Talking Biotech Podcast 433- Standardizing Therapeutic Protein Production in Plants - Jim Wilson

Hi everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech podcast by Collabra. And today we're going to be joined with co-host Donald Kuhn. Don, how's it going today?

It's going good. How about you?

Yeah, doing all right. So last time we talked with a— we had a great discussion. It was really fun. Everything was really cool. And tell us a little bit about why you chose today's guest.

Yeah, so today's guest revolves somewhat around my research interests. here at school, which is controlled environment agriculture. And, you know, going through the field for so many years, people were always saying it's super expensive, but, you know, there's other ways you can be profitable, like growing medicinal crops. But, you know, those aren't too common. And what I found here is Zia Biosciences, who is growing pharmaceutical products with indoor farming technology. I wanted to bring them on and share it with the world.

Yeah, it's really cool. I, I've been following this for a long time. I know that we've grown things like artemisinin and stuff in carrot cell cultures. I've seen things like Medicago, a company in Canada, has done some things before. I've spoken there. But today we're going to speak with Jim Wilson. He's the chairman, founder, and chief visionary officer of Zia Biosciences. Yeah, welcome to the podcast, Jim.

Uh, thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Donald. I appreciate your time and appreciate all the listeners out there listening to Yeah, it's cool that you're a Chief Visionary Officer, right?

Like, tell me about it.

So, I founded this company about 8 years ago. We're doing to drug biologics what Tesla's doing to the car industry. That has maturated over 8 years. Lately, we've brought on a whole new tier 1 biologic board, and then I stepped down from CEO. to become the visionary officer to promote biologic drugs using organic bioreactors versus traditional stainless steel bioreactors, to go technical on you.

Yeah, it's pretty cool that you have that kind of environment or that ecosystem, the business ecosystem that would employ a visionary officer, or at least go with that term. I applied for a job once with a company that shall remain nameless in small fruits, and I was perfectly suited for the job. It was in management. It really fit perfectly. And, the reason they didn't, I heard from a fly on the wall that they said, he's too visionary. And, it was the best comp assault I ever received. But, let's talk about the ideas of what you do and why you do it.

Sure.

You're producing biologically active compounds and therapeutic molecules in plants. And this has been done for some time. I mentioned that a little bit before. And we have other ways to make pharmaceuticals, right? You can do this and synthesize them or whatever. Why are plants better, or at least for a subset of these therapeutic molecules?

Right. Good question. Let's back up a minute now and let's look at biologic drugs. First off, biologic drugs are the most effective class of drugs we have out there. They're the most expensive and The top 10 drugs out there, insulin, vaccines, Humira, they all derive from biologic drugs. And the problem is they're extremely expensive. The average price tag of a bioreactor is about half a billion dollars. The total cost of going through from start to finish is about 11 years and then $2.6 billion of R&D before you even get to commercialization. So what Zia did is Zia does the exact same thing, only instead of using a stainless steel bioreactor, we figured out how to use a plant as a bioreactor. So all we're looking at is we're exactly the same drug development company, the drug biotech company, only we're using plants as bioreactors. And that's not a new concept. That's been around for as long as animal cell manufacturing's been around.

Yeah, we've heard about plant-based vaccines now for what, 2 or 3 decades? You know, that this whole idea of generating proteins in plants, we haven't really seen that come to fruition so much.

But are— That's exactly right. I don't mean to cut you off. That's exactly right. And what's the number one reason why we don't see it come to fruition?

Yeah, that's probably—

Because you're never able to get consistency. The FDA has one cardinal rule that we have never broken, which is batch-to-batch variance should be less than 5%. And in plants, unfortunately, when you get down to the molecular level, you will never get batch-to-batch variance. You cannot molecularly say plant 1 and plant number 1 million are less than 5% variance up to now. And that's what Zia did. Zia actually engineered a platform that actually, in fact, it's below 5%. NASA's been using it for verification of the Artemis project and a number of other things. So that opens up a doorway. Think about this. It opens up a global doorway of biologic drugs that could only be afforded here in the United States, possibly in Europe and Japan. Now we have a worldwide application for biologic drugs.

