James Peyer, Founder @ Cambrian

Welcome aboard Venture Passport. A podcast delivering an inside view of early stage global markets. Me, Jack Richardson, along with my co host Richard Armstrong explore insights from the worlds most innovative entrepreneurs and investors. Ladies and gentlemen, this weeks episode goes deep with one of the most promising biotech founders around.

This is Payer, the co founder and CEO of Cambrian. Cambrian developed therapeutics targeting key biological pathways that decline on malfunction of age, then creating medicines that have the potential to treat and prevent some of the world's most debilitating diseases today. With more than 16 novel therapeutics in its pipeline, it's raised over $160,000,000 in the past 5 years from some of the world's most esteemed biotech investors. Ladies and gentlemen, this is James.

All indications, coming in to the control center at this time indicate we are go, go, go. Lift off. We have a lift off. So, James, thank you so much for coming on today to chat to us about your journey.

Really excited to have you on. Maybe we could just start off with a quick intro from your side. Tell us a bit about your background and then, yeah, love to dive in deeper later. Sure.

Great to be here chatting with you guys, the spine warning introduction. My name is James Pyre. I'm a scientist by training. I did a PhD in stem cell biology.

And the sort of through line of my entire adult life since I was a teenager has been a fascination with the biology of aging. And what I mean by that is like we experience and we see changes in our bodies as we go from being a young, healthy, let's say 20 something onto a 70 year old, 90 year old, 110 year old. And those changes that we see in ourselves and in people around us as we age are driven by changes to ourselves, to our tissues, like the fabric that makes up what a human body is.

And by understanding what those things are first as a scientist, and now in my current role as a drug developer and as an entrepreneur, the hope and the vision has been to identify the things that when you set them back to the way that they were when we were young, set these pieces of almost like rust that accumulate in our bodies, you can make whole systems or maybe even our whole bodies function better than they could otherwise do. With that purpose in mind, I've, spent the last 10 years in the entrepreneurial space initially starting a venture builder called Apollo Health Ventures, which was the first to create small biotech companies around the biology of aging.

And then now I run a company called Cambrian, which I guess is one of the larger true biotechs in this field where we actually have our first drugs that are reversing some of these age related biological changes. Yeah. We can talk about it later, but like really do some incredible things that are in human trials. Super excited to talk more about that.

What inspired you to pursue this career in biotech? Right? This is a very tough field you're going after, but you must have had a strong passion from an early age, right? So I think that the inspiration started from kind of a personal experience that I'm sure many of us have had, which started when I was a teenager and my grandfather, who I really looked up to and kind of like was this paragon of what a life well lived looked like, he got cancer in his eighties.

Within a year and a half, despite all of the treatments that were available at the time, he was gone. People don't talk enough about how horrible of an actual experience cancer is. It's just a horrible thing to live through the the nuts and bolts of what a cancer does is it's metastasizing through our bodies and tearing apart our organs. It's just constant suffering for years followed by death.

It wrecked me to see this amazing person, even an older person, just ravished by this disease. I came to the conclusion that this is the thing that all of us are destined for even if we do everything right. So if I wanted to do something meaningful in my in my life, it would be to push against this this limit, this end, this horror that we are all barreling towards. And and so that's really why I started down the path of becoming a scientist, getting fascinated initially with cancer.

But then I realized that studying cancer and cancer treatments was a band aid approach. Most of the cancer biology world waits for people to have cancer and then tries to remove the cancer. And I learned fairly quickly or I developed a hypothesis fairly quickly that by the time someone has cancer, they've already sort of lost the game. That that there are so many ways to prevent this and change the way our biology is working to not get cancer.

That that's what led me to the biology of aging, which I studied as a student. When I was an academic, kind of my vision was I'm gonna find some way of using aging biology to prevent cancer. I had colleagues who were making what I viewed as fundamental discoveries around the biology of aging, where they could take one drug or one gene and prevent cancer and heart disease and neurodegeneration all at the same time. I was like, this is what I would have given my left arm to to have discovered.

