Tristan Roberts - CEO at Dog Years

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Tristan Roberts with us. Tristan, CEO of Dog Years, about canine longevity and frontier science in San Francisco Bay Area. He's got an interesting story. Was a clinical advisor at Unlimited Bio in Roatan, which I might go pretty soon, and strategic advisor research at a bunch of other companies. So Tristan, welcome to pod. bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Hey, Charles, thank you for the opportunity to share and to reach out to everybody viewing this. Uh, yeah, I have a background all over the place. I've done— I studied neuroscience, I got into crypto, I got into legal automation, but the last 10 years I've been focused on biotech development and specifically, uh, plasmid gene therapy. I was recruited by some biohackers who were developing a gene therapy for HIV. Um, I realized that even if it worked, nobody would believe me. So I did a livestream of the injection in order to get some amount of credibility, uh, in case it did work. Uh, it was covered in Unnatural Selection on Netflix. And I have to say that HIV gene therapy did not work, but something came out of it that I think did work. And so that first company collapsed, but out of it came Mini Circle. And Mini Circle, they had about $500,000. They realized that based on testing it on themselves, that a follistatin plasma gene therapy, it seemed to be working. But if you only have $500,000, it's like, what can you do? Where do you go? And you can't really run a study in the United States on humans for that amount of money. But they were plugged into the special economic zone scene, and we were— we ended up deciding to go for testing out this plasma gene therapy in Roatán in Honduras. There's a special economic zone there that has special rules, and it was faster and cheaper to get moving Even though we had to fly down to the island, it was still a lot easier to do a human study. And so in that study, we had 44 humans that were different ages, and the main thing we were looking at besides safety was whether or not their body composition changed. And so follistatin is something that a lot of people in the bodybuilding or the longevity communities have heard about. But the problem is, is that it has a very short half-life. So if you do inject it, you have to keep injecting it every like 2 or 3 days because it will decay within your blood. But if you can have a plasmid gene therapy that tells your body to create more of this plasmid, more of this follistatin, then it's a way of having A treatment that lasts for months at a time instead of just a few days. And so we saw what we were hoping for in that initial study, which is that people gained some muscle tissue, they lost some fat, people felt like they were stronger and had more energy. But it's, it's hard to say because we had a placebo. We had, we had no placebo, so it's hard to say if they were having a placebo effect. Um, but there were 2 people that had rheumatoid arthritis, and their pain went away for multiple months after the study. And this is not something we were expecting. We did not tell them that, oh, this might help with your arthritis. It just happened naturally. They weren't in pain anymore. And so as a researcher, I'm like, oh, this is, this is really interesting. And I asked the company, hey, can I give this to my family's dog that has arthritis? And they're like, yeah, sure, sure, why not? And so, I gave that treatment to my family's dog. She was pretty bad. Like, every other night, she was crying for pain relief. She was starting to not go on walks. And, you know, if a dog says no to going on a walk, then that's— something is wrong. But after giving her this folic acid plasmid, she had a recovery that lasted about a year.

Wow.

And so that got me thinking, maybe this is the right way to get this treatment into the United States, is through focusing on arthritis, which is a very painful, miserable condition. And but maybe we can get approval for that and then hopefully over time go into other areas and into humans as well. So now I'm focused on doing research to validate this in canines. Most recently, I did a study with my co-founder's dogs. With 5 being treated and 4 being controls. I guess I'll stop there for a moment.

You have a fascinating background, right? Like you studied neuroscience, then you started as a software consultant for Deloitte. Then after that, like you decided what, like to go in crypto. How would you describe yourself, and do you feel you have an edge in that industry because you come from such a different place?

