#139 Justin Coombs, COO at AusHealth on Revolutionising Healthcare Through Innovation

What if the next big medical breakthrough was already sitting in a lab, waiting to be discovered?

In this episode of Creating Synergy, we sit down with Justin Coombs, Chief Operating Officer at AusHealth, to dive into the groundbreaking advancements shaping the future of medicine. From life-saving cancer treatments to antibiotic innovations and even the surprising role of platypus venom in diabetes research, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone curious about where healthcare is headed.


Why This Episode Will Change How You See Healthcare:

▶︎ CAR T Therapy & Cancer Breakthroughs – The game-changing therapy that’s curing leukemia and could replace chemotherapy.
 ▶︎  Bacteriophages: The Future of Antibiotics? – The virus that kills bacteria without harming humans.
▶︎ Platypus Venom & Diabetes Treatment – A strange discovery that could change diabetes management forever.
 ▶︎  The Challenges of Innovation – Why Australia struggles with translating research into real-world solutions—and what needs to change.


This episode isn’t just for scientists or healthcare professionals—it’s for anyone who wants to understand how biotech is shaping the future of human health and why the most important medical advancements might be closer than we think.

🎧 Don’t miss this one—listen now!


TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 - Why Biotech Matters to Everyone

02:07 - Biotech vs. Traditional Cancer Treatments

06:12 - The Accidental Discovery That Changed Agriculture

10:27 - From Scientist to Entrepreneur

18:15 - The Life-Saving Power of CAR-T Therapy

27:49 - Fighting Sepsis with a Revolutionary Blood Protein

41:42 - Platypus Venom and Weight Loss

47:29 - Bacteriophage Therapy: A Comeback Story

1:06:04 - AI in Healthcare: Smarter Hospitals

1:10:52 - The Future of Personalized Cancer Treatment

Where to find JUSTIN COOMBS

• Linkedin

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Join the conversation on Synergy IQ on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram (@synergyiq).

Access SynergyIQ Website to get to know more about us. 

#Biotech #FutureOfMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #CancerBreakthroughs #CAR-T #CreatingSynergy #Podcast

Transcript

00:00:09:29 - 00:00:35:24
Daniel Franco
Welcome back to the Creating Synergy Podcast. Today we're joined by Justin Combs, a trailblazer in the biotech space and a true innovator who has spent his career turning bold ideas into real world solutions. From researching antibiotics in in Weight to founding the Carina Biotech to now leading groundbreaking work at AusHealth. Justin has continuously pushed the boundaries of what is possible.

00:00:36:01 - 00:00:43:21
Daniel Franco
And he's playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of health care and innovation in South Australia. Welcome to the show, mate.

00:00:43:24 - 00:00:44:21
Justin Coombs
Thanks for having me, Daniel.

00:00:44:26 - 00:01:03:02
Daniel Franco
Really excited about this conversation. The biotech world is this cutting edge in the way it's going. I guess I'll start off with the question why does the work that you do matter and why should the average person who's listening in care about biotech and the breakthroughs that are happening in that space?

00:01:03:04 - 00:01:25:02
Justin Coombs
Well, the reality is biotech has been part of everyone's life for a long time already. What we're seeing now is more the complexity of things we can do with biotech improving. So if you like one your user of biotech, whether you like it or not, that's a very ancient one, as some of the very earliest fermentations is sort of what you would think of as old school biotech.

00:01:25:03 - 00:01:25:13
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:01:25:14 - 00:01:47:23
Justin Coombs
Okay, great. That's obviously over the decades progress through to things like the discovery and production of antibiotics, you know, Florey in the forties. And so that was a form of biotech where we learned to essentially use some of the technologies that were used, you know, wine and beer to ferment things like streptomycin to make antibiotics. That's, again, biotech, helping us now see the world to be a very different place if we didn't have them.

00:01:47:24 - 00:01:48:16
Daniel Franco
Yeah, absolutely.

00:01:48:16 - 00:02:07:09
Justin Coombs
Right through to some of the really cutting edge stuff we're saying now in healthcare, where we're looking at, you know, genetically engineered immune cells to to treat cancer, you know, these could be replacements for things that are much cruder, like chemotherapy and radiotherapy into the future. And the reality is some of these these things are happening right now.

00:02:07:11 - 00:02:20:08
Justin Coombs
If you had a kid that had a chemotherapy refractory leukemia right now, they would ultimately get prescribed a new case of therapy, which, you know, literally 15 years ago didn't exist.

00:02:20:11 - 00:02:26:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, It's saving lives, really. Some of this stuff, isn't it?

00:02:26:23 - 00:02:56:06
Justin Coombs
Absolutely. A lot of medicine now is biotech driven. In fact, I would say the bulk of the big things that we're seeing now around therapeutic antibodies, antibiotics, cell therapies are all effectively biotech products. But it's not just in medicine, actually. So we're seeing a lot of biotech around environmental remediation in industrial processes, writing a lot of biotech. One might even argue things like wastewater treatment is a very basic biotechnology.

00:02:56:08 - 00:03:00:09
Daniel Franco
Why do you love what you do? Like, what is your purpose in this world?

00:03:00:15 - 00:03:23:11
Justin Coombs
So, like, ever since I've been a kid, I've just loved sort of complicated things. And if you look at the world around us and this complicated thing, we've got living things, yet we know remarkably little about them, which is sort of what makes it fun. Yeah, I was at a conference a few years ago, which was not a biotech conference, though I was explaining to someone about sort of the tools we have in molecular biology, and I used the analogy.

00:03:23:11 - 00:03:40:09
Justin Coombs
I said, Well, imagine someone handed you a seven, four, seven and you had to try and work out how it worked or even make it work better. But the only things you could do was take bits of it randomly or add bits short, randomly, and then build one and see how it's lost, which really at a very crude level is where we're at with biotech.

00:03:40:11 - 00:03:46:12
Justin Coombs
And it's so much a nightmare. But it's just that's just fascinating. Yeah, to get to play with those things and.

00:03:46:15 - 00:03:57:18
Daniel Franco
That is exciting. So let's let's go back. What do we need to know about just in your earliest contexts? Where did you start your career? Where did it all start?

00:03:57:24 - 00:04:37:04
Justin Coombs
Yes, it started right here in Adelaide. I know Adelaide, born and bred, but I'd joke, I think a lot of Adelaide people are like salmon. Yeah, we were born in our little creek. Yeah, come back going for a while and then we come back to spawn. Yeah. And so I am the quintessential cliché on that front. So it started here in Adelaide, did my day here when it worked in the US as a scientist for a couple of years, came back to Australia to do my legal training in Melbourne and then finally came back to Adelaide to spawn in Soho and since then had three kids, so generated three more Adulyadej and.

00:04:37:06 - 00:04:40:19
Daniel Franco
The guy now do the same? Probably the process continues.

00:04:40:24 - 00:04:41:21
Justin Coombs
Absolutely.

00:04:41:23 - 00:04:51:12
Daniel Franco
So starting your career in anybody in Wait and tell us about that and where where it all sort of took off from that point.

00:04:51:15 - 00:05:18:28
Justin Coombs
Yeah, it gets to this idea of the fascination with biotech, but also trying to do something. I was never really interested in sort of knowledge for its own sake. I was always interested in trying to think of a real world application. And it started with a silly idea between my supervisor and I at the time. So I did a honors project at Flinders Uni with Chris Franco, who was fantastic and that retired academic good last time.

00:05:19:00 - 00:05:54:08
Justin Coombs
And so we were looking at antibiotic producing bacteria isolated from saw and it was this one class of bacteria in that family that was known to infect plants. And we thought, well what if there's more than just that one? And so what it led to was I pitched a project was conceived where we wanted to look at some economically valuable plants and just to, first of all, screen them to say, do this particular class of actinium isolates live in economically valuable plants, and if they do, what are they doing there?

00:05:54:10 - 00:06:12:03
Justin Coombs
So that led to coming out with the project, applying for a few different pitch day scholarships. I was very, very lucky to be offered several that really determined which plants we were looking at, whether we were looking at horticultural crops, you know, zero crops or sugar. As it turns out, the grains people paid the best. Yeah, that was the.

00:06:12:06 - 00:06:13:27
Daniel Franco
Go where the money is. Yeah.

00:06:13:29 - 00:06:16:27
Justin Coombs
So yeah, no one goes where the money is in science.

00:06:16:28 - 00:06:18:12
Daniel Franco
I mean, that's.

00:06:18:15 - 00:06:19:28
Justin Coombs
The best of a bad luck.

00:06:19:28 - 00:06:21:21
Daniel Franco
Really. Yeah.

00:06:21:23 - 00:06:39:16
Justin Coombs
So what it led to though, was starting to look at cereal crops in Australia and first of all, simply developing the methodological tools to say, can we look for these things in the plants at all? So that was the first year and some of my pay day was just simply trying to work out, well, can we find them at all?

00:06:39:21 - 00:07:02:17
Justin Coombs
Thankfully, we were able to find some of these organisms and they were fascinating things. So they essentially antibiotic producing bacteria that make a whole bunch of medicinal antibiotics. But we found sort of close relatives that lived in the plants and instead of making antibiotics that killed soil based bacteria, what we found was they actually were very, very active against root pathogens.

00:07:02:17 - 00:07:13:02
Justin Coombs
So it appeared that there was some sort of symbiosis that had evolved between the microorganism and the way plant to host these bacteria that are going to protect the white groups from disease.

00:07:13:05 - 00:07:13:22
Daniel Franco
Yeah, Well.

00:07:13:22 - 00:07:32:09
Justin Coombs
So what was really cool is we could then isolate them, we could grow them in the lab, and then we could actually inoculate weight back with them, a brilliant site. And what we showed is that we could actually protect the plants from fungal root disease by simply inoculating them with spores of the beneficial bacteria present.

00:07:32:12 - 00:07:38:24
Daniel Franco
Which then grows the industry and as a major. So what it had is how has that had an effect on the wheat industry?

00:07:38:28 - 00:08:07:05
Justin Coombs
Yeah. So it's it's been commercialized and picked up by a couple of companies over time. But some of the biggest impact certainly was for me anyway, was getting that sort of taste of, you know, we can now do things. Yeah, a practical what it also shows is the, you know, the journey from a good idea to something out on the market is very long, very drawn out and really requires a vast amount of effort beyond that initial sort of interesting idea.

00:08:07:05 - 00:08:28:25
Justin Coombs
Yeah, but yeah, we are saying a lot of this work going forward and what's been really fascinating is that initial paper that was around how you isolate these organisms from weight has now been cited. Many, many hundreds of times. So it's being used all around the world to look at isolation of antibiotics, which are these bacteria that live in the plants from a whole range of different economic.

00:08:29:02 - 00:08:34:22
Daniel Franco
How does that make you feel as a as the researcher on that, that knowing that people around the world are benefiting from this?

00:08:34:24 - 00:09:02:08
Justin Coombs
Yeah, look, it's great fun. It's this idea that, you know, you've created something useful and put it in the world that's now it's a really nice feeling to have. But the reality is these early ideas, like I said, are simply the seeds of things that need to go forward. And we need to have lots and lots and lots of them because the that attrition rate between these good bits of interesting research and things that ultimately make it out to the market is very, very high.

00:09:02:12 - 00:09:17:03
Justin Coombs
And we need to you know, we talk about change. I think it's one of the big change things that needs to happen culturally is that the idea of that attrition rate is real and we need to accept it. And we need to almost embrace to say, you know, we've got to push as many of these things we can.

00:09:17:03 - 00:09:19:26
Justin Coombs
And if they don't work, so what will that pick up the next one?

00:09:19:26 - 00:09:24:18
Daniel Franco
Yeah, Yeah. It's commercialization is the toughest piece in all this, isn't it?

00:09:24:20 - 00:09:47:19
Justin Coombs
Well, it's probably even a step before commercialization and we might get to it. But I've got this sort of theory that we almost needs what I think of as a third profession in Australia. There's the industry people and the academic people, and we've had all these efforts over the years to try and get, you know, academics to move into industry or industry, people to move into academia and the language.

00:09:47:21 - 00:10:03:09
Justin Coombs
My theory is what we actually need is almost a third group. That's sort of what I've tried to do with my agree that seats in the middle that are actually the translators that, you know, they intentionally don't become one or the other and act as those intermediaries to get.

00:10:03:12 - 00:10:04:04
Daniel Franco
To get it over.

00:10:04:04 - 00:10:12:27
Justin Coombs
The line out of the boffins hands and into the industry hands. But there's usually quite a bit of massaging work that needs to happen. Yeah, between those two extremes.

00:10:13:01 - 00:10:27:24
Daniel Franco
And is that what is that when you say that's what you've tried to do for yourself, is that where the idea of the Carina research came from that you built because you transitioned from, I guess, a researcher to an entrepreneur almost, didn't you?

00:10:27:27 - 00:10:34:19
Justin Coombs
Yeah. Look, I've always played on that interface. You know, people ask me what I do for a job and I say, I'm not quite sure yet.

00:10:34:22 - 00:10:35:12
Daniel Franco
Still figuring it.

00:10:35:12 - 00:10:51:26
Justin Coombs
Out. Yeah, no, exactly. It's still figuring it out. And, you know, when I was at school, I knew I was interested in biotech broadly, but, you know, I didn't say, you know, I want to be a highly cited researcher or I didn't I am, you know, going to be and say and make a school year billion of a big company.