I just wasn't as talented a scientist as some of these people or not as lucky or whatever it is. When a few of my friends would go to a venture capitalist or a pharma company and say, hey, we wanna turn this into a human drug. The response that they got back invariably was, well, aging is not a disease. Therefore can't build a drug out of this because you can't run a clinical trial for aging.

So go back to your lab and keep playing with your mice and keep publishing papers. I was like, that can't be right. So either there's something that I see in this science that these VC and pharma guys don't, or there's something about developing a drug that like is so complicated and the market is so different that I don't understand it. So instead of staying in academia, I left to join, the pharmaceutical consultancy, which arrogantly perhaps convinced me quite quickly that I had some view on aging that was not being appreciated by the wider community With the help of a really amazing German tech entrepreneur named Niels Regge, I outlined this vision of how I thought you could build a venture builder based on aging biology.

And he was like, do you want to move to Germany and build this for us? And that's when I left consulting to just about a year from getting my PhD become managing partner of this new VC fund, trying to build my first biotech companies around aging biology. And then it's all been failing upwards from there. Take us back to the point where you fundamentally decided to start Cambrian.

I guess it was as a result of being around so many talented people with so many free flowing ideas, and that's what you thought that you wanted at the time. Is this something that really attracted you to being a founder? I guess I came to being a founder from almost like from a bit of an unusual angle. Right?

Because the first job I had was a VC partner. That's not a bad first job to have, by the way. I mean, VC partner for a very small fund. Right?

That that that nevertheless, it's still a pretty awesome first job. Yeah. It was it was a freight cool first job. I agree.

At Apollo, we were starting these baby companies around these academic discoveries. And what I found myself doing a lot of was communicating the story of the science and trying to put that story both into a way that it resonated for investors and backers who otherwise didn't like the idea of aging for the reasons that we just talked about. That like aging wasn't a disease. It wasn't like a traditional pharma or biotech story.

But then also I had to translate it into strategy at the company level. Right? Because you had these scientists who had made some discovery like, oh, I've reversed aging in a mouse. And I had to come in and slap them and say, you can't build a biotech company around slowing aging because aging is not a disease.

And so what we need to do is we need to understand how these drugs really work and figure out almost like a Trojan horse method of these drugs and get them approved and tested through our FDA regulatory hurdles for something that's not aging. They have to be a cancer drug or a drug for rare childhood diseases or an obesity drug or a heart disease drug or something like this first, and then you'll see all of the other effects that these drugs will have on all of these other systems afterwards.

I felt like that was the the thing that made it possible to even put these biotech companies together where other people were ignoring them, a real disease you can go after before thinking about aging more broadly. And then we did it with a second one and then a third one. And after a couple of years, I kind of became convinced that this was a systematic characteristic of this whole field of aging biology. And so instead of starting one little company and positioning it this way and then another little company and positioning it this way, what I could do is synthesize that whole idea together and create one large company that then had a specialty in how to take in these academic insights, position them in a certain way, strategize them, and then build a specialized R and D and clinical development team around that to do this an efficient job of turning an academic discovery in mice into a into a human drug.

Do that at scale for as much as we could swallow in the aging biology world. And that was the genesis of Cambrian in 2019. Really quickly, there's like an absence of truly early stage biotech purist investors because of that exact reason. Because the feedback loop is is so long and the process to get out to market is such a long process.

I could talk with you for an hour about the state of the of the biotech markets, but I I think that you've put your finger on something really interesting is that the ecosystem that the tech universe has in early stage and kind of seed stage angel investing, it's almost completely absent in the biotech world. In the kind of the seed stage and the tech world, you could sort of put together an idea. You can have, like, a little mock up of what's going on. And then you're like, okay.

If this is right and we've got this great team and if you believe in our ability to execute it, then, like, we can turn a $1,000,000 or $2,000,000, some consumer traction and get some revenue and build this product. And then like, there's so many clear milestones along the way. With biotech, the, the shape of the business is just so different where it's like, all right, we've got this discovery in mice, and now we need to do like 3 to 5 years of really expensive work from 20 different experts from validating this discovery that you've made in university to trying it in 10 other mouse models to figuring out all of the properties of this drug, to ironing out all of the laws in this drug.