I think right now we are living in a good age for generalists, where if you can understand the entire system and all the considerations, then with the help of LLMs, you're able to execute on things that would normally have taken an entire team to do. And so like, for instance, I think the best example is the data pipeline for my most recent study. Normally you would kind of collect all the data and then give it to an analyst, and then a few weeks later they would give you some results. But with using Claude and LLMs, we were able to create a pipeline so that we were able to pull that data, process it, create results, and keep iterating quickly over time. And so I think that we are in an exciting area, an era for that right now. And yeah, my background's been all over, but I think that actually adds a lot. Like, being— understanding psychology is fundamental to understanding the human condition. I studied consciousness and honestly psychedelics to some degree at Reed College in Portland. It's the same school that Steve Jobs famously dropped out of. And they had a culture there that was very supportive of people trying hallucinogens, which is like kind of strange, but was really very helpful for me as a student of the mind to be able to study these chemicals in the textbook, but then also study them like on myself as well at the same time and trying to figure out what's going on here with the neurotransmitters. How do we actually best think about brain activity? Got me really into frequency information, doing EEGs, looking at synchrony in the brain. My thesis was focused on what happens when something goes from your subconscious to your conscious mind. Is there some sort of signal on the EEG that we can see when that happens? And my takeaway was that, yeah, when something enters conscious awareness, it goes from being just in like the visual processing area, if it's something you're seeing, to having synchrony between that part of the brain and the rest of the brain. And so that was great, but having an undergraduate degree in psychology is pretty worthless. So I got into programming. But I realized then, this was like 2013, '14, that like If the current trajectory keeps going, then, you know, we're not going to have any jobs left because it's like all the programmers, their job is to get rid of the other jobs. And now we have the LLMs and their job is to get rid of the programmers, essentially. So it's like we're— there's definitely some bigger structural issues with society that need some reckoning. And for a while, I was really into universal basic income. as like a solution. But then eventually I realized this is actually a bad idea if our governments are corrupt, because now you're just getting people stuck on dependency to a corrupt government, and they will never, you know, overthrow a corrupt government if it's paying them, right? So that got me thinking about, well, how do we do currencies in a more voluntary manner? And it's like, I got involved in crypto. And then the more interesting problem space for me there was how do we combine legal entities with crypto entities, with DAOs? And I think that is honestly the solution that we need for AI as well, is like we need to treat— if an AI is acting independently, it needs to be treated like a corporation, and there needs to be ways of Giving them more rights than just like none at all, but also like not too much as well. It's like the right balance between that. So I, I'm all over the place, but lately I've been focused on longevity. Um, but that's such a hard problem because it's like, how do you actually evaluate what's working in humans over time? And it's like nobody has 10, 20 years to be able to like wait around and see see, did this actually change? We all want these solutions now. Um, yeah, we'll pass it back to you for a minute.

Well, it's, it's interesting. Um, what about your— do you feel that, uh, you know, prosperity and such economic zones attracted folks like you? Um, what was the— their successes, these zones, and what was their, their failure so far? And do you feel, yeah, with the FDA restrictions, like these sort of zones will sort of pick up traction and attract like better talent and create more innovations over time.

Yeah, so I guess I'll zoom out a little bit and talk about pop-up cities. I've attended Zuzalu, which was Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum. He pretty much got invited by one of the prime ministers of Montenegro to bring all your friends and we'll take over a resort town. And for 2 months, all of these very smart, brilliant people were in this small little seaside resort. And it was like being in college again, where you can just walk and run into people. It was fantastic. It's beautiful. But how do you get that to last? How do you get that to stay? And so there was another similar pop-up city called Battaglia happening in Roatan and Prospera. And it's a similar problem where we were able to attract really high-quality people there for a month or two, but getting them to live there full-time is difficult. And so I do think there's a lot of value in that for digital nomads to be able to have a community that you go to every, like, maybe a few times a year. You can check in with that. But how do you get them to actually move to a tropical island full-time? That's something that Prospera has definitely been struggling with. So this is maybe one of the most famous special economic zones. It's in Honduras. It's about 10 years old. It's been— I've been tracking its progress. I'm still not— I have mixed feelings about it. I think ultimately it's doing more good than harm, but there's definitely some pushback because the person who made the laws was pretty corrupt, so it's pretty reasonable. And they view it as like an encroachment of the United States into their country, which is reasonable. But at the same time, it's like, if the local government is corrupt, is this really any worse than, than that? I think the big value add, though, is if they actually do have special laws and you're able to start testing, evaluating things cheaper and faster. There's something called Eroom's Law. Have you heard of this?

No.

It's the opposite of Moore's Law, and it's basically like every few years the cost to bring a drug to market doubles. And so this is part of the reason why biomedicine just hasn't been progressing much is because people do a study on maybe like a small group of humans, it seems like it works, but then they're not able to raise enough money to be able to do the follow-up studies and then get approval. And so this is called the biomedical valley of death, where all of these treatments are trying to like go across, but they end up getting stuck at some point in this valley of death. And it's really one of the biggest problems, I think, facing humanity right now is that biomedicine is ignoring or not nurturing a lot of the treatments that we could have been having. And if it takes, you know, billions of dollars to develop a drug, then there's only a few companies that are able to actually bring a drug to market. And so if they're making money off of the problem as it is and they have like a recurring subscription, essentially for treatment, they're not motivated to develop a cure. And so like, this ties into my background with HIV. We've made great progress with HIV treatments, but HIV cures have really not been having a lot of success. And I think part of it is because the biggest players in the pharma space would be losing billions of dollars if they did actually cure it. I mean, they would get some money at the beginning, sure, yes, but then over time they'd probably end up losing money. So it's a very frustrating problem.

