organizations, right? This is not something that a retail customer would go by , right?

Richard Allen: 5:11

Yeah. Yeah. Number one, it’s got to be an organization because everybody has to be wearing it for it to be meaningful. So you want it to be used in an environment where everybody wants that protection. So that makes sense for it to be companies for it to be organizations. And typically if you’ve got half a dozen people working in a retail shop, the two of you can , or the six of you or whatever can probably time yourselves and do great social distancing and wear masks and be very safe. Or at least that would be my guess , if you’re committing retail customer interaction. So this is probably more for organizations that are going to be at least 20 to 50 people and up. And I would say that the majority of our installations by far are those that have at least several hundred employees and or military and government organizations

Richard Miles: 5:53

So just sort of listeners understand too as well. How you capture this data. If I remember correctly, the first time I saw an explanation is that some point or multiple points during the day where the employer employees will go by some sort of, I know scanner’s the wrong word, but some sort of device will essentially download their activity for whatever the time period is. And then that goes into a database and then you’d be able to then if you needed to figure out, okay, employee number one was briefly in contact with the employee number 101, is that more or less how it works?

Richard Allen: 6:22

Yes, that’s exactly correct. The devices store hundreds and hundreds of contact interactions with the other devices around them. But they opportunistically are always looking around for what we call a hub. So the hubs are little devices about the size of the power supply unit that would go on a computer or something. And they can be interspersed to every several hundred feet within a manufacturing facility or whatever. And those have a Bluetooth radio in them as well. And they are looking for the little devices that are the little wearable devices and they upload that data opportunistically, anytime that a little mini as we call them the wearables, anytime a mini comes within distance of the hub, the hub uploads that data and then transmits that data up to cloud servers. And our cloud servers are either the secure AWS cloud servers or in the case of the government we’re using government and military secure cloud servers.

Richard Miles: 7:12

So Richard, tell us about that. Uh , you had some exciting news a month or two ago, a pretty large contract with the Navy. So tell us how that came about and how is the Navy actually going to use Alert Trace?

Richard Allen: 7:23

So we’re very fortunate that we have the military get involved with is fairly early. I’d say just probably three to four months after we had started developing the prototypes and just came to us through a number of contacts. And the Navy was the first of those that came to us. At this point, we were working with the Navy, with the air force, with the army and with NASA and with a number of related government groups. But the Navy was the first and again, we were very fortunate that they actually provided us a contract to drill down into the cybersecurity of the system. As everybody knows, Bluetooth is on just about everything today. Everybody’s, Fitbit’s got Bluetooth. Everybody’s phone has Bluetooth, everybody’s radio has Bluetooth. So from a security perspective, we needed to be sure that especially for the military, that foreign powers or whatever would not be able to detect how many sailors or how many shipmen were in a particular area. They wanted to be sure that data was totally secure. So we went through about a three month process with their entire cybersecurity group, getting the data to be entirely secure. That was also really helpful to us and just getting us a lot of data from what the military needed in terms of operational capability of the system that has ultimately helped us a lot on the commercial side as well, because everything that we developed for the military of course is also useful for the commercial applications. So that’s been a tremendous positive relationship and where they have a lot of bright people, the Navy, their cyber guys are amazing.

Richard Miles: 8:45

So this must be ideal, I guess, for the Navy, because on a ship or large base, I imagine you have situations where it’s really hard to either monitor or enforce social distancing, that sort of stuff. So in the end, no matter what the rules are, the reality is is that you’re going to have sailors or employees come into contact with each other. And you got to figure that out pretty fast, right? If you’ve got a bunch of sailors that COVID outbreak, you want to know who they came into contact with, and that would be awful hard without a contact tracing system.

Richard Allen: 9:13

Yes. And actually, and it’s probably even goes beyond COVID-19. This is, I think, been a wake up call and I know that our military is very concerned about not just COVID-19 about, about future infections and even biological warfare. And they’re concerned. I mean, if you can imagine we’ve got ships all across the world, they’ve got nuclear warheads on them. If a ship is in essence, taken down by a disease that runs rampant across the ship very rapidly, it could certainly be a security risk. So there is all of that , both in fixed installations, army, and the like, and in Naval installations, it’s a really, really important national security matter for them to be able to track this. And frankly, doing so is really affordable. When you look at the cost of doing this kind of electronic contact tracing, it’s really affordable at that kind of level.

