Search Captions & Ask AI

All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk

September 25, 2023 / 30:40

This episode features Dr. Nicole Paul, who discusses advancements in gene therapy, particularly using viral vectors for medical treatments. Topics include gene editing, gene transfer, and the potential of viral gene therapy to treat diseases like cancer and inherited genetic disorders.

Dr. Paul, a former professor at UCSF and now the founder of Siren Biotechnology, explains the evolution of medicine from chemical drugs to protein therapies and now to living medicines. She emphasizes the role of viruses in delivering therapeutic agents directly to affected areas in the body.

She shares a case study of a patient with a rare genetic blindness who regained vision through viral gene therapy. Dr. Paul also discusses the challenges and timelines associated with developing gene therapies, including regulatory hurdles and funding issues in the biotech industry.

Additionally, she speculates on future applications of gene therapy, such as enhancing human capabilities and addressing aging. The episode concludes with a discussion on the financial challenges faced by biotech companies in bringing these innovations to market.

TLDR

Dr. Nicole Paul discusses gene therapy advancements, challenges, and future potential in medicine, including treating cancer and enhancing human capabilities.

Episode

30:40
00:00:00
next up is Nicole Paul I'm really excited for this talk I think you guys will find a lot of optimism in where
00:00:07
technology is playing out in um in biology and bioengineering to cure fundamental human disease
00:00:15
for nearly 20 years she's been developing Next Generation aav platforms for Gene repair Gene transfer and Gene
00:00:22
editing and chief directed Evolution for novel engineered capsids and comparative
00:00:27
multiomic approaches to interrogate translational aav biology she's going to share a little bit about her work with
00:00:33
her startup siren biotechnology which came out of stealth last year please join me in welcoming Dr Polk to the
00:00:40
stage we'll let your winners ride Rain Man [Music] [Applause] we open source and they've just gone crazy
00:00:56
[Music] all right quick show of hands how many of you have ever even heard of the
00:01:02
phrase gene therapy or viral gene therapy before Oh My Gosh would you guys read in Wall Street Journal and The
00:01:08
Economist all right pretty good usually it's like two hands um so who the heck am I why am I up here
00:01:14
talking to you about this so like I said my name is Dr Nicole Paul come until like a hot minute ago I was a professor
00:01:19
of viral gene therapy at UCSF in San Francisco and decided to spin out a company based off some work in my lab
00:01:25
and I'm here to talk to you guys a little bit about using viruses as medicine so so what is gene therapy
00:01:31
broadly speaking uh this is using viruses as medicines so historically we have used these to treat single Gene
00:01:38
genetic disorders but we can use these much more broadly now and I'll share a little bit about that but historically
00:01:43
we've used these when you were born either missing a gene in your genome or you had a mutation in a particular Gene
00:01:50
in your genome and all you needed in order to be completely healthy was to have a functional copy of that Gene
00:01:55
given back to you or to have um that the particular mutation in that Gene corrected and restored for you and
00:02:02
we can do all of these with viruses and so if that sounds a little bit crazy and a little bit new and a little bit
00:02:07
revolutionary it's because it is we're kind of quite literally living through um one of the most recent and kind of
00:02:14
newest eras of modern medicine and so in order to talk about where we are we kind
00:02:18
of need to understand where we came from so nearly every one of you in this room
00:02:22
this first era of modern medicine started probably with your either your parents or your grandparents this is
00:02:29
with chemical medicines this is when we realized that gosh every time I have a stomachache I can go eat this one
00:02:34
particular Leaf from a tree and when I eat that leaf I feel much better and then the scientists realize
00:02:40
well we don't have to eat the leaf we could isolate the chemical compound that comes from that leaf and then we could
00:02:45
produce that in mass synthetically in large Vats in the lab and that way we don't have to all go outside and eat and
00:02:50
eat leaves all the time um and so the Advent of chemical medicines and realizing that we could
00:02:55
isolate these and synthesize these in Mass was an absolute transformation this is nearly every drug you've ever taken
00:03:01
in your life these are all the pills you can go find at your local pharmacy uh particularly the ones that are over the
00:03:06
counter and so this is the vast majority of medicines you've ever taken in your entire life
00:03:10
and the way these chemical medicines work right you take that pillow you swallow it it goes into your stomach it
00:03:16
gets dissolved by the acids in your stomach it then gets absorbed into the bloodstream in your GI tract and then
00:03:21
goes throughout your entire body and it will bind to and affect kind of either the shape or the function or the ability
