Trey Foskett on Genomics, Gene Editing, and Boulder's Life Sciences Comeback

[00:00:00] Trey Foskett, I am looking forward to this conversation. I'm too, Dan. Thanks. We've known each other now for a few years. You're here in Boulder, and you're in a field that I know you're very passionate about, and I know has a long history here in Colorado. And let's start by talking about what's the right way to refer to the field. Is it biosciences? What word do you typically use? Yeah, so typically we would say broadly life sciences. Life sciences.

[00:00:27] And then specifically within life sciences, genomics. Okay. And so our company, Watchmaker, is really focused in developing products and tools that are used to support some of the fundamental research in life science, all the way through to genetic testing, supporting pharma ecosystem, biotech ecosystem. So we're sort of an upstream tools provider within life science.

[00:00:57] Great. Well, let's focus on life sciences as a sector. And let's start with the history of life sciences here in Colorado. Boulder, in particular, Colorado more generally. Colorado has had a long history as being a leader in this field. Is that correct?

[00:01:14] That's correct, yes. And I think one of the points I like to maybe remind the community here in Colorado is just we've had a lot of focus on the internet and a lot of the technologies that have come out of the late 90s and 2000 and the impact that that's had on Boulder. But, you know, the life science and history within Colorado is, you know, and the University of Colorado, you know, really starts from the 60s and 70s.

[00:01:43] And, you know, want to remind everyone that, you know, that so much of some of those early innovations and a lot of that early expertise, you know, was originated and developed. Take us through that history. Take us through that story. So, you know, one name that I think is pretty familiar but is good to be reminded of is Marv Crothers, who was a professor at University of Colorado in the 70s and 80s and beyond.

[00:02:11] And he developed a pretty foundational approach to being able to synthesize DNA, which at the time, you know. Tell us what synthesized DNA means. So, you know, building molecules of DNA, you know, from A, G, C, and T, the way that you want to build it. What does that really mean? Because I know we've always heard those four letters. Right. Those being the four ingredients of DNA, maybe is the way I would say it. But what does that really mean?

[00:02:40] What are these four letters that people refer to? And how would you bring that to something that's more tangible? And, you know, how does the sequencing of four letters produce us? Yeah, it's really, you know, whereas like in a digital, you know, the analogy to digital is zeros and ones. And, you know, certain combinations of zeros and ones capture a ton of information.

[00:03:05] You know, that now is really the foundation for all of the digital, you know, content and economy that we have. But are there really four distinct building blocks? There is. Yeah, and so A, G, C, and T, the four nucleotides, four bases, is sort of nature's, you know, analogy to capturing that information. And so biological, natural information.

[00:03:31] And so, you know, different strings of A, G, C, and T are coding for a whole host of information. And, you know, that supports us. I mean, in the physical reality, I mean, is four kind of an oversimplification, you know, to help us learn about DNA? Or are there really four specific blocks? There really are four, but similar to zero and one. You can have almost an infinite combination of strings of those letters.

[00:03:59] But ones and zeros is kind of just our coding. That's a human invention of a coding scheme that we use to code information. It's not ones and zeros isn't a fundamental, you know, reality. But my sense is the four. Absolutely. Yeah, and my point was just that you can have a small number of unique, you know, bits of information.

[00:04:22] And that can, you know, capture in various formats, you know, almost infinite combinations of that. And so what, you know, DNA does is it goes from DNA into RNA and then RNA into proteins, which are the three-dimensional. You're made up of protein. I'm made up of proteins.

[00:04:41] And so really the, you know, the DNA in our genome is like the recipe book for how to build all the various, you know, proteins within our bodies and all the various complex systems. Back to the four. Maybe I'm asking something that you've never really given much thought to. I don't know. But why are there exactly these four building blocks? I'm not sure.

[00:05:06] Maybe that was, you know, there's a whole, you know, biology is very much a historical, you know, so things evolve over time. And when they reach a sufficient, you know, quality to enable whatever, you know, is happening, maybe that's sufficient. And so sometimes there's a reason for it. Other times it can be, you know, somewhat random over time.

[00:05:27] But it appears, you know, that the four bases is sufficient to have, you know, supported the complexity of life, you know, around us. And what do you, like if you take one of those four, what do you imagine that that is? And how is that different than the other three? Like what is that? Yeah. So they have different, you know, those are, the bases are, you know, parts of this macromolecule, which is DNA. And it's a chemical structure.

[00:05:57] And there's actually a, so there's a relationship between the four bases. So the G and the C, they have a relationship. So they bond to each other. And the A and the T bond to each other. So DNA is a double-stranded molecule. And it's made up, it's almost like a spiral staircase or a ladder. And A and T are bonded together. And G and C are bonded together. And so they're chemical bonds.

[00:06:24] And so you can think of, you know, the A, G, C, and T is just, you know, specific, you know, chemistry as part of the larger DNA molecule. Gotcha. And so take us through how DNA goes to the building blocks you described earlier. Yeah, so that's, you know, canonically known as the central dogma within biology. Yep. It's been refined over time, but in various ways.

[00:06:54] But, you know, you have these instructions that are the DNA. And then there's a whole host of, you know, within the cell, there's a whole host of machinery, primarily proteins and enzymes, which I'll talk more about enzymes. They're near and dear to me, that then take that A, G, C, and T information, transcribe it. So taking it from DNA, transcribing it into RNA, which is a single-stranded molecule of information.

[00:07:21] And then there's other proteins within the cell that then take that RNA molecule that leaves the nucleus of the cell into the cytoplasm of the cell. And then there's other machinery that then translates. So you go from transcription to RNA and then translation from RNA into amino acids. And it's those strings of amino acids that become the proteins. And then those proteins can take on almost an infinite number of different conformation, different shapes, depending on how long they are.

[00:07:50] The sequence of amino acids, there's 20 amino acids. So now we're going up from 4 to 20 potential combinations. So you really get into very, very large numbers when you think about how you can build different versions of proteins based on strings of amino acids. But ultimately, it's that protein that's the three-dimensional molecules within the macromolecules within the cell and then making up our bodies and things. Yep.

[00:08:17] And when we have this conversation, this really is the mystery of life, too. Life came from the creation of these proteins, the structure you described, and how they developed into things as intelligent as humans is the mystery of life. Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:08:45] And it's endlessly fascinating and, I think, motivating. I mean, part of my background, I have a passion for the history of science and particularly evolutionary biology. In fact, both of my companies have used technologies that are derivatives of what nature uses, which is the power of evolution and natural selection.

[00:09:10] And we're able to create laboratory versions of that and evolve and engineer new things that aren't happening in nature. So our ability to control very complex systems, which biology is, has been a really exciting sort of – it's only accelerating as all these technologies are coming together.

[00:09:34] But certainly, you know, sort of the beginnings of life and, you know, how that has gotten more and more complex over time is, yeah, very mysterious and very fascinating. Yeah. And, you know, like any, I think, field and industry, there's a lot of vocabulary and nomenclature. So it's important – always important to define that.

[00:09:56] But, yeah, so, you know, Marv Crothers was really a pioneer in, you know, this concept of synthesizing DNA in the way that you want to. So you could define the exact sequence up to a certain length that you wanted of AGCNT. And then that was automated in the early 80s.

[00:10:20] And it's really built probably, you know, I don't know what the number is, but, you know, tens of billions, if not more, of global value around the ability to – because that's an example of our ability to control, you know, this really important, you know, biological source of information in a way that we had never had before. And so that's – Control for what ends? To create medicine?

[00:10:45] So medicines, you know, across the board, just the ability. So once you're able to write biological information, you can then start to have it express that information in a whole host of ways. And so because, you know, DNA is really that instruction set, once you have more ability to write that instruction set, you can start to do things that you haven't been able to do before.

[00:11:13] So you can design antibodies. You can design proteins. You can design, you know, new medicines. It's also a tool by which to do, you know, a whole host of basic research. So you can synthesize DNA, then you can put it back into a cell and trick the cell to start to make whatever protein you're interested in back into the cell.