00:10:51:28 - 00:11:21:28
Justin Coombs
So it was just this idea of I like making stuff happen. So I've really tried to always play at that space where it's that there's something what sorry the nothing to something phase like Yeah. So and it was the classic example of that so that was just simply going there's a real opportunity here to take this amazing technology that have been developed in the States for the treatment of leukemia using these genetically engineered T cells and say, well, how do we take that opportunity and move that into other cancers?

00:11:21:28 - 00:11:35:10
Justin Coombs
And what's been really amazing I still find this stat ridiculous is Carina is actually the first example of an Australian developed cell therapy or CAR-T therapy, sorry, that's actually made it to the clinic.

00:11:35:12 - 00:11:41:05
Daniel Franco
So what does that mean for the people like me who are a bit more simple in their thinking? Yeah.

00:11:41:07 - 00:12:10:00
Justin Coombs
So I'll go back to start out just for a minute. Good psychotic therapies in Urdu are an amazing thing. So we're all very familiar with the sorts of treatments that, you know, you would get for a cancer patient. We're familiar with surgery and radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and these are all, relatively speaking, quite crude technologies. They're about simply cutting out a bit of diseased tissue or bombing it with radiation, which just effectively burns away.

00:12:10:03 - 00:12:10:24
Daniel Franco
Chemicals in.

00:12:10:28 - 00:12:12:27
Justin Coombs
Cardiac therapies, a completely different approach.

00:12:12:27 - 00:12:15:16
Daniel Franco
So is that like immunotherapies or the same thing?

00:12:15:16 - 00:12:43:07
Justin Coombs
Yeah, it's actually the most cutting edge immune therapy there is now. So there are immune therapies now that are on the market. So you would hear about things like KEYTRUDA and drugs like that. And what those do is they broadly take the brakes off your immune system. So if you look at your immune system, how it basically works is it is constantly patrolling your body, looking for things and it's regulated by two large well, largely about two signals.

00:12:43:07 - 00:12:45:18
Justin Coombs
One is killing and one is like me one.

00:12:45:18 - 00:12:47:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah, yeah.

00:12:47:11 - 00:13:08:21
Justin Coombs
So all the cells that are yours and friendly and good. Yeah. Have a lot of leave me alone. Leave me alone and not a lot of kill me signal. Yeah. And cancers you want to have lots of kill me signal and not much. Leave me alone. Okay. And your body's is out cancer cells every day and your immune system is going round going, I don't like the look of you and killers, which is to take lymphocyte to deal with you and Maven.

00:13:08:25 - 00:13:32:13
Justin Coombs
One of the things cancers evolve to die is learning to say, Leave me alone. And what the the drugs like key try to do is basically block the life me line signal. Okay so what it causes is your immune system to become more hyperactive. Now the good side of that, of course, is it can make a cancer that was once invisible to the immune system visible.

00:13:32:13 - 00:13:43:02
Justin Coombs
And then you see some of these amazing reactions where, you know, our next door neighbor is a classic example where she's had an amazing response to one of these PD one inhibitors, which has been fantastic.

00:13:43:04 - 00:14:20:18
Daniel Franco
I think. Can I jump in there for sake? My father in law had this. He got diagnosed. Stage four melanoma. Yeah. And without sort of being disrespectful, like we were organizing the funeral like that, that's how far gone we thought he was. And, and he, he was in a bad, bad way in hospital and all the above, but then went through this immunotherapy and so to be honest, hadn't ever really heard of this, even because this happened before I met you, obviously, and I hadn't heard of I heard of an immunotherapy, but I hadn't heard of all these new things.

00:14:20:18 - 00:14:40:16
Daniel Franco
And then we're learning about it, learning about it. And I'm like, okay. And we as a family made that decision. Yep, give it a try. It's it's, it's but they'll put him in a test things the test trial and it's been 12 months later and there's no more signs of cancer and we're just like, what Woody you what do you mean is he has he got cancer is he does like what?

00:14:40:16 - 00:14:51:12
Daniel Franco
And they're like, there's no signs. Like it hasn't grown, it hasn't spread. There's it's like it's practically gone. And we're like, how is that possible stage for melanoma? You're supposed to be like, Goodbye.

00:14:51:18 - 00:15:11:06
Justin Coombs
So most powerful weapon we have in the fight against cancer is the human immune system is fighting fire with fire. And all the same ways that cancer is good at evolving and dodging things. The immune system is adaptive. Yeah, plans to look for new things. So 20 to 30% of patients in certain cancers that get put on I mean therapies have those sorts of results.

00:15:11:06 - 00:15:11:21
Daniel Franco
Amazing.

00:15:11:21 - 00:15:21:09
Justin Coombs
And what's fantastic about it is because your entire body is perfused with your immune system, then it can route cancer out of places that would be inaccessible to surgery or would be inaccessible.

00:15:21:09 - 00:15:35:12
Daniel Franco
Right. So is it surely that because he's a pretty powerful mind as well when it comes to his like these things not bloody beating me. Is that is that an element of that in there involved as well that you know the power of positive mindset or.

00:15:35:18 - 00:15:53:24
Justin Coombs
Once upon a time I would have said don't be ridiculous. Yeah I was younger, you know everything was black and white. You know, everything was, you know, very mechanistic. As I get older, I do start to wonder, you know, are there holistic things that you can do? You know, we know there are a whole bunch of things that boost immune responses now.

00:15:53:24 - 00:16:10:10
Justin Coombs
And some of them, you know, you wouldn't really expect, you know, sunlight's the classic. Yeah, yeah. So things that whether the positive thought itself is helping or it causes you to then go and do things that are otherwise helpful and otherwise generally helpful to our immune system.

00:16:10:13 - 00:16:11:15
Daniel Franco
It's a pilot.

00:16:11:17 - 00:16:11:23
Justin Coombs
Case.

00:16:11:28 - 00:16:13:15
Daniel Franco
It's part of the ecosystem. If it.

00:16:13:15 - 00:16:14:14
Justin Coombs
Works, do.

00:16:14:14 - 00:16:16:20
Daniel Franco
It. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Sorry. Keep going. You.

00:16:16:21 - 00:16:19:24
Justin Coombs
We're sorry. Yeah, I'm doing a long and winding right up.

00:16:19:24 - 00:16:21:14
Daniel Franco
No, no. Well, I cut you off, so.

00:16:21:19 - 00:16:40:04
Justin Coombs
Savings, Paddy, Why don't give it as they called that. Just take the brakes off the immune system with these first immune therapies. And I've just had amazing success there on market and they're working really well. So then sort of 15, 20 years ago there was this idea, well, what if we can selectively take the brakes off the immune system?

00:16:40:04 - 00:17:04:12
Justin Coombs
So rather than simply saying, well, we're going to take the brakes off generally, can we try an immune cells just to react to something really specific? And if we can find a marker on the cancer, can we effectively have a homing missile at it? And that was what brought about The leukemia can't take therapy. So they sound like science fiction, but essentially what they do is they involve taking some of your own blood, isolating out these serial killer cells that we know what they are.

00:17:04:12 - 00:17:29:14
Justin Coombs
They called say I kill or take lymphocytes genetically modifying them with a new receptor that doesn't exist in nature, that has two really important functions. One, there's a bit that hangs on the outside of the cell, which effectively acts like a lock that will find the cancer cells lock onto it. And then a bit that's it inside the cell that says, but once you've logged on to that cell killed the thing, you've locked onto it and importantly, make more of your cells.

00:17:29:16 - 00:17:30:02
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:17:30:04 - 00:17:50:02
Justin Coombs
So what happens? Replicate the taste cell will go around, find its target. It'll get it. All right. You're dead. And we're now going to make more of us that look this time to find more of these sort of cells. And that got effectively proof of concept against what I call the myth of plastic cocaine use. And the results were just stunning.

00:17:50:02 - 00:18:14:27
Justin Coombs
So the best story is a little girl called Emily Whitehead, who was in the in a US hospital at the time, I think she was about six, had failed. Two lines of chemotherapy was going effectively into palliative care by dumb luck. Yeah, she was in the children's hospital Philadelphia, where Carl Jane was developing these type therapies. She was offered to be the first ever human, first ever kid.

00:18:15:00 - 00:18:35:24
Justin Coombs
And to be given these parents said, yes, what else we're going to do gave her a Katie's wake up. So nothing happened by second weekend, started to develop some pretty severe favors in rashes and very, very strong immune responses. They got so strong. This was in the early days, put her into ICU. She wasn't the cancer. This was the therapy.

00:18:35:24 - 00:18:42:29
Justin Coombs
Yeah, Obliterating the cancer, as it turns out, got to die. Three had a scan. She went from palliative care to cancer for 30 days.

00:18:43:01 - 00:18:49:06
Daniel Franco
In 30 days, 30 days. She took that took about pointing the missile at it.

00:18:49:08 - 00:18:59:07
Justin Coombs
That and Emily you can look her up on the Internet now has gone more than a decade out and has remained cancer free, which is just ridiculous.

00:18:59:11 - 00:19:00:26
Daniel Franco
That is amazing.

00:19:00:28 - 00:19:01:29
Justin Coombs
And that that's.

00:19:02:00 - 00:19:03:21
Daniel Franco
That gives me goosebumps that.

00:19:03:23 - 00:19:25:21
Justin Coombs
That was sort of what inspired trying to say the idea was, well, what if we can take that technology that exists and adapt it? So instead of just reacting to these leukemias, we can have it react to other sorts of cancers. So then that set me on the journey of trying to find those markers on cancers that might present good targets and then working with predominantly at the beginning.

00:19:25:21 - 00:19:45:09
Justin Coombs
Simon Barry At the Women's and Kids Hospital, you may never be able to catch yourself before, you know, it was a random intellectual property. You're going, I think we can do this. Yeah. So over the ten year journey, we've now got to the point where we have a car T-cell in human clinical trials. First it was trying to develop one and I can't speak for the human results.

00:19:45:09 - 00:20:03:23
Justin Coombs
There's some encouraging signs, but certainly in mice we can completely obliterate colorectal cancers and not only obliterate the cancer, actually induce what's called immune memory. So you destroy the initial cancer, you leave the cells in there and then you try and reintroduce the cancer and you can. Yeah, yeah.

00:20:03:27 - 00:20:12:09
Daniel Franco
Well, so if I, if touch would be if anything ever happens to me I'm calling you and just saying is that, is that how it works. Like I've just got my.

00:20:12:09 - 00:20:13:27
Justin Coombs
Match, not a paper but.

00:20:13:28 - 00:20:22:10
Daniel Franco
There are throw whatever you can at me and get this thing out of me. I think the So the Emily scenario, have you ever did you ever meet her?

00:20:22:13 - 00:20:38:05
Justin Coombs
I met a dead yes. I've never met though we did have also an Adelaide girl actually participated in one of the very early trials. Lauren Coulson. I met her and after a cat therapy. And she's going, You are wandering around because of biotech.

00:20:38:07 - 00:20:44:24
Daniel Franco
It's it's amazing how many lives as this saves, Do you know?

00:20:44:26 - 00:20:57:16
Justin Coombs
Look, I wouldn't know the numbers off the top of my head that one of our collaborators in the US when we were starting a I called Professor Mike Jensen. He was several hundred kids in that he traded just in his lab.

00:20:57:18 - 00:21:16:06
Daniel Franco
That is so amazing. He must sleep well, like I like. There's not many people that can walk around saying we've had a positive impact on people's lives. In fact, there's there's hundreds, if not thousands of people in this world right now. He still because of the research we've done.

00:21:16:08 - 00:21:43:17
Justin Coombs
Absolutely. But it's you know, we get to do the fun sort of complicated techie stuff. But you know and it also healthy is the classic example. You know, when you have our venture team that's working on really complicated new therapies, you know, new bits of health, I tell you that sort of thing. But even our divisions that do much more, you know, commercial market facing stuff, in some ways I'm I'm very impressed in terms of the improvement in health care that they provide.

00:21:43:19 - 00:21:59:28
Justin Coombs
So, you know, we do a lot of work in hospital financial services that makes hospitals run better. Yeah, if we saved someone's life because we've got the best health care or we've got more people through a hospital system, how is that any less valuable than coming up with a, you know, very complicated biologic therapy?

00:21:59:28 - 00:22:18:05
Daniel Franco
That it is it is true, yeah. I think that's located to where it's based on a location. I think the research of what your studies and whatnot and commercialization of your product can do is have an impact globally really isn't in absolute.

00:22:18:07 - 00:22:19:26
Justin Coombs
Yeah. Scalability factor is.

00:22:20:01 - 00:22:46:22
Daniel Franco
Asia but but I'm not taking away anything like no no it is just for me it's about the the most like fundamentally what I believe is good is for the bit for people to be able to flourish. Yeah right and stay alive and flourish and everything that you are doing and the research in which you are doing is helping that.

00:22:46:24 - 00:22:50:19
Justin Coombs
Yeah, and that's the intent. I mean, otherwise, what's the point of it all?

00:22:50:24 - 00:23:02:02
Daniel Franco
So what happens from here? Because there was you mentioned that you were an IP lawyer there at one point, so you went from from research to lawyer back to research. Tell us what happens in this space in your life.

00:23:02:09 - 00:23:39:09
Justin Coombs
Yeah, there is a bit of a story there and I'm not sure if it was intended or it's just evolved that way, but it gets to this idea that I mentioned earlier about almost needing that third group of people, I think in our research translation ecosystem. So even as a patent attorney, I, I had a quite unusual practice in that I worked primarily with local innovators, so I was helping them actually get their ideas into some sort of tangible order and we could file the patent applications and actually try and take these intangible concepts and ideas and turn it into some sort of property that could then have an enterprise built around us.