00:03:27
of various proteins in your body in a way that's useful to reduce your symptoms and so then in the next kind of era of
00:03:34
medicine we had the brilliant idea well let's just cut out the middle man let's not give you a chemical that alters the
00:03:39
shape or function of a protein let's just give you the protein let's let's advance to protein medicines and let's
00:03:45
now take a protein that has the particular shape in the function that you might need in order to provide some
00:03:50
kind of therapeutic benefit for the disease state that you have and give you that as a drug and so that's kind of
00:03:56
been the next kind of most recent wave of modern medicine and so this is things like enzyme treatments and antibody
00:04:02
therapies many of you in the room have probably heard of the most successful drug of all time anyone know what it is
00:04:09
anyone want to shout out a guess what's the most successful drug of all time that's raised the most money
00:04:17
it's not Viagra guys Humira someone said it so this is an antibody that's used to treat a particular form
00:04:28
of arthritis this antibody cells on average a little over 21 billion dollars worth of just
00:04:34
that drug every single year and has been the most successful drug for the last 20
00:04:38
years this is what we call a blockbuster this is what everyone is shooting for in
00:04:43
their portfolio is a blockbuster drug and it's an antibody but now we're entering kind of this
00:04:49
newest third modern uh form of medicine which is what we call living medicines this is using things like viruses
00:04:55
bacteria cells things that are quote unquote alive that we can now use to go in and impart changes in your body why
00:05:02
would we do that well both chemical medicines and protein medicines we typically either give orally or we give
00:05:07
intravenously which means they're going to go throughout your entire body but in
00:05:11
some cases we don't want a drug to go to your entire body like for example when you take chemo boy you feel like trash
00:05:16
right it's because it's also affecting healthy cells in your body so sometimes we want the medicine to only go into a
00:05:22
simple place in your body or a single place so that way you only experience the therapeutic effect in a single
00:05:28
location the other really cool thing we can do with things like viruses and cells is we can engineer I know many of
00:05:33
you here are like Tech or Tech adjacent we can engineer in logic circuits so we can add things like if then or and and
00:05:39
all these types of kind of Boolean logic we can engineer those circuits into viruses and cells and have them perform
00:05:45
those same types of decisions uh within your body like if you experience this release the drug If you experience this
00:05:51
don't so you can engineer in these types of circuits in order to get this really
00:05:55
really precise delivery of any particular medicine that you're interested in delivering and you can
00:05:59
package almost anything in a virus and so a really common misconception is that all viruses are bad for you all
00:06:05
viruses make you sick couldn't be farther from the truth the vast majority of viruses on the planet
00:06:09
are very good at getting inside of you but very few of them make you sick I bet most of you can't name more than 20
00:06:15
viruses and all the viruses you can name are viruses that make you sick right measles mumps small polio smallpox these
00:06:21
types of things we only know of them because we study them because they make us sick but the vast majority of the
00:06:25
viruses on the planet can actually kind of be considered our allies they're tools that we can use that don't make us
00:06:30
sick but they're still very good at getting inside of us that we can use to deliver all kinds of medicines
00:06:36
so all of this is talk much more fun to look at as an actual video of this in action and so what I'm going to show you
00:06:43
on this screen is a patient from a clinical trial from a patient that has a rare form of
00:06:50
inherited genetic blindness this is a disease called Libra's congenital amaurosis these patients are born
00:06:55
basically medically blind they cannot see at Birth and you're going to see two videos the one on the left is going to
00:07:01
be this patient pre-treatment attempting to navigate a maze you can see that maze
00:07:05
on the floor at very very low light so the reason that this looks very yellow is because it's taken at one luminal
00:07:11
unit or low light all of us have much poorer visual Acuity at low light than we do at highlight so it's not that this
00:07:16
video is taken in 1985 it was just in very very low light that's why it looks yellow
00:07:20
so I'm actually going to start that video and I'll kind of talk over this this patient while they're going so this
00:07:26
patient's medically blind they cannot see the arrows on the ground that they're being told to navigate nor can
00:07:30
they see the little obstacles that they're being told like you should step over so they're feeling for them with
00:07:35
their feet just like you would if you were blind and you didn't have your walking stick you would just kind of
00:07:39
feel in front of you to see what was there so that you wouldn't manage to trip and fall
