Sano Genetics 068- Giant Health
===



[00:00:00] Dr Patrick Short: Hi everyone and welcome to the Genetics Podcast. I'm away on vacation this week or holiday as we call it in the UK. So wanted to share a podcast episode that I recorded recently with Barry Shrier from Giant Health on their giant thinking podcast. Really hope you enjoy it. .   Please email us anytime podcast@sanogenetics.com with any guest recommendations or feedback that you have, if you like the podcast, we'd really, really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or leave us a review on your favorite podcast player, this helps other people find the podcast and hear about us. So thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy this episode 



[00:00:38] Barry Shrier: Today we have Patrick Short. Hi Patrick, how are you? 



[00:00:41] Dr Patrick Short: Great. Really great to be here. Thanks so much.



[00:00:44] Barry Shrier: Excellent. Nice to see you and we appreciate your valuable time. We're talking about big challenges in healthcare and big issues in society that we're setting out to address by way of innovation. What's an example of a really big challenge in healthcare. And what are you guys involved in relating to that.



[00:00:59] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah. Great. Um, well, first of all, great to be here. I'm a big fan of your conferences and podcasts. I've listened to quite a few episodes. So glad to be part of this one, quite a few challenges in healthcare. I think one of the biggest and one where we're focused on part of it is how new medicines get into the hands of patients and how do we make it faster, more cost-effective your listeners are probably familiar with the fact that it takes 10 to 15 years for new discovery to make its way into actually impacting patients in the billions of dollars of costs. So what we're really interested in is how can we accelerate that timeline for genetic and personalized medicines in particular?

And there's obviously not just one silver bullet to this problem, but quite a few different things we can do and excited to talk more about that. 



[00:01:40] Barry Shrier: Excellent. Well, these are obviously huge challenges and if it takes a decade or longer from the point in time that you discover a new drug to the point in time that clinicians are prescribing it and it's helping patients, I suppose that's quite an obvious challenge for us in this rapidly moving world and with viruses, mutating, and adapting as they do, for example, So, what is this idea of personalized medicine?

We hear this phrase quite a lot, but maybe some of our listeners aren't so technical or they're a little bit unclear about that. Can you give us a little simple definition? Is that a uncontroversial subject, personalized medicine? 



[00:02:14] Dr Patrick Short: Yes, it is. People debate the terms, personalized precision. They mean different things to different people.

For me, personalized medicine is using data to better tailor a treatment to an individual. So it's really that simple. Genetics is one of the most powerful new technologies that's being applied to personalized medicine. And that's what I've been really interested in and involved from research side, and now starting sanogentics for the last 10 or 15 years.

But fundamentally personalized medicine is using data to tailor treatments more effectively going from a one size fits all approach to the ultimate aim of truly individualized. And it doesn't need to be a drug necessarily. It can also be an algorithm that tells you to do something differently or, or that warns you early, that you may be at risk for something.



[00:03:00] Barry Shrier: Okay. 

Okay. Excellent. Well, that's the helpful sample summary. Thank you very much. So tell us about the work that you guys are doing and what are some of your recent accomplishments please? 



[00:03:08] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah, so we started the company about three and a half years ago, before that I was a researcher working on large-scale rare disease, genetics projects.

And one of the things that struck me from a research side is, and actually it was a really specific example of this. There's a study that came out around genetic superheroes, right? These were people who were found in large research biobanks that had, or appeared to have a disease or a gene variant that should cause a rare and devastating disease.

But according to the medical records and other information, they had, these people were perfectly . Healthy. So it's a very tantalizing prospect that there were people who carried these, which should have cost the very rare spirit of these, but actually were protected for some reason. The Achilles heel of this study though, was that these individuals couldn't be recontacted because the infrastructure didn't exist.

And in some cases the consent didn't exist. So these people were potentially out there. And I say potentially, because they're never able to really determine whether they were true superheroes or there was something else going on, but that the data silos and the fact that these actions down to the individual level, these people weren't really contactable meant that there was a huge missed opportunity.