Richard Miles: 10:00

So you anticipate , and my next question, which was going to be what comes after COVID because obviously at some point COVID will still be with us, but it won’t be as much of a threat. And then hopefully contact tracing for that goes down to a minimum because you have a sufficient number, people, vaccinated and so on. So what are some of the potential applications on the horizon? Obviously I can think of a few off the top of my head in that for advertisers. It’s very useful just to find out where people are congregating and they do that through the cell phone data, but for like a large organization that has say hundreds, even thousands of employees, as you’ve said, there are other potential communicable disease , but are there other sort of non-health reasons that a company would find this useful?

Richard Allen: 10:37

Yeah, there probably are. As far as just the contact tracing goes, what we think is a number one this year, we believe that contact tracing is going to probably continue to be an issue for most of the year of 2021. And just because by the time the vaccine gets out there and we really get to genuine herd immunity and we’ve really gotten through COVID-19 it’s , it’s going to be later on this year. So for companies that are trying to keep production lines running and keeping warehouses running and keeping a film production going, and that sort of thing, it’s going to be an issue for the rest of the year. We will probably, as we get towards the end of this year, began to focus a little more on what we had been doing previously with a couple of our partner companies. And those are for instance, employee safety routines, where not only are you just contact tracing between individuals, but individuals that interact with various equipment and machinery. You have large scale construction sites when you’re building large airports, when you’ve got large indoor facilities for manufacturing, and you’ve got a lot of equipment are individuals that are using the pieces of equipment trained for the safety on each of the individual pieces of equipment. We can tell all of that information. We can also tell frankly, when somebody comes to work, when they leave work. So you kind of get to build all of those HR or management issues, especially on large scale construction sites and the like that you can track when people arrive, you can track when they leave, correct when they’re taking breaks. So that you’re able to do a lot of what we previously have had to have been done with managers running around with their time blocks or whatever. So there’s a lot of application for us beyond contact tracing and beyond this year. But this year, I think I mentioned the film industry where we’re really taking off in the film industry right now. We’ve got a Warner brothers, the producers of the walking dead and several film studios that are using our devices to keep their productions running.

Richard Miles: 12:21

So yet another reason to stay to the very end of a movie, right somewhere you’ll be on the credits, right? Richard Allen contact tracer.

Richard Allen: 12:28

We haven’t heard about that, but we wondered if on one of the walking dead, you might actually wind up seeing one of the little devices.

Richard Miles: 12:35

So Richard you’ve been developing the company and the products or several other product for a couple of years. And if I remember correctly, initially you started out making a pet tracker and then you were also at the same time, or maybe subsequently integrating smart Bluetooth devices in first responder vests, and then along comes COVID. So was there a distinct moment in your company when somebody realized like, Hey, we can do this, or did you just sort of have to iterate your way to Alert Trace?

Richard Allen: 13:02

It actually happened in tandem with one of our partner companies, and there were kind of two precise moments during which it happened. So one of our partner companies located out in Texas, we had been producing the devices for them to use on the large construction sites. I’ve mentioned the Dubai airport where they’ve got some 20,000 employees. So we had been providing a little wearable devices for them to be able to track the employees on slate over there. So they had unknown to us decided, gosh, you know, this would be a great thing to get into. We should search out there to see if there’s anybody that could produce a contact tracing device for us while they were doing that. Dr. [inaudible] one of our co-founders here and our CTO just walked into the office one day and said, Hey, you know, and this was probably back early March. You know, we could do this contact tracing thing electronically with Bluetooth only if we just got rid of the GPS element on our little devices and just stripped them down, we could do this with Bluetooth. So we all said that might be a good idea. Let us take a week and think about it. So literally we took a week and we came back a week later and we said, okay, you know, we’ve looked at the market and we think this is a good idea. Well , He, and John and Rusty, and a couple of our guys who are in prototype development had actually created a prototype. They had just gone ahead with the idea. So that’s where inventors are really great. They don’t wait to find out about the market. They just go do it. And they had created a great little prototype. So at that point we decided we would launch the product. And so we went through the normal stuff that you do i n a really rapid, rapid deployment fashion. And it was only about a week later that the other company, o ur partner company reached out to us from Texas to tell us that they had had the same idea. And they were wondering if there was any chance that we might be able to produce a contact tracer for them. So it was a perfect fit because they were the ones that w ound up with t he military c ontacts and actually had a lot of the sales and marketing machine a nd b uilt up. So it was just a perfect marriage. And we just put the two companies together and created a new company.