Now let me ask one other quick one here. Is this transient expression, or are you looking at stable transformants that are producing the—

You can do it both ways. You can do it both ways. The stable is always the best, is the better way to do it. I've seen transient in other states. It's really, that's a variable. It comes down to What are you getting for the targeted expression in the plant on a gram-kilogram basis? That's really what it comes down to. Again, using the plant as the bioreactor is the key. And I'll even give you some economic costs that make it even more interesting. We know after 8 years of doing this is that it's about 1/10 the cost, production costs. And I can give you the rotavirus vaccine we've done in tomato plants. Or the flu vaccine, which we've done in lettuce plants. So that's about one-tenth the cost of production. The capital costs are about one-tenth. And more importantly, because you can do multiple trials of different variables, of different expressions in the plant itself, you can churn early-stage drug candidates much faster rather than one bioreactor. Wait 3 months, move on to the next trial. So in our case, we'll do 24 trials in a 3-week period.

So in general, from beginning to end, for a non-R&D crop, what does biological production look like?

I mean, so yeah, so essentially, we already will have licensed from a university or from a research institution, some sort of stable, they've already genetically modified the seeds to express the certain protein. In our drug ZB1, it's hemophilia, a tolerization drug for hemophilia. ZB2 is for colorectal cancer. So we're receiving something that on the test bench, somebody at some university or some research institution already has done that heavy lifting. The problem is, how do you get that from the test bench all the way to commercialization? It comes down to scale. And that's where plant biologics kind of falls apart and has fallen apart for the last number of decades. Now they have a platform, and we have shown that that platform works. And our goal is then to design the workflow process, the production process, Everything that you could imagine that goes into a drug, developing a biologic drug, we do the same thing. It's the same process. It's the same regulatory requirements. The only difference is it's in a plant. The only other major thing, which when I mentioned we're like Tesla and we're the Tesla of the drug manufacturing world, all biologic drugs, obviously the ones that are in steady-state protein, molecules. The challenge you have is they always have to be injectables. And the real cost is the extraction out into your bloodstream. Every one of Zia's drugs is an ingestible. And how we do that is we have a technology called bioencapsulation. And that actually, that bioencapsulation was actually founded at the University of Florida. It was developed at the University of Florida. And that's— we own the patent rights to that. And that bioencapsulation allows us to take any protein drug out there, as long as you can transform it into a plant and then be able to ingest it. So the hemophiliac drug is an ingestible pill. The colorectal drug, which is a BioBetter drug for cetuximab, is an ingestible pill. The flu vaccine, which everybody's big on, and eating food, once it gets approved by the FDA, it will actually become a flu pill.

Yeah, this is pretty cool. So, but the question is, you're talking about a really diverse set of different diseases here. You're talking hemophilia, you're talking osteoporosis, you're talking about flu, colorectal cancer. What is it about the platform that all of these things share? So in other words, are these specific kinds of proteins that make themselves amenable to production in plants that are also able to be encapsulated?

No. Imagine you're designing a biologic drug and the plant is the bioreactor, and the plant will produce that protein at a certain level for every 600 grams of plant that you have. We could use lettuce, we could use basil. I mentioned in the rotavirus, we used tomato plants. The platform is agnostic to the plant inside of it. The key to the Zia platform is 2 parts. Number one, that you can control over 28 variables that are in the grow cycle of a plant. And most people think light, your specialties in light. I'm familiar with your research. But there's actually 28 variables. I'll give you one that people don't even realize is an important one. The airflow that keeps steady state, what we call steady state targeted expression, you will need to have the same flow of carbon dioxide over the plants throughout the entire grow cycle.

Yeah.

So in our case, and it's not a big secret, it's been published before, that it's about 1,500 parts per million. That's the optimal amount. Now, how do you do that over the plants? Well, that's the engineering part. That's part of our platform. And to do that in batches where you're growing 16,000 heads of lettuce or 16,000 and plant one at the bottom shelf inside the cleanroom, that becomes an engineering challenge.

Yeah.

So in answer to your question, in the short form is that The platform is agnostic to the plant that you're putting in there. The platform is able to deliver consistent targeted expression at a consistent volume level. And that is what makes all of a sudden plant biologic drugs much more marketable. In the world, put add into that that it's an ingestible that you add the bioencapsulation technology and that you don't have to extract it out like Medicago does or other where there's all these extraction. You still have to use the needle that you can ingest it. That's the second thing, and that it you don't need the cold storage chain to store those drugs. You store actually take those plants. You lyophilize them down into a dry powder and you can put them on at room temperature.