00:07:43
so I'm not actually going to show you this entire video because it took this poor patient 214 seconds to attempt this
00:07:48
navigate this eight foot eight foot by eight foot maze and all this patient needed they were
00:07:54
missing a single protein in the back of their eye all they needed was a single viral infusion for that virus to express
00:08:00
a single protein that that patient was missing in their eye and this is that exact same patient
00:08:06
again this was a 10 year old just one year after treatment they would have been able to do this within seven days
00:08:11
though so they have absolutely perfect vision so we're able to see pure blindness
00:08:21
this same young patient has now gone on to get their driver's license they are they are walking quite
00:08:29
literally they are walking amongst us leading a completely normal life so this feels crazy and revolutionary like oh my
00:08:36
gosh I hadn't heard about this when is this when is this coming for the rest of us and all of our indications
00:08:42
soon where are we now this is a one-year-old Slide the next prospectus from Wells
00:08:48
Fargo is expected to come out any day now I was hoping it would come out before this talk but it didn't but this
00:08:53
is the annual prospectus they put out every year of kind of the advancement of these gene therapy companies they do
00:08:58
this for every industry but this is for gene therapy so this is all of the logos
00:09:02
of all of the companies that are working in gene therapy for various diseases the
00:09:05
outer rings are kind of the earliest stages of development those phase one phase two trials and as you move towards
00:09:11
the center towards the bullseye that's when you're FDA approved and you can sell your drug for hopefully 21 billion
00:09:15
dollars a year and be a Blockbuster but as you can see right there is a wave of Gene therapies coming from so even those
00:09:22
few of you who didn't raise your hand earlier that you had ever heard of gene therapy before I promise you in your
00:09:28
lifetime no matter how old any of you are in this audience in your lifetime you are going to receive a viral gene
00:09:34
therapy as medicine so there's a particular virus Dave mentioned it earlier that I like to work
00:09:40
on this virus called aav and it's typically used like we were mentioning before to treat rare genetic disorders
00:09:45
some of the disorders that we've been able to cure are the ones shown here on this slide
00:09:50
and again we've typically only done rare single Gene disorders and in my lab at UCSF and now at the company we wanted to
00:09:57
ask a little bit Bolder question typically we've only used these to treat rare genetic disorders could we use
00:10:03
these to treat other indication spaces ones with many more patients where the need is much greater and the benefit to
00:10:09
humanity would be much more so we wanted to ask a rather audacious question rather than having a virus that might
00:10:14
cause cancer could you use a virus to cure cancer Could you actually use a virus as a medicine that could be used
00:10:19
to treat cancer so we've been working on this for the last seven years to try to go against
00:10:25
conventional gene therapy so every gene therapy on the planet all the ones on that Bullseye I just showed you on the
00:10:30
last slide whether they're from Academia industry big Pharma doesn't matter every one of those is bespoke and
00:10:36
personalized for a single indication so that virus that you make can only be used to treat that one disease and no
00:10:41
other disease and every one of those viruses takes about 10 to 15 years to develop so this is very time intensive
00:10:47
usually on average about two to three billion dollars so maybe not necessarily as expensive as the gentleman who just
00:10:52
left the stage but a very very expensive technology nonetheless and typically treat very very small patient
00:10:58
populations the definition of a rare disease in the United States is anything that occurs in fewer than 200 000
00:11:03
patients a year but most of those Gene therapies are going after indications with like a hundred patients 200
00:11:09
patients so very very rare disorders and so we wanted to go after something that would help much more of humanity
00:11:15
and so we wanted to ask the question could we make a single gene therapy that could be used to treat millions of
00:11:20
patients across a variety of indication spaces things like cancer where they're often very similar to one another
00:11:26
could you make a universal gene therapy is that even a thing and so we wanted to kind of set out on a
00:11:35
fairly audacious project to not only bring viral gene therapy to the oncology world but to blend it with one of the
00:11:41
newest forms of oncology which is this idea or this concept of immunotherapy many of you have maybe even heard of
00:11:46
this before there's a variety of different ways you can accomplish this they all essentially work the same way
00:11:52
where they retrain your immune system to fight cancer and I'm using that word retrain very purposefully
00:12:00
every single one of you in this audience has a tumor you've had a tumor every single day of your life
00:12:07
it's usually a single cell you often have many of them throughout your body your immune system is doing what's