Richard Miles: 14:54

And did you ever have any moments of doubt because it was obviously a huge pivot and reorienting of your resources. Did you ever think, are we jumping off a cliff here or did you just kind of know we’ve got the tiger by the tail now.

Richard Allen: 15:05

There’s always doubt because you don’t know until you come up with the concept and then you’ve got a prototype, but before you can actually get something that you can sell, it takes a few months. And certainly during that few months, you’ve always questioned whether or not you’re doing the right thing, but I think everybody’s gut told us that it was the right move . And thankfully, in this case, we only needed to wait a few months for the proof of the pudding to basically appear when we started really getting the major interest. And then when the military stepped up and I’m one of the fortune 500 companies, Boston Scientific, big medical manufacturer , they stepped up and were one of our early development partners. So we launched into several of their production sites initially before the thing was really ready for prime time. And they were incredible development partners with us in helping to get it really refined and working well.

Richard Miles: 15:49

So you make it sound so easy, Richard, but I remember seeing you over the summer and they’re were a few nail biting moments. It seemed like, Oh boy, what have I done here? So,

Richard Allen: 15:57

Oh, definitely. Yeah. We threw the kitchen sink at this and the kitchen sink was a really expensive kitchen sink. So we basically took everything. We had everything we could borrow, anything we could get from any source and put it into this. So we had a lot riding on it , a ton , the success of it. And he probably turned the corner for us in probably September or so, maybe October, we finally got to breathe a sigh of relief and go, wow, we’ve really made it.

Richard Miles: 16:21

So I’m sure part of that confidence was the fact that this is not your first rodeo for listeners who aren’t familiar with you, the Gainesville entrepreneur community knows you sort of the godfather of the startup scene here, and you don’t have any hit guys working for you, I assume, but a call you the godfather. And you’ve been involved in lots of different ventures. I didn’t know until I dug into your bio, but as a kid, you wanted to be a scientist. Then you discovered you’re good at selling stuff. And along the way, you’ve been everything from a licensed electrician and mechanic, autobody, repairman sound, and light director of big rock concerts and the owner of a record shop. And then on top of that, you have a couple of degrees, one in creative writing another one in accounting. And if that’s not enough, you’ve launched four companies that are analysis on the NASDAQ at least four that I know of. You’re sort of like the Forrest Gump of North Central Florida, Richard. Uh , yeah , I got to say, and I mean that as a compliment, I was introduced once as a Forest Gump and I thought, wow, I guess that’s a good thing.

Richard Allen: 17:18

Um, and I just want to say, and this is not false modesty. Every single company that I have started has been a success because of the incredible people that are around me and to come up with the ideas and that work like it’s their company, because it is their company. We’ve just had amazing teams of people. And if I have any gift at all, it is just in the gift of being able to be blessed by being surrounded by so many talented and great people on these teams.

Richard Miles: 17:44

Right. I was going to say, I’ve always found that one of my greatest strengths is to realize how many I don’t have, and then you go out and look for people who can help you or sort of cover for that. Once you realize you can’t do it all yourself. But yet what I wanted to ask you is, did you ever have a career philosophy or does an opportunity present itself? And you just say, sure, what the hell or did you have a detailed blueprint when you’re nine years old of your life? How do you approach these opportunities as they come along?

Richard Allen: 18:09

I definitely did not have a lifelong blueprint. And if you look at my swerving career in life, you would realize that for sure. But I think that probably one of the key essential parts of my character is that I always want to know how things work. It doesn’t matter what it is ever since I was a kid and lots of folks were like this as a kid. And lots of folks still are, but it’s like every single thing I want to learn, how does it work all the way down to the molecular level what’s going on? And so that has largely driven me. I think that people come up with ideas and concepts around me, and I want to find out all the elements of how it works. And if you’re in business that goes beyond just the science and technology and how did the electrons flow and how’s the display screen work or whatever it also gets into, well, who’s going to buy it. Why are they going to buy it? How’s it going to interact with their life? How’s it going to make them feel? What’s the interface going to be because of all that, I think it winds up helping you to basically be part of a good team, because you need to have people around you who are good at all of those aspects. From the science side, from the technology side, from the human side, from the marketing side and from the finance and business and accounting side.