But do you feel that's true? That's a true narrative? Because, I mean, have you spoken to executives that think that way? Obviously, I mean, they get paid big money, and they're incentivized. But I think most of these people want to help, like 90% of them, and they have loved ones in their family, or have seen stories that are heartbreaking that they would never keep the cure to themselves, whatever the economics, right?

Yeah, I think that some of these companies are actively developing cures, and it's really at this point more of an incentive problem. Uh, for HIV specifically, I— it's going to take a combination of different types of treatments to be able to create a cure. And the problem right now is like, what happens if one company owns piece A, another company owns piece B, another company owns piece C. All of them have to work together, and getting a bunch of these people to work together for a very risky project that might not work out is really difficult. And there's not really a top-down influence on that to make it happen. So it's also just a coordination problem as well. But I do think that the pieces for curing HIV are there. They just haven't been put together. By a large company yet.

And to come back to dog years, right? Like, do you see any other founders or researchers applying human findings and cross-pollinating that to animals? That's pretty novel to me.

Yeah, most people go from animals to humans. I'm going from humans to animals. I think that there The biggest example of this happening right now is a company called Loyal. They were able to convince the FDA to start doing longevity in dogs. And this has been one of the biggest problems for the longevity space, is that even if you do have a great longevity treatment, the FDA does not evaluate longevity. So there's no way to get FDA approval for longevity treatment in humans. So the fact that it's now possible to do that in dogs is huge because, um, I think when people see their dogs living longer, they will naturally have an emotional response of like, why aren't we doing this in humans? And then hopefully it will open up, uh, the FDA to doing it in humans. But this is a bigger societal, political, economic question of like, Is this a treatment that's covered by insurance, or is this something that you have to pay separately? And then also, if you think about it from like a nation-state perspective, having to pay for a bunch of elderly people's retirement benefits is actually not good for them. They would rather you like work and then die so that way you don't have to cash in on your benefits. So it's a messy problem, and I'm hoping dogs can help with this because beyond these bigger issues, there's also just like the translation problem where like something might make a rat live longer, but then when you move it to humans, it does nothing or almost nothing. I think that it's only like 20% of the things that work in rats work in humans. So I'm hoping that it's a higher percentage in dogs because they share more of our environment. They have a longer lifespan. Um, so hopefully we'll see that, uh, translation from dogs to humans is more valuable. And also it's just, it's better to do longevity in dogs because in 5 years you can have a very good idea if it actually helped. Whereas it would maybe take 10 or 20 years in humans to see if it helped.

And how do you make sure that your trials are scientific? I mean, 4 and 4, right? Like, at what stage does it become scientific, right? I think you're testing on 4 and 4 go with a placebo, right? So how do you make sure that, yeah, your test is scientific, scalable, and that, yeah, it's cost efficient?

Yeah, it's— I don't think of things necessarily as being scientific or not. It's about the strength of the evidence. And so depending on the situation, you want to be able to get the strongest evidence you can out of that situation. But there's never going to be like a completely perfect study. And I think that's actually a harmful idea of like, oh, it has to be this double-blind placebo or else It doesn't count, especially considering there's like a group of people that control of what is or is not a double-blind placebo study, which is kind of what Anthony Fauci was, was kind of monopolizing. So with the— I would say my previous study with the 5 dogs, 4 placebo, that was more of an exploratory thing of seeing like, A, does it seem like the vector that I'm using, the gene therapy that I'm using, does it seem like it has any effect at all? That was the basic— 'Cause I'm using a slightly different version than what the municipal company was doing. I wanted, for me personally, to see which of these things, if it's still functional. And then the next big question is like, it's like an exploratory study. And so we collected as much data as we could, and then we saw which of these things seems to have the most impact. from the treatment. And so that is more hypothesis generation rather than like, oh, this definitely works, because I did not use placebo in this most recent study, right? And so, and we didn't in the human study for Mini-Circle either, because nobody wanted to fly down to Honduras to get a placebo injection and then have to go back there in 3 months to maybe get the real thing. So my next study with 50 dogs, I am planning on doing placebo. And I'm using the data from the previous study to kind of figure out how many dogs do I need, what should I focus on. And the result that I got from that 5-dog study was that the posture score was the thing that changed. So it's kind of like a Fitbit for dogs, like a smart collar. And you would think, okay, maybe they'll be more active afterwards, after the treatment. But that's not true because the human determines how much outdoor time, how much walking and running time the dog gets. But the posture score is just how often they're moving positions when they go from sitting to standing to laying over. And so if a dog is in pain from their joints, they might lay down and then not want to move for a while because getting back up would hurt. hurt them. So that posture score did improve significantly, even though it's like a small sample size. And so that gives me and the investors enough confidence that the next study should show even stronger results. And so it's really a matter of not is it science or not, it's like, who are you trying to convince and how strong is the data that you'd need? And so Right now my problem is convincing investors. After that, the next problem is convincing the regulators. And so having a dialogue between these things is really the best way to inform it so that way you're not just shooting blank. And I think that answers your question.