[00:11:35] And so it just – it's such a foundational – you know, the ability to write DNA, the ability to read DNA, and the ability to edit DNA is completely transforming, you know, the world around us. And it's really only accelerating. So let's put medicine aside. What other use cases are being used? Is that being applied to? Yeah, I mean, I think – I mean, human health and, you know, is really the anchor to all of this.

[00:12:04] I think most everything leads to that. But there's, you know, a lot of fundamental basic research where you can go in and ask questions that you couldn't ask before. You could go in and say, if I was to change, you know, this DNA sequence, you know, what would happen, you know, in this cell or in this organism? And so it just really unlocks an ability to – But is it being used to modify, you know, living things? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

[00:12:33] So, you know, gene editing requires – and gene therapies, you know, require the ability to synthesize new DNA because that's the DNA that you're putting in. You know, you can – And I'm looking for examples that aren't related to human – directly related to human health where you would be putting this technology to work either now or in a forward-looking way. So –

[00:13:01] So maybe another example is DNA storage. Maybe that's something that you've heard about where the ability – you know, there's, you know, strengths and weaknesses of that approach. But there's been a lot of research and actually a company called Atlas and others that have spun out working with Microsoft that if you can start to print and synthesize DNA, you can start to encode information in the same way that, you know, magnetic hard drives are encoding information.

[00:13:29] But you can do it at a density and a cost and a scale that, you know, just will absolutely swamp what you can currently do with sort of magnetic storage of digital information. And so the ability to – but you really need the ability to synthesize DNA to do that. Now, for cold – deep cold storage, that works really well. For, you know, the ability to then get that information back out is more expensive and time-consuming.

[00:13:56] But to get the information back in because of all these improvements to the ability to synthesize DNA, you know, a lot of groups are now starting to really compete and leapfrog our ability to store digital information using DNA. And you really need that synthesis technology to enable that.

[00:14:17] And what about creating living organisms to perform tasks, like almost living robots to clean up oil spills? Yeah, so that's a great example as well. You know, Craig Venter, who passed away recently, you know, was a pioneer not only in reading DNA,

[00:14:37] but also in, you know, taking synthetic DNA and building new genomes to sort of reboot single-celled organisms for the first time. So entire chromosomes, entire genomes, and a lot of that synthetic biology is being used to have organisms do things that you couldn't do before.

[00:15:02] So your example around, you know, breaking down chemicals that, you know, don't normally get – aren't easily broken down in nature is a great example of that. And really harnessing our ability to change the instruction sets and the code and then, you know, co-opting single-celled organisms to then do new things for us is absolutely a great example of those applications. So building living organisms to do specific tasks that we want done.

[00:15:31] And then let's get a little bit more forward-looking in science fiction terms. Where can this go to? Can we – you know, is this related to bringing back extinct animals from the past? Is that – So that's a great example. Colossal, you know, is a company. I think they're down in Austin, Texas. You know, that – George Church, who was at Harvard Medical School, has been, you know, working on this for years.

[00:15:57] But the ability to – there's a whole host of, you know, steps that are necessary to do this. But one of the first steps is to be able to redefine and redesign the genetic code of extinct organisms. So – and these are like woolly mammoth, you know, various, you know, birds and tigers that have been extinct for a while.

[00:16:24] So the ability to – you first have to know what that, you know, genome might be or parts of the genome that are different from extant organisms. Put that in and then there's very good probability that now – there are some challenges in how you gestate, you know, these new organisms. Because, you know, there's – what happens many times is that, like, an African elephant would reject a woolly mammoth because it looks foreign.

[00:16:54] Because the DNA is different, because the organism is different. But certainly – Reject meaning – Yeah, you can't use a host. You can't use, like, a surrogate species because, you know, you're introducing a new species, you know, into the womb, you know, of that.

[00:17:11] So there's been a lot of research on developing these, you know, synthetic wombs so that you can take new species, put them in synthetic wombs, and then gestate them through to birth. So that's actually the harder part. They've actually – you know, the genetic piece to this has mostly been solved. They've been able to go back and, you know, read the genomes of these extinct species, recreate the genetic information.

[00:17:37] It's just now how do you get that new organism to grow in the right environment. And at what level have they done that so far? Because there has been stories of some – Yeah. Some extinct animals. Yeah, I think some of the examples have been mostly around very closely related species.

[00:18:00] So even there was maybe a species that has gone extinct, but the living versions of a related species are close enough. Like a wolf. A certain wolf that's been – Exactly, yeah. That's a great example. You know, I think initially the woolly mammoth was expected to be another one that would be more straightforward, and it's not been as straightforward as that.

[00:18:25] But, yeah, I think – I don't know all the – I don't remember all the successful species yet, but I do recall the wolf. I think there was also another bird recently that was successful. But, you know, the further out that these extinct species are different from, you know, existing species, the harder that is. But I'm really excited about that. I think that technology is – Jurassic Park is still a ways away. Absolutely.

[00:18:51] Well, I think slowly, you know, sort of marching toward, you know, our ability to do that. You know, so I think that's – Yep. So what about, you know, if I want my grandkid to be a little faster, a little taller, and a little smarter than my friend's grandkid? You know, when are we going to be doing that type of – You know, that's in some cases happening now.

[00:19:21] So, you know, we've been working for many years with technologies that are related to IVF, so in vitro fertilization, where, you know – And it's completely transformed for the better IVF, because you're able to now screen at a very, very early stage, you know, embryos that are viable or not viable.

[00:19:49] And that, you know, is, I think, a very positive thing. But now you're able to go a different layer within that to say, okay, not only is this embryo viable or not viable, but what is the genome of the embryo? And what are the differences within – maybe you're looking at, you know, four or six or eight different, you know, fertilized eggs prior to implantation?

[00:20:15] And now you can start to look at, you know, what additional, you know, characteristics and traits might those individuals – So it's not just viable or not viable, but viable and maybe, you know, it has these traits or viable and it has those traits. So that's happening today.

[00:20:34] But, you know, I think there's also a little bit of a misunderstanding and oversimplification of how the genetics, you know, to certain specific traits like running or intelligence or – you know, those are very complex networks. And we still don't know what's called the penetrance of that – of a lot of those genetics. Even eye color, we've oversimplified.

[00:20:56] But, you know, to go and say that you've got the gene for brown eye versus, you know, blue eye, it's multiple, you know, genetics that go into play there. So, you know, certainly that's improving. And I would expect that will only continue to – but there are just – it's very hard to predict some of those types of traits.

[00:21:15] Now, I think what I'm really excited about, you know, is the ability – and this is obviously a social question and where the line is and should be is up for debate. But, you know, there's a lot of disease that's Mendelian, which means you know very clearly that it's that genetic trait. It's been passed down in that family. And if your, you know, child has those traits, it will have this disease. And cystic fibrosis is a great example.

[00:21:45] There's a whole host of those. And so, you know, if we had the ability to either pre-screen, you know, embryos prior to implantation that we knew did not have a lot of those very serious diseases, that's probably a good thing. But then to your question, you know, then what is – well, you know, some of those diseases are very lethal. And I think that's maybe an obvious and easy ethical question.

[00:22:12] But then as you move beyond, you know, lethal diseases to maybe, oh, that's just a debilitating disease or that's just a – and then all the way through to trade improvements. But I do think we will have the tools and already have some of those tools to – and are being faced with those types of questions. So we're on a trend of being able, as I said earlier, to control and manipulate biology in ways that it's only accelerating. And so –

[00:22:39] Have you – you're familiar with the book Homo sapiens? Yep, yep, yep. And the sequel to that book was Homo duo? Yep, yep, yep. And Homo duo went through this whole – which I found to be a fascinating book. Yeah, both books are amazing. It's probably 10 years old now, but it's still ahead of its time. And what it talks a lot about is this world of post-humans.

[00:23:05] So if you look backwards in time and, you know, you were born into good circumstance from a wealth standpoint or social standpoint.

[00:23:18] So you were the son of the king or you were, you know, you were in the family of the emperor or you just, you know, were born into wealth because you had a parent who made a bunch of money in the tech world. You know, you still have the same genes as everyone else. You're still the same human being. You know, maybe, you know, maybe you are more intelligent. Maybe you are more intelligent.