00:12:12
called background cancer immunosurveillance your immune system is circulating throughout your body every
00:12:17
single day and it's actually able to detect and find and sniff out where those tumors are and get rid of them why
00:12:23
they are while they are still single cells how do they do this so that single tumor
00:12:28
cell wherever it is in your body it sends out little chemical cues to the local environment as well as the immune
00:12:33
system and the healthy cells that surround that tumor are also able to detect something's weird about that guy
00:12:39
and they'll send a little message over to the immune system and they'll be like come over and do an investigation check
00:12:43
him out what's up with him your immune system will come over sniff it out and be like yeah I agree
00:12:47
something's up with him and they'll kill that cell and this is happening all the time
00:12:52
throughout your entire body it's your immune system right now today your immune system knows how to fight
00:12:58
cancer it's Exquisite at it so how in the heck do you ever get a baseball-sized tumor how does that
00:13:02
happen it happens because that individual tumor cell through a variety of different mechanisms there are many
00:13:07
ways this happens but typically somehow through one or two mechanisms it will end up basically randomly generating a
00:13:14
mutation that will give it essentially an invisibility cloak that invisibility cloak makes it so that those neighboring
00:13:21
healthy cells can't detect that something's up with it so they don't send a message to the immune system and
00:13:25
because it's a little bit invisible your immune system also can't just like randomly swim by and detect it and see
00:13:30
that something's wrong and so because it can't be seen it can't be destroyed and
00:13:34
so then it starts to grow and become your big baseball size mass and then you become symptomatic right and then you go
00:13:39
to the doctor but you can retrain your immune system to be able to see that invisible tumor
00:13:44
and if you can do that with immunotherapy then now you've got a way to destroy a tumor that doesn't involve
00:13:50
chemo that doesn't involve radiation but basically uses your own immune system to fight Cancers and so we wanted
00:13:56
to blend the power of viral gene therapy and the Precision delivery and kind of those logic circuits around like do this
00:14:02
when you experience this these types of things with immunotherapy to see if we couldn't do something
00:14:07
important in the cancer space so we developed a platform a variety of different Universal Gene Therapies in my
00:14:13
lab at UCSF and spun those out into the company and the name of the company is actually based off the mechanism of
00:14:18
action here so we can take these viruses have them deliver a variety of different
00:14:22
kind of cancer announcing payloads that will announce to immune system the cancer is here and so that way both the
00:14:30
cancer cell as well as the neighboring cells will basically set off the fire alarm pull the fire in and let the
00:14:37
immune system know this is where the tumor is come in and fight it and you'll have these three different waves of
00:14:41
tumor killing that can happen both with your innate and your adaptive immune system
00:14:47
so while we were still at UCSF we were like okay we have this really cool idea we want to try this but we're agnostic
00:14:53
to any particular cancer type because again we weren't an oncology lab we were a viral gene therapy lab so we went over
00:14:58
to our colleagues at the Cancer Center and we're like what's the gnarliest cancer what's the one that nothing works
00:15:03
we love a challenge tell us something that we can work on that will be interesting and they said go after brain
00:15:08
cancer so we decided we'd start collaborating with Folks at UCSF to determine a brain cancer kind of path
00:15:14
but how do you test a drug in order to make sure it works on human brain cancer when you can't test it yet
00:15:19
on humans because the FDA wants you to have a data package before you go up for your clinical trial
00:15:24
so the way you test it is you actually make mice with human brain cancer so you can take brain cancer samples from
00:15:30
humans from biopsies and resections Transplant those into mice they'll grow a mini human brain tumor you can come in
00:15:36
and now treat them with your human drug not your mouse drug your human drug to test if it works and look to see whether
00:15:42
or not you get a response and this is a quick little sample from three Mice from a treatment group where
00:15:47
you can see uh those big colored blobs or the tumors and the brains of these myosis is live non-invasive
00:15:53
bioluminescent Imaging where the control treated mice that receive either a control virus or just receive sterile
00:15:59
saline have massive tumors these mice die versus the mice that have been treated with our virus where we can
00:16:04
completely eliminate these tumors as you would imagine if you can eliminate the tumors with imaging that might just
00:16:09
correspond to improvements and life expectancy so this is the one and only graph that I'm showing you very simple
00:16:15