Richard Miles: 19:19

So Richard, I thing I usually ask most of my guests is , were you a good student? And was there a particular age at which you sort of crystallized for you? This in general is kind of what I want to do a particular event or teacher or mentor, or how did that work out for you?

Richard Allen: 19:33

Well, that’s a great question. I remember when I was a child that I got to visit one of my uncles, I had several uncles and one of my uncles lived up in Missouri, Elva , L Allen and Alvin Allen industries was his company. And he made lots of car parts for the insides of automobiles, the door panels and all those kinds of things. And in order to do that, he had decided that he needed to actually build the big punch press machines that actually punch those things out. And in order to do that, he had decided that he needed to have a steel mill. And so he smelted the steel and poured it into mold and created these large punch press machines. And then they would move the punch, press machines in and use those in production to produce these parts. And then on the side, he had decided that he wanted to go into crystal radios. This was back in the forties or fifties, I guess, and that he had wanted to go into desalination kits for the Navy. And I just remember visiting his plant one time and just being overwhelmed by how cool. So I think that he was probably a major influence on me and he had no idea that he was just kind of do everything. So I would have probably been in the eight to nine range somewhere in there that was probably a major influence in my life. Right .

Richard Miles: 20:43

So there’s something about that world that you thought was kind of cool and pointing its way?

Richard Allen: 20:47

Yeah, yeah. Wanting to do kind of everything. And that kind of gets to, you asked if I was a good student. I was a really good student at figuring out how to do the least I needed to do in order to get a relatively. Okay, great. Very good . I was very good at that .

Richard Miles: 21:06

That’s efficiency, right? Most amount of output for at least amount of input,

Richard Allen: 21:09

But I was interested also at the same time and , and everything. So when I was an English major, I decided I wanted to take four quarters of calculus because I also had wanted to take electrical engineering when I was an English major to do that. I had to have the four quarters of calculus. So I took those and I took organic chemistry. Cause I was thinking, well, you know, someday I might become interested in medicine. So I took kind of a broad array of stuff and then wound up getting my degree in creative writing and then went back and got the finance and accounting degree after that. Right .

Richard Miles: 21:37

Richard, one thing I remember shortly after we met about 10 years ago, it seems like we were in an event in Gainesville. And I was very impressed because some young entrepreneur wanting to do a startup company came up to me, mistakenly thinking I could help him do this and you were in the room. And I said, no , no, no, no. You need to go talk to that guy over there and ask him for advice. And you took all the time that you had in that event and you listened to the person’s questions. I’m sure you probably don’t remember it, but my guess is this happens to you probably frequently that a younger version of yourself comes and says, Hey, I want to start a company and I’ve got this great idea. What sort of questions do you get? And then what sort of advice?

Richard Allen: 22:13

Well, the questions that you would get are the standard questions where somebody is coming up and they’ve got this concept and they think it’s a great concept. And so you’d be wanting to listen to that. And usually they are great concepts. And my response to those is usually to think about them from the standpoint of a customer and we have a market system here. And so you’ve got to really think about how big of a market might you have. You can come up with the coolest idea in the world. That would be really, really helpful to somebody. But if the market for it’s only going to be a handful of people, so likelihood is that you’re just not going to have enough financial resources behind it to make it viable. So somebody really does need to think about the total market. How big could it be? And then if it looks like it’s big enough that it might support taking it forward as an entrepreneurial idea, then you kind of really need to drill down into what’s it really going to take to develop this? And once it’s developed, what’s it really going to cost to produce? And then if you put yourself on the other side of the fence and you’re a consumer and you’re trying to buy what it is that you just produced, how much are you willing to pay for that? And does it have any kind of recurring revenue structure to it? And that at least put you into an overview of whether or not it might be a viable entrepreneurial idea. That’s the advice I would give to folks, right?