I think researchers, whether you're in academia or industry, especially in genetics, where data sets can be really expensive, still to generate often end up forming their hypothesis around the data that they have. And it's almost baked into what we do that we can't go and recontact individuals, whether it's for, to gather new data, to have.

Hey, does this person actually not have the disease? Do they have a, maybe just a less severe subtype of the disease that wasn't picked up in their medical records? So this was the problem that we face this researchers on the flip side as participants in research, it's the flip side of the same problems.

If you get enrolled into a large research program, but you're never recontacted about a trial that might be relevant to you for example. That's a missed opportunity to give real value to patients in particular with rare diseases. So in a nutshell, we, we developed an online platform that helps. Patients who take part in research to have a much better online and at home experience and for the researchers who are either conducting clinical trials or running large scale research programs, to be able to manage that relationship in terms of long-term recontact, new sample collection, notifying patients about research opportunities for them much more effectively.

And we've been at it now for about three and a half years. 



[00:05:28] Barry Shrier: Excellent. Well, congratulations on what you guys have accomplished so far. I can imagine there's a very long list of big challenges to get to where you guys are already. On the surface though, it seems quite simple, doesn't it. Let's keep in touch with all the people that have participated in trials. Let's incentivize them to keep in touch with us. Let's keep their, their contact information fresh. Let's make sure that we are successfully bringing together these two extremely important audience. Patients and anybody willing to participate in trials on the one hand and the pharma businesses or the a, what do you call them? contract research organizations. Who on the other hand, want to conduct these trials? Why is all this so difficult? Why wasn't all this of 10 years? 



[00:06:08] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah, what's tricky here is a couple of things. First on the patient or participant facing side. Once you actually dig into the problem, it's clear that it's not as simple as we just need a website with a contact form and a couple of surveys, and then off we go. We need to think about things like the electronic consent. How do we keep information, contact details up to date over time. As people move, change, emails, phone numbers, there's also the actual delivery of value back to patients and participants. Simply asking people to do surveys repeatedly. It doesn't really, you know, doing it online versus doing it on paper. Doesn't really fundamentally change the experience for participants. So it's things like how do we tell people the impact they've had in research years, months, or years after they've taken part of it? How do we give people back personalized information based on an updated profile?

So that it's actually really something that delivers value to participants in the short, medium. And long-term. So actually when you dig into that, Product side of things of what does it look like for a participant there's it's not one single thing. It's a thousand small things that people need to reinvent.

And on the research side, it's a scale challenge. So no as you'll know, and your listeners will know clinical trials in particular. Are having incredibly detailed recruitment criteria and inclusion exclusion criteria. So you really need to be able to reach a vast number of people with the right data in order to find those needles in the haystack that are relevant to an interested in eligible to take part in a particular trial.

So bringing these two sides together kind of sounds simple, like you say on paper, but what you really need is a large number of organizations that are all using the same framework or infrastructure to do recontact. And then, and only then can the pharma, biotech, academic researchers who are running trials and other research can reach these audiences more effectively.

And so it's, it's a classic kind of critical mass challenge. 



[00:08:00] Barry Shrier: I understand. Yeah, no, that's very helpful. So for example, your clients are pharma businesses, is that right? 



[00:08:08] Dr Patrick Short: Yes. We mostly work with pharma midsize, small, small mid-sized biotech, some large pharma, as well as academic researchers, anyone who's running either recontact based genetic studies.

So they're interested in identifying people that carry a certain genotype to understand more about either the disease that it may influence or the protection that they get from this genetic superheroes problem or clinical trials that are focused on genetics. 



[00:08:33] Barry Shrier: Just for the sake of the discussion to help our listeners understand this in more detail.

A big global pharma business, you know, market capitalization, $50 billion, loads of cash, many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of employees around the world, what are their challenges? Why don't they do this themselves? Why can't they just sort this with their vast manpower, resources, their cash, their, their global reach, their legacy of being in business for many, many decades.