it's a survival curve the line is vertical you died the line is horizontal you lived so we can massively improve
00:16:23
the lifespans of these animals and for all intents and purposes cure these mice of brain cancer and we're cueing up for
00:16:29
a clinical trial in 2025. so we're excited to start our clinical trial in 2025 and very quickly I'm going
00:16:40
to share with you guys maybe like 15 three little 15 second vignettes on what else could we do with viruses so we see
00:16:47
a gentleman here sleeping how many of you are short on sleep every one of you raise your hands come
00:16:53
on uh so there is a rare mutation that happens in patients these are people walking amongst us who have a mutation
00:16:58
in a gene called dec2 these patients again single mutation single Gene these patients only need four hours of sleep a
00:17:06
night to be completely rested the same way that we have the need for eight to nine hours of sleep a night
00:17:12
you interested in getting this gene therapy we could do this today we haven't yet but we could do this
00:17:18
today another example most of us in the room pretty probably interested in longevity
00:17:23
um we could use viruses to regenerate the tissue in your in all of your joints maybe get rid of things like cellulite
00:17:30
viruses brain fog all these types of things this is probably a few more years out where we're probably five to ten
00:17:36
years out on being ready to do this but this is absolutely coming in your lifetime you could get a Rejuvenation
00:17:41
gene therapy you really want to talk far out we could talk about maybe 30 years from now we
00:17:47
could absolutely engineer Humanity to withstand life in much more drastically harsh environments so we could alter
00:17:54
your skin color to be able to reflect more UV light so you wouldn't get as much damage if perhaps say you were
00:17:59
living on Mars we could engineer the cells in your immune or in your gut and the bacteria that live in your gut to be
00:18:05
able to metabolize foods that are more easily grown on a martian environment and these types of things so really your
00:18:12
imagination is the limit so could we enhance human potential we absolutely can it's just a matter of are you
00:18:17
interested in when so happy to discuss the future foreign [Music] [Music] times yeah
00:18:45
can you just um help everyone understand the timing and the regulatory hurdles um
00:18:56
viral gene therapy had a moment where there were setbacks and just share that with everyone how
00:19:03
that's affected how this technology has been held back how it's progressing now and what timelines generally look like
00:19:10
for getting these uh these uh breakthroughs to Market absolutely so today if you were to start
00:19:17
a brand new gene therapy company called siren biotechnology or anything else and
00:19:22
you wanted to develop a viral gene therapy and you wanted to get to Clinic you're still probably looking for that
00:19:27
first program in like a 10 to 15 year mark and it's not because it's going to take you that long to run the clinical
00:19:32
trials it's not because it's going to take you that long to grow up the Vats of the drug it's it's mostly going to be
00:19:38
a regulatory timeline so in between each one of these clinical trials even before
00:19:41
you do your very first ones I mean we're ready today we could start our brain cancer clinical trial today but we're
00:19:46
looking at 18 months of paperwork in order to file to do that first phase one and then you need to do your data
00:19:51
readouts in between each one of those trials there's this kind of massive amount of paperwork that goes in front
00:19:57
of the FDA that needs to be reviewed and there's back and forth and so the regulatory hurdles both from
00:20:03
if you weren't even doing anything you know really drastic like those last three vignettes that I talked about is
00:20:08
still going to be 10 to 15 years but if you wanted to propose something like the
00:20:12
Sleep one that I mentioned that I think we'd all I'm certainly interested in um there you're probably looking at an
00:20:17
ethical review board and whether or not they let you do something like that because that's not a disease so fun fact
00:20:23
the FDA only lets you queue up clinical trials to test drugs that are for diseases but aging is not a disease
00:20:32
state wanting to sleep fewer hours is not a disease State insomnia is but wanting to
00:20:40
just sleep fewer hours and be fully rested is not a disease state so we kind of have to get to this moment where
00:20:47
does the FDA start changing their definition of disease do we have a new regulatory body who will review these
00:20:54
types of things that are more like augmentations and enhancements how are we going to Grapple with this as a
00:20:59
society are we are we okay with this and let me just ask one more question it's a
00:21:05
great it's a great question you pose because there is increasing consensus that maybe we
00:21:10
should think about aging itself as a disease obviously and that there's a lot of approaches now to addressing that
00:21:16
what about the other challenges to completing the research and the trials and scalability what are the bottlenecks
00:21:24
we've talked about I've talked on our show about car T therapy and the challenge and getting manufacturing
00:21:30