00:23:39:09 - 00:23:52:06
Daniel Franco
So you went from research back and then you went back to the union due to a legal degree, Yeah. Yeah. So it said on the back of you going, actually there is this third space that I want to, I want to try to combat.

00:23:52:10 - 00:24:23:07
Justin Coombs
Yeah. And it was probably more subconscious than that. I people have asked me before, how did you end up as a patent attorney. I joke it's because I don't like the city of Milwaukee with a story behind it. But essentially I was working as a scientist in the US and I was starting to think of options that might bring me back to Australia and I ended up just on a whim calling the people off and that we had filed the patent applications or my patch day work and said, I'll look interested in coming back to Australia one day.

00:24:23:10 - 00:24:34:19
Justin Coombs
You know, what opportunities are there in the IP oil space when it turns out within a week I had an interview in sort of an early 2000 video conference set up. Yeah, a lot less.

00:24:34:22 - 00:24:36:01
Daniel Franco
Zoom, like.

00:24:36:03 - 00:24:37:02
Justin Coombs
A lot less sophisticated.

00:24:37:02 - 00:24:38:00
Daniel Franco
Bit more pixelated.

00:24:38:04 - 00:25:02:21
Justin Coombs
And so yeah, that brought me back to Australia. But again, I kept on that theme of rather than just acting for foreign companies trying to get patents in Australia. Right from the beginning I was intimately involved with innovators and researchers and in some ways I think that was one of the best trainings I had in terms of translation of tech, because, you know, there was really no other environment where you got to see such a breadth of work.

00:25:02:21 - 00:25:18:16
Justin Coombs
So, you know, I worked with many of the big universities in Australia, the biotech companies and all sort of saying the best and brightest that was getting over the filter of engaging the patent attorneys. So I got to say this amazing cross-section of work. Yeah. And from that.

00:25:18:18 - 00:25:21:14
Daniel Franco
Was some of the most exciting stuff that you've seen.

00:25:21:18 - 00:25:25:02
Justin Coombs
Will look a lot of the stuff in terms of the legal side of things I can't talk.

00:25:25:02 - 00:25:25:23
Daniel Franco
About. Yeah.

00:25:25:25 - 00:25:45:00
Justin Coombs
If for some I mean a lot of the work we're doing now on health is fantastic. So we've got, you know, some of the cancer therapeutic work that's going on, but we've got some amazing work happening in sepsis therapy, which, you know, I could say what I think could be a blood protein that's currently being.

00:25:45:02 - 00:25:45:23
Daniel Franco
Explained to me.

00:25:45:23 - 00:25:52:06
Justin Coombs
Sepsis targets therapy. Sepsis is a disease you're probably familiar with. Yep. So and this.

00:25:52:06 - 00:25:53:20
Daniel Franco
Is why we want to explain.

00:25:53:25 - 00:26:17:24
Justin Coombs
What kills a lot of people. So basically, if you get an infection that goes from being a local infection from account or a wound gets into your bloodstream, you become septic, which basically means you've got an uncontrolled infection floating around systemically. Yep. And this kills a lot of people. Often it's sort of the proximate cause of death that might have other things before, but that's what actually gets you in the end.

00:26:17:24 - 00:26:47:20
Justin Coombs
And there's been some amazing work done at the Royal Adelaide here where a couple of the doctors there and I'll namecheck them just because they deserve it. So David Torpey and Emily Myer were looking at the blood profiles of people in septic shock and what they actually found is a particular blood protein called CABG and they found that if you had low levels of CABG in your blood, your chances of dying in a septic shock event were effectively tripled compared to normal people.

00:26:47:22 - 00:26:57:11
Justin Coombs
And that went through to an amazing thought that, well, if that's low, could we intervene and actually bump up the levels and save people?

00:26:57:13 - 00:27:06:15
Daniel Franco
Is that like, like iron shots and stuff like that? Is that kind of what you're talking about? Just give him a supplement and now you could. Well, is it does it work? Is it that simple? And it's.

00:27:06:15 - 00:27:07:14
Justin Coombs
Not quite that.

00:27:07:15 - 00:27:10:21
Daniel Franco
Simple, but I know you're laughing because I'm a I'm a dumb bastard over here.

00:27:10:21 - 00:27:39:26
Justin Coombs
But well, funnily enough, in principle, you're sort of. Yeah. So what would be hoping is that we can find ways of supplementing the level of CABG in people, and this could be quite acute, right? So when you've gone into ICU and we think you won't be saved, it looks a bit like you're at high risk. If we could have stocks and CABG on hand where we could say, okay, we're going to supplement you out and we're going to then hopefully protect you from that massive mortality risk in sepsis.

00:27:39:28 - 00:27:49:21
Justin Coombs
So we're doing some amazing work at the moment, which a lot of it's unpublished. But what we're showing is this looks potentially viable and we may even find a potential source of the CABG protein, which.

00:27:49:22 - 00:27:50:24
Daniel Franco
Yeah, well.

00:27:50:26 - 00:27:55:08
Justin Coombs
If we can stock it in hospitals, then you could actually reduce the chances of.

00:27:55:10 - 00:27:57:12
Daniel Franco
How many people die from this per year.

00:27:57:17 - 00:28:01:20
Justin Coombs
On. Septic shock. It's a massive thing. Again, it's it tends to be a consequence of something else.

00:28:01:21 - 00:28:02:05
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:28:02:07 - 00:28:10:20
Justin Coombs
You've got like a wound or even after cancer therapy, something's gone wrong and you've got an infection and it then goes rogue thing.

00:28:10:21 - 00:28:15:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Okay. So it affects you in so many different ways. It's not like you just got a cut on your leg.

00:28:15:08 - 00:28:29:15
Justin Coombs
And no nuts on most mice Points of iron. Yeah. You know, you treat them and they're all good, but typically, you know, immune suppressed people, older people, cancer. Yeah. A whole range of different settings where sepsis is the thing that sort of finishes you off.

00:28:29:21 - 00:28:30:19
Daniel Franco
So it's scary.

00:28:30:22 - 00:28:32:09
Justin Coombs
Catch it at the end.

00:28:32:12 - 00:28:55:03
Daniel Franco
I am a friend of mine just went through the same age as me recently. Had an operation for Stone Stones. Yep. And got a really bad infection. Went back in. Yeah, it was one of my best friends and he he was in a bad way. And I think remembering now that as you're talking here, I think it was sepsis related.

00:28:55:10 - 00:29:00:24
Justin Coombs
And it's it's really worrisome Once you're getting to the point of having a septic shock event, then they're probably worried about it.

00:29:01:00 - 00:29:02:09
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:29:02:12 - 00:29:04:28
Justin Coombs
It's interesting. The mortality risk is high.

00:29:05:00 - 00:29:32:23
Daniel Franco
Was touch and go. So I want to talk about something that you mentioned to me previously, which I think is really interesting, current research, which you are still in, Bartek you're still part of that a shareholder, aren't you? However, I mean, you founded this, you were the CEO, you scoured it from 0 to 10 and you've identified yourself as the you know, and you said it earlier the zero to something.

00:29:32:25 - 00:29:58:22
Daniel Franco
And I think it's really it's really liberating. He's hearing you say that, and you've said this me previously, that I'm not the guy that takes the business from 10 to 2200 million or and grows and scales it. But I'm the guy that helps. It starts, it understands, it builds a business and then takes it for me, it's it's really interesting to know that you've got the awareness of that.

00:29:58:22 - 00:30:18:04
Daniel Franco
And I think I've had I've had a guy by the name of Mark Randolph on this show. He's the founder of Netflix, and he was sitting in that chair that you're sitting in. And he he was the 0 to 10 million as well with Netflix and his and he stepped away. And you look at that and you know, you think about how much he's possibly missed out on.

00:30:18:04 - 00:30:46:02
Daniel Franco
But he goes, I don't regret it at all because I know my niche. I know where where I'm strong. And then you said the same thing to me. I'm like, wow, it's it's enlightening. First two questions of is first, what is your approach to starting something from scratch? And then second is then how do you identify the the transition point in which you say, okay, I now I'm no longer the person to take this to the next level?

00:30:46:06 - 00:31:14:11
Justin Coombs
Yes. I look when I'll deal with both of those questions in order to say that starting something from scratch is working out sort of what components you need for that Genesis event, I like to think about it. So there's an amazing amount of research out there, but a lot of it is not sort of suitable actually for. And when I say not suitable, I don't mean of a sufficient quality, but there are certain bits of research that lend themselves to commercialization a lot that doesn't.

00:31:14:15 - 00:31:34:05
Justin Coombs
Yeah. So part of it's trying to recognize the sorts of technologies that would benefit from a commercialization path rather than, you know, a public funding path or whatever it is that, you know, you might be able to do with it. And then the next bit is almost it's not quite a checklist, but it's sort of a rough mental list of things that you need.

00:31:34:05 - 00:31:47:24
Justin Coombs
You need some very, very good people, both in terms of their skills but also the temperament. And, you know, someone once said, you know, startups are a contact sport. Yeah. So if you don't do it.

00:31:47:26 - 00:31:48:19
Daniel Franco
They're pretty rough.

00:31:48:19 - 00:32:09:01
Justin Coombs
Yeah, you don't do it because, you know, you want an easy path going forward, but you do need people who, you know, want to create something and get it out there and have, you know, that resilience. So when stuff goes wrong and you say, I use the word when it's matter, it's yeah. And then it's about does the asset itself stack up?

00:32:09:02 - 00:32:32:14
Justin Coombs
You know, is there a market that's going to be served by the product you're creating? Do you have a product at all? So, you know, is there something we can build an enterprise around here or, you know, have we gone and published it that we made it effectively part of the commons already? And if you can knock off a few of those things, you'll find that the opportunities start to emerge as to which ones are going to be suitable.

00:32:32:14 - 00:32:42:19
Justin Coombs
But even then, for everyone that you think might make it, there might be some that you invest in and a bunch of them will die. And it said this pretty harsh funnel.

00:32:42:21 - 00:32:46:22
Daniel Franco
Yeah, it's constantly it's continuous improvement is an innovation.

00:32:46:27 - 00:33:00:10
Justin Coombs
Absolutely. And you have to have a willingness to lose right at the beginning because, you know, one in a thousand might make it through to the final product. But the problem is you can't tell which of the thousand is going to be that one.

00:33:00:12 - 00:33:20:17
Daniel Franco
It's and I think what you're saying when you're talking about product, you're talking in particular from a biotech point of view. But I think about product in any from a widget to a to a service, I think it's all the same. It's in in the sense that you have to trial and error and you have to find out what actually is going to have the biggest impact on the community.

00:33:20:17 - 00:33:40:01
Justin Coombs
Yeah, and this is where sort of biotechs probably got a harsher funnel than most because, you know, with widgets, you know, we understand engineering a hell of a lot better. Yeah. And the human body, Yeah. The way biological systems work. But then the flip side is exactly what you pointed out earlier, the impact you can have with some of these things.

00:33:40:01 - 00:33:43:12
Justin Coombs
It's amazing. So it's sort of high stakes, high risk.

00:33:43:15 - 00:34:06:09
Daniel Franco
I was having this conversation last night actually with one of our clients, and he I said to him, sure, I look back when I started this business in 2008 and how green I was and what I know now, six years later to what I knew then. And I think to myself from what I know now, I never would have done.

00:34:06:14 - 00:34:26:27
Daniel Franco
I never would. It's so it's so tough like it is so hard. And I think it's almost this is there's got to be a bit of naivety when you start in in especially the early days when you're just trying to figure it out and you've got because I think if it wasn't for that naivety, I probably wouldn't still be here today in the sense of like forging forward.

00:34:27:00 - 00:34:30:06
Daniel Franco
It's like, well this internal optimist I suppose.

00:34:30:09 - 00:34:45:19
Justin Coombs
And you have to I mean, if you knew the risks of something, particularly in mindspace, there's no anything to stop it. No, it's, it's funny actually. I spoke to a lot of students that say, you know, I want to go and become a patent attorney. And I said, don't try to become one. Yeah. If you saw the path in front of you, you'd never do it.

00:34:45:19 - 00:34:46:20
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:34:46:23 - 00:34:50:24
Justin Coombs
So I think a little bit of naive enthusiasm is actually a very good thing.

00:34:50:24 - 00:34:51:23
Daniel Franco
Yeah, absolutely.

00:34:51:23 - 00:35:04:09
Justin Coombs
And some of these things and it's what it creates in the sort of this, you know, will spill over benefits, you know, one person's failure or something is actually the next person's discovery. Yeah. And I think, yeah, you need it.

00:35:04:12 - 00:35:26:26
Daniel Franco
It's just the way it works. So then the transition when with creative biotech, you've said, Righto, that's it, that's enough. I'm going to, I'm going to step down as CEO. and I'm going to hand this over. I'm going to hand my baby over to to someone else to grow and scale that insight. I mean, what, what advice do you have for navigating through that moment?

00:35:26:29 - 00:35:46:05
Justin Coombs
Well, a lot of it's about not in my mind. It wasn't about saying, is it as any sort of failure. I go the way I looked at it, I went. That's, this has actually got real legs. We've done the pre-clinical work and we've established an IP position that's looking pretty good. What this now needs is a bunch of different things.