Yeah. So you had briefly mentioned lettuce, tomato, and basil. Is there anything special about those plants that make, you know, one of them better or worse than the others for production?

Well, you know, like there's really, we see it all over. We see tobacco. There's a perfect example is tobacco. But it's the easiest way to transform a protein and get an amount. And we've grown tobacco inside our platform. The challenge is it's not an ingestible. There's too many alkaloids, there's too many things. So, if you have to take that tobacco plant, take it out of our system, and then extract it through traditional means, you're actually— and that was the challenge KBP had and Medicago had— is that it's actually costing you more money than it was traditionally. So that was kind of the fall of plant biologics. So the real holy grail here is the ability to ingest those and not have all that downstream processing. And that's what plants can do. And only plants can do that. No other bioreactor system could do that.

When you talk about growing plants indoors and growing these in very specific environmental conditions, and we've seen from multiple failures of vertical farming in the last couple years, that it's really expensive to do, that the lighting, the air conditioning, all the stuff that's there, the infrastructure is so expensive and expensive to run. What is it about doing pharmaceuticals that makes it more plausible?

So there's a couple reasons. One is you can't do pharmaceuticals unless you have a controlled environment. You will never get The analogy, the basic analogy I use to friends of mine are you could take 2 lettuce plants, 2 basil plants. I could put them on your dining room table. They could have the same genetic seeds. You could water them the same, everything the same, and they will not produce the same targeted expression because of lighting, because of airflow, because of, believe it or not, electrical charge in the air.

Sure.

All those things matter. So because of that, you get variability and that just, that's expensive. But when it's actually counterproductive or counterintuitive thinking that when you start growing plants in an ISO 7 cleanroom, a sterile cleanroom where you're able to blow air over the plants consistently, deliver lighting consistently, Deliver a temperature within a 0.2% variance. All these things, we even look at things that you think are crazy, like the, the statoelectric charge inside the room itself actually makes a difference because it actually makes the CO2 molecules cling to the leaves rather than be absorbed into them. Those are different variables. And so when we talk about the platform, we say, what's the secret sauce? Everybody wants to know what's the secret sauce. Well, There's the physical part, but then imagine creating a formula that has 28 variables, that has so many moving parts to it because plants are constantly growing and the environment's changing around them as it grows. How do you adjust for that? That's not a 28-variable optimization operations research problem. That's a 28-variable dimensional problem. And that data, there's, you know, we're collecting 10 million data points an hour. How do you handle that? And that's where artificial intelligence, what I call a number of different algorithms. So you never get to the optimal phase, but you're getting close enough that you're keeping each plant below that 5% variance.

And so compared to traditional production methods, You've touched on it a little bit, but what are some other challenges that you find with this farming with pH?

Well, you know, it's no different than indoor farming. You have hydroponics, so you have challenges with water, you have challenges with bacterial infections, you have challenges with temperature, you have challenges with nutrient solutions, you have challenges, you know, you have all these different things going on. Imagine growing a plant in a thermos. The analogy I use is, as NASA asked us and UC Davis asked us, All they wanted to know is what was the nitrogen dependency in romaine lettuce. That's all they asked from us. That took 3 months to get it down to a mathematical equation to give to them on what they call the modified energy cascading model. So, we think lettuce is a simple thing to grow, but when you start breaking it down into, you're looking at what I call molecularly symmetrical plants, and you need to do that over a batch of 16,000 heads, that becomes a lot more complicated. And that's where people don't appreciate the math involved, and it's a lot of math.

Would you say it's easier or harder than traditional pharmaceutical production?

It is as hard as traditional, as traditional drug biologic production. The difference is you're not managing— in traditional drug production, you have 2 parts that we don't look at. Number one, we don't have the downstream processing, which is very costly and is prone to variability. That's one part. The second part is, as you increase, and this is kind of the key thing in plants that is, if you think about it, is actually kind of inherently good. When I go from producing, let's just say, 1,000 grams of a hemophiliac drug in liquid for an injectable, And then I need to go to 2,000. I may need to go from a 100-liter to a 500-liter bioreactor. Number 1, that takes a long time. Number 2, I have to reprogram everything. Number 3, just because animal cells were growing in a 100-liter bioreactor doesn't mean they operate the same in a 500-liter. In fact, we know they don't because there's a whole science behind that. But in plants, think about this. If I'm growing that plant inside a controlled environment— when I say controlled environment, we're not talking in a warehouse or in even in an environmental con room where you're just managing the airflow and stuff. We're talking about when you actually manage everything that that plant absorbs energy-wise and element-wise. Then I can scale that. I can scale that a little bit. I can scale that a lot. And what that does for the world and what that does for medicine is it gives a path to predictability. Whereas once that we figured out how to make the drug on a small scale, it can be linearly scaled. That is something that's the challenge in drug biologics today. And that's actually one of the big bottlenecks.

