How Immunity Project Moves Forward | Naveen Jain & Reid Rubsamen

Now, in terms of how we carry a project like this forward, so just tactically, bottom line is we need money. We need money to move this project forward. The reality check is that developing drugs is really frickin' expensive. From inception in a lab through final FDA approval of a drug, most drug companies will spend well over $1 billion. So how the heck do a couple guys in a lab raise such an extraordinary amount of money so that we can move our vaccine project forward? So the answer is, A, we don't need that much money. We're more efficient than the big drug companies. That's the first answer. Second answer is that we're doing it through some very, I think, creative partnerships. So the first thing we did is we launched a crowdfunding campaign. So we raised $462,000 in less than 3 weeks launching a crowdfunding campaign.

Thank you.

So, and we did that last year and that was, Really, really difficult because, again, we're dealing with this reality check of people thinking, OK, are these guys too good to be true? Is this real? All of those kinds of questions come up for people as they think about a project like this. So we did our very best. So we did a Reddit AMA. And we spent hours and hours— Reid actually spent hours on the computer answering questions in real time from people on Reddit. And that was actually really valuable because it enabled us to actually interact with the people that ultimately, many of which became our backers, our supporters, and some of which didn't and were just curious. And that was really valuable for us, and it's still out there. It's like the magic of search, right? That AMA is like permanent record on the interweb. So that was actually a really powerful thing for us. And then there are many other tactical things that we did, so I'm happy to answer questions about crowdfunding if you guys are pursuing that for your various projects. And then the second thing we did is we did a bunch of experiments, which I'll let Reid talk about.

Sure, so we wanted to do an experiment that we could do, you know, well, how do you do an interesting experiment in the interval of a Y Combinator, for example? It's not a very long period of time. We wanted something with a beginning, middle, and an end. So we decided to do what's called an in vitro vaccination event, where we actually drew blood from all of our Y Combinator partner companies. Everybody lined up, we drew 40 samples of blood, took it back to our laboratory. We got a clinical trial approval to do that from a clinical trial approval entity. in the United States, and we basically took their blood and vaccinated their blood in the laboratory with these microspheres, and then we actually infected their blood cells in the laboratory again with HIV and looked to see if we could kill HIV-infected cells with the vaccinated cells. And it's a simple, it's a small experiment. We only had 10 subjects we could take all the way through, but within the limits of the funding and the smallness of the experiment, we were able to actually kill HIV-infected cells. We presented that data at HIV meeting in Cape Town last year, so in a poster format. So I mean, that was a very good first step for us. And in fact, the other thing we found about this that was really interesting is the fact that this is a very unique not-for-profit effort to develop a pharmaceutical targeted at HIV. It has been an incredibly powerful recruitment tool for talent. So Lots of people see this and really wanna help us. And we were able to recruit scientists and advisors and a lot of other people, including the 40 people that donated blood for us at Y Combinator, because it is an interesting, different approach. So we were pleasantly surprised at how much help we got just sort of walking in off the street. And we still get emails to this day. People say, hey, how can I help? And we interact with lots of different people with different interesting backgrounds. And that's been another very interesting sort of side effect of this funding approach.

So the next steps for us are that we want to pursue a human clinical trial. So that's the next step. So we want to do a Phase 1/2 human clinical trial, and we want to do this as soon as humanly possible. The challenge is that we, again, need to raise a meaningful amount of funds in order to actually pursue— make this happen, to move this forward. So we've got a couple ideas on how we're going to go about doing that, and I'd love to share them with you. Because I think they're interesting and frankly would love your feedback. So as we described, this is sort of a blend of really interesting sort of computer science, machine learning software, and biology. And so what's interesting is that a lot of people sort of in our community here in Silicon Valley care very deeply about the computer science end of it because there are obviously a lot of people who are programmers. And they understand what we're doing once we explain it to them very clearly. And they really love this idea of essentially hacking the HIV virus. That's just a cool thing to do. And that's basically what we've done. So what we're planning on doing right now is we want to open source all of our software. So we want to open source everything. We want to put it all out there so that anyone who's interested in perhaps using our approach can take that and download it off GitHub. And can use it for whatever project they want to use it for. We also want to open source— the targets that Microsoft Research published are obviously out there, but we think there are potentially even more targets. So we want to publish all those targets as well, because the moment that the targets are out there, they actually can't be patented. So that's another key element for us is we really, really want this to be free. I mean, there are over 34 million people living with HIV in the world today. Over 4,000 people a day die from AIDS-related illnesses. That's like 10 747s falling out of the sky every single day. So we don't necessarily— we don't want this to be some protected thing where some big drug company is charging people an arm and a leg for access to this vaccine. We really want it to be free. We want it to be given to the people who need it most. So that's our approach is we want to open source everything that we're doing. And then we have a really interesting fundraising approach that we are looking at pursuing. So if you think about a human clinical trial, we need to make many thousands of doses for this HIV vaccine prototype that we have. And so when you— and by the way, not all of those doses end up in people, right? So a lot of those doses are used for stability testing and other kinds of tests that you need to do on the formulation to make sure it's exactly what we want to test. So what we want to do is we want to create a program where people can essentially join us in essentially sponsoring doses. So you can come in, you can say, look, I really like what you guys are doing at Immunity Project, and for X dollars, I would like to sponsor a dose. And then we want to create a really cool visualization system where you can essentially log in and track your dose as much as we can provide. Obviously, we can't provide all the detail. as much as we can possibly provide, share that information back with you, our backers. And so that's sort of what we're working on right now, is we're putting together this program where we are working on open sourcing all the software, so really commenting it super well, making sure people really understand what we did, and how it works, and why it's important, and then putting together this program where people can essentially participate with us and join us on this journey of this human clinical trial, which will take a meaningful amount of time, but we think we can accomplish it relatively quickly.