And then we have to have the absolute perfect drug before we put it in humans. Because once you put it into humans the first time, you can't change it. And we're gonna need $200,000,000 in order to get it approved. And even after the 1st 4 years, the likelihood that it fails is 80 to 90%.

Big jump from $2,000,000. Right? So that creates this world where there's only 2 types of groups that are really investing in biotech. It's those that are kind of forming almost LP like plays like many of our investors in Cambrian.

They were like, we believe in this team and we can see this thesis. And so we can invest in a bigger way so that at least 1 or 2 or 3 things within the Cambrian thesis bubble to the top, and we get around the scientific risk problem that way. Or you have large super specialist investors that for that are basically employing an army of PhDs. They come in and they say, if one of these bets works, we're great.

Even though most of them are not gonna work. And so let's come in and and bet big on a lot of bets. You know, the early stage investors in biotech are like a 1,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 AUM. I I guess why we maybe invested very early was because of the the founder profile.

Right? Back then, there wasn't any whole vision, more or less. TAV was just backing you as an individual. Correct?

TA was actually a backer of my first fund before Cambrian. And then when I had this sort of moment and I could do it as a company, Victoria, who who runs she was like, James, I think that you will figure out how to be successful, and I wanna support you in doing whatever it is that you do next. That confidence that Victoria had in me was actually the spark that allowed Cambrian to exist. When you're a biotech company or a fund, you have one thing separating those 2 if you're just starting it up for the first time.

And that is, do you have assets? Right? Do I have some scientists that already live under me where I already own their company? Right?

Or I already own their science. A fund is the black box. You're gonna pour a $100,000,000 into it, and then you're gonna say, hey, we've got a great team and I'm gonna distribute that 100,000,000 in the next 5 to 10 years, and hopefully make money back from it. For a company, alright, well, I have this drug, I have this drug, and I have this drug.

But you need something in order to get that started. By having Victoria as I jumped from Apollo into Cambrian, and I was actually deciding, oh, can I actually do this as a company? Do I have to do it as a fund? Victoria and one other investor say, James, we're gonna back you whatever this is.

Just like, let us know the structure. I was able to go to the first three universities that I had picked out, say, all right, I'm gonna be able to dedicate this. You're gonna give me this kind of structure. And then I was able to go back to, and the one other investor and say, this is what it looks like right now.

And I'm gonna figure out the rest. And and eventually I kind of random walked into Christian Engermeyer who runs a family office investment group called Apirin Global Investments. And Christian was really excited about this and was like, how much money do you need to really get all of this done? And we were able to form Cambrian and then went on to consolidate that and then raise a series a 2 months later to really push it from there.

Wow. I mean, that I think that sounds about like us. Right? You know, we just find great people.

Whatever the idea is. Maybe let's talk about the mission of Cambrian. Right? I mean, the mission and the vision of, Cambrian and I guess what sets it apart from other biotech companies.

We've already talked a little bit about the biology of aging and my fascination with that, and that certainly infuses much about the mission that we have at Cambrian. But I wanna be technically correct because there's this term that gets thrown around all the time that I truly hate, which is the term anti aging. People are like, oh, you're like an anti aging company. And I'm like, fuck off.

That's a really useless imprecise term that if we were to approach true drug developers, pharma companies, FDA, we get thrown out of the room. Here are the 2 things at a technical level that Cambrian is really about. The first thing is that we identify drugs that these pathways that degrade as we age back to youthful levels. And we figure out some way that we can turn those drugs into useful medicines for patients, people who are acutely suffering from some disease today, whether that's cancer or heart disease, or even just as a drug for obesity to to reduce adiposity, our proof of concept.

The second thing really more the long term mission, there is a massive underinvestment right now and a market failure in preventative medicines. There was a huge boon in like the early 1900 when we were figuring out vaccines. Vaccines are the first true preventative medicines. And then we have some decent preventatives that have come sense, right, like statins to lower your cholesterol and reduce heart disease risk and so on.