00:35:46:05 - 00:36:07:17
Justin Coombs
It needs vast amounts of money raised for, it requires different networks to the sorts of people that, you know, I had in academic circles and angel investors and grants. Yeah. And it requires almost a different temperament to go out there and pitch and raise money. And I remember thinking to myself, Well, I could do it, but do I want to do it?

00:36:07:19 - 00:36:27:22
Justin Coombs
And once you think, well, I've got two options here, I can find someone who wants to do it, and then I can continue to do things that I want to do, or I can sort of try and squeeze myself into this box. That's not quite me. And then I thought, Well, I why am I doing it? And B, even if I did, is that actually in the best interests of the organization and everything around me?

00:36:27:22 - 00:36:53:13
Justin Coombs
Yeah. So I spoke to the chair. She was slightly horrified at the time, but I think, you know, on reflection, best thing we did. Yeah. So Crane has gone on from strength to strength. We hired Deborah Rathjen, the seasoned clinical development biotech executive whose areas strengths were directly complementary to where I'd got the company. She's gone on to raise significant money and taken the product into the clinic.

00:36:53:13 - 00:36:57:11
Justin Coombs
So on reflection, I encourage everyone to do the same.

00:36:57:11 - 00:36:58:04
Daniel Franco
Yeah, well, dig.

00:36:58:04 - 00:37:03:12
Justin Coombs
Deep passion, stick to the things that you love doing, and you sort of can't go too far, I think.

00:37:03:15 - 00:37:37:18
Daniel Franco
Yeah, it's difficult. The thing to hold the mirror up to yourself. So in that, in that space, I think with your, your notion of I don't want to be put myself in a box and do something that I don't want to do, I think that that's quite clear cut. But when you're so connected to the purpose of what your business that you've created, the baby, your baby that you've created, and when you're so connected to the purpose and vision and literally everything in your internal being is like, no, I want to see this through.

00:37:37:18 - 00:37:42:12
Daniel Franco
Stepping away seems like kind of a contradiction, doesn't it?

00:37:42:15 - 00:37:56:21
Justin Coombs
Well, yes and no. Actually, I think it's to the level you assess the purpose, at some point you look at yourself and Guy is the best thing I can do for my purpose to change the way I'm involved. And it's not like I've stepped from God.

00:37:56:21 - 00:37:57:16
Daniel Franco
That's true.

00:37:57:18 - 00:38:22:09
Justin Coombs
It's true to the imagination. I'll go to meetings and Deborah will still introduce me as the founder, which is lovely. Yeah. And I still have my options in the company. So it's absolutely still part of me. It's just it got beyond my sort of day to day work. Yeah. And so now I have my day job trying to find the next guy I know, trying to say what we can do to, to get something going.

00:38:22:09 - 00:38:48:05
Justin Coombs
And I think it's one of these things I've talked about the numbers game before. You know, we need lots of people having a swing at training like companies. It shouldn't be an exception. Yeah, we need these over and over and over again and we need to watch 90% of them die and let them, you know, the ones that actually get through be the successes that will fade, the next crop coming through because it's a natural selection sort of game in biotech.

00:38:48:05 - 00:38:50:04
Justin Coombs
So you just need big numbers.

00:38:50:06 - 00:39:21:09
Daniel Franco
You know, I'm thinking when you say you let them go, I'm thinking of, you know, The Lion King, like where there's like the bone. The graveyard. Yeah. Is that is that kind of is there amazing ideas and potentially life saving ideas in that boneyard that just couldn't get commercialization because I didn't have someone like you or Mike is there is someone once said to me that the cure for cancer potentially could be in someone's inside of a kid's head or brain that couldn't afford an education.

00:39:21:14 - 00:39:30:06
Daniel Franco
Right. And then and, and like, that's kind of always stuck with me in the sense that it takes a process to actually cure cancer, not just the idea itself.

00:39:30:13 - 00:39:31:10
Justin Coombs
Absolutely.

00:39:31:13 - 00:39:41:23
Daniel Franco
And the idea of this boneyard of failed biotech, why wouldn't could you go around and search for some debris that you go? Actually, I could I could revive this.

00:39:41:25 - 00:39:55:24
Justin Coombs
Site, almost look at it the other way. Actually, I don't think it's a bona fide biotech because in some ways, that boneyard like, you know, come back to the salmon analogy, You know, you hear about the salmon swimming upstream, dying, but they act as fertilizer for the soil, for the trace.

00:39:55:26 - 00:39:57:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:57:10 - 00:40:15:04
Justin Coombs
So those failed biotechs, actually, I don't mind at all Those people come out with experience. There's data that gets generated they only value that I really say is where work is done, not well and doesn't give you an answer. Yeah. Generating an answer that wasn't what you expected. I don't see as a failure at all.

00:40:15:05 - 00:40:15:12
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:40:15:12 - 00:40:41:06
Justin Coombs
Okay. You still generated an art, so you've added to the the broader stock of knowledge. Yeah. Where I think we have a real bottleneck, particularly in Australia, not so much is the burnout out of failed biotechs, but it's the biotechs that were never born. So we say a lot of technology is languishing in universities, in research institutes, in health services where there's great ideas.

00:40:41:06 - 00:41:12:05
Justin Coombs
There's some drive, but it's quite hard to typically extract those technologies and get them out where they can have a chance at life. And that's one of the big reasons I came back towards health was, you know, we're way uniquely positioned to actually give birth to some of these ideas and try them out. And given the nature of our structure, we we've got a I won't say a risk free environment to to work on them, but we've got to have the right structure to have a go at these things.

00:41:12:05 - 00:41:13:18
Justin Coombs
Yeah. And see if they fly.

00:41:13:21 - 00:41:32:03
Daniel Franco
So tell us about them. What are some of the stuff you've told me, some of the amazing work that you guys are doing around, you know, the platypus Venom, which was one that just blew my mind to the bacteriophage. Yeah. Project can you can you talk to us about some of the work that you guys are doing there?

00:41:32:05 - 00:41:42:27
Justin Coombs
Look, I'll talk to the platypus, man. Yeah, Yeah. And it's a great Australian story side and I'll start with the thing everyone's worried about. No platypuses were harmed in this. Yeah.

00:41:43:02 - 00:41:47:15
Daniel Franco
You know, I'm going to go out and believe me, I did not know platypuses had venom.

00:41:47:17 - 00:42:19:03
Justin Coombs
No. Well, and that was the finding that started all this. Yes. It's an amazing sort of biological story. So male platypuses have a spear on their hind legs that they use to fight with other male platypuses. And as it turns out, the venom in them is a molecule which effectively controls insulin production. So it's a hormone. So what happens is the male platypuses spike each other and the winner who spikes the loser gives them a dose of this peptide.

00:42:19:03 - 00:42:40:06
Justin Coombs
And what it does is it causes a massive release of insulin in the the victim as well. What that does is takes all the glucose in their blood and packs it away, which they then have a hypoglycemic event and pass out. Yeah. So what happens then. Of course he's the male platypus. That's the winner can go and entertain the lady platypuses and what you got.

00:42:40:06 - 00:42:42:20
Justin Coombs
And then so night just cycle continue.

00:42:42:20 - 00:42:42:28
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:42:42:28 - 00:43:00:05
Justin Coombs
And then the you know, is it like something. Yeah. It's but what's amazing is that the molecule that for whatever reason nature decided was going to be found in the platypus venom actually is extremely similar to a molecule that we're all very familiar with which is the active ingredient isn't it.

00:43:00:10 - 00:43:16:25
Daniel Franco
Yeah. There's MP, is that right. Yeah. For those who don't know, is MP, if you've been living under a rock as Mpic is a really exciting weight loss drug I guess. But it's been around for a long time because it's diabetes drug. Yeah.

00:43:16:27 - 00:43:28:01
Justin Coombs
So it's designed to effectively control blood glucose. No, People have worked out some of the side effects of as big a weight loss because it slows down gastric transit. There's a bunch of things. So because.

00:43:28:02 - 00:43:35:15
Daniel Franco
What when you say GLP one GOP one is the hormone is that the right it's way of saying it that.

00:43:35:18 - 00:43:40:02
Justin Coombs
It's a peptide that acts on the GLP one receptor which then causes that, which.

00:43:40:02 - 00:43:48:08
Daniel Franco
Tells you that you're not as you're full when you eat a little bit. Is that is that what it does. It tells you that hang on, you're not hungry here.

00:43:48:09 - 00:43:51:00
Justin Coombs
It's a key component actually in your sugar metabolism.

00:43:51:00 - 00:43:51:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Okay.

00:43:51:23 - 00:44:09:17
Justin Coombs
So JLP one comes out when you've got sugar in your blood, so then that causes pain insulin to be released, which impacts the the sugar away. But then there's a whole bunch of physiological effects as well. So it slows down gastric emptying, which is sort of the fullness factor. So it's it's a molecule that's doing amazing things at the moment.

00:44:09:17 - 00:44:31:28
Justin Coombs
And it's it's a classic example of where the market's gone a little bit funny as well in that there's now a whole bunch of diabetics that are struggling to get supply of the jailbait, right, because the Hollywood celebrities are all trying to do it to get the enzyme. Yeah. Where are we going with polypeptides now? We're probably going to change the name, but stick with us for now.

00:44:32:02 - 00:44:49:26
Justin Coombs
Lady Pipp. Yeah. Is that where we went with the idea? Was, Well, nature's designed this sort of long lasting JLP one in Platypus to knock out the delays for quite a while, whereas human JLP one has a very natural short half life because you want it to turn on and off quickly depending on how much glucose is in your blood.

00:44:50:00 - 00:45:10:21
Justin Coombs
So we had this sort of crazy idea, and this is when I was at the first time actually what if we could actually mix the molecules so we could look at what molecule the platypus uses and we could look at the human version of JLP one. We had the made and over the last couple of years we've tested them and they work, so we know they.

00:45:10:24 - 00:45:13:04
Daniel Franco
Tested them where humans are in mice. So yeah.

00:45:13:06 - 00:45:38:25
Justin Coombs
So first of all, just in cells to say, can we get insulin production induced, Can we control blood glucose? We're now moving into animal models. So we know that these things can induce insulin production in mice. Yeah. So and now what we're about to embark on, in fact, we've just approved some new funding is believe it or not, you can make mice fat by feeding them effectively the mouse equivalent of McDonald's diet.

00:45:38:28 - 00:45:41:06
Justin Coombs
Yeah. Fattening up some.

00:45:41:09 - 00:45:43:16
Daniel Franco
Cream cheese is like, what's the what's was that?

00:45:43:18 - 00:45:46:06
Justin Coombs
What's that. Just call the high fat chow.

00:45:46:06 - 00:45:47:15
Daniel Franco
It's very Yeah yeah.

00:45:47:18 - 00:45:49:14
Justin Coombs
Basically it's Macca's from us.

00:45:49:15 - 00:45:50:06
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:45:50:08 - 00:45:55:17
Justin Coombs
You just feed them that for months they get horribly base and then we can give them.

00:45:55:24 - 00:45:56:12
Daniel Franco
Access to.

00:45:56:12 - 00:45:59:24
Justin Coombs
Any pet and see if we can actually get them to drop the weight.

00:45:59:27 - 00:46:05:00
Daniel Franco
So you, you building this as a weight loss drug or as a diabetes.

00:46:05:03 - 00:46:28:12
Justin Coombs
Well they always intimately both. Yeah. And so what we are going to want to do though is start to think about how do we differentiate these from some of the molecules that are on the market. Now, you've already pointed out that's a really important point, that the level of development around some is making it sort of friends will drop off a bit because they're becoming old molecules of generic.

00:46:28:12 - 00:46:50:07
Justin Coombs
So we're coming in what we think a new and different and then we also got some clever ideas around. We think our molecules might be a little bit more amenable to better ways of delivering it. So at the moment, as is largely injected, people don't like injecting themselves. So we've got some interesting ideas about how we might be able to adapt our molecule to other ways of being.

00:46:50:10 - 00:46:51:23
Daniel Franco
Like ingested or something.

00:46:51:26 - 00:47:04:28
Justin Coombs
Yeah, oral is one, but there's actually some even clever ways of doing it, which I won't go into now. But yeah, there's, there's other ways that you can get into people. We think brilliant doesn't involve having to stick yourself with a native.

00:47:05:02 - 00:47:13:14
Daniel Franco
Well when you when you were in human trials, give me a call. Got plenty, I got plenty of weight to try to remove. I'm more than happy to help out.

00:47:13:19 - 00:47:17:03
Justin Coombs
Everyone as as I try this line of sight. We're not quite there yet.

00:47:17:03 - 00:47:29:18
Daniel Franco
That's hilarious. So the other one that we were talking about recently was the The Phage Project. The Bacteriophage Project. Can you explain that? I thought that was really interesting.

00:47:29:18 - 00:47:42:29
Justin Coombs
Yeah. So this one's actually a rebirth of a very, very old technology, say, in sort of the 1920s. And people were developing, they use bacteria, phage to treat bacterial infections.

00:47:43:03 - 00:47:45:08
Daniel Franco
Can you explain what bacteriophages before?

00:47:45:15 - 00:48:05:23
Justin Coombs
So I'll go back a step. So bacterial infections, we're all familiar with them. You get a nasty chest infection, you might have a pseudomonas or something like that. So these are bacteria that get in and make you feel sick. Yeah. So in the same way that the bacteria is making you sick, bacteria themselves also get sick. So they have diseases too.

00:48:06:00 - 00:48:06:27
Daniel Franco
Because they're a living thing.