[00:23:47] But that's true for anyone who was born in any circumstance. So that's always been true. You know, you may have had advantages, but you didn't have the advantages of better genomics than the next person. If you're a son of a basketball player, perhaps you were more likely to be taller. But it wasn't something that the wealth of where you were born didn't be used to influence kind of your genomics.

[00:24:15] But as we go forward in time, you know, we may be entering a world where those with wealth can get designer genes. Yep. Yep. And end up with true DNA characteristics that may give advantages over others. And he would use the term post-humans. Yep. So we talk a lot about, you know, today's, you know, AI world.

[00:24:43] You know, is AI going to take over humans? And what's it going to mean to be humans relative to AI? What we don't talk as much about is kind of the melding of technology and humans, which is sort of beginning to happen in ways that you described, maybe to avoid certain kind of debilitating diseases.

[00:25:08] But if you extrapolate that forward, you know, we could be headed toward a future where gene editing is used to, you know, tweak with, you know, characteristics. Absolutely. And whether it's, you know, legal or not legal in one geography or different geography, that doesn't stop it from happening somewhere else. That creates a whole new category of social dilemma that is way beyond kind of, you know, what's AI going to do to disrupt kind of the human journey?

[00:25:37] It's like, you know, what happens when you have, you know, different breeds of humans that have been, you know, tweaked with? And does that start to create a separation between, you know, what humans were and what humans will be? And, you know, all the social ramifications of that are pretty crazy. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:25:58] I mean, you made me think of, you know, Brave New World and Aldous Huxley, who, you know, was a really genius at anticipating. And so, you know, over, I guess, you know, over 100 years ago or just under 100 years, you know, his book anticipated this, you know, with respect to our understanding of biology and genetics and then the social implications of that and the social stratifications that come with, you know, enhanced or not.

[00:26:28] You know, genetics. And so, I think now, you know, that's not a new idea, but the tools that we have are starting to be more and more, make that into, as you said, you know, into a reality. I think, you know, there's also precedence for this, too, where, you know, we have been artificially selecting for life for a long time. That's what I think made us pretty successful as a species.

[00:26:52] So, you know, when you look at agriculture, you know, you look at, you know, farm animals like cattle. I mean, we've been selectively breeding traits for thousands of years and with very profound consequences. And I think, you know, what you're referencing now, applying that to ourselves with tools that don't take thousands of years, that could take days or, you know, months to be able to implement those changes,

[00:27:18] puts things on a tempo and a pace that makes it very hard to predict the implications of that. Yeah, crazy. So, you know, I've been intrigued by quantum, as you probably know, for a long time, decades. And a lot of what I like about quantum is, and what's fascinating me is, what is it revealing around, you know, the reality that we live in, how things really work, how they really exist.

[00:27:45] Because it sounds like you've been on a similar long journey about the history of biology. And do you have deep thoughts about, you know, what biology is really revealing about kind of the creation of life and the evolution of life and how that dynamic works? Is that something that fascinates you? Absolutely, yeah.

[00:28:06] Yeah, I mean, you know, just, and, you know, I mean, again, we're still, I think maybe you and I touched on this before, too, but still trying to get some evidence for this. But it feels very likely that, you know, life is, you know, ubiquitous in the universe.

[00:28:25] You know, if you look at, you know, planet Earth from the very deep, you know, thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean, so under huge amounts of pressure, whether very cold or very hot in these thermal events, you find life. You climb to the very highest peak in the planet, you know, in Everest or whatever. You go into the snow there, you find life. And so it's not like there's this narrow band that, like, has to be perfectly set for life to exist.

[00:28:54] You can be in atmospheres that have oxygen. You can be, you know, even on Earth, you know, water and other chemical environments that lack oxygen. And life's everywhere, right? It's teeming with life. So it's very, very high probability that the universe is teeming with life. And that's so exciting to think about that.

[00:29:15] And, you know, we haven't fully discovered life, you know, elsewhere, although I think all signs are leading that Mars has certainly had some ancient signs of life there, which is really cool. But, yeah, I think about that all the time. And I think, you know, we're very much focused right now on, you know, just I think it's also pretty exciting to be all the things that we talked about earlier around, you know, these tools that allow us to manipulate and control life.

[00:29:41] And just like other technologies, whether it's, you know, quantum or elsewhere, you know, these tools that humans invent can be used in good ways and bad ways. And, you know, I think it's really our challenge as a, you know, as a society to inform those decisions and have really good debate around where these tools are headed and what the implications of those are. But, yeah, I'm always interested in the history of life.

[00:30:11] And if you want to spread life, let's say we want to spread life from the Earth to an Earth-like planet that was a long ways away, you know, if you think about how would we do that? Would we send a big spaceship of a bunch of humans and send them for, you know, lots of light years to get to some distant destination?

[00:30:30] Or would we get some people like you together and say, we need you to kind of, you know, create kind of the ingredients of life in a way that can be preserved for a very long journey. Yep, yep. And, you know, put them on a smaller vehicle. Yep, yep.

[00:30:47] And let it take off and traverse for a long period of time and then hit the destination and then, you know, have some kind of trigger in there that allows the evolution from the ingredients that we sent. Mm-hmm. So that it would grow to be, you know, a human species on a distant Earth. It's much more likely the latter, much less likely the former. Mm-hmm.

[00:31:13] And, you know, and I think there's a lot of speculation that, you know, perhaps that's how we got here to Earth. Mm-hmm. We came here, you know, we didn't evolve from nothing here on Earth. We might have evolved from nothing somewhere else, but that we might have come here on Earth through some kind of, you know, transported set of ingredients. You know, some people might even think the ingredient might be mushrooms. Mm-hmm. That got us here and that might be the carriage of, you know, of life over vast differences, distances.

[00:31:42] I mean, we do have a record of the history of life on Earth. That tends to follow a pretty consistent pattern. And, you know, it's still very mysterious. And I think, you know, we're always learning about, you know, how that works and how it would. You know, time is a very big component, and I think it's hard for humans to, you know, like, you know, you and I and, you know, us here are very, very, very well adapted to think in a few years. A hundred years starts to get hard.

[00:32:12] That's, you know, our average lifespan is around, you know, 70 or 80. And so you think about billions of years and the implications of a process that's at work for billions of years. It's so powerful, you know, but it's very, and so humans try to come up with other ways to relate to that concept. But, you know, we do have a history of that here. The planet's been very different over those, you know, four, five billion years.

[00:32:41] And it's just been fascinating that humans are still trying to, you know, learn more and more about what's here and the record of what's here and all these. And what I think are intrinsic properties of the universe, you know, that are enabling that. It's, you know, and so, yeah, I think that's a big part of it.

[00:33:03] And, you know, even as a more discover that the human species that we are part of may have existed on Earth far, far, far longer than maybe we had thought until very recently. So it may have existed for, you know, humans that are just like you and me according to the DNA that gets discovered might have existed largely in the same form that we're in 100,000 years ago. Yeah.

[00:33:33] And if so, what were they doing all those years if they only discovered, you know, how to, you know, how to write language, how to farm only a few thousand years ago? You know, I think we, you know, the history books say that somewhere around 4,000 or 5,000 B.C. is when civilization really began.

[00:34:00] Well, okay, if that's only 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, 6,000, 7,000 years ago, what were they doing for those other 100,000 plus years? Why did it take so long to get to that point if seemingly the DNA didn't really change much in all that time? I think there's still a lot to be discovered about our history here on Earth, let alone kind of. Well, I mean, that's, I think, I think you bring up a great point.

[00:34:25] I mean, I think, you know, you know, the real innovation for human evolution is actually, you know, we've transcended the, in some ways, the constraints of, it's all biological. So, and from my perspective, so I'm not suggesting otherwise, but sort of that time period that genetics needs to evolve and change over time is very, very long, large amounts of time, to your point.

[00:34:54] But we came up with something that moves much faster, which is cultural evolution. So our ability to communicate information, so using the DNA, you know, sequence that we talked about at the beginning, you know, that codes a lot of information that gets, you know, passed down through thousands or hundreds of thousands of generations over long, long periods of time. Versus everything that a generation of humans does today, you know, we've written that down.