But we're not making systematic discoveries in preventative health using everything we know about biology. We are still bad at that compared to approving medicine after medicine for acute diseases, people who are deeply suffering from Alzheimer's or who have already had cancer a little bit better. This avenue of aging biology is the way to create the first new true preventative medicines. Things that the 3 of us on this call could take maybe in our thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, pick your starting point.

But before we have cancer, before our metabolism is degraded, before we have heart disease, in order to prevent us from getting those things. And I think once you've got an approved drug for some disease, you can just work something like this earlier and earlier that needs to be a drug that targets aging, which is super safe, fixes something that is already going wrong before a disease happens, and starts out by treating some existing disease. If we've got those three things, you can make the next better statin or the evolution of what vaccines were a 100 years ago, but applied to the the chronic diseases of aging that are the leading cause of death today.

You take something like penicillin. Right? It is not taking a lot of antibiotics is actually bad for you, But the reason why people keep taking, right, because the cost of production is so low. So, I mean, maybe we can talk a bit about the breakthroughs.

If you had to name 1 or 2 that you're extremely proud of at Cambrian, what would you say it would be? 2 that we're thinking about the most right now are are almost two sides of the same coin, which relate to how our metabolism degrades as we age. I don't know if you guys were this way, but when I was in my twenties, you could eat or drink just about anything and you would feel pretty good the next day. I wouldn't really put on weight.

And then sometime after my 30th birthday, I realized that, like, the sugar and cake was like not moving through my body. It was staying in my body. Body. I'm not too sure I need to get to 30 for that.

I'm 25 and I still suffer from all of the above. Yeah. I thought you run marathons, Jack. I do.

Unfortunately, I run marathons because it stays in my body, not because I really enjoy it. I would say. So, Jack, or Jack, they're really in our late twenties to early thirties, when people start to start putting on weight, it all correlates with changes that are happening in our bodies as our kind of youthful metabolism is slowing down. And our youthful metabolism is driven primarily by 2 sensors that exist in almost every cell in our body.

1 of them is called AMPK, and one of them is called mTOR. MTOR is the sensor for nutrients. When we eat, it gets turned on, and and its job is to basically activate energy storage. And as we age, it actually gets more and more turned on.

We're eating 3 meals a day and it kind of gets locked in an active state, constantly storing more and more energy. But when we're young, it's actually almost off. And then the second one is AMPK, which is a sensor for energy levels within the cell. The fuel for all of our cells is ATP.

ATP stands for adenosine triphosphates because it's got 3 phosphate groups on the end. The way that energy is actually created is this chemical reaction where you break off almost like a KitKat bar, or you break off these bonds and like 1 phosphate comes off and you go from triphosphate to ADP diphosphate. And that makes a little energy and then you crack it off again and it becomes monophosphate or AMP. So it's like depleted energy fuel.

And when we exercise and we burn up all of our ATP and make all of this AM AMPK comes on. Right? And so now you have this sensor that starts flashing because we have low energy. And what does it do?

Well, it says we need to refuel all of our energy, especially like in our skeletal muscle. Right? But it tells our fat to start turning its fat into sugar. It starts pulling sugar in from the blood.

It tells the cell to start turning that sugar through its mitochondria into more ATP, more energy. Our ability to activate this AMPK sensor also goes down with age starting in our late twenties. Our 2 drugs that we're most excited about at Cambrian are one drug that in animals can turn up AMPK levels back to youthful levels of AMPK. And then a second one that takes that overactive mTOR that's like constant on nutrient sensing and reduces mTOR levels back again to youthful, almost minimal levels of of mTOR signaling.

It's been known for more than 15 years with each of these pathways that they extend healthy lifespan, that they can prevent or treat diabetes or treat heart disease. There's like all of these benefits that have been going on with them, but like no one has quite nailed. How do you turn this into a drug? Our AMPK program has been in a 150 humans.

It's now being used to treat obese Incredible. Diabetic people. And the mTOR program is starting its phase one trials in humans. Just on that topic, these drugs, it no, it won't just actually improve energy levels and reverse aging, but it could actually potentially cure certain diseases before they could even happen.