00:48:06:27 - 00:48:35:28
Justin Coombs
They're living thing. So it's, you know, this whole fractal idea that even the flies have fleas. So. Yeah, yeah. So bacteria themselves have pathogens that make bacteria sick and they are bacteria biologists and what they are, they're an amazing virus particle, basically. And these things infect bacteria. Give the bacteria nucleic acid signals to make morphology and then they end up making so many phage in the bacteria that the bacteria itself explodes and releases all the fat.

00:48:36:04 - 00:48:38:06
Daniel Franco
Is like the enemy of the enemy is an.

00:48:38:06 - 00:48:39:24
Justin Coombs
Enemy of the enemy is my friends.

00:48:39:24 - 00:48:40:11
Daniel Franco
Yeah, that.

00:48:40:11 - 00:49:09:01
Justin Coombs
Is the classic. And what's really nice with the bacteria viruses, they're beautifully adapted to killing bacteria but not adapted to infecting humans at all. So you're full of bacteriophage right now? Yeah. And they're all trying to keep the bacterial colonists of you in check. So what we've been doing for the last few years is working with a group out of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to start trying to isolate bacteriophage that are particularly good at killing bacteria that way.

00:49:09:07 - 00:49:35:26
Justin Coombs
Don't like. So these can be respiratory tract infections, lung infections, upper respiratory tract. There's even some amazing work coming out of UK where there's some bacteria that are implicated in skin cancers. And so if we can control the bacteria that infect wounds, all these sorts of things, we can we can manufacture them pretty easily. And what over the last few years this group has been able to do is again manufacture some of these and actually start treating a couple of humans.

00:49:35:26 - 00:49:56:15
Justin Coombs
So we've got an Einstein what a clinical trial called the space trial running out of the QE II right now. And that's created some patients. And we're also starting to see some potential to even treat patients under what we call compassionate use, where people could come to us and say, I've got this recurrent infection, antibiotics aren't working. Can you make me a faj tailored to my infection?

00:49:56:17 - 00:49:57:14
Daniel Franco
It's amazing.

00:49:57:17 - 00:50:07:21
Justin Coombs
Completely workable. And again, it's this idea of harnessing biology to help us so much more sophisticated than trying to use chemical poisons or something like that.

00:50:07:27 - 00:50:26:12
Daniel Franco
How much does this get involved with the gut health and the gut bacteria and the microbiome and all that? How does this sort of because the gut health thing is kind of exploded in the past five years or so, Everyone's becoming more and more aware about, you know, people are saying it's almost your second brain and and all these different things.

00:50:26:12 - 00:50:29:02
Daniel Franco
Can you explain how all this comes together?

00:50:29:07 - 00:50:59:15
Justin Coombs
look, your gut microflora are almost certainly held in check by a population of bacteria phage. And in fact, you know, if you get a Clostridium infection, that's almost certainly involving a component of it getting out of whack with the other bacteria in the virus. So one of the things that we have started some research on is can we get phage against things like Clostridium and some of those bugs where we're even playing with the idea of other got pathogens where we might be able to try and isolate some phage against them.

00:50:59:21 - 00:51:20:19
Justin Coombs
And it's this classic example. I think I made the point before, there are so many opportunities for development of new biotech products. If we've just got the will and the resources. Yeah, yeah. Clearly big thing. And you can say there's already some work going on in this space with companies like Iron Bank looking to essentially achieve the same end of rebalance.

00:51:20:20 - 00:51:42:19
Justin Coombs
You got microflora now they had taken the approach of fake transplants. Yeah, but again could approach it by the far side of things as well. If you can find a bacteria there that you want to try and get rid of or at least control and, you know, rather than having to have something like an anti what we'd be hoping for is you can just pop a capsule of Yeah.

00:51:42:22 - 00:52:12:25
Daniel Franco
The one thing that this really more in a personal thing more my wife had to go on a host of antibiotics for a while there and I fundamentally believe it's sort of had a bit of an impact on her gut health where she's got rosacea and stuff like that. And is that something where this type of work that you guys are doing can can help replenish gut health and, you know, build the phase that is that where it's going on my way off the track you.

00:52:12:28 - 00:52:36:26
Justin Coombs
Know theoretically yes. So one of the things with antibiotics have been an amazing thing for medicines. Yeah. They've saved essentially innumerable lives going forward. But one of the problems with antibiotics and it's being recognized is now that killing bacteria is a double edged sword. Yeah. So you kill the bad guys, that's great. But a lot of the time you'll kill some of the good guys as well.

00:52:36:26 - 00:53:03:17
Justin Coombs
And that's where you can get some of these dysbiosis in the gut where you start to say, well, actually we would have much preferred to have just killed the bad guys and left the good guys alone. And we actually think that's one of the primary opportunities with phage because they actually have variable what we call host range. So what we can do is then also select so we can say, right, we want to phage that specifically kills the bad guys but leaves the good guys alone.

00:53:03:22 - 00:53:21:24
Justin Coombs
So and we can simply screen for it so you can say, well which for doing that and not doing that, which again because we can take a personalized medicine approach with a far treatment, it's a lot easier to do than something like an antibiotic. You know, you've got to have a one size fits all approach.

00:53:21:27 - 00:53:29:19
Daniel Franco
It's amazing what sort of a a set of that. What's the most exciting thing in the biotech space that you're seeing right now?

00:53:29:21 - 00:53:52:09
Justin Coombs
Yeah, look, I think we're working in a lot of it. Yeah. Now I think the the sort of synthetic biology and immunotherapy still have a long way to run, and we've only just scratched the surface of what these things can do. And it's, you know, I think we'll start to move into applications outside cancer that got huge application potential for things like autoimmune disease.

00:53:52:12 - 00:54:27:04
Justin Coombs
And because what we're really recognizing is the sort of central role the immune system plays in a whole range of disease conditions, it's, you know, not just inflammation. Yeah, it's got a pivotal role in cancer, it's got a pivotal role in infection. It's got a pivotal role in autoimmune disease AIDS. So I think if we can start to pull apart that seven, four, seven and understand really how that immune system works and how can tailor it to do certain things, then I think that's the bit that I think is really exciting and it's coming off the basis of development of a whole bunch of basic research tools around, you know, actually being able to genetically

00:54:27:04 - 00:54:32:08
Justin Coombs
engineered immune cell. You know, without that earlier work, you'd never be able to do something simple and stuff.

00:54:32:11 - 00:54:56:09
Daniel Franco
As you're talking there, I'm thinking about I'm thinking about the conspiracy theorists of the world. Right. And I not that I want to dive into that too much, but there's the common talk, especially on social media, where you see people saying, you know, it's cure for cancer, but the governments aren't releasing it. There's cure for motor neuron disease, but they're not doing this.

00:54:56:09 - 00:55:13:14
Daniel Franco
They're not doing that. What's your answer? What's your response to some of the conspiracy theorists of the world who think that these these cures are already available, but just not not being released by a way of controlling population and everything else.

00:55:13:16 - 00:55:34:14
Justin Coombs
So these probably a kernel of truth in it, but not the one they think. And I think it gets back to this point that you made earlier, you know, the cures for cancer, various diseases are sitting in the head of some kid right now. Yeah. So I suspect there are amazing breakthroughs that are sitting out there that remain unrecognized or unexploited.

00:55:34:14 - 00:55:53:07
Justin Coombs
I don't think there's an active campaign to suppress them. Yeah, but I do think a lack of opportunity for these things to get translated, or at least tried is probably holding back some things that are there. I mean, every great therapy is touted as a stupid idea or something. It was just lurking on someone's bench at some point.

00:55:53:07 - 00:55:59:23
Justin Coombs
Yeah, I think it's one of those things where there's a kernel of truth that's being looked at probably in slightly the wrong way.

00:55:59:27 - 00:56:05:20
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Yeah. So it's not the government suppressing, it's just a lack of availability of funds and well.

00:56:05:22 - 00:56:40:29
Justin Coombs
Opportunity or it's not even funds necessarily. So we spend a lot on research. Yeah. In Australia I think it's more the way we deploy it. We do a lot of, you know, very good basic research, but we do tend to lave, you know, pushing some of these things toward the market a little bit underfunded. And, and I think it's also a cultural thing in that where in some ways we're quite happy to say, aren't we doing great research, use the papers but taking that next risky step where you put yourself on that hash funnel that I talked about is something that we don't naturally do in Australia.

00:56:41:05 - 00:56:47:14
Daniel Franco
And what's the point of the research if we're not? That's the point you're trying to make that, yeah, it's the third space that you're trying to create.

00:56:47:16 - 00:57:12:12
Justin Coombs
Exactly. And I think we need to need that third space because typically it's the technology that's still too risky for industry to be able to go, you know, we're ready to run on this, but it's got to the point where it needs more than what the academic researchers are willing to do. So it is how do we identify and drag through those opportunities and what do we need to do along that path to polish them up ready so they do become hackable.

00:57:12:15 - 00:57:18:03
Daniel Franco
When you say it's too risky, what do you mean by that? Is it risk to human life? Is that what you're saying?

00:57:18:13 - 00:57:41:23
Justin Coombs
no. Typically it's commercially or technically risky. Okay. When I say too risky, I don't that now. You know, controlling things like actual medical risk is something we're really quite good at. We have, you know, the whole clinical trial regime for a reason. And that I think is really quite polished. When I say too risky, it's more, you know, people are they willing to risk something, you know, failing spectacularly?

00:57:41:25 - 00:57:46:06
Justin Coombs
Yeah. And I think it's something the Americans do better than us. Yeah.

00:57:46:08 - 00:57:48:00
Daniel Franco
So I just I what the I.

00:57:48:04 - 00:57:49:23
Justin Coombs
Guess it's let's have a crack.

00:57:49:29 - 00:57:52:02
Daniel Franco
At the state of mentality over there that.

00:57:52:05 - 00:58:04:06
Justin Coombs
Absolutely. And I think it's also a cultural thing so you know people look at someone with a couple of child star Labs behind them they're going to get You've got some experience. Yeah. Rather than all your bad domes.

00:58:04:09 - 00:58:08:04
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Whereas in Australia, if you failed, you failed. Yeah. Yeah. Which is.

00:58:08:04 - 00:58:17:20
Justin Coombs
Which has a really chilling effect. Yeah. Because then people tend to go into derivative predictable areas because they think well because it's. Yeah.

00:58:17:21 - 00:58:44:17
Daniel Franco
It's a shame isn't it. Yeah. Look where you know that the business that I run and operate is big in the change space. We work with a lot of organizations helping them through change and transformation, and I am really interested in your expertise in this world because I know that what you guys are doing in health, you're doing some really amazing change and transformation programs out there, but we often talk about the concepts with Change IQ.

00:58:44:20 - 00:59:10:10
Daniel Franco
We often talk about the concept of sense making and how to help people understand and navigate complexity during times of change. And in the biotech world, digital world, AI, everything that's happening, there's a lot of change. How do you help? How do you, when you set out to lead through change, how do you help your teams and your stakeholders make sense of change, especially in a world that's so complex in what you're doing?

00:59:10:10 - 00:59:32:21
Justin Coombs
I think a lot of it's about establishing the why. Why are we doing this at all? And if you can get sort of the hearts and minds as to the purpose of it all, then I think a lot of the the steps, you know, even if they're quite abrupt or big, start to make sense and people go, Yeah, well, this might be uncomfortable, but I'm I can appreciate why I'm being uncomfortable.

00:59:32:21 - 00:59:43:12
Justin Coombs
Yeah, correct. And I think if you're I think some of the more change that I've seen happen in other organizations is being away. Someone's gone, Well, we're just doing this and it's why do we do it? Well, just.

00:59:43:19 - 00:59:46:23
Daniel Franco
Go and do that because that's what the exact said.

00:59:46:29 - 01:00:05:19
Justin Coombs
Yeah. Whereas I think if you can establish the why you can, you know, try and build that case, you know, pitch the reason, you know, this is going to help us in the long run or it's going to help someone else in the long run, it really smooths that path forward and you can get people, you know, willingly embracing rather than resisting.

01:00:05:21 - 01:00:29:12
Daniel Franco
How do you put that in practice? Because it is it is a difficult thing, right. And what we typically see is that the executive team have been talking about change and transformation in the strategy and all that for the past six, 12 months or however it might be a building. This plan, new strategy comes out saying we're going to make all these changes and then they don't understand why the people don't understand it, because they had been working on it for the past six months.

01:00:29:12 - 01:00:36:10
Daniel Franco
It's just like you haven't allowed your teams to absorb it. You haven't communicated it correctly. How do you combat that?

01:00:36:15 - 01:01:08:15
Justin Coombs
So look, in startup up everything is effectively that situation. So I go back to this idea of, you know, before you doing practical things, you introduce the concept and you know, try and get the vision what into more than the what. Yeah. And if you can sell you know the big picture of this is going to be good then I think it's made it through and the classic example is starting kind of getting onto sort of I won't say being an evangelist, but yeah, you know, there's a massive opportunity here.

01:01:08:16 - 01:01:23:24
Justin Coombs
Are we wanting to go and change that? You know, we know all the things that could go wrong. You know, this is high risk, but we've got an opportunity. Do we want to take it? And in that case, you know, we're able to do it. But it's about having that sort of the cliche, you know, the light on the hill.

01:01:23:25 - 01:01:27:09
Justin Coombs
Yeah, there is no absolutely that which I.