[00:35:23] We've communicated that to each other. We're learning from each other. So to your point, you can absolutely imagine once the ability to speak and to communicate, you know, was a really inflection point. And then you start to accumulate information. Hey, don't go up and pet that, you know, lion.

[00:35:43] You know, you tell your kids that versus having to wait a few generations for the, you know, for humans to understand that, you know, lions are very predatory or whatever it might be. You can start to, you know, and so you get this nonlinear effect. To your point, you can see hundreds, you know, thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years of what looks very slow. And then all of a sudden you get this inflection point.

[00:36:06] And I think that's basically the expression of us decoupling from the transfer of information through DNA and transfer of information culturally through spoken information. And then even more powerfully written information. And then our ability to adapt and manipulate our environment that we're not reliant on those timescales anymore. And so I think what you've just described is that expression of that where, and humans are unique in that respect on planet Earth.

[00:36:35] Although there is cultural evolution that does happen in other species, but it's not comparable to what we've been able to accomplish. In fact, one of the most popular movies right now, Odyssey, was written shortly after we learned how to write. That's what's really bizarre to me. Like, how could, shortly after we learned how to, you know, communicate through writing, could a book like the Odyssey have been written by...

[00:37:05] It was spoken. It was spoken. It was spoken. It was spoken for many, many generations. And that was another inflection point. So Iliad, Odyssey were these early examples of humans transmitting information. A lot of that information was not true. But it was a way to conceive the world and operate in the world that made more sense than not having that context.

[00:37:29] And then, to your point, ultimately that was captured as a lot of these early written songs, spoken songs and stories. And then it gets, you know, transformed over time. It starts to change, you know, over time. And it's very unlikely that the Odyssey that we read now is anything like the Odyssey that was either spoken before and then written down, you know. But we do have a way of capturing with fairly high fidelity through writing information in these stories that we love to make up.

[00:37:58] It just seems odd that a story written that long ago and that early in humans' ability to write stories could have largely existed in a form today that even looks relevant. Like, it's almost like some other species of animals started to learn how to write, that the first thing they would write would be a book that would still be relevant to humans.

[00:38:27] It's like, you know, shortly after they learned, you know, some other species learned how to write. It's like, well, gosh, wouldn't you have expected a much slower progression of learning how to write to be able to write something that, you know, which seems to us by today's standards still very, you know, very complex, very thoughtful, very elaborate, you know, very good story. I don't know. I think there's some strangeness and all that that, you know, still doesn't fully make sense to me. But, you know, I'm a curious person. So let's get back.

[00:38:57] So Boulder, life sciences, long history. We barely got going on that. Let's go on that again. Yeah, no, we just. Because I know that what you care about deeply, and I admire you for this, is you want Boulder to once again be known for kind of being very prominent in life sciences. And there's several examples, you being one of many, that add credibility to that.

[00:39:20] So it's important to see the history of that and, you know, bring us up to current day and look at what is active today and what's the opportunity for, you know, for Colorado. Because I think the history center plays a gigantic role in this, but Colorado and Boulder is kind of an offshoot of that to be a nationally recognized, you know, top geography for life sciences. Absolutely.

[00:39:45] Yeah, and like I think I mentioned before, you know, Boulder's sort of written and, you know, Colorado to some extent, you know, a host of industries. But I've noticed, you know, from an entrepreneurial perspective, there's a bias toward software and a bias toward the Internet boom and everything that happened, you know, for I think mostly good reasons there.

[00:40:06] But I just want to keep reminding folks that there's a long history of really pioneering and innovative science, you know, from Colorado and from CU. And we talked about Marv Crothers and, you know, obviously, you know, Tom Cech and, you know, really. Tom Cech's a Nobel Prize winner, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, in the 1980s, you know, really.

[00:40:29] So getting back to sort of that central dogma, it was always believed that RNA was, you know, an intermediary information molecule that was more passive in what it could do. And then, you know, Tom and his teams discovered that, in fact, RNA had a whole host of properties that no one knew nor really predicted.

[00:40:55] So RNA had this, like an enzyme, could fold and take a shape that was then had catalytic properties, which means it can promote, you know, chemical reactions in the cells. And that just completely was not expected and, you know, rightfully was recognized with the Nobel Prize. But, you know, again, so these are fundamental, you know, insights and discoveries that, you know, are just a few miles from us here.

[00:41:24] And, you know, a lot of, you know, some of the early, you know, biotech companies and then I think, you know, several years ago, you know, the pharmaceutical companies have all been in and around, you know, the Front Range and in and around Boulder. Yeah. But there's a lot. I mean, very vibrant ecosystem that existed for a long time here.

[00:41:44] And it kind of, I don't want to say died out, but it certainly reduced in prominence here. But there's still a lot of remnants of that, you know, all in and around here. But there's also a few really exciting new companies in this area, yours being one of them. So let's go deeper into Watchmaker.

[00:42:07] And I was also going to mention, I think, you know, to your point around sort of the cycles of companies that have come through, you know, the Front Range and then in Boulder. Because of some of the history had been in, you know, some of the more traditional biotech and pharma, you know, and those are very much, you know, therapeutic and drug-centric, drug target-centric.

[00:42:30] I think some of the reason for the comings and goings of those companies is a lot of the innovation in Boulder on the pharma side had been acquired. And then, you know, by much larger pharmaceutical companies. And then after the acquisitions, you know, they don't really need a presence here. They've got the target or the targets that they need. And then they'll move those to these much larger manufacturing and much larger R&D sites that aren't here.

[00:42:57] And so I think that's why we've seen some of the expansion and then contraction. But it still speaks to the innovation that's here. And I think, you know, to your next question, in sort of our industry, which supports biotech and supports, you know, pharma and the diagnostics, you know, industries, you know, we're really excited about, you know, some of the leading companies in our space.

[00:43:22] So in life science and in genomics, just to provide a couple examples, you know, so another really important name, you know, from the history of Boulder, Larry Goel, you know, really invented this idea of using the ability to synthesize DNA to make a lot of, you know, trillions or billions of trillions of these small DNA molecules called aptamers that are like, almost like antibodies. But you have a lot more control over them.

[00:43:51] So he started a company 25 years ago called Somalogic, one of a few companies. And, you know, Somalogic, I think, was ahead of its time. And so they sort of had some start stops with respect to commercialization of this, what they called Somascan, which was, again, a way to, you know, have therapeutic targets, you know, that were not going to be antibody based, but that were DNA based.

[00:44:17] And, but more recently, a company in our space called Illumina acquired Somalogic because they're very focused in the protein. So we call genomics, but this is now, genomics is very linked to the proteome and now proteomics.

[00:44:37] And so Illumina is now, has a presence here in Boulder as of the last year, where they've taken, you know, Somalogic and their technology and started to port it onto the Illumina instruments and readouts, primarily for proteomics, which is, I think, really exciting and powerful for us. And then, you know, there was one of, well, both of my co-founders at Watchmaker were at a company called Archer DX that was here in Boulder.

[00:45:05] They, they were really pioneering in the use of some of these new technologies for reading DNA, you know, and applying that to oncology and oncology diagnostics. And then, you know, they were, you know, in the use of the, you know, the co-founders at the time of the year, which was very early at that, that company was acquired and then more recently acquired by a company called Danaher, which is one of the largest, you know, conglomerates and sort of life science. Yeah, well, Danaher was from Boulder area, Niwot, he was a neighbor of mine and he took over the entire firm.

[00:45:34] Yeah, and they're, they're an exceptional company. And so they've been expanding, you know, here in Boulder as well, which is, you know, really cool to see. So we've got these examples of, you know, just continued innovation and then, you know, larger companies coming in. But, you know, I think we're really building more of a critical mass around that ecosystem.

[00:45:56] I mean, you know, other companies like Thermo Fisher that acquired, you know, some companies here years ago, Agilent, you know, has had a presence here. All those are the tools providers in life science that we work closely with. And again, I don't, I don't think we acknowledge enough of what's happening here for, you know, which is part of what, you know, why I like to speak to it. But, and, you know, we've really seen a lot of good momentum in the ecosystem here.