And does that require funding? Is that like where you're at right now?

Yeah, the past month I've been focused on fundraising for a 50-dog study. I've been considering going with BioXYZ for a token launch, but I'm also just debating just going with traditional venture capital as well, now that I have the data.

And what's the cost of a 50-dog study?

I'm expecting about $10,000 per animal, so around half a million dollars for the next study.

That's intriguing. So what would be the test? You know, how long and what would be the scope of the trial?

Yeah, so we would follow them before the injection for a few months to get good baseline data, and then there would be a few different cohorts. Um, so after the injection, they would be like for a year, but some of them would get the real treatment at the beginning and some of them would not get it until later, like Like a half a year later, and so that way we can compare the ones who did not get it versus the ones who did get it and be able to remove the placebo effect, which is pretty strong. So it's kind of a hard question for arthritis because you can't ask the dog, "Are you in pain or not?" Directly, but there are still other measures that are pretty useful. So the smart collar, like I talked about. We're also going to be doing a videographic gait analysis. So you record the dog walking like 10 times, and then there's like an algorithm that looks at how their joints are moving. And so we did that as well in the previous study. They seem to be improving, but again, it wasn't controlled. There's also seasonal effects as well that we have to think about for arthritis where The animals are— when it's cold and wet, they have more arthritic pain than if it's hot and warm. So that's something that we have to factor into the design of the study as well. So I would probably be having a few set dates so that way we get different seasons over the course of the study, so that way they're not all just getting better during summertime, which is a problem for arthritis studies.

Okay, and let's say you have success with that trial, right? Like, what are the probabilities of success with that trial? Wouldn't that necessitate, like, I don't know, 5 or 10 of these eventually so that you can stumble onto something intriguing? What would be the success ratio here?

I mean, the success would be enough to file an application for a new drug, a new animal drug with the FDA. So it needs to be enough evidence for them to think this is worth their time. And so if I can get— if I can show that the dogs are moving, changing their postures more frequently, as well as the other things supporting it, like the gait analysis, the questionnaires, the— Kind of doing like range of motion tests with the dog's joints where the veterinarian moves their paws to see how much they can move it until the animal's in pain. If all of those things are being supported, then I think that the FDA would be on board. And so then I would pretty much be doing— going from 50 to 500, or, uh, it's another times 10, right? Each time I'm doing this, it's another times 5 or times 10. So that would get me to doing a study that would be seeking out conditional approval. So the FDA for animals is a little bit more relaxed in that if it looks like things are good halfway in the middle of your study, if there's not any serious problems and the results are showing positive effect, then they do a conditional approval. Which is faster than humans because this can, this can happen in like 4 years total rather than it taking 6 to 10 years total. And that's what's happened with Loyal, the other longevity company for dogs. They have received 3 conditional approvals. They're still running their study to make sure that they get the results that they want, but they're able to start selling their treatment now. So that's exciting.

And if you succeed, what would be the cost of the treatment for my dog? Let's say, what would be the end cost for the customer, and would they have to cover it entirely, or would that be covered by insurance or other programs?

Yeah, dog insurance is definitely growing. I haven't talked to anyone in the space yet, but it's, it's definitely a big thing. Uh, the treatment would probably cost between $1,000 and $2,000. This is in part because plasmids are very cheap to produce. They're like probably the most cost-effective gene therapy, but also, I think that's on par with the top-of-the-line arthritis treatments right now. People are paying about $1,000 a month for Adequan or Librella. I mean, $1,000 per year, I should say, or they're paying up to $3,000 to inject Radioactive tin into their joints. I didn't know this was a thing, but it's a medical device. It's, it's crazy. It's not even called— considered a drug. It's considered a medical device, and they inject radioactive tin into their joints, and that makes the pain go away, which is nice, but you're just covering up the pain. And so if you are already going to be spending $1,000 to $2,000 on your dog's arthritis, wouldn't you choose the treatment that also makes them live longer, that makes them have more muscle tissue?

Yeah, and if it's radioactive, it will go in the rest of the system, so actively diminish their longevity. Uh, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's a cool industry though. It's like lots of money to be made in there. It's just like, yeah, how, how can you scientifically calculate longevity, which is also a challenge we face amongst humans, right? But But no, I think it's really interesting. Where can people find out more about you and Dog Years, Tristan?

Yeah, if you're interested, whether it's for the study or for investing or just in general, our website is dogyears.bio.

There you go. So it was Tristan and Charles for another