01:01:27:16 - 01:01:36:18
Daniel Franco
And then when you get the stories of Emily, as you said earlier, that only fuels the need to want to do more and change more and innovate more.

01:01:36:20 - 01:01:40:13
Justin Coombs
So I used to start my funding pitches for Corrina with the Emily story.

01:01:40:13 - 01:01:40:29
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

01:01:40:29 - 01:02:00:01
Justin Coombs
And because it's such an easy thing to relate to and you know, people say, we don't care if this is high risk, you know, we think this is worth the swing. Yeah. And I think if you can do that, it's great. Now, now, obviously, not every, you know, change, you know, employment is, you know, chasing the cure for cancer.

01:02:00:05 - 01:02:05:14
Justin Coombs
No. But again, if you can have that thing that people can just relate to, yeah, I think it really works well.

01:02:05:14 - 01:02:23:14
Daniel Franco
They need to make sense. They need to make sense of why we're doing this. I think people are more likely to step into the ambiguity when they understand why they're doing it. We often like it to a goat track. If you ever heard of the analogy of a goat track. So if you think about a house on top of a hill and you go, this is the path that we've always gone.

01:02:23:14 - 01:02:43:08
Daniel Franco
This is the way it works. We're asking you every single day to get to the top of the hill. Take this path. Walk this path. It's it's nice. It's gravel, it's tree lined, all the above. And then one day executive comes along and says, right, you're going down the goat track now, you're not going up that path. You go on to the left and everyone's sitting there and going, Well, hang on, it's money.

01:02:43:08 - 01:03:00:20
Daniel Franco
Like, why would we go? That's not we've we've always done it this way. This is the path we've always gone. Why would we take the go to our car, make sense of it. So it's our job as leaders, as we embark on change, is to help people understand why we're taking the right track and then make them feel safe while walking along that walking on that goat track.

01:03:00:22 - 01:03:20:02
Justin Coombs
Exactly. And again, when I was that carrying on, I think that was part of it. To say, you know, we are embarking on something risky. We're getting you to do research that you haven't done before. But, you know, my job as the CEO of the organization is to ensure the resources are here. And, you know, this isn't going to trash your reputations if we do something silly.

01:03:20:04 - 01:03:25:13
Justin Coombs
So it's time and again. It puts a bit of load on the leaders. But I think it's you know, it's what they do.

01:03:25:18 - 01:03:38:05
Daniel Franco
But it's their role as an actor. Can you talk to us about the changes that you guys are going through? It always helps because you're looking at I in a in a special way, aren't you? It'd be interesting to unpack that. Yeah.

01:03:38:08 - 01:04:04:17
Justin Coombs
So what we're starting to really say is I'm making inroads into the health care setting on a whole range of fronts. So we've got to live by projects right now. And what it is, is it's all about the way I like to think of it. It's about converting the mountains of data that we have in hospitals and health care and turning it into information useful to clinicians, nurses, whoever.

01:04:04:21 - 01:04:33:04
Justin Coombs
So we've got in fact, we've just had a little island software company move into our building site. We we really embraced it. Brilliant. So we've got our accelerators down south and our first tenant was a health care AI company, right? So we've got a project that's actively looking at making sense of massive strains of data that come through intensive care units and turning it into doctor digestible information that they can start to make more informed clinical decisions.

01:04:33:04 - 01:04:46:23
Justin Coombs
They can look at histories of patients through hospitals, how patients have come in and out of the ICU, longitudinal observations, that sort of thing. So we've got that to the point where there are working prototypes right now down in the Royal Adelaide, which is amazing.

01:04:46:28 - 01:04:52:06
Daniel Franco
Is there any risk with that that the I might be wrong? Is that something that people are worried about?

01:04:52:07 - 01:05:06:14
Justin Coombs
That's what we're doing with the KISS project, as we call it. That's actually not creating anything new. Okay. To actually about assembling the information or the data that's already there just in a more digestible way. So it's about the human factors.

01:05:06:15 - 01:05:07:07
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

01:05:07:09 - 01:05:16:13
Justin Coombs
How do we make exactly what you said? How do we make sense of this mountain of information's? There in the best way for the human to interact with it? Yeah. So that's.

01:05:16:15 - 01:05:17:09
Daniel Franco
That's exciting.

01:05:17:09 - 01:05:18:25
Justin Coombs
Going along beautifully. And actually.

01:05:18:26 - 01:05:21:24
Daniel Franco
Is anyone else doing that or is that something groundbreaking though?

01:05:21:25 - 01:05:40:07
Justin Coombs
As far as we can tell, I think we're the only people building a similar tool. And what's been really nice and this is again, one of the strengths with all this health is we actually try and work with clinician and users right from day one. Yeah, we don't do they build it they will come the theory. Yeah. Actually going, okay, who needs to use this.

01:05:40:07 - 01:05:41:04
Justin Coombs
How are we going to.

01:05:41:07 - 01:05:42:07
Daniel Franco
How do we partner with them.

01:05:42:07 - 01:06:04:09
Justin Coombs
Through them? And obviously our connection with as a health and the central and local health network has been instrumental in getting some of these tools that led to the hospitals that will use it. But there are they I told that I'm really proud of because when we started just recently is looking at making hospitals run more efficiently in terms of the way they interact with their billing and Medicare.

01:06:04:09 - 01:06:43:14
Justin Coombs
So at the moment there are teams of people. I didn't realize this was the guys that take doctors notes and convert them into billable events for Medicare. Yeah, well, and that's how our hospitals functions fund themselves. So what we're looking at is building some tools that will the these clinical coders and stakeholders actually again, take that mountain of data that exists around a patient's experience with the hospital and more easily turn it into these billable codes that's, you know, not onerous, more accurate and actually meets all of the all the many administrative and data requirements that are needed to to get these bills through.

01:06:43:16 - 01:06:59:13
Justin Coombs
That's exciting. So again, trying to help the coders rather than you know, we're not looking to replace any humans with AI. We just want to make their jobs better and easier so we can have, you know, more hospital people doing hospital ing and less time doing admin.

01:06:59:21 - 01:07:29:27
Daniel Franco
Yeah, productivity at its finest. That's what is there for going back to the first AI pace that you're looking at in grabbing the data on the individual. I was, I was informed of the well, I don't know if this is actually in play at the moment, but the idea that I could, in coming back to Katrina, biotech and cancer and everything else, if with the amount of data that we have in the world, we could potentially understand genetic makeup.

01:07:29:27 - 01:08:05:03
Daniel Franco
So you're an Anglo-Saxon 40 year old white male or, you know, 30 year old female, African-American female or whatever it might be, and you have a particular type of cancer, and let's call it I don't know about cancer or what have you. And with all this data across the world, you could look at in an instant what a person with your similar blood type and genetic makeup and the therapies in which that and what's been the most successful, and then pull that data together and go right there as you one.

01:08:05:10 - 01:08:20:20
Daniel Franco
So it's no longer your your your doctor that's making the call it's the it's this this is what's had the most success. Right. And we start with the number one on the list and we'll work our way to. And if that doesn't work, is that available? Is that something that's happening.

01:08:20:22 - 01:08:42:18
Justin Coombs
It's being built as we speak, saying. But the bottleneck with all of that is what we call the functional genomic work. So it's so yes, know all of your genetic variability and I know how you went in your therapy with the drugs that we used, but the hard bit is still sort of the wet biology of knowing that, well, the correlations effectively.

01:08:42:18 - 01:09:00:05
Justin Coombs
So if you've got this genetic make up and there's, you know, 20 examples of people like you. Yeah, and we tried 20 different drugs and then we can start to say, well, this makeup tended to work better with this drug. But what we still need to do is the wet biology work and saying, Well, who did well with what?

01:09:00:08 - 01:09:23:01
Justin Coombs
Yeah, So the markers are very easy to get. It's now doing what we call the functional genetic work. So yeah, but this is happening now. And so there have biobanks of cancers that are being established. Cancers get profiled to various markers where in fact we have an active project now, Adults Health, where we're actually trying to match drugs to certain markers in childhood cancers.

01:09:23:01 - 01:09:30:08
Justin Coombs
So that's sponsored with the Bone Broth Foundation. So we've got projects working in that space, but that is a that's a massive global task.

01:09:30:12 - 01:09:30:26
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

01:09:30:27 - 01:09:43:03
Justin Coombs
The bigger that database gets, the better because eventually you get to the point where you can start to get some evidence guided data on how a particular individual cancer could be treated. Yeah.

01:09:43:06 - 01:09:58:03
Daniel Franco
And then it's not what we want. Like we want that to actually happen. And some of the way it was put to me was imagine if one of your children was suffering from this particular cancer and all the information is there readily, but you just know that to do it because of privacy laws or this the other won't.

01:09:58:03 - 01:10:23:07
Justin Coombs
I mean, some of it actually this is where the personalized medicine and things like CAR-T starts to make sense. So as I mentioned earlier, that the CAR-T is directed against a very specific protein that lives on the cancer and the way patients are selected to go on to the clinical trial is they're actually screened. So they take a biopsy of the cancer and they say, do you have this particular protein or not?

01:10:23:07 - 01:10:39:26
Justin Coombs
Because if you don't, we're not going to put you on the drug. And that's you know, we're very much at the front end of this personalized medicine approach. But eventually, with enough data behind it, you'll be able to say, okay, well, here's your list of markers. He is all the people like you that have been treated with various different drugs.

01:10:39:26 - 01:10:52:00
Justin Coombs
We think it'll be drugs IIB and say that will be the best bet this year or even more cleverly, all these markers of cancer associated, we're going to build a bespoke immune cell to attack that.

01:10:52:04 - 01:10:55:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah, that's brilliant. When's eventually to you what is eventually.

01:10:55:22 - 01:10:58:09
Justin Coombs
Well countries happening now Yeah.

01:10:58:11 - 01:11:04:24
Daniel Franco
But when does this become is it mainstream now. Like when does it become business as usual?

01:11:04:26 - 01:11:11:15
Justin Coombs
So is there won't I don't think there will be an event where one day we wake up and go personalized medicines. I think.

01:11:11:16 - 01:11:11:29
Daniel Franco
It's just.

01:11:11:29 - 01:11:22:00
Justin Coombs
It's going to it has been creeping already for years. Yeah. It will continue to creep in. The granularity of those decisions will get smaller and smaller and smaller.

01:11:22:02 - 01:11:33:21
Daniel Franco
And so from a numbers perspective is, is it that we in the next five years should see a massive transformation in the way in which we view.

01:11:33:23 - 01:11:52:16
Justin Coombs
Look at this or think there will be a cliff linking it now so there are already prognostic predictors of cancer that you will get screened for that are associated with, you know, better or worse outcome. We've just looked at one now at Odds Health, where we've got a predictor of whether one of these PD one drugs might actually work for you or not.

01:11:52:18 - 01:12:14:03
Justin Coombs
Yeah, okay. Because, you know, being able to pick that sort of 20 to 30% that have the amazing response from the rest. Yeah, we think patients would like to know which bucket they're in, you know, before they start with, you know, some of those decisions. So I don't think there'll be that step change. I think, you know, in 20 years time you look back and go, God, things were a lot quieter back then.

01:12:14:04 - 01:12:17:03
Justin Coombs
Yeah, I think it'll be a gradual so.

01:12:17:11 - 01:12:42:23
Daniel Franco
Question and it's it's a it's a tough question and one that I don't want to put you on the spot with. But if a family member or a friend or a relative or someone came to you in this day and age and said, I'm I've got cancer, stage four cancer or stage three cancer or whatever stage they are, What what would your advice be to them right now?

01:12:42:26 - 01:13:08:13
Justin Coombs
Yes I it would be to obviously work with the oncologists. I mean, these guys, the guys and gals at the cutting edge of what they're doing think there's an amazing raft of clinical trials that are happening at the moment right now, if you know, a cancer was suitable for treatment with a PD one inhibitor, I think they're the ones that are pretty mainstream for, you know, a lot of cancers.

01:13:08:13 - 01:13:16:18
Justin Coombs
Not every cancer is responsive to these PD one inhibitors, but they are you know, they have been an utter game changer. Yeah. At the moment.

01:13:16:22 - 01:13:22:27
Daniel Franco
So. PD So you can say I want a PD one receptor trial or something that is that.

01:13:23:03 - 01:13:30:03
Justin Coombs
Yes. So there's a bunch of trials but there's a bunch of commercial drugs now as well. So again, if you had your oncologists, you know, trained.

01:13:30:05 - 01:13:31:20
Daniel Franco
They're well aware of what's going on, well.

01:13:31:20 - 01:13:48:23
Justin Coombs
Aware of what's going on, not just what's on market, but also what trials are available. But again, you know, if one of my daughters got a look, Amy, I'd be up for the counter therapies. Yeah, right now. And that's been an amazing thing that's literally happened in the last five years.

01:13:48:26 - 01:14:00:09
Daniel Franco
So so you would say that we're in Australia, your cardiologists would have an absolute awareness of all the potential trials that are going on in the world.

01:14:00:11 - 01:14:00:25
Justin Coombs
No.

01:14:00:28 - 01:14:10:12
Daniel Franco
Yeah. And I think that's the point, is that there might be some stuff that you miss out on and you lose a family member. That's kind of a how do you know?

01:14:10:17 - 01:14:34:13
Justin Coombs
I mean, you can't expect every doctor to be aware of every trial that's around. One of the things actually, we do have a very varied sort of driven, tech focused ophthalmologists. Actually, there are and it's got a real interest actually in developing some tools that can start to flag trials for patients based on their demographics records. Yeah, I think so.

01:14:34:18 - 01:14:47:00
Justin Coombs
Yeah. Which gets to your point, correct? Yeah. Where you can say, you know, you're not relying on that unrealistic expectation of a doctor knowing every trial that's going to have software that says, okay, well, you mate this, this and this inclusion.

01:14:47:00 - 01:14:48:23
Daniel Franco
Is a database. Brilliant.

01:14:48:29 - 01:15:03:28
Justin Coombs
And the database is exists clinical trials databases exist for both Australia and the US. So the data's out there. So again, it's how can we use some of these AI tools to start making those connections. Yeah. These big pools of data and turn it into useful information.

01:15:04:06 - 01:15:11:06
Daniel Franco
And are the trials that we have available here in Australia, are they Australian made only trials or do we have access to American known?

01:15:11:06 - 01:15:23:08
Justin Coombs
So now Australia is a very popular trial site, so globally sourced innovative products. Yeah, we have a lot of trials running in Australia that are products developed over say elsewhere.

01:15:23:11 - 01:15:53:15
Daniel Franco
Which is exciting too for this industry to continue to forge forward. It's going to need some real leadership. And this third space, I want to keep coming back to this because it just sounds like to me that there is a lot of a lot of missed opportunity in this third space of how do we actually get what is an amazing research and biotech research into, a commercially sound product leadership is something that I'm very interested in.

01:15:53:17 - 01:16:02:07
Daniel Franco
Who is leading this in this space, who is and and what does the world need from a leadership point of view in this space.

01:16:02:12 - 01:16:23:08
Justin Coombs
So I think it's an emerging need. Yeah, it's starting to be recognized. I think we spend a long way, did spend a long time trying to push from both sides rather than grow something in the middle. So I think we are starting to see some appetite. Actually, this is something that's required in the middle. You know, I've used this line before.

01:16:23:08 - 01:16:43:21
Justin Coombs
I said, you know, the only way to take, as far as I'm concerned, gets out of the lab and into application industries if someone carries it. I think it's a quite human driven thing. Yeah. You know, there have been attempts to systematize things with, you know, you know, various IP and commercialization models and, you know, try and turn them into a bunch of roles and it's just going to happen.

01:16:43:24 - 01:17:06:12
Justin Coombs
I don't think they've worked particularly well. What I think we need to focus on is the cohort of people that are going to make those connections, assess those opportunities, because at the moment we still can't, I think, make it down to a systematized set of roles. And I think the drive and desire to do it is something that still is an inherently human thing.

01:17:06:15 - 01:17:32:05
Justin Coombs
Yeah, but what we are starting to say is recognition from both I think the research community and industry to say, well, there is this group that we want to try and build in the middle and we're starting to see some real efforts actually from things like their Quality Research Centers program in Australia, where they're really starting to position science as that bridge and people associated with the science aids as the people that will do that, carrying.

01:17:32:12 - 01:17:32:18
Daniel Franco
The.

01:17:32:18 - 01:17:35:23
Justin Coombs
Ground across the divide between academia and industry.

01:17:35:29 - 01:18:02:05
Daniel Franco
Yeah, beautiful. If they're like what? What do we need to know that, you know, right now? I think that's kind of a question like there's a lot going on in your brain and obviously there's things you kind of say from a legal standpoint and all the above. But to the common folk out there, whether it's about cancer research or whether it's about health care in general, what is it that you think we should we should all know and think about?

01:18:02:10 - 01:18:23:17
Justin Coombs
Look, I think what we should think about is that people are trying you know, we are actually out there trying to develop these things. And I think people should be supported to do it again. It's that cultural thing. You know, someone tries and fails with a bit of tech. It it shouldn't be. you failed. Yeah, well done.

01:18:23:17 - 01:18:46:18
Justin Coombs
Where's your next one. And that's one of the things that again, we really want to do it ourselves. We want to have that sort of recirculating group of people in tech saying, you know, our job is to try and launch things and some apply some way. And we fully accept that from the beginning. And I think if we can get people starting to to have that mindset of trial and error and pushing it forward.

01:18:46:20 - 01:19:15:14
Justin Coombs
And I think one of the things that we also need to do is build opportunities for people to move into space as well. So, you know, we do a lot of science push, particularly with kids, but then they you can say a wall is where they go and actually where does this go now? Yeah. So how do we build that industry around what we're doing to give opportunities for, you know, the next one of May coming along?

01:19:15:14 - 01:19:26:25
Justin Coombs
That guy? You know what? I really want to get into technology translation and not have to say, well, I'm going to have to go and forge my own path. You know, that starts to be archetypes and pathways for people in that space. Yeah.

01:19:26:28 - 01:19:55:17
Daniel Franco
I saw well, I mean, with the defense industry, the way it's going in the engineering space and the I even saw an ad on social media from Seipel the other day targeting Year 12 students. And I don't know if you saw that as well, targeting these 12 students who have just just successfully completed year 12 to there's a lot of industry that is after the the younger generation to come in.

01:19:55:17 - 01:20:07:05
Daniel Franco
Yeah. This one year seems to me as if it's one of the most important that you don't see the advertiser easing and I don't is there is that something.

01:20:07:08 - 01:20:25:00
Justin Coombs
And look there's there is always a bit of a push but I'm a big believer in the pull and leave way builds you know companies that are doing cool thing yeah if we put the current is up in lights you're going to get smart kids going actually I want to go. Yeah, I don't know this.

01:20:25:00 - 01:20:26:21
Daniel Franco
It's kind of sexy work, isn't it.

01:20:26:23 - 01:20:37:29
Justin Coombs
Yeah. So that's sort of my own philosophy. Yeah. We need some of that and calls startup culture. Yeah. And you know, where you actually get the best and brightest wanting to do it.

01:20:37:29 - 01:21:02:08
Daniel Franco
People want to change the world. There is a cultural transformation here, though, isn't there of the whole industry. It was kind of what you said earlier. How do we how do we change the the culture here within Australia, around the start up space and the failure space? What what is your perspective on it as opposed to just going, look, just just copy what America are doing?

01:21:02:08 - 01:21:15:29
Daniel Franco
Like what? What can we do here in Australia to remove, especially in South Australia, remove the tall poppy syndrome, all this stuff that happens? How do we culturally change and shift this industry?

01:21:15:29 - 01:21:40:05
Justin Coombs
Yeah, look, if I had all the solutions, putting them out there, but I think we can only just do it actually is the most important. And I don't think people will be told how they should think. And what we need to do is try and lead by example. And I'm hoping, you know, fingers crossed that, you know, companies like trying to do amazing things and it'll spawn the ones coming behind it.

01:21:40:06 - 01:21:58:18
Justin Coombs
We'll start to say, you know, people become famous not because they're really good at football, but, you know, they started Company X and that was a cool thing. Yeah. And we'll start to build some of the ecosystem around it as well. So, you know, you, you get the professional services that will be there to support that startup ecosystem.

01:21:58:18 - 01:22:17:12
Justin Coombs
And Adelaide is sort of a cool place to do it because where I think about the right science, what we don't have obviously is the huge pools of Capital One. Yeah, and San Francisco and Boston. Yeah, I think we've got a nice science for getting things done, so I think we'll have to do it in sort of Australian style.

01:22:17:12 - 01:22:33:00
Justin Coombs
Yeah, it won't be the big brash American way of doing it. That's not to say there isn't capital here for good ideas, but I think it's more convincing people that spraying some money at a little biotech company is equally fun, as you know, because the waterfront apartment in Sydney.

01:22:33:08 - 01:22:36:27
Daniel Franco
That's right. Yeah, because it comes with a bit of risk, doesn't it?

01:22:36:27 - 01:22:37:26
Justin Coombs
Absolutely.

01:22:37:28 - 01:22:48:17
Daniel Franco
What's your what excites you about the industry looking forward if you're going to cast your your mind forward ten years, what is it? What's the most exciting thing about this biotech world?

01:22:48:22 - 01:23:12:08
Justin Coombs
Yeah, look, to me, it's getting some of these new things out there and and it's not focusing on any particular one. You know what? I want people to come to events, and you talk about they're called little projects working on and, you know, the successes and failures they're having. And I want to see some people coming back for Rounds two and three and forward to say, you know, that project wasn't good.

01:23:12:08 - 01:23:23:25
Justin Coombs
So I'm I'm working on the next one and there's that support network around them to do it which again is probably a bit of naive. Yeah yeah, yeah that's, that's where I'd really like to see things going.

01:23:24:00 - 01:23:30:08
Daniel Franco
What's your, what's your proudest moment in, in all this that you've in your journey so far.

01:23:30:09 - 01:23:50:17
Justin Coombs
Well that's a tricky one. I know I've had some, you know, just little vignettes almost. I remember one of them was a creative moment where we saw the very first animal daughter actually in a social mixer, and one of the scientists just not got something to show. He pulls out of folder piece of paper just with a graph on it.

01:23:50:17 - 01:24:16:06
Justin Coombs
Yeah, actually, that makes me think, you know, there might be something here. Yeah, well, so that was an amazing moment. And Just when you have again, for me, it's always those sort of Genesis events where you see something appear for the first time and we've just done one at Odds health where we've got a, you know, large US investors showing some interest in one of our takes and you think God this really could launch this one.

01:24:16:06 - 01:24:24:01
Justin Coombs
Yeah so you have those events where you think right something's going to happen here. I don't know what it is. We're going to have something happen.

01:24:24:01 - 01:24:26:03
Daniel Franco
Is that excitement? That is.

01:24:26:05 - 01:24:27:09
Justin Coombs
What keeps you coming.

01:24:27:09 - 01:24:39:21
Daniel Franco
Back. Do you ever get frustrated that you can't get the money for something that you truly believe in? Or is it a case of actually this is working and the money sort of just comes?

01:24:39:23 - 01:25:01:18
Justin Coombs
The money never just comes. You've always got to, you know, pitch it and try it. But I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing. You don't want money to be too easy because that can actually be a little bit counterproductive. So you do want to send in your investments in terms of, you know, who's putting money. The problem is, you know, one person's discernment.

01:25:01:18 - 01:25:03:26
Justin Coombs
It's not obvious and sort of harsh. No.

01:25:03:27 - 01:25:05:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah, it's.

01:25:05:11 - 01:25:26:21
Justin Coombs
I think it's one of those things that you do have to just let sort of be a little bit emergent and actually have the opportunities and the money bumping up against each other and tough times find a natural equilibrium. So I don't think, you know, I always use the extreme. You know, if you had a provable cure for cancer, you will have no trouble raising money at all.

01:25:26:23 - 01:25:27:21
Daniel Franco
Absolutely.

01:25:27:24 - 01:25:41:13
Justin Coombs
But nothing's that black and white. So I think you do need to have that to and fro. And again, that's where I think we need more opportunities bumping into each other to reach that equilibrium, because the more you have, the more it will sort of average out to something sensible.

01:25:41:15 - 01:25:59:04
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Brilliant. Right. I'm conscious of time. Jump into some quick questions before I do that, I wanted to ask you just one quick question. If you had to look back at your journey and everything you've achieved so far, encapsulate your journey and in a seamless and or a message, what would that be?

01:25:59:10 - 01:26:28:03
Justin Coombs
So I've been asked this before actually at student events, you know, to them. And the advice I always give or the message I always give is focus on mastery in the present. So just try and be good at whatever the thing that's in front of you is now. Yeah, because the reality is that the big life changing things that you think will happen almost certainly won't, and the ones that you will never expect a million years will be the ones that have big differences to you.

01:26:28:03 - 01:26:29:24
Justin Coombs
So yeah, again, the one.

01:26:29:24 - 01:26:30:18
Daniel Franco
Step at a time.

01:26:30:18 - 01:26:34:04
Justin Coombs
One step at a time. Focus on the present and put in the best effort you can.

01:26:34:06 - 01:26:47:16
Daniel Franco
I love that. I love that. Right. Beautiful. Quick some quickfire questions as we as we round off the podcast. What's one book or or a book that you've given you read or recommended the most?

01:26:47:19 - 01:26:53:19
Justin Coombs
One That's actually compulsory writing for my children and I think it's the best book in the world is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

01:26:53:26 - 01:26:55:08
Daniel Franco
yes, brilliant.

01:26:55:14 - 01:27:04:13
Justin Coombs
I just love the the counterpoint of the big philosophical questions, the absurdity of day to day life. Yeah, So beautifully distilled in that book.

01:27:04:13 - 01:27:09:09
Daniel Franco
It's one of the best. Yeah, one of the best. What's one lesson that's taking you the longest to learn?

01:27:09:13 - 01:27:29:12
Justin Coombs
So I think again, I've made some notes, but I think one that's taken me a long time to learn coming from a very technical background is actually that any complex system, the most complicated and impactful is nearly always the people coming from a very strong science background that does take a while to hammer out into your head. But as I've got older, absolutely.

01:27:29:14 - 01:27:57:13
Daniel Franco
Or we work in change just in. So that is the I like that. So to be honest, every time we go into a company, the tech does what the tech needs to do. It's the people and the way in which they can make sense of it, adapt to try and get trained in it and be communicated to like there is the people and it's often referred to as the soft and fluffy stuff, which is the people part, but it's not it's the actually the hardest part is dealing with the human being.

01:27:57:13 - 01:27:58:29
Daniel Franco
So yeah, I am.

01:27:59:01 - 01:27:59:23
Justin Coombs
What I call the wet.