The closest comparator, I'm gonna zoom in our our AMPK story, which is a drug called the Sure. The GLP-one drugs. I'm very familiar on that, like, stock right up to Exactly. Right?

300, 400%. I guess wild. It works on what has become a huge problem worldwide, which is our obesity epidemic. And the way that those GLP one drugs work is that they reduce appetite, make people feel full, and they prevent their stomach from emptying.

It's a really traditional diet. Right? You eat less, and therefore, you lose weight. The major downside of those drugs is that if I'm just like crap, doing a crash diet, not only do I lose fat, but I lose muscle as well.

And then when I go off that drug and I start eating again and I'm eating crap, my weight rebounds. I've still lost my muscle. The weight that I put back on is mostly fat. That's the major downside of these drugs that we're starting to see.

Although they work great for for reducing appetite. And so the cool thing about this ATX 304 drug that activates mitochondria is it actually doesn't reduce appetite at all. It actually increases appetite. It makes you wanna eat more, but now all of your muscles have turned into this furnace that is constantly burning energy, like the metabolism that we had as teenagers.

And so with enough of the drug, you can actually put a person's body into energy deficit. And when you're in an energy deficit, no matter how much I'm eating, I'm pulling so much from my fat to the sugar from my fat and from my blood into my muscle. I end up losing weight, but the weight loss seems to be coming from the fat compartment, not from the muscle. Increased appetite, no nausea, increased energy levels while still getting about the same amount of weight loss.

That's a real disease indication that the big pharma players are playing in, and we can take our drug right in there. And then once it's approved for obesity, then we can start exploring, is it helpful to prevent diabetes in non obese pre diabetics? And if it's useful there, then maybe it's good for people with diabetes or a little bit of high cholesterol. Many people can really benefit from this, this molecule.

Maybe it's a subsection of everybody, but we think it could be a lot of people since reduced energy metabolism is almost a universal feature of natural aging. How conducive really overall is the regulatory landscape in order for you to do your job? But ultimately in the very little time I've known you, you also seem quite personable for a very technical pounder. You're able to explain something which is very technical to a simpleton like me, who has that personality, like improved fat regulatory standpoint of Cambrian specifically.

So the short version is I have no idea. Because we're still made quite a lot of progress from the stage that the field was at 10 years ago when it was like, this isn't even fundable. The way that we're interacting with the regulators, it involves, for better or for worse, very little personality at this point. It's really all tech.

It's here's why we've got a great obesity drug. Here's why this will be useful for diabetics. And here's the data. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

That's what the regulators like to see for now. As we get into the later stage, again, I'm gonna use the Ozempic story as an analogy. Once you get approved for the first thing, the the communication and the almost like political side of this is how is that viewed by the world? I think this is why when you guys asked me about, like, the mission of Cambrian that I was like, we have to be technically correct on this.

Because if we screw up over the next 5 years, we know from running, pulling, and having lots of conversations that less than 50% of people are interested in reducing their aging or reversing their aging. There's this perception, oh, that sounds unnatural. However, if you talk about what the drugs will actually do, increasing metabolism back to youthful levels, being a preventative for cancer and diabetes, almost everybody wants those drugs. They want their parents to have those drugs and their grandparents, And that's the kind of medicine that should exist now.

And so we're doing our best starting today to frame that for future regulatory Medicare politics conversations that Ozempic has also had to go through in in different guises. Longevity is kind of a hot topic. We could do the entire world a massive disservice if you make this a thing for like rich biohackers that then turns half or more of the population who could really benefit from this against it for no real reason other than science miscommunication. Got it.

I'm sure that Cambrian has so much data. Right? How do you manage and integrate these vast amount of data generated? What do you plan to do with it?

So there are a few different pieces of this, one of which I'm super excited about. We have a a fair amount of data. How how should I phrase this? When we started Cambrian, right, this Trojan horse or like the stepping stone approach where you get some disease first, the analogy of, okay, well, once you've got it for that first disease, how do you expand it out?