[00:46:23] Yep. So let's go through your background because you've had interesting success in the past before what you're doing here at Watchmaker. So let's talk about that for a little while. Sure. Your journey. Yeah, sure. You know, I was always interested in biology, thought, grew up on a farm in South Carolina, you know, spent most of my time outside, you know, fishing and exploring and stuff.

[00:46:48] And so, you know, when I went to undergrad initially, I was very focused in pre-med, but, you know, sort of realized I, you know, was really interested in the molecular side of things, molecular biology, evolutionary biology. So spent a lot of my time focused on, yeah, those elements and not as much pre-med.

[00:47:08] And then came out to CU for graduate school studying evolutionary developmental biology and really had a great experience here. But, you know, quickly learned again that maybe an academic, you know, I was probably not going to be an academic, but really loved the research side of things. And was super fortunate to have a close friend as an undergrad who was at MIT as part of the Human Genome Project.

[00:47:37] And he had started a company and developed some new technologies that supported the sequencing of the human genome in the late 90s and early 2000s. And he and I had always talked about, you know, starting the company together. And so in 2006, I actually left CU to take some of my expertise in molecular biology and protein engineering and apply that in more of a commercial setting. So I didn't have a ton of commercial experience at that time, but my co-founder did.

[00:48:07] And so we started a company in 2006. We were based in Boston, but the South African Department of Science and Technology was promoting foreign investment and expertise. We had some connections there. So we set up a lab in Cape Town and, you know, got to work on developing new tools and reagents that were supporting really the molecular diagnostics. So the ability to test and inform disease.

[00:48:33] And then that company was acquired in 2015 by Roche, which is a big pharmaceutical and diagnostic company. And then I led the sequencing and life science division for Roche North America for a few years. But, you know, my passion's really in that building, you know, builder phase. We learned a lot at Roche, a very sophisticated, you know, company, but, you know, wanted to take a lot of our experience and apply that to sort of a new environment. And so I was just very fortunate.

[00:49:02] I was living in Boston at the time, but wanted to come back to Boulder to raise my family. I have two daughters. And my brother was here with his family. And then my co-founders at Watchmaker were also here as part of Archer DX. So it was sort of this perfect storm to want to come back to Boulder. But that was where my, you know, sort of heart had always sort of been, wanted to make my way back here. And so we started Watchmaker about seven years ago. And the idea behind Watchmaker when you were first starting it was? Well, so the idea was a couple things.

[00:49:32] One, my previous company, you know, we were part of this really exciting new disruptive technology in the ability to read DNA. So the cost of reading DNA. So it took, you know, 10 years and $3 billion. I mentioned my co-founder at the Human Genome Project to sequence a really rough draft of the human genome in the 90s and the early 2000s.

[00:49:57] Today, you know, I can, for a couple hundred dollars in a day or two, I can sequence a very high quality genome of Dan Caruso, for example. And so it's a hundred thousand fold decrease in cost with an associated increase in performance, which swamps Moore's law, by the way. So this is one of the most powerful forces on the planet for the last 25 years.

[00:50:24] So we got to be, in our own very small ways, part of this very disruptive technology around reading DNA. And so when costs come down... And if you read MyDNA, what would be the benefit of that, to me? Yeah, so there's a whole host of, you know, sort of predispositions. So we talked about Mendelian diseases. So it's very common now if you were to, you know, want to start...

[00:50:50] If you were, you know, wanted to start a family and you and your partner, you know, wanted to test for any, you know, sort of predisposition that you may have that you may not want to pass down, you know, to your offspring. So that's called carrier screening. So there's a lot of that happening all the time. There's also predisposition for certain disease risks in cancer, which is, you know, very important.

[00:51:17] And then, you know, other associated, you know, genetic foundations for, you know, cardiovascular risks and metabolic disease. And so it gives you a foundation, you know, of information that I think is only growing in our ability to learn from and, most importantly, act on. And that's always sort of been the gap with genetics in part because of what we talked about earlier. It's not a one-to-one, you know, simple sort of cause and effect.

[00:51:44] But we're learning more and more about, you know, how all this genetic information translates into disease. And so, yeah, I think in some cases it can be – so that ability to have actionable information is growing from, you know, from the sort of core, you know, genomic information. How common is it now for people to get their DNA sequenced? Great question. Or their own health journey? Great question.

[00:52:08] You know, there's a whole host of different points in sort of our life cycle where people are being tested. And I gave the example of, you know, parents being tested prior to having offspring, a mother being tested prior, you know, in place of amniocentesis to test for chromosomal abnormalities like, you know, trisomy 21 and other types of disease. That's become the standard of care now.

[00:52:33] And then, you know, increasingly, you know, there's sort of the consumer genetics piece to this where people are just curious about their ancestry. They're curious about maybe some of their predispositions where they can go out and order a test for themselves to learn about that. But I think the biggest and most impactful and most – I think most motivating for me is around oncology.

[00:52:59] And it's completely transforming, one, our understanding of the disease of cancer, which is really 200-plus different diseases, and then translating that in how we detect, how we monitor, how we diagnose, how we inform treatments. And all of that is done with DNA information. And certain cancers are more – the information we have about that is more advanced than others.

[00:53:26] But that right now is probably the most – you know, that's becoming the standard of care. And many, many genetic tests are happening around oncology. Okay. So in your prior company, it was about reading DNA. Yep. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. And then the current company is also about reading DNA.

[00:53:49] But some of the examples that I gave you, I think maybe speak to this, where those early technologies are for reading DNA that I talked about and the powerful force that the cost performance curves provide. It's very much a research tool 10, 15, 20 years ago. Now that tool has shifted very much into a clinical tool. So you can take the information that you're receiving from reading DNA in these genetic tests, and you can inform treatment decisions from that.

[00:54:18] Drug treatments, you know, maybe lifestyle recommendations, et cetera. And so when we started Watchmaker, that was our thesis, is that, you know, our previous experience in these new technologies have been more focused on research. And we want to build a company that can support, you know, the acceleration of these technologies and migration of them into clinical applications. And I gave you that list of applications, you know, now.

[00:54:47] And so Watchmaker, you know, has built out a whole host of products that support improving performance and data quality of these genetic tests, the ability to read DNA at higher and higher levels of sensitivity. And then building out workflows. So as you take a sample from blood or from tissue of a patient, and then, you know, how you process that and get that on to an instrument that then does the test and does the readout.

[00:55:17] Simplifying those so that they're more amenable to clinical pipelines and clinical workflows, you know, is another big area. And, you know, in building out, you know, quality systems and manufacturing scales that are critical to support this transition into, you know, the clinical applications of genomics. And that's what we built Watchmaker around. So we were really excited about that. And then, you know, my background, and I mentioned this, and passion is in protein engineering.

[00:55:45] And so, you know, we were also really excited that a lot of our products incorporate new and improved proteins and enzymes. That's how we differentiate, you know, our products compared to some of our competitors.

[00:55:56] And so we also felt there were these converging technologies, you know, using machine learning and using all the compute and storage and information that was coming out of all the reading of DNA that we were doing that could, and our ability to manipulate it, that could, there were new ways that we could apply new technologies in protein engineering that would allow us to be even more competitive. And differentiated in the products that we were developing.

[00:56:25] So we're really excited about building out some new platforms in protein engineering as well. Gotcha. So, and you guys have been doing really well. So take us through your, where you are in terms of building up the company. How far along are you? Yeah. What track are you on? Yeah, no. Yeah, we've been really fortunate. We've had a lot of, you know, momentum in the business. You know, like any company that, you know, we're about seven years into this now.

[00:56:49] You know, the first few years we're, you know, developing, you know, discovering and developing products. And so, you know, that took us about, you know, two to three years to develop the first set of our products. So we were founded in January of 2019. And then, so we've really been commercial for about, you know, four or five years now. And just seeing, you know, a lot of growth in the business. So we're headquartered here in Boulder. We just made an announcement yesterday. Big announcement.

[00:57:18] A pretty big expansion. Yeah. Which we're really excited about. And we'll remain headquartered here in Boulder. But, yeah, we've got a team. But we do have a site in Cape Town that started primarily as a research site because of my history. And my history with a team, world experts in protein engineering in that site. And then we have commercial teams in EMEA, in Europe, and in China and in Asia. And so, you know, it's really, you know, our markets are global.