[00:08:56] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Let me take you through one specific example and can illustrate what the problem is and how we solve it, but also how other, other alternative ways of solving it. So. If we take a, if we take a common disease, like Alzheimer's, there are now many trials that are looking for people with Alzheimer's disease and a very specific genotype.

So APOE4 as, as one example, that puts people at higher risk of Alzheimer's, but also they're genetically targeted potential genetically targeted therapies. The way that trials have traditionally been run is a pharma company, outsources to a CRO, and the CRO will then set up sites, work with sites all around the world.

Typical phase three trial will have maybe 10 countries recruiting and those sites then reach out to patients who are already in their database or near them geographically to recruit for these studies. But as, as the criteria have gotten rarer and rarer, this site-based model has started to become more and more challenging and expensive because you'll have fewer people at each site you need to open more and more locations.

So where we come into the picture is two pieces. The first is we have a database and a partner network. That includes people who've already been genetically tested and want to take part in trials. So we can help that clinical trial to identify people who are near its sites that already exist and who want to take part in the trial to get them involved.

And then the second piece is to actually do genetic testing of people who have never been genetically tested before. Who again are eligible and interested to take part in the trial. And what's hard to replicate here is that there's a, this is the software element that I mentioned earlier of the patient facing application that people are using to screen.

See if they're interested in taking part in the trial, the database and partner network that we've built already, that they need to go ahead and rebuild. And also the logistics element of actually doing the at-home saliva based testing. So what we found is most organizations are really interested to work with you with someone else who can, who can take this off their plate, frankly, and as you'll know, starting a new business, it's harder in the beginning. When we were four people, five people, it's much harder for us to tell a large farmer that they can't do what we do, but as we've grown and we've grown our database platform logistics, it starts to become more and more clear why something that you wouldn't want to do yourself?



[00:11:13] Barry Shrier: I understand that makes a lot of sense. But I suppose, are there challenges within these very large international organizations? I remember when nom, he was the chairman of Google. Eric Schmidt used to always say, look, we're too large to be innovative. Innovation isn't natural in a very, very large organization with huge groups of people working in extremely large offices.

So are there lessons learned? You mentioned that, uh, at the beginning of your journey with this business, obviously, if you were only a handful of people and not a unknown provider, Was it difficult for you to do business with a big global company? Were they worried about your credibility? What are the lessons learned for all of our listeners out there who are actually working in these big, large pharma companies?



[00:11:54] Dr Patrick Short: Definitely for large pharma companies in particular, um, you have to be really patient because the number of people you need to speak to is it's usually in the multiple hands rather than just a single hand and their policies that are in place for a good reason to identify screen and onboard vendors.

What we found at the beginning was the best customers for us were actually the small and mid-size biotechs that were still running very innovative. And in some cases, the most innovative, precise medicine trials, but they were in terms of organization, size 50 people, a hundred people, 200 people. And so they were a little bit easier to navigate and actually articulate our value. Um, as we've grown, we've started to work with more large pharma companies as well, and take the time we need to navigate those organizations. But I do think every company in this space has to approach a little bit differently, but for us, it made sense to start with companies that were a little bit smaller, easier to navigate, prove our value, generate case studies. And then we can start to move into the large pharma. You're much more challenging enterprise, enterprise navigation challenge there. 



[00:13:00] Barry Shrier: Exactly. And for those largest businesses, do you see any change over the past few years? Are they becoming more or not necessarily open to engaging with various small businesses?

How do they go about with engaging with small businesses? 

What's been most successful for us is the large pharmas that have dedicated genomics or genetics or personalized medicine unit in particular have been the best groups for us to initially work with because not every company is structured this way, but often they're cross cutting units that sit across the therapy focused disease areas. So if a drug company is working in cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease and cancer, and a number of different things often they'll have actually a genetics unit that sits cross-functionally across all of those. So for us, rather than having to go to build independent relationships with each of the disease focused vertical parts of the organization, we can actually go and build a relationship with the genetics part of the organization that can then help us identify where are the other parts of the organization that would be the best fit for us.

It's really, I think just about actually solving a genuine problem for someone and then taking the time to, to navigate your way through the organization. And some, some pharma companies make it easier than others to actually navigate that. 