Yeah, I think that when, as a plant biologist, the first thing that comes to mind for me is there has to be a kind of plant that would do this for you better, and that maybe there's a way to breed for it. And is there some sort of effort that's being made to find something like the brassicas, which have been shown so much ability to diversify?

Right.

Is there kind of a Swiss Army plant out there? that you could come up with that would give you better protein production, better protein stability, maybe less modification, that kind of thing?

Yeah, there is. I mean, not to plug myself, but I wrote a book, a compendium book a couple years ago, and I listed every plant biologist. I pulled every researcher on every plant biologist around the world. So, I'm pretty familiar with everybody that's done something like this. And, you see Plants range from tobacco to lettuce to. In fact, Dr. Steinmetz out of UC San Diego just announced that she did a cowpea that stops the metastasis of certain cancers. So is there a better plant? I honestly don't know. I know that by the time we get the by the time we get the plant, that's what they used it in. That's what they've already done. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all. It's no different than true drug biologic production.

Yeah, I see.

So you—

so someone in a university or whatever, academic or government lab, comes up with a solution that seems to work, and your job is to scale it and add the precision where you can have a consistent output from that original finding.

Correct. And then we actually partner We have 3 universities we partner with right now where the plants that they put them in, we actually suggested some better plants for them, and some we saw a better production rate in their plants. Specifically at Arizona State, at the Biodesign Institute, and at Loma Linda, we actually have part of our platform in their labs so that they can look at that precision. And be able to churn their experiments much faster.

Yeah, that's pretty cool stuff. So we'll finish up on the other side of the break. We're speaking with Jim Wilson. He's the chairman, founder, and chief visionary officer at Zia Biosciences. This is Collabra's Talking Biotech podcast, and we'll be back in just a moment. And now we're back on Collabra's Talking Biotech podcast. We're speaking with Jim Wilson. He's the chairman, founder, and chief visionary officer at Zia Biosciences. And before the break, we were introduced to the technology and what's happening there. But let's talk about what happens in terms of the processing side. So you mentioned before that when you're dealing with regular biologicals through a typical pharmaceutical chain, that this is really a big part of the process that gets expensive. What is happening when you're going from, say, a head of lettuce down to something that can actually be bioencapsulated and used as a therapeutic?

That's the key. That's the key to using plants in the biologic drug process. The key is it's no different than Tesla using their battery technology, which they obviously have changed the car industries in more ways than one. Bioencapsulation really is going to change the world and change how plants are used in drug biologics. And when I talk about that, let's be very clear about this. Yeah. We're not talking about artemisia or nutraceuticals or anything like that. We're talking about taking a plant, genetically modifying that plant, putting it inside a controlled environment, a totally controlled environment, growing it. And now let's talk about the process on the go forward. And traditionally there would be multiple filters, multiple extracts, And in the case of a number of traditional drug companies, you lose anywhere from 50 to 90% of your targeted expression through that. In bioencapsulation, it's really interesting because what you're doing is you're, you're, you're taking that, let's say, head of lettuce, you're cutting it, you're immediately lyophilizing it, you're dehydrating that. And one of the interesting things is, That you're taking the, um, the— you're using the advantage of the cellulose around the plant cell walls. So as you dehydrate, it collapses onto the protein itself and then encapsulates it. And at that point, you can grind it up as a pill and/or powder and put into a pill. A lot of people say, well, wait a minute, it's a protein, so how do you get that through your stomach? Because it's like hamburger, it'll digest. And this is the very clever part that a lot of people forget about, is that— so what people have been doing, and they've tried it for a number of years, and now it's, it's pretty well known, is they take the, the deadliest, uh, part, the chlorotoxin B, and they cut out the deadly part of it, and they bond the, the protein molecule, uh, to that chlorotoxin B. Because that doesn't get digested by your stomach. And more importantly, it passes through your small intestine very fast. It has a— so, you take that, you put that back into the plant, you grow the plant, and now, the powderized bioencapsulation has this powder with the protein attached to a piece of material that allows you to pass through your stomach and into your bloodstream. That by far, folks, will revolutionize how we do business with plant biologics. And it's passable by the FDA because the FDA, the only thing they want to know about drug is what is that targeted expression and how does it interact in your body? That's the challenge with nutraceuticals. That's the challenge with any type of plant in the past. Because you mentioned Artemisia, it has over 600 different molecules, of which we don't know which one really works still when we combat malaria.