scaled up to treat enough patients each year even though the Technologies here it's FDA approved those drugs are in
00:21:35
Market we just can't make enough what are the chat and I've heard a lot about uh lentovirus production and all these
00:21:41
other kind of viral vectors being 18 month delay super bottleneck how bottleneck are we in being able to do
00:21:47
the research that you guys are doing and ultimately to get these products to Market make enough of the stuff to treat
00:21:52
patients so the single biggest bottleneck is actually not technological at all it's Financial it's access to
00:21:57
Capital um right so these are like I said very very Capital intensive the average viral
00:22:02
gene therapy is about two to three billion dollars that's about three times more than making one of those chemical
00:22:06
medicines some of that has to do with time how long that process takes right every year your company is operating uh
00:22:13
that GNA oh it's expensive um it adds up really fast and so some of this is just access to Capital and
00:22:19
there's right the any company every one of us in this room this has a company there's depending on your sector there's
00:22:24
a valley of death for some of you it's very very early stage for some of you it's a little bit more later stage but
00:22:28
there's a valley of death where you just can't access Capital before you hit this
00:22:31
like big de-risking milestone where the bigger checks will come in and private equity and those types of groups and
00:22:36
crossover funds in your IPO so there's a value of death for many of these early stage companies where usually either
00:22:42
after your seed stage or your series a but before you've got clinical trial readouts where people are very nervous
00:22:47
to give you a really big check so that's certainly the biggest hurdle right now and why you see many companies going
00:22:52
under across the biotech space regardless of if they're selling Gene therapies and then from the
00:22:56
technological side it's still manufacturing is just like the drum beat being able to manufacture these things
00:23:02
at scale continues to be a challenge we need folks who come from like the mechanical engineering and these types
00:23:09
of backgrounds who don't historically necessarily think of Biotech as a place where they could apply their their
00:23:15
knowledge and Technologies to please come over to biotech and help us make you know new generations of bioreactors
00:23:22
and types of things that will allow us to produce these at scale cleanly cheaply and easily and it's just not
00:23:29
intuitive making chemicals at scale is something that we've been doing for 40 years so we're really good at it genenta
00:23:35
can make kilos of drugs in an afternoon with a robot but viruses are still something like if I queue up the biggest
00:23:42
cdmo in the world catalent Pharma and ask them to make us a 5 000 liter bioreactor a virus they'll
00:23:48
absolutely say yes but they won't even touch it for two and a half years um because I wanted to double click on
00:23:54
the concept of making life better for people who aren't sick the Marty Seligman from
00:24:01
the American Psychological Association actually posed this question 20 years ago and he said well we try to make all
00:24:07
of psychology and Psychiatry is taking depressed people and anxious people and making them less depressed and anxious
00:24:14
what about meaning and fulfillment for people who are content what about more joy and so when you look at the field
00:24:20
and it's amazing the progress you're making and thank you for doing all that work aside from hey can we sleep less
00:24:27
what else is you know do you do you talk about wow if we had the mandate to take
00:24:33
healthy people and and give them a gift of augmenting them making them into superheroes almost when we're talking
00:24:39
about like X-Men mutations here what are the fun things that you dream about that
00:24:45
you could do for Humanity could we all just have Vision like Hawks or oh night vision is totally possible night vision
00:24:51
yeah easy not literally without the goggles yeah easy I mean a world in which that's just
00:24:59
an FDA like I need a I need the green light but no that's easy so okay that feels like Professor X kind
00:25:06
of level I like it what else you got keep going um night vision would be possible the
00:25:13
ability to metabolize um you know a food that grows perhaps in a different environment that not only
00:25:19
you can't get any nutrients from but you can't even absorb it um so we could make
00:25:23
it so that you could you know pretend pretend Soylent tasted good um you know uh you could eat anything
00:25:30
and not only could it taste good to you but it could provide you all the nutrients that you need and be able to
00:25:35
grow with you know much less much less water and in the types of environments that we'll have in in the future planets
00:25:40
that you know given the climate change challenges that we all have um as far as other augmentations I mean
00:25:45
there's there's all of the obvious Beauty applications uh that I think all of us are already doing uh now this we
00:25:52
would just be doing this with a different modality right so removing you know there's a there's a gene therapy
00:25:56
