EP 18: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

The problem I started out trying to solve is not the one I ultimately ended up building the company around, but in my academic research, so I'm a mechanical engineer by training before becoming a biomedical engineer and then for my PhD work.

And then I did my postdoc in a cell signaling lab.

And when I got my first faculty job, I wanted to bring all of that together and study how the cells in the cartilage of our joints convert mechanical inputs into biological outputs.

That's a process called mechanotransduction in cell biology.

Kind of the business as usual way of culturing cells, the way that it's been done for the better part of a century now, is to put the cells in a glass or plastic flat dish.

And, you know, as someone who's interested in understanding how these cells interpret mechanical inputs, the very first one we're giving them is that.

right? We're putting them on a very stiff, we call it a substrate, a surface, you know, that in the case of plastic is 100,000 times stiffer than the environment of the body that they're in.

In the case of glass, it's literally 1 million times stiffer.

And so, you know, we can do all we want to look at the cell signaling pathways that are happening when we probe specific molecular receptors.

But if they're in that just ridiculously unrealistic mechanical environment, it's going to change the things that we're looking at.

And so we could get the most beautiful data, publishable, reproducible in the world, but it's never going to translate it in an actual human if that's the system we're doing it in.

And so initially started out trying to solve that problem by making a technology that would be more realistic for the cells mechanically.

but still allow us to investigate the very transient and delicate cell signaling pathways that we're interested in studying.

Absolutely.

And I think what would be great is to help folks understand, okay, this was, I'm going to use the word, initial research problem we were solving.

But where you are today, there's a massive problem.

And I won't steal your thunder, but a massive problem in how we think about diseases and treatments and qualification therein.

Can you talk a little bit about maybe the macro problem that you're looking to solve in addition to the one you just shared?

Absolutely.

So the one that that initial one led us to is is the fact that, you know, 95 percent of all drugs that are proven safe and effective in a lab setting or an animal setting before they go into a human fail when they get into a human.

And for osteoarthritis, which is the disease that I'm focused on specifically, that failure rate is 100 percent.

Nothing has ever been proven safe and effective at treating arthritis in a human.

All we can really do is treat the pain or replace the tissue.

That's really the problem that we're going after right now.

And, you know, what do you think are the consequences of not solving both of these problems? I mean, clearly, this is not a new disease.