Why does the FDA regulate the expression plant-to-plant when really we're only worried about what's going into the people?

Well, we're not— the FDA is not regulating plant-to-plant.

Okay.

The FDA is regulating batch-to-batch.

Batch-to-batch.

Okay. That's right. So in batch to batch, you want to be able that as you're growing that batch that you have, let's just say the average amount is 40 micrograms per kilogram of targeted expression. And then the next batch you do inside the Zia platform better have plus or minus 5% of 40 micrograms. It's not plant to plant. But if you don't go down to the plant level, Donald, then what happens is, is that you only need a couple far outliers because you have a tight variance. And we're shit. Let's just, I'll give you a perfect example of that. Matt, we have 16 racks inside our, in our production room. If you're growing 16 racks and 16,000 heads of lettuce and the lights go out on one of the racks for more than 2 hours, and we'll just use lights because lights are the worst, they can screw up a plant. As quick as anything. We found that you can be off by a variance of almost 15% when you combine. You don't think it, but once you stop the metabolic reaction inside a plant, it is very hard to start it back up. And now those set of plants are behind everybody else and it blows it up. So it's not plant to plant, it's batch to batch. And that, that, that in lies Does that answer your question?

A little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was just curious, you know, why, why is the batch-to-batch variance so important to the FDA when we could—

Because you don't want to be taking aspirin. You don't want to be taking aspirin where one bottle of aspirin has the effective amount and then the next bottle doesn't have the same amount of effectiveness to it. Oh, okay.

So there's no post-processing that we can do to like, you know, this one was low, this one was high. Well, Mix the 2 and get the—

Well, you, you, that, that when you're doing the batch-to-batch, you know, that's the other thing with plant biologics, you know, the, the, the thing about plants that makes them great is I've explained all the great things about, um, uh, linearization of scaling, that the, the ingestible component of it, uh, the ability that's 1/10 the cost. Those are all the Nice things about it. Here's the downside of it that is just same is true as traditional biologics. Once that you cut the head of lettuce, you already see the degradation. And, it doesn't take— you'd have to talk to a plant scientist, but I do know it's within an hour or 2, then the proteins start to break apart.

This is super cool, but the big thing I see on this, and this is from decades of watching, is people love science, but they— well, how do I phrase this. They always are a little bit skeptical of new ideas in science, and people are perfectly fine with insulin. They're fine with chymosin in cheese. They're fine with all the other goodies that you can get from molecular biology and genetic engineering. But then, they start getting a little weird about things like genetic engineering crops and things they eat. And so, how is an edible vaccine going to find the social capital to be able to find large-scale application when it's available?

That's an excellent question. So, I think what you're referring to is the most recent Tennessee law that got passed with the governor, and then Kentucky, the Kentucky congressman that has now pushed a bill through Congress that says, if you have any type of genetically modified plants, you're not eligible for NSF, NIH, or any type of federal funding. I'm very familiar with that. Here's here's where it breaks down. Okay, I and our company actually supports what these states are doing and what Congress is doing. And here's why: You can't make a drug and call it a food. You don't have the you you don't have the consistency. You don't know the dosage. You Can't do any of that. That's the whole purpose of our federal FDA—is it protects the consumers against that type of thing happening. So, you're—they talk about the word. We'll put aside the genetic part for a minute right now. But when you talk about the drug itself, I have a hard time believing that any researcher believes that you're going to eat a head of lettuce and it's going to contain the flu vaccine. That just won't happen. It's an impossibility because, you know, one head's larger than the other. That's— put that aside. When we talk about the genetic modifications of plants, which is a big part, in fact, all what we do is a genetic modification at Zia, that people are afraid that The social stigma is, is I'm eating a genetically modified plant. The answer to that is, from Zia's standpoint, no. You could actually say you're eating a genetically modified protein in an animal because when you take insulin every day or when you take the COVID vaccine or any— those are all genetically modified organisms also. Mm-hmm. In a sense, and so the theme I have is once it becomes a medicine, people and it's approved by the FDA. They're not the public isn't worried about that. They assume the FDA hopefully still is protecting our best interest. If that's the case, then it becomes: Is it simpler than before? I talked about the flu vaccine. And I'll give you a real-life example and share an insight of what Zia is doing without violating any confidentiality. Right now, there's a researcher at a university that is producing last year's flu vaccine inside a plant, which is an edible plant. But the problem is it's not edible in the sense that you can eat the lettuce. It's edible in the sense that when you lyophilize it, you have enough of the vaccine that 2 of the 500 milligram pills would actually be absorbed through your bloodstream and have enough of an effectiveness to contain in your body. That's not science fiction. That's happening in the next 2 or 3 years where you're going to be walking down to CVS or Walgreens and saying, honey, I'm going to go get our flu pills. And imagine the amount of impact that has on why we couldn't get people vaccinated for COVID. And the only way we can do it is through plant biologics because that's the only outlet as a bioreactor where we can use an ingestible that it's stored at room temperature and all those other factors I said. Does that answer your question?

