Hi, and welcome to Business Without Bullshit.
I'm Pippa Sturt, and alongside me is my co host, Gemma Hotter.
Hi Gemma.
Hi Pippa.
And today we're joined by John West.
John West is Chief Development Officer of CyMar, a biotechnology research company focusing on type 2 diabetes prevention and treatment.
Hi John.
Hello.
Um, so John, we always start with um, sort of basic question, what's keeping you up at night?
Oh, well, what's keeping me up at night is, uh, is fundraising.
Cymar is a pre revenue company.
Oh, okay.
And, uh, we are commercializing four products for the detection, prevention, and reversal of type 2 diabetes.
All four of those products need to go through a regulatory pathway.
It's, uh, the FDA in the States and, uh, Health Canada, uh, here in Canada.
And that can take ten years and over a hundred million dollars to get those products to market.
So is that because they're medicines, or?
Yeah, that's right.
Two of them are nutraceuticals, so more like vitamins, and they have an easier path to market.
And then, uh, two of them are pharmaceuticals, so those go through three phases of clinical trials.
And is this kind of groundbreaking?
At the moment there's nothing that cures type 2 diabetes, right?
That's right.
Uh, talking about a cure is, is a pretty big statement.
So, what we have found is, uh, 30 years ago there was a discovery in the laboratory that insulin is not plain alone.
So, most of us know that diabetes has to do with insulin.
If you don't have enough of it, then your blood sugar goes up.
Your pancreas produces this insulin, and, uh, so it's vital for, uh, for your health.
But what we, we've discovered is that there's another hormone produced by the liver, we call it hepatilin.
And this hormone is, uh, released, uh, when you eat.
It reduces your blood sugar at two thirds of the firepower of what we thought was, uh, happening from insulin is happening.
from hepatolin.
And, uh, the most important part is that we've learned that insulin is taking all that sugar from your blood and storing it in fat, where hepatolin is partitioning those nutrients into muscle.
So what's this called?
Hepatolin?
Hepatolin.
So it's insulin from the liver.
So hepa, like liver.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
From the Greeks, ladies and gentlemen.
The discovery was, uh, was, like most discoveries in science, was completely accidental.
The chief scientific officer of our company is not a diabetologist, he's a liver expert.
Right.
And he was, uh, this is a very shortened story, uh, but, uh, for brevity, he was trying to understand How the body knows how to regrow the liver.
The liver is one of the only organs in the body that can grow back.
You can take half of it out and it grows back.
I think we all know that from things like Grey's Anatomy and stuff like that.
Yes.
They liver.
And they've known for, you know, since, uh, I think there's, uh, you know, Greek legends about, uh, a crow, uh, that, you know, would peck out the liver and would grow back.
So, um, so for forever we've known that the liver grows back, but we...
Didn't know science didn't understand.
Why does it grow back?
How does it know how to start growing back?
How does it know when to stop and so it was thought well, maybe it's you know, maybe there's signals Maybe it's nerve signals.
Maybe the brain knows and so our chief scientific officer.
Dr.
Lott He was working in basic research trying to figure this out so he would cut the nerves going to the liver in rats and then You know, sew the rat up, come back a few weeks later, see if the liver was able to regenerate.
And it was, so it's not nerves, but all of those rats then developed type 2 diabetes, which was, uh, shouldn't have happened.
There should be no reason why cutting nerves to the liver would cause type 2 diabetes.
And so this started an odyssey for over 30 years now, where he's trying to figure out what's happening.
And now we've known, now we understand that these nerves are controlling the release of a hormone.
That hormone is released only when you eat.
It's very fast acting, it's only around for 30 to 90 minutes.
And, uh, if you have it, uh, you're lean and more muscular.
As you lose it, you become, or your body composition becomes more fat, which is why we're seeing Uh, people with obesity then, uh, move to diabetes.
So, one of the interesting insights here is that being overweight doesn't cause diabetes.
It's an underlying cause that starts body composition changing.
And as we get older, and as we have more stress, and as we consume sugar, all of those have been shown in the laboratory to, to degrade the release of, of hepatolin.
And, uh, and then you have to rely more on insulin.
And the insulin only has one place to put it, which is into, is into body fat.
And that underlying cause that you mentioned, that kind of kicks it all off, is that genetic?
Because I thought type 1 diabetes was genetic, but type 2 wasn't, am I completely wrong?
No, you're absolutely correct.
So type 1 diabetes is a, uh, is a genetic disease.
We used to call it, uh, juvenile diabetes, but unfortunately, uh, we have many young people, very young people, children developing type 2 diabetes.
So type 1 diabetes is a autoimmune disease, where your body is attacking the cells in the pancreas that are producing insulin.
So you no longer can produce insulin.
So you with type 1?
No, don't produce it at all.
And you have to, you have to inject it.
Uh, an easy way to think about it is type 1 diabetes is you don't have enough insulin.
Type 2 diabetes is you have too much.
And now we know why you have too much is because you don't have this, this hormone.
But the, the current understanding, they would say that you're insulin resistant.
So you need more and more insulin.
For some reason, your body needs to produce more insulin.
We see more insulin in the blood.
And, uh, you know, current science doesn't, doesn't understand why.
So type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease.
It's thought to have, uh, genetic or, uh, epigenetic, uh, causes.
So, um, you know, you might be more prone to developing it.
But what we see currently is that it can't be fully genetic.
It has to be something that has to do with lifestyle.
Because we see diabetes increasing across the world based on...
Economics.