01:27:59:23 - 01:28:05:08
Daniel Franco
Wear. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what are some of the best advice that you've ever received?

01:28:05:11 - 01:28:23:06
Justin Coombs
So I've got to actually that for that because I had to remember the quotes. Yeah. So one was actually back when I was a patent attorney in training, one of the crusty old partners got out and said, you know, we're here drafting patents. This happens. And you've all been told that there's no one right way to do something.

01:28:23:08 - 01:28:46:15
Justin Coombs
We with that, but there's definitely a whole lot of wrong ways to do something. Yeah, a big part of success is learning to avoid them. So I thought, that's it. Yeah, that's classic one. And the other one I really like actually is one that came from my daughter and she called it the title Sweet Philosophy, which is the idea that doing something simple really, really well is often a whole lot better than trying to do something very complicated in a somewhat haphazard way.

01:28:46:15 - 01:28:47:22
Justin Coombs
Yeah.

01:28:47:24 - 01:29:14:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Both amazing lessons, I think for the first one is, a rule ladyship like I probably I if one lesson that it's taken me the longest to learn is probably to your first point is there's no one way of doing something right which means as a leader, when I sort of say this is the outcome I'm looking for, I'll go off and do this and people don't do it in the way in which I think it should be done.

01:29:14:15 - 01:29:35:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah, it's kind of like, hang on, what are you doing with it as a leader? It's about setting those boundaries, isn't it? Really? and then to your daughter's point, I mean, from what I've learned in the startup space or business, space is niching down is actually one of the most important things to do so lately. So yes.

01:29:35:10 - 01:29:35:27
Justin Coombs
Complexity.

01:29:35:27 - 01:29:46:12
Daniel Franco
I'm big on nice too. How is failure? And we've talked about failure a bit today, but house failure or apparent failure set you up for later success. Do you have a favorite failure?

01:29:46:15 - 01:30:05:18
Justin Coombs
Well, I think it's the one that we talked about earlier that, you know, some people would view know the kind of handover. Why did you give up your baby? Was that a did you say that is a failing? And to me, it absolutely wasn't the best thing we ever did for the company. So I think it's learning to, I would say stick to your lane.

01:30:05:18 - 01:30:22:08
Justin Coombs
But this idea that, you know, you've got a real strength, so why not just hammer away? Yeah. As much as you can. And it's not a failure to not sort of stretch yourself into areas that, you know, are at least not your real core. Yes, that's.

01:30:22:10 - 01:30:27:12
Daniel Franco
Yeah. And you get to find what your unique abilities and and what makes you sing. Yeah.

01:30:27:15 - 01:30:28:18
Justin Coombs
So absolutely.

01:30:28:22 - 01:30:32:18
Daniel Franco
What's one skill or talent you had that you wish you had but you.

01:30:32:18 - 01:30:53:08
Justin Coombs
Don't so this is one which is on being on a podcast but one thing I'm utterly shocking at is small talk Yeah events and what not it's my utter weakness because I watch my wife who that is utter. So yeah, talk to anyone about anything and chat on them best friends in 15 minutes and I just look at it God and I just do not know how was that?

01:30:53:08 - 01:30:55:13
Daniel Franco
Is your mind go into the technical.

01:30:55:15 - 01:31:09:28
Justin Coombs
Well, I don't know what it is. It's just I think it's because I'm usually so thinking about a whole bunch of you know. Yeah. Okay. Two things. And you know, that idea of turning it all off and just going to the purely, you know, social joy for its own, it's just not good.

01:31:09:28 - 01:31:37:21
Daniel Franco
It is tough, I think small talk, tough things to navigate through. And there's a quote that I love. It's by Eleanor Roosevelt where she says, you know, small minds discuss people average on average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas. Yeah. And And sometimes when you go to those networking events and you get off, we have to talk about this small stuff again.

01:31:37:24 - 01:31:50:20
Daniel Franco
When you want to be talking about the ideas and how we can change the world. So maybe you and I will get along at those networking events quite well. If you could swap lives for with anyone for one, who would it be?

01:31:50:22 - 01:31:58:10
Justin Coombs
Look, that was a really tough one. When you gave me the list, I decided, given the crazy busy year I've had this year, I'm actually picking a cat.

01:31:58:13 - 01:32:01:24
Daniel Franco
Yeah, well, you can lift yourself over to the laziest.

01:32:01:24 - 01:32:13:22
Justin Coombs
Great job. I just look at it and going, Now, who's running the show? Yeah, we're just your staff. Yeah. And so I'm. It was not for long. It's just a day I.

01:32:13:24 - 01:32:23:18
Daniel Franco
Was at The Simpsons or something that said, Who actually runs the world when you've got humans running after dogs and cats picking up this shit? Yeah, Yeah.

01:32:23:21 - 01:32:29:29
Justin Coombs
And it's a rescue guy, actually. What's going on in the brilliant?

01:32:30:01 - 01:32:35:03
Daniel Franco
If you can have a gigantic billboard anywhere in the world with anything written on it, what would it say and why?

01:32:35:10 - 01:32:38:17
Justin Coombs
Well, given my favorite book, there's only two words and it has to be panic.

01:32:38:18 - 01:32:39:28
Daniel Franco
Yeah, don't panic inside.

01:32:39:28 - 01:33:05:15
Justin Coombs
But again, I all joking aside, I actually think it is very good advice. I think some sort of way we tend to have at the moment, you know, a very panicky reaction to a lot of things. I think social media and electronic communication hasn't actually helped a lot. So I think a little bit of slowness and deliberation coming back into the way sort of people handle themselves is probably be actually very good for everyone.

01:33:05:18 - 01:33:36:09
Daniel Franco
Absolutely. I've never until now, I've never Stoicism and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is as you talk about that, because it is very much about that controlling one's emotion. I think of saying this someone yesterday, happiness is is a fleeting emotion and it's essentially reality, not meaning expectation, which is what panicking is. Yes, reality is not about to me, your your expectation.

01:33:36:09 - 01:33:41:21
Daniel Franco
I love it. If you were to start a podcast, what would it be about? I mean, this is be an easy one for you.

01:33:42:00 - 01:34:03:19
Justin Coombs
you may have to be something sciencey, but I love sort of. And again, I watch, you know, late night TV. Yeah, it's on like nine Rush where it's sort of unexplained things like Novo. the Greek, anti-Catholicism mechanisms, that sort of stuff that's out of place, that sort of things. I that's, that's what I'd have to do as my sort of guilty pleasure.

01:34:03:19 - 01:34:04:18
Justin Coombs
Yeah.

01:34:04:20 - 01:34:05:29
Daniel Franco
The mysteries of the world.

01:34:06:01 - 01:34:09:01
Justin Coombs
Given My small thought. Yeah. I reckon I'd make a shocking podcast.

01:34:09:06 - 01:34:13:02
Daniel Franco
If you could be famous for one thing, what would it be and why?

01:34:13:05 - 01:34:29:15
Justin Coombs
Yeah, so this was actually a really tough one for me. My idea of fame is probably a lot smaller than what a lot of people would expect. So I you know, I looked at sort of my motivations for doing all the stuff that I do. And for me, it's actually a family thing. So that's, you know, I looked right down to the underlying driver.

01:34:29:21 - 01:34:48:09
Justin Coombs
And for me, it's sort of obviously my own family and a very small horizon. But even for others, you know, ultimately you just want people to have sort of relaxed, relatively comfortable, happy lives. Yeah, It's it's that sort of which I know, you know, it should make your answer all that sort of Yeah. And it's not really I know.

01:34:48:11 - 01:34:58:13
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Being what I'm hearing is you want to be success to you is value your community almost value in your in your family.

01:34:58:13 - 01:35:03:19
Justin Coombs
And it's a really, really hard thing to try and articulate. And like I said, I'd much rather explain.

01:35:03:19 - 01:35:10:00
Daniel Franco
Yeah, yeah. What's if you could sorry if you could time travel to any event in history, where would it be.

01:35:10:03 - 01:35:17:28
Justin Coombs
If this was a shocker as well? And it's a weird one, but something that's always fascinated me is this concept of the beginning.

01:35:18:00 - 01:35:18:19
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

01:35:18:21 - 01:35:31:03
Justin Coombs
You know, the Big Bang, whether it's the Big Bang, it's a sort of biblical Genesis event, you know, whether it's the simulation turned on, whatever it is. But I think that would give real insight as to the the point of it all.

01:35:31:06 - 01:35:45:18
Daniel Franco
You've just opened Pandora's Box talking about the simulation theory on this podcast. I really like that idea about a simulation, I think I don't buy that. I don't buy into it. I don't disregard it.

01:35:45:20 - 01:35:46:06
Justin Coombs
Yeah.

01:35:46:08 - 01:35:47:03
Daniel Franco
It's interesting.

01:35:47:04 - 01:35:52:07
Justin Coombs
Well, I mean, if you'd really geek out on it, it's the maths that makes it at least correct.

01:35:52:11 - 01:35:57:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah, it's down to a pixel like the atom is. The pixel is kind of like all the different things that can.

01:35:57:21 - 01:36:00:02
Justin Coombs
Well it's the idea of the Planck like thing, the pixel.

01:36:00:03 - 01:36:01:25
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And we could.

01:36:01:25 - 01:36:02:17
Justin Coombs
Do a whole lot.

01:36:02:20 - 01:36:08:06
Daniel Franco
Yeah we could. That's a, that's an interesting. What if you became invisible. What's the first thing that you would do.

01:36:08:08 - 01:36:15:27
Justin Coombs
Well, being a person, the first thing I'd have to do is work out the roles and candidate, visible person. Say themselves. These I'd have to look at my fate.

01:36:16:01 - 01:36:23:12
Daniel Franco
You've gone right to that level. Yeah, that's true. You look at whether you could see. I never thought about that. Could you actually see self if you're invisible?

01:36:23:12 - 01:36:31:27
Justin Coombs
I don't. I sense the roles because you'd have to night because if you can't see your hands and feet then you'd be worried about what you're actually then going to do.

01:36:31:29 - 01:36:36:05
Daniel Franco
If you could see then everyone else can see it well, so I'm assuming you can't see.

01:36:36:05 - 01:36:37:27
Justin Coombs
So the nature of the invisibility.

01:36:38:05 - 01:36:39:01
Daniel Franco
here we go.

01:36:39:03 - 01:36:40:19
Justin Coombs
Next. Anyway.

01:36:40:22 - 01:36:45:29
Daniel Franco
This is what we can start a podcast about. I mean, if you had any superhero power, which one would it be?

01:36:46:09 - 01:37:02:25
Justin Coombs
look, I'm going to be flippant on this one. We're doing some renovations around our house at the moment, and I have some high gutters and. Yeah, which got head getting on the ladder because I'm at that age where I've become a place I'm falling off. Yeah. And I super stretch for sure. Super stretch. I can reach up to the galaxy, the.

01:37:02:28 - 01:37:08:17
Daniel Franco
Brilliant if and last one, my favorite question of the whole podcast. What's your best.

01:37:08:17 - 01:37:24:08
Justin Coombs
Budget? Like I said, this has been cringe tested as my daughters, particularly my youngest, because she allegedly is the strongest printmaker. So I've tried a few, but this one seemed to be the best one. And it is. How can you tell when a joke has turned into a dead joke?

01:37:24:13 - 01:37:27:09
Daniel Franco
Hacking. So when the jokes turned into a dead joke.

01:37:27:11 - 01:37:29:16
Justin Coombs
I know when it becomes apparent.

01:37:29:21 - 01:37:51:22
Daniel Franco
That's brilliant. It's so bad. It's good. I love it. Thank you very much for your time today, Justin. It's been a wonderful, wonderful conversation. I guess I'm going to speak on behalf of everyone. Thank you for all the amazing work that you're doing in this industry, in the biotech industry. You are having impact on human beings and their lives and their longevity.

01:37:51:22 - 01:38:17:02
Daniel Franco
And I think it's something you should you and your teams should be very, very proud of. Yeah, I appreciate it. The conversation coming in. I've learned so much of you and a couple of conversations we've had to keep doing the amazing things that you are doing on health as well. Keen to watch that, watch that story grow and see some of these, you know, especially the platypus, when I'll be called up for the human human trials.

01:38:17:02 - 01:38:22:09
Daniel Franco
So keep doing what you're doing. And yeah, really excited to see see it grow.

01:38:22:11 - 01:38:24:12
Justin Coombs
Well, thanks for having me, Daniel. A great opportunity.

01:38:24:13 - 01:38:29:07
Daniel Franco
Not a problem. If anyone wants to work and they get in contact with you or learn more about what you guys are doing. Yeah.

01:38:29:07 - 01:38:39:20
Justin Coombs
Look, just reach out to me. Was out so you can come through our website. We've got a inquiries box where you can email me directly. Jay Coombs at uthealth dot com today.

01:38:39:27 - 01:38:44:06
Daniel Franco
Beautiful. That's it from us. Thank you. Everyone will catch you next time.

01:38:44:11 - 01:38:44:21
Justin Coombs
Thank you.

01:38:44:21 - 01:39:03:20
Daniel Franco
Thanks for listening to the podcast so you can check out the show notes if there was anything of interest to you and find out more about us at Synergy IQ dot com today. I am going to ask though if you did like the podcast, it would absolutely mean the world to me if you could subscribe, write and review and if you didn't like it, that's alright too.

01:39:03:27 - 01:39:07:15
Daniel Franco
There's no need to do anything. Thank you guys. All the best.