[00:57:48] You know, we're still a young company. We started this year at about 200 employees. We'll end the year at about 300. You know, so growing at about 50% with respect to headcount. And, you know, we're, you know, our customers are some of the highest throughput, most sophisticated, you know, precision genetic testing labs in the world.

[00:58:09] And, you know, we just feel really lucky that we're, you know, trusted, you know, to be a partner with a lot of these, you know, really innovative and impactful, you know, types of partners and customers that we work with. And a lot of our growth is coming from, you know, the differentiation that I mentioned that we have in our products. But then also, you know, a lot of these end markets in oncology and then, you know, more broadly in genetic testing, you know, is just really seeing, you know, very strong growth.

[00:58:39] In part because the impact that the information that you get from these tests is becoming more actionable. And so, therefore, the value is increasing and the ability to, you know, to actually have an impact on somebody's health journey is incredibly, you know, sort of motivating for us. So, yep. Well, let's go deeper into this expansion. So, that was a pretty major announcement. Yep, yep. You're doing an expansion.

[00:59:08] Tell us what you're building. It's a production manufacturing facility. Yep. To understand what does that mean in the context of your industry? What gets manufactured there? What kind of environment does it look like? And why did you decide to do that here in Boulder as opposed to somewhere else? Yeah, great question. So, just to set the stage a little bit, you know, currently we have two sites in Boulder that are separated. We're East Boulder.

[00:59:35] You know, we have one site in the Flatiron Business Park and then one site just outside of the park. So, we're about a 10-minute walk from each site. But, you know, everybody gets into their routines and, you know, sometimes, you know, you can feel very separated even by a few-minute walk from across sites. So, we've always been in our culture of in-person is a big part of Watchmakers' culture. And so, we've always been looking to consolidate those two sites for, you know, cultural reasons.

[01:00:05] But then also, you know, the growth that we've been seeing in the business, we've been just outgrowing our ability to, you know, to sort of keep up with things. And so, and it is a long process to identify space and then build out that space, which I'll talk about next. And so, this has been ongoing for about a year, year and a half. And then it's going to take us about another year, year and a half, you know, to grow into that. So, we've got about 40,000 square feet currently in Boulder.

[01:00:33] The site that we're going to move into is just around 100,000 square feet. So, we'll almost over double our capacity, I think, which is a pretty big deal for commercial real estate these days. And then, you know, to what we're building, you know, we have a lot of lab. A lot of that lab is used for R&D. So, development work, discovery work, have a lot of equipment and instrumentation that we use for that.

[01:01:01] And then, you know, we also manufacture all of our own proteins and enzymes. We manufacture all of our reagents and biochemistries that go into these products and kits. And what does manufacture mean in that context? Are you manufacturing your own proteins? Yeah, great question. So, we have a process which is, you know, been around for many, many decades. But it's sort of always improving.

[01:01:28] And every company has their own, you know, sort of, you know, innovations around it. Some of it's dark art. Some of it's, you know, patented IP. But, you know, what we do, and this gets back to part of our earlier discussion, you know, we engineer new proteins. So, they have a new DNA sequence that codes for a new protein sequence. And then we use E. coli cells in our manufacturing process where we take that new DNA and we put it into the E. coli cell.

[01:01:57] And then we feed the E. coli. We make them very happy. And just when they think they're really happy and they're dividing very quickly, you know, within minutes and hours in an exponential way, we trick them into start making the protein. We hijack the cellular systems to start making them. To start making, exactly, yeah, to start making the protein that we're most interested in. So, we do that at a certain scale.

[01:02:24] And then we harvest all those E. coli cells. We burst them open. And then we have to purify and get rid of all the things that we're not interested in, contaminating DNA, all the cellular machinery and proteins and everything, only to leave us with very highly pure amounts of the protein or enzyme that we're most interested in. So, when I talk about manufacturing, that's one piece of what we do.

[01:02:50] And at the new site here in Boulder, the new facility, we will be building out, you know, best-in-class, you know, protein manufacturing capability. And so, that's one piece of what we do. If I'm your customer, what am I buying from you? Yeah, and I had made a note and then I forgot, Dan, but I wanted to bring you a kit to show you. But we sell small volumes of liquid, clear liquids.

[01:03:19] And the typical volume for us will be in microliters or milliliters. And so, and then very large volumes to our customers may be in liters. But what I like to, you know, half-joke that, you know, we do sell atoms. So, we're not a software company. But it's pretty close to a software model because, you know, the volumes that we sell, the gross margins, you know, of the product.

[01:03:46] So much of our development work is upstream of engineering these new enzymes and these new formulations. And then our actual manufacturing because we can do it at such large scale. And then the volumes are so relatively small. You know, it's a great model. And so, our customers take these invisible liquids, clear liquids, I should say, and then they will combine them. They're made up of a whole host of various, you know, biochemistries.

[01:04:15] And then when they receive a sample from a patient, they'll combine our reagents with that patient sample. And then they'll start to go through a series of fairly complex biochemical processes to prepare the DNA or the RNA in that patient sample to then be measured on one of these DNA reader instruments in a very high resolution, very high throughput way.

[01:04:40] So, every time a genetic test is performed, a small volume of our product is used. And then we have a recurring revenue stream. So, these are consumables. So, you know, once we work with one of our partners and they incorporate our products, every time they run a test, they use our products. And then they have to buy more to run more tests. And so, we have that recurring revenue model. Yep.

[01:05:09] And it's really, you know, the IP and what they're buying because they can't just say, well, someone else is going to offer me a better price for that liquid that we get from watchmakers. So, it doesn't drive a commoditization of the price as long as you're supplying them. It's very difficult for someone else to have a substitute for. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, the type of tests and the type of sample, you know, that's coming in.

[01:05:33] You know, it's a full range of, you know, so as I mentioned before, because the price of reading DNA has come down so much and the throughput. So, there's so much elasticity. It's like anything for humans, you know, the cheaper you make information, the more information you want.

[01:05:52] And so, we're just, you know, went from sequencing and reading DNA of a composite single human to now full population scale human genome reading, you know, reading the tumors of cancer, single cells. You know, so we're just more and more information. But the reason I bring that up and the more and more that we want to, you know, sequence and read. But from a genetic testing perspective, more samples are being tested. But there is, you know, pricing pressure to want to do more and more of those.

[01:06:22] And so, we always have to be mindful of, you know, where our cost structure fits within that value chain. But then also certain applications where you're really at the frontier of the type of sample or the type of information that you're, the level of sensitivity that you need to find, particularly in cancer type testing. Very high value. Very, you know, where differentiation matters a lot.

[01:06:46] And then there's other tests where, hey, I can get a lot of high quality DNA from your blood or from your saliva. And, you know, maybe the value of a highly differentiated reagent is less important in that, you know, specific type of test. So, it really just depends on the application and the type of test. But to your point, I mean, you know, how we compete is through innovation where our reagents are able to really improve the data quality and the workflow that our customers require to perform these high value tests.

[01:07:16] And then the R&D, the innovation aspect of it is how to keep coming up with kind of new, what would you term them, reagents? Exactly, yeah. New reagents to allow different types of testing to create new products, new differentiation in the future. That's exactly right.

[01:07:39] And, you know, there's a cycle that goes from, you know, R&D, not just R&D, but from a genetic testing perspective. What are the DNA or RNA or epigenetic information that's useful from a test perspective? So, that requires R&D. And then you translate that into clinical applications.

[01:08:01] And so, that's always this cycle where you're learning about new, you know, what we would call biomarkers that can be informative around disease. And then those mature from an R&D perspective and then they mature from a clinical perspective. And then, you know, it's sort of this ongoing cycle of stabilization and then improvement and stabilization and improvement.

[01:08:27] But we're always asking more questions and we always want more and more information. And so, another – and so, from a watchmaker perspective, you know, I sort of – we've spent the last seven years, you know, sort of being very patient to get to this point. Because when I look at our innovation pipeline and our product roadmap, you know, over the next few years, this is what we've been building the company for us.