I won't ask you to name the easier ones to do business with.

Um, yeah, I've never worked in a large pharma, so I also, it's hard for me to tell them how they could or should do it better. And I have a lot of empathy for them. If they get people coming in all the time to say, Hey, we've, we're going to solve this problem for you. So I think you also need to be a little bit humble and make sure that you take the time to actually really understand whether they see the problem the same way you do.

Yes. And how about yourself personally? We'd love to hear a little more about your journey. If you don't mind, how did you start off? Did you originally studied science or business and what did you do, which led you to this business? 



[00:14:53] Dr Patrick Short: Yes. I originally studied math and biology. I actually went into university wanting to study math and economics, but I, I did a in business actually, but I had a series of unfortunate intro economics classes that maybe decided I didn't want to, I didn't want to do that anymore.

And so I switched to biology. Um, but I've kind of come back around to do more, more business and entrepreneurship. I've had, my family is as long as I've known it, I've been in a family of entrepreneurs. My mom and dad run a small business and I've got lots of family members who are entrepreneurial. So I've always been interested in this side of things, but I, I studied math and biology.

I came over from the U S to the UK to do my PhD in rare disease. Focused on large scale genetic testing programs and project called this developmental disorders project. And then spend a little time . Working on the a hundred thousand genomes project here in the UK, right? I've I've always been really interested in, um, in rare disease.

It is speaking to one of the, one of the particular challenges . Earlier in getting drugs to market there's 7,000 rare diseases, but less than 200 approved therapies. So lots is changing there from a technology and regulatory perspective. I've always had an interest in rare disease, um, and personalized medicine more generally, how it can take common diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's that we've discussed earlier.

And actually those are getting broken down into much, much rarer diseases. So I think there's a long-term trend here, which is that basically everything becomes rarer as we move towards more and more personalized. 



[00:16:20] Barry Shrier: I suppose, yes, by definition, if it's perfectly personalized, if it's a N equals one, then it's still rare as one person.

Is that correct? 



[00:16:28] Dr Patrick Short: Yes, that's right. And I think that you're already starting to see that in some ultra rare diseases companies that are designing and patient groups are leading NF1 type therapies. I think that is the future. It will probably take us a really long time to, I think it's, asymptotic eventually we will end up there, but until then, it's just a continuous fragmenting of what we understand to be a disease today in five years, it will be fragmented into five sub types and 25 subtypes. And so on until as you say, it really is down to the individual. 



[00:17:02] Barry Shrier: Let's hear a little more about your business. Are you the founder of it? And how did you get it off the ground?

Have you had to do any fundraising and other fun things in that entrepreneurial journey? 



[00:17:11] Dr Patrick Short: Yes. So I'm one of the three co-founders. I founded the company with Will Jones and Charlotte Puzo, who I met actually while I was a student too. We're all doing a PhD at Cambridge and Will was doing machine learning and Charlotte and I were doing genomics and we actually bonded over a shared view of the problems that we discussed earlier around the participant experience, as well as the firsthand research experience and how it could be improved and where we actually started by building a really rough prototype of what we imagined the platform could be while we were still PhD students.

So we were testing our idea with our research, friends and family. We learned a lot in the early stages, got a lot of good, helpful features. But as I was finishing my PhD, we raised our first round of funding. So basically when we went straight full-time into the company, after finishing my PhD, our first round of investors were seed camp, which is a London-based seed fund, a really excellent angel investor guy named Paul Forster, who founded Indeed, which is the job sharing marketplace at university of Cambridge has a seed fund that invested as well.

We've had a number of different angel investors. Join about a year ago, we raised our second round of funding, which was the seed round a little more than a year now, about 18 months from episode one, which is a seed fund in London. And we are getting ready to raise a series a and the next couple months.

So as you'll know, it, it takes capital, especially in healthcare to be able to take a really long-term view on, on how we can take a new drug in, help the developers get it through trials. And can it be one year instead of five? Can it be one month instead of one year? What, so where can we push this? I think COVID has showed us that there are, there are ways to push this process to be much more, take a lot less time, but how far, how far we can push that timeline?