Richard Miles: 23:19

Now, that’s a solid advice. So now let me flip it around on you. Is there anything that you wish somebody told you, let’s say, I think back on your 21 year old self that you now know, right. Do you wish that you knew when you were a lot younger, either starting a company or researching an idea or more life general lessons for the benefit of being a little bit wiser and a little bit older, what do you wish you knew then that, you know now?

Richard Allen: 23:42

Yeah . You know, I think about that some. I mean, it’s a question that I’ve been asked before as well. And I think if I go back to my younger self college age , self, whatever, shortly after, there was certainly a time during which I could have gotten an earlier story in all of this, but honestly, all of those other ideas, all those other ventures, all those other employment opportunities that I pursued each one really helped. And every experience really added a lot to what ultimately created success with our very first public company. So I don’t think I would go back and do anything different. And I think the way that it worked was just perfect in the aftermath of things. When I look back at the things that we have created and we have done, there’ve been a couple of times that we’ve started up with ideas that were great, great ideas and everything about them seemed perfect when we invested a few years and a lot of time and a lot of money and they wound up not working out, everything doesn’t work out and in the aftermath, I can almost always go back and trace it back and go, yeah, this is why it didn’t work. You can’t know everything in advance, right ? So sometimes you just have to move forward on faith.

Richard Miles: 24:44

I find sometimes the most powerful lessons are actually those that you take away from the failures or the setbacks. Those really stick with you. And often they’re a little bit more identifiable than sometimes it’s the successes, which, you know , sometimes to have a cast of hundreds, just a little bit hard, maybe to call those as honestly as setbacks. One last thing, Richard, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to mention one other thing that you and your wonderful wife do. You run a great nonprofit called Sustainable Cambodia. So tell us a little bit about that, how long you’ve been doing that and what is that about?

Richard Allen: 25:12

Oh yeah. Thank you for that. And we’ve been at that for about 16 or 18 years now. And , uh , we work in rural villages in Cambodia. Our foundation has set up so that we have no paid staff, no overhead internationally. The only staff that we have our team in Cambodia, which made up of Cambodians and it’s an empowerment based model. And we work with at this point a little more than 30 different villages in the rural part of the country where , um , basically post committee Rouge families trying to rebuild their lives after the genocide and our program is based on helping them to both create a sustainable quality of life through income, through largely agricultural training. So they grow alternative crops in the like helping them to install a wells safe water, bio sand filters with top rainwater, harvesting community ponds. And then we’ve got fell 20 schools in those rural villages that take kids all the way from preschool all the way through grade 12. I think we’ve got maybe I think on the order of 25,000 children that have graduated through that program, we’ve got almost a thousand. I think that have gone through Cambodian university towns and our scholarships. And most of our team that’s working in Cambodia now is made up of former students who started when they were little kids in the villages, went to school through our programs, went to university over there in our scholarships and have returned to the villages. And they’re part of our team. Now we’re kind of on our second generation now of the internal management team. And it’s , um , it’s one of those things where you look back on your life and you go, I would have never predicted that I’d be doing that. But it’s probably the thing that gives the most meaning to our lives. My wife and I both just deeply grateful that we’ve been able to be involved in that over these years.

Richard Miles: 26:52

It’s a fantastic model. And I got to say the only downside, but someone like you, Richard is you make the rest of us feel really lazy. I’m trying to, trying to figure out how, how many hours in the day do you have? You must only sleep two or three or something to get all this stuff done, but I want to thank you very much for being on Radio. Cade and I want you to promise me that during the Alert Trace IPO, when you ring the bell, invite me and I’ll take you for a beer somewhere near the stock exchange.

Richard Allen: 27:15

You got it. You got it. Thanks.

Richard Miles: 27:18

Thank you very much. And look forward to having you back on the show at some point. All right. Thanks.

Outro: 27:24

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida . Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak . The radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist Jacob Lawson.

Everyday people around the world step on to a scale to see what they weigh, but is this really the most effective tool for measuring our health? Michael Fedewa and Mike Esco, lifelong health and fitness researchers, co-founders of MADE Health and Fitness, and Cade Prize finalists tell us why cutting edge technology on our smartphones may be the best tool for managing our health. By simply downloading an app and taking a photo we can gain an accurate assessment of our health, body fat % included,  that is as accurate as what we could get from a high-tech lab.