Right? To the pre diabetic or to someone with high cholesterol or whatever. The true way that we will make this happen is by identifying using, first of all, deep biomarker analysis, genetics, epigenetics, metabolomics, etcetera, plus AI to find the actual risk factor. So we can give my me a score for how likely I am to develop cancer or heart disease using way more data than the healthcare system is processing right now.

That's how we'll go go from being an obesity drug to being a longevity drug. There, I use those words. And so a cool thing that we put together at Cambrian was an infrastructure for a data lake that could accept all kinds of data. Everything that you would measure about the health or biology of a person and then built the the data infrastructure so that you could run AI biomarker algorithms over it and like understand, oh, hey, when this intervention was made, it led to all of these effects.

And as we built this, something that was really exciting that happened, which is people who are trying to optimize their health today, kept knocking on our door and saying, Hey, you guys are Cambrian. You're at the forefront of measuring aging and longevity and so on. Can we use what you're using to track ourselves? We were like, this is kind of neat.

Because if we let you use our data lake, our data lake infrastructure, then it all will be intercomparable. The clinical trials that we're doing, the small clinic that's that's seeing patients and collecting all of their data, that won't just filter into nothingness. We can actually collect all of this in a shared data back end that is anonymized that you do to need to do in order to safely collect health data, but then you can start deploying AI algorithms on top of those massive piles of data and start learning real things, not just about drugs.

Because drugs are easy to learn from because we can do placebo control, double blind clinical trials, and that's what the FDA needs in order to work. But how do you tell if this supplement is actually good for you? Or if, like, intermittent fasting is actually good for you? And all of these things that there's never gonna be a phase 3 placebo controlled clinical trial.

And the answer is you have to use dirty data systems or just like dirty kind of data from a clinical perspective, but collect it all into a shared data architecture and use novel AI algorithms that can sort of pierce through the messiness of that data that like a clinical trial couldn't and that the FDA wouldn't accept in order to learn real things about. And so like, that's where I'm getting excited about data plays in this space. Just going back The point that you referred to before in terms of the long process of obviously getting a drug to market.

Hypothetically, if I were to present a race between you and your competitors, apart from intelligence and natural intellect to the people who are working within the companies, What makes one company go faster? Is it a huge part of capsule injection? What peels that? For better or for worse, the market doesn't make that much of a difference because almost everyone is playing in the US as their primary and most important market.

The US pays more for drugs than the rest of the world. And what that allows the US to do is essentially command the pharmaceutical r and d market. When we are building small companies, we build them for the US market and not for other markets because the other markets are all kind of like the cherry on top of the, the big US market. And that means that the very high levels of drug regulation exist in the US that are, I would say, far beyond the rest of the world.

At this stage. The 2 pieces that determine speed here are fundraising risk. How much capital do you have and how much do you do in parallel versus in sequence? Right?

The more things you can parallelize, the faster you can go. The second is the the specific strategy that you take. Have you found a way to weave things together that will result in being able to run shorter clinical trials, improve your case in less time. It's very non sexy, but that's what we talk about and do every day.

This huge rise in obesity drugs that we've been talking about with like Ozempic and whatever, this has actually been a game changer for our whole business. Because prior to having any big pharma obesity drug approved 4 years ago, it would have been almost a nonstarter in the investment world for me to tell you that Cambrian's building an obesity drug. Oh, what? You're gonna be the 1st?

Yeah. Good good fucking work. Right? Understood.

We were gonna have to run much longer trials. Like running a diabetes trial or running a heart disease trial, you have to wait years to see if your drug actually reduces how many heart attacks or strokes people have. But now that we can run obesity trials, we can shift the whole game towards how long does it take to measure whether someone lost weight? Only a few months.

Well, your phase three trials are only 1 year. Whereas like a heart disease trial is like 4 years. And so, like, those are massive increases in speed. In a way, it's like using obesity as a starting point, and then you're focusing drugs around that.

But the real market you're going after is all other issues around health care. Right? That's very interesting. Yeah.