company in San Diego working on male pattern baldness uh there are folks working on you know all the wrinkles and
00:26:01
cellulite and you know getting your hair color back and like all of the normal Beauty things that you would expect
00:26:05
that's absolutely coming but as far as beyond the obvious Beauty things like what other types of augmentations I
00:26:10
think the mental Health space is a huge one because it's it's usually a very very simple thing and it's complex but
00:26:17
it's simple they're usually missing a single receptor or a single protein somewhere in their brain and if we were
00:26:23
just able to restore that for them in just that location and not everywhere in their body
00:26:28
um you could restore Joy you could restore happiness all of these types of things do you want to talk about the
00:26:34
capital markets piece because you mentioned you need Capital yeah we're fundraising hi yeah and uh tomorrow
00:26:41
maybe maybe you can help out here but you know the biotech Market's been decimated oh yeah since November of 21
00:26:47
and it's really intricately linked to interest rates because of how far out you have to make a bet on a biotech
00:26:54
company and so as a result the valuations have plummeted 80 90 percent in many cases a lot of stuff just not
00:26:59
getting funded right now um maybe tomorrow you can share your point of view on where things are headed
00:27:05
there and um Nicole maybe you can share a little bit about what the experience has been fundraising even though you
00:27:10
have a great technology that's got some proof points how hard it is well I I have a I have a kind of a technical
00:27:15
question but which is just you had to when you picked aav you had to make a decision about small
00:27:22
edits and not large edits I guess right so just explain to these guys about what
00:27:27
payloads are actually possible in AV and are you thinking about what happens if you actually have to go beyond four KB
00:27:34
and how are you going to solve that so because a lot of the diseases that these guys will actually probably
00:27:39
understand are not small Snips they're going to be large you know cut and paste two types of gene therapy
00:27:45
there's Gene transfer gene therapy where we give you the whole Gene that you were
00:27:49
missing like perhaps you were missing that portion of your chromosome at Birth so that's Gene transfer gene therapy
00:27:53
we're literally transferring a functional copy of the gene back to you and then there's Gene editing gene
00:27:57
therapy where we go in and actually correct a mutation in place uh within your genome and don't give you anything
00:28:02
extra so every virus on the planet has a carrying capacity it has a size just like a sedan can't carry as much as a
00:28:10
minivan and so aav viruses the viruses that I work on are amongst one of the smaller viruses so it can only package
00:28:16
about 4.75 KB so the numbers of nucleotides that you can fit inside of it and different viruses have larger
00:28:21
packaging capacities and can fit more studs that's 4700 letters of DNA and so different viruses will have different
00:28:28
packaging capacities and so if you're doing Gene transfer gene therapy where you need to provide the entire copy of
00:28:33
the gene you can only put in genes that will fit with all of the other regulatory elements for expression
00:28:38
within that virus so of all protein coding genes since we're typically going after diseases that are in influencing a
00:28:46
protein of all protein coding genes eighty percent of those genes can fit within my virus so actually the vast
00:28:50
majority of genetic diseases can be treated with aav gene therapy with Gene transfer gene therapy with Gene editing
00:28:56
gene therapy we can treat anything because now we're not size limited we only need to deliver either the knicker
00:29:01
or the cutter right many of you have heard of things like crispr that's one of the many tools we can use to Nick or
00:29:06
cut DNA and we can either make a Nick and have your body repair the mutation we can go in and make a Nick or a cut
00:29:13
and we can cut something out that wasn't supposed to be there or we can go in and
00:29:18
Nick or cut something in your genome cut something out and then put something that was meant to be there the whole
00:29:23
time back in all three of those forms those Gene repairs and Gene edits are all kind of broadly classified as a lot
00:29:29
of Gene editing gene therapy and all of those would fit within a lot of any virus there's a high percentage of
00:29:34
disease I don't know the percentage you probably know which is really just like one point mutation right yeah huge
00:29:40
transcribe AC or something is typically the biggest one right can you just explain to folks in when you think the
00:29:46
tool chain will exist for us to do those single point edits and actually just today you can actually go in and
00:29:52
accurately rewrite an a to a c okay today there's a yeah there's a few in yeah there yeah
00:30:00
um guys we got to wrap and I want to really thank Dr Nicole Paulk for her amazing work
00:30:06
um fantastic thank you so much thank you thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]
00:30:23
rain man [Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music]
00:30:37
I tried