[00:18:55] Barry Shrier: Exactly. Do you have a rough estimate there? Do you have some kind of forecast? Are you guys saying, look, you know, historically it's taken this amount of time, but if everybody plugs into our system is going to, we're going to gain the following improvement. 



[00:19:06] Dr Patrick Short: Yes, we aim to at least help our customers go five X faster. It depends on the trial, what it is that we can do. But fundamentally, one of the things that takes the longest is running clinical trials and the recruitment process in particular, the forecasts are almost always very optimistic and then reality hits and time takes longer costs balloon. There's a tragedy to this in that there's a lot of people who actually really want to take part in trials and either don't hear about them, the criteria are incredibly strict, so they can't take part. So there's a huge, huge number of challenges to solve there that I think can help us into the, to shave time. Hmm. 



[00:19:44] Barry Shrier: Hmm. I mean, that's extremely ambitious, I think, but rightly so to have a goal of a five X improvement in that timetable, I can imagine the impact of that would be absolutely profound going back to your business and going from being a student directly to a co-founder and dealing with investors. What lessons have you learned, or what would you like to share with fellow entrepreneurs and people that are at the beginning of their journey, launching new businesses when it comes to investors, that's one area we'd love to hear from you about. And another is the idea of launching a new business and the challenges of engaging with, for example, yeah, clients and big businesses that are scratching their heads saying, who are these? Who are these young people I've never heard of? And what do they do? 



[00:20:24] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah. I, I think that doing a PhD teaches you some things that are really helpful starting to start up and other things that are not so helpful. So it teaches you to be really rigorous and analytical in your thinking and, and obviously teaches you deep domain expertise, but it, you know, it doesn't teach you things like how do you do sales? How do you, um, how do you hire a team? How do you manage a team? How do you work together towards a common vision? It's often. This can be somewhat of a team sport in academia, but more often you're spending most of your time working there, working on something yourself in terms of how people make the decision. I remember when I was thinking as a PhD student, what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to go into starting a company or doing a postdoc or something like that. I think the walls are so porous now between academics and industry, that people can make the decision, like guided to go and try and start a company.

And it doesn't mean that the doors shut for them to go back. And the decision that I, yeah, when I felt at the, at the very beginning was I was really excited about what we were building in Charlotte and I it's not, oh, I thought it had a lot of potential. And if it doesn't work, then I'll try something again.

I'll I'll, the door is not going to close. Right. For any future options, it's worth thinking about where are you going? The biggest impact, where are you going to learn the most? Um, and where are you going to enjoy, you know, doing what you do every day? And what I, what really appealed to me about this route was I felt like I could have a really big impact and do something that made a big difference.

And I also felt like I could learn a lot. So I'd be doing things that I hadnt done before and, and change, change things up a little bit. So for me, it was, it felt like the right decision. 

Nice, excellent. It's also, of course, very good to hear that you don't feel like you have locked yourself in and imagine there's a lot of fear amongst people regarding, you know, shouldn't they take that fund.

Should they consider launching a new business with all of the inherent risks that are attached to that? And are they eating a hole for themselves? But, uh, very good to hear that from your perspective, the answer is no, obviously we hope you're going to be extremely successful with your venture and whether it is successful or not as good to hear that maybe you could go back to academia, the door isn't permanently closed there in terms of the relationship with that community.



[00:22:36] Dr Patrick Short: Although I would say that, uh, at some point you make a decision. And that that point for me was when we raised our first external round of funding. So there's a period of time where you've got latitude and configure out, whether you enjoy it doing it or want to do something else. But for me, I pretty quickly realized that I wanted to spend the next 10, 20, 30 years, whatever it took working on this company and solving this problem.

So at some point you do have to decide, am I going to go down this track or not? But I think people don't realize how you've got a lot of flexibility early in your career in particular. What we were doing, wasn't working that, you know, you've got, you've got all sorts of options, but once it starts working and . You're really excited about it, then I think it's worth, you're going all in for 10, 15 years, whatever it takes to make it successful. 



[00:23:23] Barry Shrier: Oh, absolutely. How's the journey changed since you guys launched the business, there's all sorts of trendy words out there coming out of Silicon valley, like pivoting and getting to plan B . And so forth and so on. Are you guys doing now, what you set out to do when you launch the business?



[00:23:37] Dr Patrick Short: We are largely with some variation, so I don't think no plan survives contact with that reality. I think where. For us, we've only been really clear on what the problem is that we're trying to solve. And I think we've been a little bit less prescriptive about exactly what the solution is. We had a really good, strong idea of what we thought the solution looked like, but we knew that, especially in healthcare, there's so much complexity that it's, it's very hard to be overly prescriptive about.

This is exactly what we're going to build, whether people want it or not. We took the other approach to say, there's this big problem that we want to solve, which is how do we accelerate the transition to personalized medicine. How do we get personalized medicine to be not a buzz word, but to be the reality and how we solve this?

There's a lot of ways to solve that problem. And we focused on really the it's bringing together different parts of the ecosystem, patients, organizations like biobanks and patient registries that use our software and biotech pharma companies. But exactly what it looks like within each of those sectors is very, I think you can. Yourself at this service, if you're overly prescriptive about saying this is precisely, we're going to build and not listening to, to your customers and partners about what they do. 



[00:24:49] Barry Shrier: Yes. Yeah, exactly. No, I think that's absolutely true. And it's a good point you're making there. So, uh, what about the future? Where will you guys be? Maybe in five years? Do you have quite a clear roadmap and are you on target for that? Yes. 



[00:25:01] Dr Patrick Short: The future is always uncertain, but what we're we're most focused on is how can we go from the traction that we've got here in the UK and in the last go globally. So as I mentioned earlier, most, um, phase three clinical trials run in 10 plus countries is something we've been investing in a lot is taking our infrastructure and enabling our infrastructure to go globally.

And there's a regulatory aspect to that, but there's also things like internationalization, new languages. So that that's one access for the future that we're really focused on. And the second is increasing the number of diseases that we, that we're working in and go working with patients, partners like biobanks and registries and pharma companies.

So we focused historically on about ten diseases where there was a really clear market for personalized medicines that were being developed. And there was a really clear need for better access to genetic testing and genetic data for child recruitment, where we're now starting to expand the number of diseases that we're focused in so that we can grow as a company.

And that we can, yeah, we can help more patients partners, customers. Nice. 



[00:26:07] Barry Shrier: Excellent. And, um, as far as the direction of the business, the expansion and so forth is fundraising a necessity. And are your current investors, uh, supporting you regarding upcoming rounds? What are some challenges or issues there?



[00:26:20] Dr Patrick Short: We've got a great set of existing investors. One of the, I mean, one of the pieces of advice I can give to anyone who's thinking about fundraising is really focused on getting high quality investors that you like to work with and that you think can bring something to the table that's, that's much more than funding and that's definitely been the case with all of our investors.

So we're getting a huge amount of support there. Episode one, who's our, who that our seed round is a, it's a seed focused fund. So part of what they bring to the table is to help companies like us, get ready to raise the series a and, and expand for our business. It's possible to do what we do without having to raise money, but it would be very slow and would prevent us from doing what we want to do on, on any kind of reasonable timeframe.

To us it it's, um, you know, it's it's to help us move more quickly and in particular, growing the R and D team to develop a product and also our, our commercial team to go out and find more customers and partners to work with is really the key ingredients for us right now. 



[00:27:15] Barry Shrier: Yeah. What's your business model. And is that evolving? What sort of friendship between that and your investors, for example, 



[00:27:22] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah. So we charge the pharma biotech companies that we work with to help, to accelerate recruitment in their studies. So it's really very simple. They pay us to launch their study on our online platform and they pay us while the study is . Running.

And then we have a volume or performance-based fees around the genetic testing and analysis portions of what we do. So we don't charge patients to use the platform. It's completely free to find and research and get access to testing. And really the core customer for us is the pharma biotech company.

One thing that's quite different about this. If I can compare us to someone like 23andme, for example, who was one of the companies that we looked at a lot in the early days in terms of how we were counter positioned and different from what they were doing it. So 23andme has built a very large database through e-commerce sales.

And now, now transitioning into a pharma company. So they have 30, 30, or so assets that they're taking into clinical trials. The approach we've taken is it's almost the inverse of that. So we're building a platform that allows every patient or participant to have a 23andme like experience in research and every pharma biotech company to run a research project that takes advantage of the genetic data analysis that a company like that is built.

So where they're vertical and using the data set that they built to develop their own drugs. We're trying to bring that tool set to, to the industry as a whole. Um, so, so yes, that's the strategy really in a nutshell and where that's different from us from 23 and me is that we have, we have a partner network.

So we work with patient organizations. We work with large-scale biobanks. And if those patient organizations biobanks want to use our platform, then patients who are already in their research project or registry can get access to the studies that are running on our platform. So rather than needing to buy a test to be in the database, it's, uh, it's, it's free for patients free for our partners and they get access to those research projects with a revenue share split. If they take part in the trial. 



[00:29:24] Barry Shrier: Very cool. Again, I can imagine there's a lot of challenges because there's a lot of moving parts here. Would you say that that's one of the main things that you guys are developing skill or value in? Is that part of it? The fact that you got all these large-scale bio banks, the patient organizations and so forth, the COVID clinics you've mentioned and so forth that in this of itself, I suppose, is this correct? That's a, that's a big part of the value you're giving to your clients, which isn't easily accomplished overnight. 



[00:29:51] Dr Patrick Short: Yes, that's right. It's a very simple framework that I kind of like, which is investor interested Horowitz in the U S called compete or connect. So in healthcare, you can either compete with an existing incumbent and say, we want to be a telemedicine company that displaces, or you can connect groups, that were not previously, otherwise connected. And we're very much in the connect category. What is challenging about a business like that in our business is, as you said before, we have, we have a couple of different parts that we need to focus on.

And for us it's three in particular, the patients or participants who want to get access to potentially life changing research to the platform, biobanks and patient registries and pharma . Biotech. So with those three groups, Come some complexity, but exactly. To your point, that's also where we think some of the value is to our customers and partners, is that nobody else that needs to build that infrastructure that connects those three pieces in the future, they can, you know, they can work with us and don't have to go through the pain and struggles that we've gone through the past three years or so.



[00:30:49] Barry Shrier: I . Don't know what you're talking about pain and struggles. I can't imagine there was any whatsoever. But um, no joking aside, Patrick, this is very, very interesting. We're going to wrap up in a few minutes. If that's okay with you, I'll be honest. I wish we were sitting in a pub garden and we could have a pint and I'd love to continue this discussion for at least another hour or two.

I'd absolutely love to meet your colleagues. So many. We could have another episode relating to this in a few months. Until then, like I said, I'm sorry to say we are running out of time. So we'll wrap up over the next few minutes. We are a global community of people around the world. People in global pharma, businesses, med tech, hardware, or software management consultants, people working in public health, investors, startups.

Do you have any asks of the community? Are you guys looking to recruit people or any partnerships or ambitions, what would you like to share with the community and how can everybody in the giant health global community support the important and interesting and admirably successful work that you guys are doing.



[00:31:44] Dr Patrick Short: Yes. Great. You've given me a, an opportunity here. So I'm definitely going to take it a couple of things. The first is every hiring in particular, we have a role open for senior bioinformatician and very recently for business development roles. So you can visit our website. If anyone is interested, it's always, uh, you know, people are the most important thing to us.

Keeps the wheels moving. 



[00:32:06] Barry Shrier: I might apply for the job. What's the website address, please 

Yes, sano Sano genetics.com, S A N O genetics.com. We'd uh, we'd love to see your application or for either role can't pronounce the first job 

title, but I'll take your word for it. 



[00:32:19] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah, absolutely. That's not a. Um, the, the only other two things that I'd love to plug is where we've recently launched a study, looking at the genetics of long COVID.

So in particular, anyone who is themselves affected by long COVID or is interested in supporting that research as a partner or otherwise, we're planning to genetically test around 2000 people that have long COVID. So very chronic long-term symptoms to try to understand. What the genetic role within either is in long COVID.

And really the long-term goal of this is can we help to identify biological pathways that that could point towards therapies? So, um, and then the final point is just anyone in large mid-sized small pharma biotech that are planning a clinical trial or natural history study would love to talk to you and see if this way that we could help to accelerate your recruitment through our at-home genetic testing or database.



[00:33:13] Barry Shrier: Excellent, excellent Patrick. Well, for sure, we know as a certainty, there are well over 20,000 people in the giant global community working in pharma and in life sciences more broadly. And I hope that our listeners find this interesting. And I'm going back to the long COVID study. How do people apply for that?

Or let's say, for example, if I know somebody who might be interested, how do I direct them to this. 



[00:33:36] Dr Patrick Short: So if they just visit our website, it's not our genetics.com. There's a blue bar across the top that will tell anyone with COVID, that they should click and read more and learn to take part. It's very simple. You don't have to leave home at all. I said, questionnaire that asks about how you were affected, whether you knew that you had it from PCR or whether you were unsure. It's not a requirement to take part information about how people are affected for how long. And then the final step is, you'll get one of our outcomes, salvia-based tests that's delivered to you and takes about five minutes to do.

Yeah. You can see your impact on that research as well as take part in other research through our platform. 



[00:34:14] Barry Shrier: Yes, that's extremely interesting. Well, I certainly hope that our listeners will participate in that and support you guys is that for people only who have had COVID as a certainty and feel like they are suffering from long COVID.



[00:34:26] Dr Patrick Short: It is, it's actually not a requirement to have had a PCR confirmation because we know early in the pandemic, lots of people do not get these tests. So there are two groups of people can take part people who are, who have long COVID and whether they've had a PCR test or not. And people who want to serve as healthy controls.

So they know they have not have long COVID and ideally they have, they know they have had COVID but not long COVID because we really want to understand what are the factors that differentiate people who get COVID and then go on to develop long COVID versus people who get COVID and recover quickly.



[00:34:58] Barry Shrier: Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'd love to support that in every way possible. So very keen to engage with you going forward on that. Look, Patrick, I'm so sorry. We're running out of time, but this has been incredibly interesting. You very easily fall into the category that we're always trying to recruit for ourselves, which is people that are at the forefront of valid, important, and completely credible innovation advancing our ability to deliver better healthcare outcome. For the wellbeing of people around the world.

So for us, it's a pleasure and we're proud to have had you on the show today. Thank you so much. And obviously we wish you the very best of luck, quite keen to keep in touch with you, and certainly hope that we can bring you back perhaps with some of your colleagues and maybe with some of those big global pharma companies who certainly need to spend a lot more money recruiting you guys and getting you involved in their work.

So, Patrick, thank you very much. What a pleasure speaking with you today.



[00:35:47] Dr Patrick Short: Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much. And I will be at the, at your events in London, in November. So we can have that pub garden catch up there. If you won't be completely busy . 



[00:35:57] Barry Shrier: No, in fact, I'm going to reserve a table right now. Let me make a note. 

No joking aside, we look forward to that. Obviously your business has partnered with giant health, and we appreciate that. So very keen to be showcased in you guys, and the great work that you're doing at the giant health event, which of course is 30th of November, and 1st of December in London. Again for our listeners, that's at the giant website, www.giant.Health.com very keen to encourage everybody to come along and to hopefully to meet you Patrick. So Patrick, thanks once again, brilliant conversation and luck with all of the very good work that you're doing. 



[00:36:28] Dr Patrick Short: Thank you. And thanks for all your hardware putting together. These shows, I really enjoy listening to them. It's great to be part of it. 



[00:36:33] Barry Shrier: Excellent. thank you.