At what point did the tumor microenvironment acidity become a, a central part of Dive scientific strategy?

Well, Dive was, as you said, we were built around our delivery science, uh, DMAX, that moves molecules from the surface of the skin into the circulation and, and we do it, you know, roughly at the, the speed of a needle and bioavailability of, of a pill.

Um, the first molecule we moved was sodium bicarbonate, and we were actually looking at this in, um, uh, also to buffer acidity.

We were looking at it in athletes.

Um, and we reali- in, in essence, to buffer lactic acidosis in, in athletic performance for elite athletes.

And we realized we were quite effective at modulating that, that pH.

Um, and once we realized we could modulate that, the question then became: where does pH matter most biologically? And the answer, you know, in the literature for over two decades has been the tumor microenvironment.

And, and what makes delivery through the skin compelling as a way to address this problem?

When you said to your family and your parents and your loved ones that you were starting off perhaps after the consulting and striking on something with no clear definition, how did that go? It

was interesting because I grew up essentially with a single mom in Greeley, Colorado.

And she was a teacher by training.

She worked in school administration while I was growing up.

She had a very... supportive approach and and I think didn't didn't push me in any direction was more explore your interest find your passion let you get you know you're gonna get tugged in a certain direction and I'm gonna support you whatever that is there were no physicians in my family so and no scientists in my family and so I think that was interesting to everyone I had a real passion and draw to math and science and loved it.

And I think what connected with me very early was not just the math and the science, but it was more that problem solving approach.

You know, in math, I loved figuring out a problem.

What do those misunderstandings tend to be? How do you bring them back into where you really are?

So, uh, tell us about some of the upcoming milestones ahead.

Well, the big milestones is, you know, again, we've, we've known about the underlying biology for a couple decades.

It's just been a delivery challenge and, and we've shown that we can k- can do this in animals on the cancer side and, and, you know, upregulate the immune system and ultimately lead to better survival, less tumor growth, et cetera.

And then in our parallel path in inflammation, we've shown that we can deliver it in humans, in, in non-oncology patients.

And so the big goal here is to show that those two fields of work that we've been focused on can merge together, and we can not only deliver it in, uh, the oncology setting in the h- in the- in patients, in humans, uh, but we can also take advantage of that same biology.

So the, the big milestone this year is our first in-human studies at Moffitt.

We'll be looking at a bunch of, uh, you know, different readouts, both in terms of tumor growth and, uh, a number of different biomarkers on the, looking at the immune response in particular.

particular.Are you getting the feeling that there are certain tumors that are gonna be more responsive to this approach?