Badges

This episode stands out for the following:

  • 70
    Best concept / idea
  • 65
    Best overall
  • 65
    Most original
  • 60
    Most inspiring

Episode Highlights

  • The Era of Living Medicines
    Dr. Nicole Paul discusses the shift towards using living organisms in medicine, including viruses.
    “We're kind of quite literally living through one of the newest eras of modern medicine.”
    @ 02m 12s
    September 25, 2023
  • Gene Therapy's Future
    Dr. Paul predicts that everyone will receive viral gene therapy in their lifetime.
    “You are going to receive a viral gene therapy as medicine in your lifetime.”
    @ 09m 32s
    September 25, 2023
  • Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment
    Exploring the potential of using viruses to treat cancer through gene therapy.
    “Could you actually use a virus as a medicine that could be used to treat cancer?”
    @ 10m 16s
    September 25, 2023
  • Gene Therapy Breakthroughs
    Patients with a mutation in the dec2 gene only need four hours of sleep to feel rested.
    “These patients only need four hours of sleep a night to be completely rested.”
    @ 17m 04s
    September 25, 2023
  • Future of Human Augmentation
    Discussing the potential to enhance human capabilities for survival in harsh environments.
    “We could absolutely engineer Humanity to withstand life in much more drastically harsh environments.”
    @ 17m 49s
    September 25, 2023
  • Regulatory Hurdles in Gene Therapy
    Exploring the significant regulatory challenges faced in bringing gene therapies to market.
    “The regulatory hurdles are mostly going to be a regulatory timeline.”
    @ 19m 31s
    September 25, 2023
  • The Valley of Death
    The financial challenges biotech companies face in securing funding for clinical trials.
    “The biggest hurdle right now is access to Capital.”
    @ 21m 53s
    September 25, 2023
  • Augmenting Human Potential
    Imagining a future where we can enhance human abilities and experiences.
    “What other types of augmentations could we do for Humanity?”
    @ 26m 10s
    September 25, 2023

Episode Quotes

  • We're kind of quite literally living through one of the newest eras of modern medicine.
    All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk
  • The vast majority of viruses on the planet can actually be considered our allies.
    All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk
  • Your immune system knows how to fight cancer; it's exquisite at it.
    All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk
  • We could absolutely engineer Humanity to withstand life in much more drastically harsh environments.
    All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk
  • What about meaning and fulfillment for people who are content?
    All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk
  • We could make it so that you could eat anything and it could taste good.
    All-In Summit: Gene therapy and a new era of medicine with Dr. Nicole Paulk

Key Moments

  • Introduction of Dr. Paul00:40
  • Gene Therapy Explained01:31
  • Living Medicines Concept04:52
  • Cancer Treatment Discussion10:12
  • Sleep Revolution17:04
  • Future of Longevity17:23
  • Regulatory Challenges18:52
  • Financial Bottlenecks21:53

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown