199 Eve Hanks, Founder, CEO and Veterinary Scientist: More Terrifying to Stay Than Scary to Go

Speaker A: This is a conversation that has generated well over 100,000 views on YouTube. Listen to find out why. Recorded live on stage. This is my conversation with Dr. Eve Hanks, CEO and founder of, uh, Myrna Ltd. A novel veterinary diagnostic testing company. Her, uh, path there wasn't a straight line from research to business. She's a vet with a PhD in immunology who founded and grew Myrna and is an outspoken advocate for improving disease control in animal health. Work that sits at the intersection of veterinary science, diagnostics, and genuinely new territory for the field. In this conversation, we explored the Unlock moment that shaped Eve's path, the moment of clarity that changed how she sees leadership, risk, and the discipline of building something genuinely new in a field where the stakes are measured in animal welfare, not just commercial success. Here's my conversation with Eve Hanks, recorded live at Ah, Climb 26.

Speaker B: It was a Monday. I remember sitting with my finger hovering over the incorporate a company button almost. I thought, I wonder how many times, if I don't do this now, how many more Mondays in my working life can I really have to launch this? And I actually worked it out and it was around about 2,000 Mondays, and I thought, well, that's not a lot of Mondays. So I thought, if I don't do this now, what chance is it that I will do it? What's changed? You leave it and leave it and then Suddenly you've got 100 Mondays and, and who knows if that's enough?

Speaker A: I'm Dr. Gary Crotaz and this is the Unlock Moment, your podcast about life changing flashes of clarity. In each episode, I talk to extraordinary people about the moment everything shifted when they suddenly knew the right path ahead. These are powerful stories of purpose, resilience, and transformation. Listen closely and you might just discover the key to unlocking, um, your own future. Before we start, I want to ask you one thing. You're about to hear a conversation that could change how you see your own path. Uh, if someone you know needs a moment of clarity too, please do share this with them. As ever, thanks for being here and welcome to the Unlock Moment. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a live podcast recording of the Unlock Moment. There's a particular kind of certainty that comes from following a traditional career path. You have the training, you have the title, you know what good looks like. It's all set out for you. And that certainty is hard won through the journey of training and development that you go on. Uh, entrepreneurship can feel very, very different. It can feel like freedom, but at the beginning, it can also feel like stepping off solid ground and onto a roller coaster that you are still building as it moves. There's no guaranteed outcomes. The risks that you take are, uh, personal, and that takes a different kind of courage. That's where the roller coaster begins and sometimes where the real work starts. Please welcome CEO and founder of veterinary diagnostic business, Myrna Eve Hanks. Thank you for coming.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker A: So we're talking about unlock moments, and I often start my conversations when I'm doing the podcast with this question, which is, in order to understand the person you are today, where would we need to start in your story?

Speaker B: I think that's such a complex question, isn't it? And I would just like to say the person I am today is not the person I'm going to be in five or ten years, I would imagine, or 15, 20 years, hopefully. Um, so I think there's a series of moments, uh, when I'm seven years old, watching James Herriot, for example, in the living room floor, and, um, fascinated by the idea of becoming a veterinarian and working in practice and saving cats and dogs and cows and that type of thing. So there's like, the kind of early implantation of that idea and the fascination I've always had for the animal kingdom and nature. And then clearly, uh, that took me forward into a veterinary career, which took me a little while to get started with, um, but I did manage to get to veterinary school around about 25 or 26 years old. So that was the start of my more formal career, if you like, in this space. And then there's definitely a watershed moment, um, around about the age of 39 or 40, when I had a bit of a midlife crisis and decided to throw everything out the window and start a business. So, um, from that point of view, there's. There's been many moments, but those are maybe some of the ones that, that have led me, from a career perspective, to be here now.

Speaker A: And when I talk to people about unlock moments. So an unlock moment is a moment in your life or career, often decades in the past, but sometimes recently, where people can remember exactly where they were, who they were with, what they were thinking, when they knew a thing they didn't know before. And when I talk about that, what, what comes to mind for you?

Speaker B: Um, sitting in the lab, the laboratory moment, when I discovered. I didn't discover completely Micrornas, of course, which is the molecule that we work with. The scientists that discovered micrornas won the Nobel Prize for that just at the end of 2024. So it's very new science. But the first time I realized I could work with micrornas was a big moment for me because the technology is so new and was so new that when I first started my PhD, I was working with micrornas. It would take around about six months, um, to extract them and then find out what's there, which isn't the best basis for diagnostic tests, as you can imagine. And then there's this moment about five years later. And it took me two hours to do the same thing. And I thought, wait, this is an afternoon, not a lifetime. Now I think I can do something with this.

Speaker A: I remember many years ago I did a PhD in a lab in the field of protein folding. And when I was in the lab, because I'm old, um, they used to crystallize, uh, proteins in a, in a box or in a fridge or something over a long period of time. And then they would shine X rays through it to see where it is. And now Google's computers can predict that structure of proteins. So used to win a Nobel Prize if you discovered the structure of hemoglobin. And now they know the structure of every protein there is. And it's incredible how rapidly that's moved on.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Explain to me, in the world of micrornas, which is what, what your business is based around, what was the world, pre microrna? And, um, what's the opportunity, post microrna? What, what's changed? What is enabled by this technology?

Speaker B: That's an excellent question. So pre microrna discovery, there were processes in the body. Now micrornas are in plants, they're in all mammals, including humans. They're in viruses, fungus, bacteria. So they're everywhere, but we didn't know they existed. So pre micrornas, the scientific community were a little bit lost as to why, say, larva, uh, of a, uh, nematode, a type of worm, would suddenly start to develop. How were they receiving those signals? And the proteins that we knew of weren't really answering that question. So they were first discovered, therefore, in nematodes, in, uh, a, uh, type of worm called C. Elegans, which we use in the laboratories all of the time for research. And they were thought for about five or six years just to exist in C. Elegans and not necessarily anywhere else. But they were obvious triggers for developmental PAT pathways. Then fast forward to now and we Understand there's over 60,000 micrornas that exist in humans. They control some amazing things. So I'll give you just a couple of headlines in terms of what they can do to us as humans. So micrornas are made by us in our cells, but they're also made in our microbiome. So in our gut, for example, by the bacteria and the viruses that we harbor there. And they're also made by pathogens that might come to invade us. However, in chronic disease, for example, in the human side, there are two micrornas that will elevate in a human in the year before that person dies from a heart attack. They're very predictive and they're very precise. That statistic is not those two elevate before you have a heart attack. That means that you're going to die from that heart attack. So it's very precise. So there are things like that, um, which suggest that they actually have significant power over us in terms of our immunity. Almost like project managers of our immune system. There are others that shine a bit of light into that interplay between the microbiome and our brain. So for example, in um, sadly in cases where people have died from suicide, there are two to three micrornas that elevate in the 24 hours before that happens. And they are gut microbiome related micrornas. So therefore because we have this interaction, this bi directional conversation all of the time, you can imagine the well that you may need to go down to discover more about micrornas. But they're not just diagnostic markers or therapeutic targets. They're actually our control system we didn't even know existed.

Speaker A: So it's like a new lens on um, disease process and so on, so forth that you hadn't um, had access to before.

Speaker B: It's exactly that. It's that moment where if we go back and try to compare it to a scientific discovery, it's when we discovered bacteria existed. So like whole new world, literally whole new world. So to be in the middle of that, to be a leader in that space is incredibly exciting. So yeah,

Speaker A: so talk to me about where you were, uh, the moment before you became a founder of a business. You were practicing Beck, you were in the Lab doing your PhD. But what did that look like?

Speaker B: Lots of work, of course, because PhD stipends tend not to be great. So there was that mixture of working the weekend, working the weeks, working evenings. Um, I had my teenage daughter at home, the dogs to walk the garden to do, just a small super normal life. And um, I was at the time with my ex husband as well, things not working out. You know, he uh, was my husband at the time. And I just, the more I was pushing to get through the PhD. And the more I was fascinated by the science that I was discovering, the more it was reigniting, uh, an entrepreneurial spark that I've always had. I've always wanted to do something but hadn't felt that my risk profile would have been useful in that area. Because when my daughter, through her, her life growing up was the priority financially. So you, you make sure she has her school trips and her, you know, her safe housing and all of that sort of thing. So I was kind of more focused on that. But as she, she's 27 now and she just got engaged at the weekend actually, so congratulations. Congratulations to her. But so around about six, seven years ago or so when, um, she was finishing up university, she was turning 21, she had her job, her flat, her partner who she's now engaged to, um, I thought, you know, that's my time, this is my moment. So I packed up some boxes and I drove off to France, bought a house that needed renovated and launched a business and changed, I suppose completely my life just, um, and during COVID of course, just to make it a little bit more complex and changed my life completely. And that was what I needed to actually do in order to have this space to launch the business.

Speaker A: So I'm just going to play that back. So starting a business is a huge life change and you moved to France and all these other things simultaneously. What was going on for you that you thought it all needed to change?

Speaker B: I think I was in a super safe university job because this was post PhD, so I was in this super safe clinical pathology job in a university. But, and it was, it was fine, but stifling in the way that a university is for certain personalities. So I was kind of stifled at work, stifled at home. Just had so much on my shoulders, everything was on me and I didn't, I didn't have any time to express who I was. Yet at the same time I knew I've got the brain, I've got the drive, I've got the excitement about this and I want to make something of it. So I think there was, there was always going to be a point in my life where I potentially moved away from Scotland, you can tell by the accent, but moved away from Scotland and tried something new. I perhaps thought it was going to be in a retirement type of phase, but just as the pieces started to fall together, the dream grew and it became more terrifying to stay than it was scary to go.

Speaker A: More terrifying to stay than it was scary to go. I love that. So at the beginning of the journey with my rna. Did you have the plan all set out? You. You felt confident you were clear on the path it was going to go, or did you look at the beginning and go, I kind of have no idea how this is going to go, but I need to start. Where were you on that spectrum?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think when I started the research project within the university, no idea. I just thought I would like to carry on researching this. And then I had. So we work with artificial intelligence and my artificial intelligence head of that side of things, Javier. I phoned Javier and I said, javi, I've got results from this research, but I'm trying to look at too many micrornas and I can't work out if this is diagnostic or not. I can't work out if we're going to be able to look at disease pathways here or not. Can you help me? And so he said, yeah, I'll try and build a thing. You know, obviously this was out of my expertise at the time. So he built a thing and then he phoned and he said, eve, I've got bad news, it doesn't work. I said, oh, that's a shame. He said, yeah, it's only diagnostic and 98% of cases, which of course we laugh at. But for someone who works in probabilities of 1 or 0, that for him didn't work for me, that's beyond any gold standard diagnostic you could imagine, you know. Um, so I spat my coffee out and, um, then I sat down and thought about it. And then, yes, I would say I had quite a clear path as to what I'd like to do. I knew this was bigger than the small amount of research I was working on, so I thought, right, I have to get grants, have to get funding. Don't really know how that investment thing works, but, ah, that's. People seem to do that. So I'm going to go for some of that and then hopefully take this up to scale. So that was probably a moment where I thought, yeah, something could come of this.

Speaker A: I'm fascinated by what drives the moment itself with my fascination with unlock moments. Um, and I often ask founders or leaders, why that day? Why then did you start? So when was the moment when you said, I'm, um, literally going to start turning this thing that I know is a good idea, but today is the day. What was that day for you?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I. There's a few things I think, that build, isn't there? I don't like to be told no. And so my supervisor said no. So that Was number one, said, no, I think you should get on with your job and perhaps do this on the side. So. So that kind of ignited a little bit more. The other thing was that someone told me that no company had ever spun out from the university that I was in before. So that was like, there's a path I could follow, like, I'm heading down this way. So that would be another moment. And then the last one is that I, um. I often think about life in terms of the timeline of life. Um, there are only so many opportunities you will get. And I remember sitting, looking at this, this potential chance with my finger hovering over the incorporate a company button almost. And I thought it was a Monday. I thought, I wonder how many times, if I don't do this now, how many more Mondays in my working life can I really have to launch this? That where everything could fall into place like now? And I actually worked it out and it was around about 2,000 Mondays that I could have had. And I thought, well, that's not a lot of Mondays. And if I don't launch this, because you don't launch a business on Wednesday afternoon. You launch on a Monday, obviously. So I thought, if I don't do this now, then say I wait another 500 Mondays. What, what chances it that I will do it. What's changed? So for me, having that kind of, this is a limited time deal. You know, you go now when everything's perfect, you know, your parents are in good health, your daughter's happy, your life is good, you've got capacity, or you leave it and leave it and then Suddenly you've got 100 Mondays and who knows if that's enough.

Speaker A: Exactly. And I always talk to founders and leaders and they say the difference between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones is starts with the successful ones did start at some point, and that is the hardest step. I mean, all. There's loads of other hard steps to go. But I think that starting, particularly if you've come from a background, you know, you trained as a vet, I trained as a doctor. Um, if you've been in the background where there aren't that many people around you who have started a business or, you know, in the science lab, it's the same. It's not like you're in an MBA class where everybody there, uh, is starting things, or at climb, where you're surrounded by founders and you kind of feel a bit out of the loop if you're not busy starting a business, it's quite different.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's, I think we talk about internally in my rna, the business that I run, we talk about the academic trap and how people can get into that loop of refining and optimizing and refining and optimizing and doing that over and over again and trying to get to the very most granular possible level of that science and missing completely the application of that science. So the academic trap, I think, is very real. But application of good science shouldn't be blocked by not knowing every single detail of that science, particularly in a field as new as this.

Speaker A: Yeah. So talk to me about my RNA today. What is it? What has it grown into? What's the scale of it? What's it doing? What difference is it making?

Speaker B: Yeah. So there are 35 workers now in Maurne, which is amazing. We have raised about $10 million. So we're very good value for money. We have investors on board like, uh, Mars Pet Care. So obviously they make chocolate. Every time we go to an investor meeting, you walk past this big tub of chocolate, you can take whatever you like. That's my favorite moment there. We're also in strategic partnership with Soetus, so they're the largest animal health company in the world alongside other, uh, you know, kind of moments of traction like that. Innovate uk. So the UK government pay for some of the production, animal work we do, etc. But the thing that's, I suppose, most important to me is that we are this global virtual team. So we have a wonderful, fantastic amount of fun actually together. Lovely cultural diversity, lots of different thoughts, etcetera, on what's happening. And we work almost 24, seven, you know, from the different time zones, so nine different countries, um, involved in this. We have a lab in the US in Athens, sadly not in the Greece, Athens in Athens, in Georgia, and a lab in the uk in Scotland. So at the moment we are poised for a commercial entry. But for us, in 2027 we'll have about five products coming to market with partners, which is amazing. But this thing for me that I love is that we have unlocked this kind of health screening part of Micrornies. So early disease detection and monitoring of chronic disease. Very important. Our pets will live longer. We love them, we want that to happen. But we are also working and we're nearly there with what we call predictive assessments. We're going to predict what's going to happen next. So if you imagine as a doctor or veterinarian receiving results, um, of a blood sample, ah, or urine sample, and it says to this dog is in heart disease, it's at this stage, it's stable. You don't need to treat or worry at this point. Retest in a year how useful that would be. So that whole kind of information comes under a banner called precision medicine or personalized medicine. And we are the only company in the world doing that with micrornas and AI.

Speaker A: Amazing. And talk to me about the challenges of raising money for a novel technology that people don't understand yet. And even you wouldn't have fully understood the potential of this yet. What did that look like in fundraising?

Speaker B: It was, to be fair, I think we have the right investors who got it. So there were moments for sure. So we pitched wide, far and wide to start with, um, and I was a solo founder for a couple of years and I pitched to every lamppost I passed, almost know to try to get the idea out and get some money in. Um, I had pitches where I pitched to angels and then afterwards you'd be asked questions like, uh, excuse me, just to go back a bit. What's a dairy cow? You know, so it's like there was some degree of education needed. I didn't realize that people as a veterinarian, I hadn't realized people didn't know that beef cows made beef and dairy cows made milk. I didn't realize that that wasn't widely known, for example. So it was breaking down the pitch, making it more accessible, trying to move away from jargon, etc. So there was a lot of that that was highly uncomfortable. And um, you know, I just, it's not great pitching and it's landing on this kind of stony ground. Um, but to be honest, the angels that then did come on followed through on every single round we've done. Um, and then by the time we kind of got the mars peck here and we got some of the V VCs, they followed through as well. So every round has become successively easier even though I'm asking for more money in a shorter time frame. And um, I don't think I could have found better investors that knew the sector well, that networked me so well. Um, one of our, you know, VC investors, I would say that hopefully after this journey and through the VC backed part of it is over, you know, is going to become a very firm friend, etc. So yeah, we're very lucky and, and it's been a good story. But I would certainly say go us for your investment as soon as possible for health, tech and life sciences

Speaker A: and for you as a leader who hadn't come from a particular business background, you must need to learn an awful lot to become the leader of a growing commercial organization.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is true. I think there's a journey, isn't there, from founder, scientific founder to CEO. And I'm just finishing my mba actually, so that has been useful, very useful thing to do. But I think there's. I think there's also an element of, um, allowing yourself to make mistakes and to learn along the way. Like learning on the job is by far, I think the best thing you can do. Um, and allowing that to be that you're authentic, you're a bit vulnerable, you rely on other members of your team at times, etc. I think leadership, there was a couple of words. I misunderstood. So leadership. I misunderstood. I thought leadership. You had to be always at the helm, always have the answers, always driving forward. You can do that when you're confident, but if you're not, leadership also involves making sure that other people in the team can help you with what's happening and, um, fill in those blind spots, etc. And the other one was resilience. I really thought that resilience was about being bulletproof. And I will not be upset that nobody knows what a dairy cow is. And I just spent, you know, an hour of my life talking about them. But, um, actually, resilience is, for me anyway. I think it's probably a personal thing. Resilience is pitching, having no traction, crying in the bass, going to bed, getting up next morning and doing it again. You know, that's much more a resilience to feel everything, to be present with it, to accept it and then go, keep going.

Speaker A: And, um, what have you, what have you had to learn along the way that you weren't doing before? In that,

Speaker B: um, how to prioritize myself, I think, um, would be a massive one. Perhaps Most women around 40 learn that a bit better than they do before. I don't know. Um, another thing I think is be able to have those moments of being able to take that charge out of your life. I don't know how to, but if you're literally plugged into the socket all of the time, it's very hard. And I can be like that. And, uh, the more pressure I put myself under, whether it's real or my imagination, the more plugged in I feel. Um, so for me, one of the skills that I really never thought I could master but ended up being able to do was meditation. So I, I do, I try a new thing every year. So I did a year as vegetarian, I did a year with no alcohol. And then in this Third year, I decided I was going to be a, uh, year of meditation. And the first six months, it was just me forcing myself to listen to this guided meditate. M. It was so pointless, you know. And then after about five months of forcing myself to do this, um, five nights a week, something just changed. Like a network grew somewhere in my brain. And I was like, oh, this is a thing. This is that thing. So if anybody, you know, who has been thinking about meditation and thinks, my brain's too busy, I can't relax, I'll fall asleep, keep at it. It's a skill. It's like riding a bike and then suddenly you've got that right balance going. So now that I can do meditation, I can meditate in airport sports, trains, on a walk in the car, you know, uh, before you go on stage. Wow, what a skill. It's amazing. It just helps to center back a lot of that energy we throw out and panic about all of the time. It centers it back. You have your composure, life is nice and you enjoy. You wake up in the morning, you think, this is going to be a great day, rather than, oh, my comfort zone, much to do. You know, it just really changes.

Speaker A: And I think that it's a hidden art of leadership, the ability to put it all somewhere because there's lots of leaders who are in massive roles, high profile roles, paid huge amounts of money. They're not very good at that. And actually, if you look at the rest of their lives that you, you look, you would look and say you're not a very successful leader because your life is falling apart. Yes, you've got a lot of money in the bank account, but in all other dimensions you're losing. And then you see other people and you think, you know, you haven't made the number that they've made, but you've absolutely won in life. And getting that the boundaries right, getting the balance right is, is really important. Do you intentionally find time away to, to put that all down beyond the sort of meditation side? Would you, would you try and block out time at the weekends to say, work cannot contact me in those times, that kind of thing?

Speaker B: No, no, I don't at all. But I love my work. I love my job. It's the best job in the world. I love every day I work with. So it would be more of a punishment for me to do that than it would be necessarily a stress, stress management. So I think I manage very well the stress through meditation, a little bit of exercise, you know, walking and enjoying nature, enjoying my other relationships. So that, uh, for me it's not about having four hours on a Saturday without work, where I think about work, it's more that I can enjoy three or four hours on Saturday doing work and then I don't need to think about work because I know that everything's going fine. But like, we have like the highest trust team that you can imagine. Everyone's autonomous. Like the comparison of where I work now compared to the university of like siloed and knowledge hiding and low trust to now it's. I know that if I'm not there, people have got it, you know, So I think this isn't because I've got some miracle power to avoid stress, it's just I don't need to stress. You know, we've got a great team.

Speaker A: Yeah. If you're mentoring a young scientist who was, where you were, uh, on some new technology that's coming through and thinking about starting a business, what wisdom would you like to share with them?

Speaker B: Well, I do, I do actually. So I'm on the board of two health tech startups and then I work as the entrepreneur in residence for the University of Surrey through their Beehive program, which is paid for by Zoetis in that sort of circle of life. So I coach six businesses there and we talk about this often. So I think there are a lot of scientists, um, and I did exactly the same, who want to pitch the science and talk about the science and everybody would agree that that's not ideal for an angel. Ah. Audience. So it's useful to talk about that aspect first. But also there's a lot of scientists who don't feel at home in this environment of the entrepreneurial space. So they don't present themselves as subject matter experts, even though they are. They present themselves as humble and cap in hand and please, could I have some money, etc. Whereas they know so much that they've launched a business. Like these guys are potential gold mines for investors and they should be very proud of that. So. So I think just changing their mindset is what I try to do. To say, you are in this room, you don't need to take money from anybody. You are the one with all the, the kind of magic cards. So, you know, don't you delight those cards to people you don't want to deal them to. It's your choice, it's your business, it's your future. And when you have that mindset, you present differently, whether it's your body language, your words, et cetera. And you see that, uh, they start to grow into those real experts that they genuinely are as well, which is good. So a little bit of potential unlocked, I think.

Speaker A: Great advice, Eve. How can people find out more about you and um, the work that you do?

Speaker B: So our company, Myarni, we are simply www.myrna.tech and you can find us there. We're also super active on LinkedIn, so we share a lot of our. If you're interested in the science, there's lots on LinkedIn, we've got lots of webinars talking about future science, etc. So yeah, and then the other way I suppose is if there are veterinary innovation conferences or scientific conferences for any vets out there that want to know more, then we tend to be, ah, at most of those presenting with the work we're doing.

Speaker A: Fantastic. The Unlock moment is that flash of remarkable clarity when you suddenly know the right path ahead. There's something powerful in what you're describing in that mindset shift to say, I've come from science and now I'm going to turn that into something with much greater scale and impact through commercializing and building this amazing business that you have with my rna. You can find out more about either Hanks and, uh, her work at Myrna Tech. That's Mirna M. Tech. Thank you so much for joining me here live at climb 26 and on the Unlock, uh, Moment podcast. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you so much.

Speaker A: You've been listening to the Unlock moment with me, Dr. Gary Crotez, conversations about those remarkable flashes of clarity that changes everything. If this episode inspired you, follow the podcast now on Apple or Spotify and share it with someone who needs to hear it. And for more reflections on purpose and transformation, join my LinkedIn newsletter, also called the Unlock Moment. Thank you for being part of this journey. Until next time, keep searching for your own moments of clarity.