[01:08:49] Now, we can – you know, we're really, I think, unlocking, you know, a lot of where some of our earlier ideas around product development, you know, when we started the company are now just coming to fruition. So, we're really excited about that. But, you know, one example would just be, you know, you could take a patient sample today and just get DNA information from it. And that's very valuable, particularly if it's, you know, high-resolution information.

[01:09:14] But if you could also get the RNA information from that same sample or the epigenetic information from that same sample, what's called multimodal information, it just increases the value of that test and what you can either predict or detect earlier or what you may be able – you know, complex diseases that historically you didn't have all that information together. So, that's one of the frontiers that, you know, we're – you know, in our small way and I think the industry is really focused on right now.

[01:09:45] It's like taking what historically had been these disparate pieces of information in separate tests and combining those into single tests. And I think that's where things are headed right now. And that's where we get a lot of excitement. Okay. So, let's talk about two futures. One, your future. Like, what are you looking to accomplish, Watchmaker and otherwise?

[01:10:06] And also the broader role that life sciences is playing in Boulder and Colorado today because you're part of a business park that is branding itself as a business park for life sciences. I don't know if they use the life sciences word or biosciences. Yep. But they envision that there's a whole hub here in Boulder. There's some other really interesting companies in Boulder. And for some reason I am doing the name blank of Viswa's company. Can you tell me what Viswa's company is? Yes. If you're familiar with that one.

[01:10:35] Another just really interesting. Almost focused on plant life. Right, right. And Vita. Yeah, Vita. And we're right across the street from Invita. Okay. So – And, you know, they're very focused in using some of these, you know, advanced tools that we were talking about earlier but more from a therapeutics perspective. So, developing new drug and new drug targets. They've got a really exciting pipeline.

[01:10:59] Whereas we're very focused on the diagnostics, you know, which is not a therapeutic but they're complementary. And it's really cool. I'm glad you brought that up and I mentioned that earlier. We're right across the street and our new facility is – that new facility is right across the street from them. And so, yeah, from a watchmaker perspective like I just mentioned, you know, we have control over our own destiny.

[01:11:23] And that means, you know, we can take the time and the resources to – When you say control over your own destiny, it's because you're talking about kind of from a cap table standpoint? Sure, yeah. We do have professional investors through our Series A. But, you know, it's more of a minority, you know, holding there. And so, you know, we get to – you know, I think we're not on anybody's, you know, fund life cycle or anything like that.

[01:11:51] And so, you know, we really feel – we're also profitable as a business. We've been growing very quickly. But we've been pretty disciplined from a sort of operating model perspective. And so, we just have the opportunity now to reinvest a lot of that. You're having an impact in a few different dimensions. One is you're creating a lot of jobs. Yep, yeah. High-paying jobs, a growth company, 50% growth this year.

[01:12:20] You're helping to contribute to creating an ecosystem here in the Boulder area. And the nature of what you guys do is impactful. You're helping people live more healthy lives. So, the success of your company is more impactful, at least in my opinion. Everyone wants to have impact.

[01:12:45] The success of your company is an ideal example of by building a growth company in a field that matters a lot, that has a benefit to your customers, but also benefits to your employees, their families, the ecosystem of Boulder itself, and the future spon-off of other life sciences companies that are going to be here, you know, in and around our geography.

[01:13:09] So, on behalf of, like, Boulder and all of Colorado and the world, I recognize and thank you for the impact that, you know, that you're having by the nature of what you're doing. But you're also the kind of person who thinks about impact in a broader sense of that word as well. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think, you know, our primary goal, and I'm glad you mentioned this too, is, you know, we're, I think, very fortunate to be part of an industry.

[01:13:38] You know, again, Watchmaker in our own very small ways get to contribute to that. And then, you know, from a local community perspective, you know, get to work with a team of people that, you know, I think we're very aligned around our mission and vision, and then the passion that sort of comes with that. And, you know, I think, you know, to get to do that in a place like Boulder, you know, we get to contribute back to the community, but then we get to, and I know how passionate and how impactful you've been for many years in the same regard,

[01:14:06] where, you know, it's this, you know, sort of positive feedback loop where, you know, absolutely, you know, the University of Colorado, Anschutz, CSU, other companies here are feeders into the amazing team of talent that we have here. And, like, I go in every day and I get so, like, energized by getting to work with, you know, young folks that are so creative and innovative across, not just from a scientific and technical perspective, but really across the business and to be, you know, in this ecosystem around innovation

[01:14:36] and, you know, the environment that, you know, a lot of the business community and the academic community in Colorado has helped to support is, like, really, like, I don't know, super fun. And, you know, again, in our own small ways, like, feels really rewarding. And so to your question around, like, sort of, you know, vision and future, like, I love the time that I get to spend. I wouldn't, like, change that right now. I mean, there's a whole host of things that you have to balance as a parent and as an entrepreneur

[01:15:04] and as a, you know, a fast-growing business. You know, but I think, you know, for me, Boulder and then, you know, the ecosystem here has been such a great opportunity and a great balance of all the things that have mattered most to me. And then a lot of our team. You know, I think we're all here, you know, with very similar cultural priorities and values. And I really attribute, you know, Colorado as being, you know, part of that, too. And that's really important to me because if you're not having fun and you're not doing it with,

[01:15:33] you know, people you enjoy doing it with, you know, it's not a huge point in continuing to do it. Yep, absolutely. And you're part of Endeavor Colorado, which is part of Endeavor Global, one of the more recently selected, which I think is, serves a lot of purposes. One, I think it, at least I hope it helps you in the journey of your company. But it's also a way for you to give back by being an example, a role model for those who want to follow in your footsteps.

[01:16:03] You know, it helps identify what you're doing and you participate in different discussions, different initiatives that allow you to share broader than your specific industry and your specific company, you know, what it means to be impactful in creating kind of a high growth business. How does AI intertwine with what you're doing, kind of the latest?

[01:16:30] Yeah, you know, we were, when I was walking in, we were just discussing, you know, every Thursday morning, we do a global company standup from all of our sites. Everybody joins, you know, the video call. And this morning, we were really talking about AI as a company, you know, what's our philosophy, what's our, what's, where are some examples and sort of how we've been thinking about it. So I think like everyone, it's very, very top of mind.

[01:16:55] And, you know, specifically for biology, you know, it's almost, you know, again, a perfect storm where, you know, biology has got all this information now. It's really transformed into an information science. And just at a time when we've got tools that can take information and synthesize it and interpret it and look for patterns in ways that it's impossible, it was impossible for us to do. And then make predictions, you know, around that with biology,

[01:17:25] because it's really the science of a lot of small, very complicated interactions versus physics, which are just a few very large interactions, very complicated as well. But biology is just sort of that next layer of complexity around how things are interacting. And I think, you know, certainly at the most generic high level, biology was already on a pretty exciting trajectory even 10 years ago.

[01:17:51] And now I think, you know, the power of, you know, a lot of the learning and the AI applications is only going to accelerate that. That's very generic, but I think super exciting. And then specific to Watchmaker, I would say, you know, I've touched on protein engineering. I'm trying to remember, as a core competency, you know, of our company, I'm trying to remember the exact dates, but, you know, very recently, you know,

[01:18:17] the team at Google, at DeepMind, and then the Baker Lab at Stanford, you know, for the ability to take that amino acid sequence, which is two-dimensional, and then predict what the three-dimensional structure, and that was always considered to be, you know, math has all their, you know, century-old questions and problems that, you know, they want to solve. And for biology, that was sort of the holy grail.

[01:18:45] Can you take a string of amino acid sequence information and predict a three-dimensional structure? And that, you know, they did in 2018 and won, no, excuse me, they did that in 2021, and then, you know, less than five years later won the Nobel Prize for that. And that's at the core. Very quick, yeah. I don't think it was the quickest, but it was, I think, in the top five,

[01:19:11] from discovery to recognition, and so, you know, that ability to, you know, predict very complex interactions, you know, I think, and it was very hard to anticipate just a few years ago that that was, that we were going to be not just close to it, but effectively, you know, have cracked that challenge. And so, you know, as a protein engineering company,

[01:19:37] we get to leverage a lot of, you know, the innovations that are happening and taking, you know, very, you know, complex protein sequence space and make predictions around that, make changes to that, that historically you just didn't have the quality of information to do that. And so that's transforming, you know, to the point now where I think the very leading edge,

[01:20:03] and some of our teams are working with, you know, other groups and other academic labs in this, where you can build de novo proteins. So not just predicting from a sequence what a protein might look like from a three-dimensional perspective, but building new amino acid sequence that creates new active and functional proteins and enzymes. And that's, like, very early days and very, very crude and complicated in how that works.

[01:20:32] But, you know, it's like everything. You can start to see, like, what, and not too far distant future, how all that starts to, you know, you can start to build designer proteins on demand and the way that you can build designer DNA sequences on demand today. I think it's super exciting. Back to the post-human stuff. And quantum, you know, one of the applications that's often talked about with quantum computing kind of crosses over to be able to do things that traditional computing will never be able to do.

[01:21:02] The, you know, the impact on biology is one of the areas that's talked about significantly. And all the complexity you're describing in terms of, you know, DNA is there's just a lot of, you know, a lot of math involved with that and the kind of math that you can't do with ones and zeros, but you can do, at least theoretically, with the way qubits work, the way quantum computing solves problems.

[01:21:31] So that could have a whole other renaissance in what you're doing. Absolutely. And then, you know, all the compute that's required, you know, for not just the DNA side, but how do all these things interact with each other? How do all the proteins of the proteome, how are they interacting in these complex systems like our bodies? And when they act differently, you know, is that a signal for disease? And how early, you know, what resolution of information do you need around these interactions? So, yeah, absolutely.

[01:21:58] It's really becoming, you know, information, biological information is accelerating. And then, you know, as we develop these new ways to process and compute, make sense of all that information, I think. And then the connectedness of different, what seems like different industries, you also have in Northern Colorado the focus that they have on ag tech. Yep. And how ag tech is interrelated to what you're doing as well. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:22:24] And so all these technologies sort of, you know, are all overlapping and having various different impacts on different settings. Which is what makes the future both exciting and unpredictable. Absolutely. And let's touch on Anschutz as well. How does the Anschutz campus and all the research they do there, how does that, you know, play into what you're doing here in Boulder? Is it somewhat disconnected or is there more connectedness there? No, it's a really great question. So we have a very, in a very maybe pragmatic sense,

[01:22:53] we have a direct connection into Anschutz. They have some equipment and some centralized labs that have been designed for companies and other research, you know, labs and things to leverage. So we work with them, I don't know if it's weekly, but, you know, certainly multiple times a month leveraging some of the infrastructure they have to help us, you know, on our research side of things using their equipment and instrumentation.

[01:23:20] And then, you know, as I was talking about earlier, you know, Anschutz is a great example of, you know, research and clinical, you know, center. And so you've got this really powerful, you know, with all the investment that's happened there, all the expertise, and then translating that into real clinical impact. And so it's like a great example of everything I maybe was talking about more abstractly

[01:23:46] that you have, you know, at the Anschutz campus and, you know, outside of Denver, where, you know, from very early pioneering research all the way through to, you know, having some of the best, you know, doctors and practitioners, you know, in the country, all there working together, you know, helping to fuel the ecosystem from an innovation and research perspective. And then equally, you know, taking that innovation and getting to apply it in, you know,

[01:24:12] in the medical community more directly, I think is, you know, and then we do, we work with various labs who use our products at Anschutz. And then we also hire, you know, we do have, you know, members of our team that have come in and have been trained up at Anschutz that will come in and work at a more commercial setting at Watchmaker. So there's a lot of different touch points. Great. Let's close off both from a Boulder and a Colorado standpoint.

[01:24:42] Is there, like, an organization, a equivalency of an LV quantum or some of the space, aerospace and space tech organizations, is there a life sciences kind of grouping of people that exist? So there is, you know, Colorado Bioscience Association, which has been, you know, pretty active,

[01:25:05] you know, in, I think, bringing, you know, both academic and commercial, you know, companies together within Colorado. So, and I'm not certain of the history there, but, you know, certainly for many years, you know, they, I think, served as a, you know, an aggregator and a communicator and a facilitator of a lot of the life science, you know, ecosystem here. So I think that would be one example.

[01:25:32] And is there something more specific to what Boulder, where the creation of the life sciences campus, what did they call the campus environment there? In East Boulder? At the Flatiron Park? Yeah. I'm not sure. Because I understood there were some buildings that are, been invested in that are viewed to be kind of the epicenter of life sciences right around where you're at. Maybe, maybe I'm mistaken there.

[01:26:01] Yeah, I'm not remembering. Heard people refer to it. Yeah. And a lot of it's pretty recent, you know, recently constructed buildings, maybe the ones you're even in, I don't know. Mm-hmm. So, but nothing, no formal, formalized effort or emerging effort. If there is, if they're not, you know, been aware of it or, but it's a great question, you know, maybe, you know, to further leverage that. I was just curious if there's more of a concerted effort to further establish, you know, this geography

[01:26:31] as a leader in life sciences. You know, people think about leadership and they think about Boston and they think about the San Diego area. But, you know, I think they used to think more about Boulder in this category. And I think there's an opportunity for Boulder to reestablish itself. I know that's something you're very interested in. Yeah, it's a great point. And I think maybe, you know, as, you know, as we talked about some of the cycles and, you know, I think as we've been in some of the companies, which are just a few of the larger ecosystem,

[01:26:59] maybe being more intentional around bringing the now critical mass around that, I think, you know, from our lens as a group of companies and being able to, you know, communicate and to promote that with more intention, I think is an interesting idea. I think, you know, it's also in small ways too, I think, you know, with the manufacturing sites that we have here today and the one that we're expanding into over the next year or so, you know,

[01:27:26] we also host a lot of, you know, our customers that fly in and, you know, come to do audits and site audits. And I think the more the companies that are being built here, it's happening more, you know, we could, to your point, we could be more proactive in how that gets communicated. And then also there's all the large and small ways that, you know, we bring in these customers from San Francisco and Boston and those areas and they come into Boulder and see, you know,

[01:27:54] all the other companies that they recognize and get to see maybe the scale and the sophistication and the critical mass that's here. And so I think, you know, that's another, you know, way that we've been trying to, you know, build some of that awareness maybe indirectly. Yep. Good. Great. Well, you know, I feel like I knew you a lot before we had this conversation. I feel like I know you even more now and really excited about this area

[01:28:18] and what's going to unfold in the coming years, what it means relative to the future of humankind. But also as I like to, for whatever set of crazy reasons, think about how we got here and how we evolved to what we evolved to, you know, the biology of it all is one of the biggest mysteries still. And I think we explained things away with Darwinism and we explained things away with, as you said,

[01:28:46] just long passages of time that are, you know, that are hard to even kind of get your head around as humans. But there still seems to be some other things that we don't fully understand that have contributed to that equation. And I think we're starting to discover them. And maybe one of the most interesting contributions of AI in particular is going to help us understand more about these fundamental questions than, you know, we've been able to figure out ourselves as pure humans.

[01:29:12] But, you know, with all the data we collected and all of what is going on around us, maybe AI is going to help us uncover some secrets that have been just outside of our reach. And I think that's a lot of information, we might see an explosion in more fundamental scientific understandings in multiple different fields, including biology and evolution and what makes us what we are. Yeah, I'm equally as excited by that.

[01:29:41] And I think if anything with, you know, a lot of my, you know, sort of scientific background and training, I think, you know, the one thing that, you know, you learn from that is humility and, you know, the mysteries that still remain are much vaster than the ones that we think we understand. And I do think the convergence of a lot of these new tools and technologies coupled with the amount of information that we're able to generate in our understanding of the world around us definitely is really just in the very,

[01:30:10] very early days of that. So I share your excitement and, you know, curiosity about the future around that. So thanks for including me. Thanks for all the great questions, Dan. I really appreciate it. All right. Good deal. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Bear Roars. Check out Stretch, the new song from Dan Caruso with music by Jason Mendelsohn, available now on all streaming services. If you enjoyed the episode, please like and subscribe on your listening platform.

[01:30:37] This podcast was produced by Loud Bear Productions and edited by Hannah Schmetzer with support from Kendall Weinberg, Alex Kim and Gibson Seagood.