That's that's super smart. I I just have one question before we move into a quick fire. Right? What do you think is something that you believe in health care right now or in the longevity space that is not gonna happen yet in the next maybe year or so, but you think we are extremely close, let's say over the next 5 years?

I would say in the next 5 years, we should get the first real longevity drug approved for something. Like that's the milestone that my entire life has been arching towards. And I don't know if that's like innovative enough because it's almost looking forward from where the whole space is right now, and it's like gonna be the most advanced players that hit that milestone. But like, to me, that idea of when the first drug that everyone looks at it in this aging biology world and they say, yep, that's a longevity drug.

That's, like, correct some pathway that's dysfunctional in aging. When that drug gets approved and is safe for large numbers of people to take, I think that's just such a game changer that like the entire industry is like in its infancy until that point. And then all of a sudden it's like, that's puberty. You're an adult now.

And like, there's going to be this explosion. It's gonna start small. Let's say it starts in obesity. It might start as a liver fibrosis drug or like fatty liver disease or a kidney drug.

Like who knows at this stage, we have to kind of navigate that over the next 5 years and whether it's ours or someone else's. But I think that once that's in the market, there's gonna be so much interest because we will know in mice that it impacts not just fat, but liver and kidney and heart and all of these sorts of things. There'll be so much interest to say, oh, let's apply it to those things right now and see if it works that way in humans, that we will go from like knocking down 1 domino every couple of years to like 1 domino every couple of months, because you'll just be doing all of these things in parallel so that you can maximize the value to, first of all, patients, but second of all, to the companies that that would stand to benefit from it.

Makes sense. We definitely learned a lot during this, you know, podcast, but before we like to finish it off, we'd maybe have a quick fire, just 1 or 2 questions. I'll kick things off. You know, what do you think is something contrarian, right, in your field right now that you believe in that other stone?

I believe that there should be no separate definition for aging biology and that aging biology and preventative medicines are the same thing. It's almost like a nihilistic view within the aging biology community because I'm saying like our field doesn't exist. We're just a part of all of these other things. It's like aging really isn't a disease.

Anyway, okay. Ramble on a lot of what I thought, but I think the fact that I don't think aging is or should be a disease is a pretty unusual take in our field. What's the one thing that you knew or that you know now that you wish you had knew at the start of your career or starting Cambrian? How complicated it is to do what's called CMC, which is the manufacturing process for drugs.

The amount of challenge to get a compound where you already have the defined compound, you know exactly the shape of it that you want. And like to just put that into a person requires so many hundreds of steps that I never could have imagined when I was just an academic scientist that like there's been an absolute black hole of my time, energy, and resources that have gone into making sure that the manufacturing of these drugs before you put them into people is just right. Because screwing up one little bit on that can mean that's huge, right?

The end of an entire compound. If you screw it up just once. Do you preach what you sell and you do? How much of a healthy lifestyle do you live and how difficult is that running a company at the same time?

I would say I do a decent job in terms of like exercising a few times a week. I run regularly, try to stay in good shape, but I'm also not a biohacker or a fitness freak in, in any way. I try to go where the evidence is and the evidence suggests that an active lifestyle with a good kind of Mediterranean ish diet, not too much sugar, not too much alcohol, good social life and getting enough sleep are like, those are the best things that you can do that are clearly validated. And then beyond that, it's like tweaking and optimizing.

Yep. Jeez. Thank you so much for this episode. I think, you know, as I say, it was it was not your our usual episode, Jack.

We usually have a lot of consumer founders, enterprise founders, even health care founders, but biotech, not so much. We're super excited at TAV as well as us to see how far Cambria can go. Hopefully, you bring the longevity drugs to the market very soon. It's super fun.

Richard, Jack, thanks for having me. Thanks for thanks for dealing with my long scientific digressions as I, you know, try to teach everybody about how how drug making works. As you say, sometimes the craziest and the smartest people is who you back. Right?

Because as Victoria did, you know, you're figuring it out. Hopefully, hopefully we'll get there. Yeah. Awesome.

Thanks very much, James. Appreciate that. Wow. I'm sure you can agree that was an amazing episode.

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