It does to some degree. I think I still have a— and I would never have predicted this years ago, but when we had the COVID vaccine, for instance, the pushback against all use of mRNA vaccines, and now what we see happening with the pushback against livestock and use in livestock, there's so many ways in which new technologies are looked with such a jaundiced eye. That it almost makes me ask the question, you know, what is your company doing to kind of prepare the public for this? Or is there a strategy to kind of roll out the communication ahead?

Good question. There is a preparation. I'll give you an example of what we're doing with hemophilia. We are developing a hemophilia tolerization drug. And so the tolerization drugs out there now, the, you know, average hemophiliac, if they're using factor VIII or factor IX, They're injecting themselves 3 to 4 times a week and they've been doing it their whole lifetime. To sit there and tell them that, oh, by the way, we may have a possibility of a pill that you can take instead of injecting yourself. And this is the holy grail because I do speak to the National Hemophilia folks and I do speak to parents.

Right.

Who are the kids, are the patients. This is what they're praying for, that you could stop taking the needle and you could stop. So whatever social stigma there is in that patient group goes away. Now, the answer to your question is we're focused on specific patient groups. How can we handle that in a social setting for— Flu vaccines. It comes down to the same thing. They may argue about it, but a lot of it is people will overlook, and I believe this, that when you make it the ease of medicine easier, the argument, you know, the argument that they argued with COVID is they found that 54% of people that didn't want to take the COVID shot were just afraid of needles.

Yeah.

It wasn't the science. It wasn't anything like that. It was just they were afraid to take a needle. And I understand that. So we tend, as Zia, to prepare for this, is explain the benefits, because without a bio-better delivery system or a better drug out there, then you are going to face those evils of science. I do agree with you, Kevin.

Yeah, I think people didn't freak out so much about the flu mist, for instance. I mean, that was a different delivery method. And, you know, I mean, it's an excellent example because I'm trying to picture in my head how I would argue on your behalf for this and how I would convince somebody who was, you know, telling me this is just Bill Gates trying to get microchips in me. And because I've read this stuff online, I read it all the time. And I'm very interested in getting innovation to application. That's my job. And to help smooth that out. And so immediately the strategic communicator and he starts thinking, if this was my Rubik's Cube, how would I spin it? And so, so that's where I come from.

Donald, what was the next question that you had?

What are some of the success stories that are possible just because of Zia's platform?

I think I just labeled one with flu vaccine, right? The ability— and here's the big thing about it is vaccine— the beautiful thing about the FDA is Vaccines, if you can show a better delivery system with the same effectiveness, you, and we saw this with Medicago, 'cause they actually were ahead of their time. They just ran out of cash and they couldn't, they weren't making enough money because it cost them more than what the traditional flu vaccine was. But when you look at it, the imagination, of having a flu pill, or better yet, being able when the next pandemic comes is the ability to deliver it. Because it's not just about the delivery method to the delivery mechanism to the human, it's the delivery mechanism of getting it from the manufacturing plant, not storing the vaccine at -80 degrees so that you're able to put it in cases at room temperature and drive it all around the United States. States. So that's a success story there. Let's go one step further than that. Let's talk about some other major things in the world today that we see going outside the United States because we're so US-centric. What will happen when we are able to take simple diseases like COVID, which was a disaster outside the developed world, Because of the lack of delivering the vaccine, what will happen to those? What will happen to those countries? What will happen to those people? And I think that's that's the success story that you're able to tame and make people better through the delivery of drugs, through the better delivery of drugs. And here's one last thing: I bet. A lot of people forget about, but the stats are there. 14% of the world's carbon footprint comes from pharmaceutical delivery, manufacturing, and R&D. 14% of the carbon footprint. And when you look at Zia, we actually ran it many times over. Indoor farms actually are They could never get— they like to say they could get to a zero carbon footprint, but as you say, the energy just sucks it up. But in Zia's case, because you're dealing in a thermos, and there's a number of things we're doing, you don't need as much light as you would for traditional food production. Food production, you've got to take an enormous amount of energy to get large amounts of volume. You don't need that in biological drug plant production. So we actually hover around 0 to 1% in our carbon footprint. That actually is, that's another success story. And we don't even report that. That's the side note. But it's no different than when you're driving a Tesla and you don't realize that, yeah, it may cost more in the front end, but on the back end, after a 5-year lifespan, That car actually saved X amount of tons offsetting their production. And, you're like, wow. Yeah.

Here's an interesting one. Are you guys working on GLP-1 agonists?

No, we're not. I know about it, but that's another interesting— yeah.

Yeah. That would be a great one, especially the irony of oral delivery, right? Because now you're dealing on a once-a-week injection And, and, but this seems to be such a trend and really such something that could have profound impacts on health in the US.

I'll give you the vision of what our company— you know, when I say we're the Tesla of the drug biologics, we really do follow what Tesla's role is, is that you don't realize that Tesla licenses their battery technology to every electric car company in the world. We actually license our HVAC system That's one of the patents inside that to cannabis companies here in the state of Massachusetts, because they can get an extra three weeks of grow time just by managing the temperature better inside their facility. This is where the world's going, and it is going to be a plant-based system. That it's the mindset of getting out of the agrarian technology side. And being able to merge biology with, and quite frankly, I hate to use the buzzwords, but merging with large amount of datasets, AI, and the digital world to solve problems.

So you mentioned AI and all of the other buzzwords. Okay, great. But if students are really interested in the future in plant biology, which may involve these other edges of AI and scalable production and controlled environments. What kind of training do they need to focus on in order to fit in a company like Zia Biosciences?

Yeah, we find the challenge right now, especially with doctorate students, master's students, and even undergrads, is the traditional plant science route doesn't— teaches you how to understand plants. It does not teach you the holistic process of the pharmaceutical side, the microbiology side of plants and what they can and cannot do. That is probably our biggest challenge we have right now is finding researchers that understand both sides of the coin. That is becoming very valuable. And if you don't believe what I'm saying, You can just look up at the job descriptions over at Bayer in agroscience, and, um, and they're, they're already looking into that R&D. The Danforth Center, uh, I could name a number of others. They're looking at that holistic. So if you say, I just want to study agriculture for farming, fine, but that's not going to get you to the next step of where you want to be.

Well, very good. Jim Wilson from, uh, From Zia Biosciences. If people want to learn more about Zia Biosciences, where would they look online?

It's zia.bio, Z-E-A-B-I-O.com. And I'm all over the LinkedIn along with our company. There are a couple books out there on Amazon I wrote. One was in AI and biotechnology, another one's in plant science and biotechnology. So there's plenty of resources out there to start.

Oh, very good. Well, let's, um, I'll read one of the books sometime in my spare time and we'll get you back on again and we'll talk about this because this is an exciting edge for me. I'm always looking for new ways in which biotechnology can help us out. And this sounds like a great merging of all the things we preached about with controlled environments finally coming to an application that looks realistic. So thank you very much for your time today. Thank you, Donald.

Thank you. And thank you. To your listeners. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Talking Biotech Podcast. Think about ways that you could share the ideas around this new class of drugs, which would be administered orally, which takes away the needle. And there's going to be skepticism and things said online that just aren't true. And I want you to keep an eyeball on those and use the information that we talked about here today to help counter that disinformation. You may never change the mind of the person living in their Patriot bunker in rural Florida here with me, But you may be able to influence people who are just watching on the outside, wondering who to trust. So this is the Talking Biotech podcast, and we'll talk to you later on. Thank you.