So, as a country becomes more developed, they have enough money to start spending money on sweets and soft drinks, and then you see 10, 20 years later, all of a sudden there's a diabetes epidemic.
And so, genetics don't spread in 10 or 20 years, but the advancement of sugar in the society and having jobs where you're sitting down and having more stress, these come with economic development.
So, there is a genetic component, we're sure, because we can see that there's a higher prevalence in some.
Um, ethnicities than others, but truly it's, it has to do with, uh, what we're eating and the lifestyles we're living.
So, John, you're currently in, been sucked into the whole try to raise money taking over your life thing, have you?
Yes, yes.
How much are you trying to raise?
So, uh, in academia, when you're working in basic research, you're asking for grants from the government or from, uh, you know, different, um, charitable organizations, like the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Diabetes Foundation.
Those have totaled over, uh, 17 and a half million dollars as the discovery was still in, in university.
As soon as you say, Wow, this, this discovery of these chemicals could be, um, put into a product and then made into a medicine, all of a sudden your funding disappears.
That's not something that, uh, works in the academic circles.
So, uh, for, uh, over ten years, we were working to, um, Move the intellectual property from the university into a, into a private company with a transfer agreement and royalties paid back to the university.
It's often said, I'll just take a, I digress for a second.
Insulin was discovered in Canada as well.
So lightning striking twice in this country, Banting and Best were the scientists that, uh, that discovered insulin 100 years ago, 101 years ago out of the University of Toronto.
And it's been said that if they would have given a 1 percent royalty.
Back to the University of Toronto, no Canadian would have paid for post secondary education.
There would have been billions of dollars that would have flowed into the academic structure in Canada.
So, we have a 2 percent royalty back to the university, so hopefully we'll fix that for the next generation.
Fix your children's education.
Yes, yes, that grandchildren maybe.
Yes, exactly.
So, it took about 10 years of hurry up and wait of many meetings of trying to transfer, uh, that, that intellectual property.
Dr.
Lott started a separate private laboratory, which then continued to produce, uh, more intellectual property, more patents were produced outside.
And so now the company owns all of that intellectual property.
And then we have to start fundraising with people that, uh, want to partake in the risks and the possible rewards of bringing these four different, um, products to market.
And so that starts with friends and family.
And, uh, the company is, is a family company.
Uh, Dr.
Lot.
The chief scientific officer is my father in law.
Ah, okay.
The CEO of the company is my brother in law, his son.
I'm married to a family company, and that's part of why I think this worked, because you have to have ten years of focusing and working on it, but maybe it's only one meeting or, you know, talking to a lawyer.
Or an IP consultant and then waiting a week or a month for something to happen, uh, until, until it can turn into a business.
So I've been watching this company progress for over 17 years and I've been in the company for, uh, seven or eight years, uh, myself.
Once it got to the point where all the intellectual property is together and they need a business plan and they need to start bringing on investors, that's when I was pulled into the company.
So to answer your question that you asked maybe 20 minutes ago, it feels like, uh, we've raised 20 million.
Privately and there's 17 and a half million dollars that was public.
We think about 17 million dollars of infrastructure was also Given by the university your grants and university can't cover Any of the facilities and they can't cover any of the labor.
Right.
You need grad students for that.
Yeah.
So, so maybe, you know, 60 million dollars of work has been done, 20 million dollars, uh, has been raised.
And we still have probably another 100 million dollars to go to get all four of these products out, uh, to the finish line.
I mean, it's amazing actually.
It really makes you think.
Cause everybody always says, Oh my god, you know.
Pharmaceuticals cost so much, and, you know, and people say it's because of the amount of time and effort it takes to create them.
And you don't really think about it, but when you describe, sort of, Almost 20 years of work to get to this point.
It suddenly makes it completely apparent why you have to raise so much money to do it.
Absolutely.
You know, and why you then have to charge for the product in order to, to make that money back.
Especially if you start looking at the success rates.
And, you know, maybe 1 out of 10 of these products will get all the way to the finish line.
And there's a whole bunch of reasons for failure.
It's not just a...
Oh, it didn't work, or it was found to be harmful, um, although those, those do happen.
It's often that, oh, it's going to be more expensive than, uh, than something that's currently on the market.
And an insurance company won't pay for something that's twice as expensive, but maybe 10 percent better.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of checks along the way that you have to make sure that this has commercial viability, that you're going to be
able to produce it, that the raw materials are going to be available, and, uh, that people are going to be willing to, to take it.
Like, if it's something that you have to inject into your eyeball, no one wants to do that.
Right.
And so there's a whole bunch of reasons why these things fail.
And how many years into the FDA approval process are you at the moment?
We're probably about, uh, five or six years into it.
Okay.
And we've got five or six years to go, depending on which product.
Some of the products are, are gonna be, uh, ready, like, uh, the, the diagnostic test.
We'll be, uh, already within 18 months in Canada.
And then you have to repeat one trial.
You don't have to do all three trials.
You have to repeat one trial in each country.
So we've harmonized all of our clinical trials, uh, between, uh, Europe, Australia, Japan.
Uh, China and Canada, the U.
S.
So we just have a higher standard than all of those countries combined.
And then the rule is you have to test it once in our country to make sure that it works.
And you can understand why there's ethnic differences.
There's size differences.
You know, those those types of things.
So, um, the first product will be on market in 18 months and then a year after that in the States and then a year after that kind of worldwide and again is the faster We can raise
money the more you can do these clinical trials Simultaneously we have to do one at a time Because we're not able to raise, you know, a couple hundred million dollars all at once.
Wow.
And it really is a life's work, I suppose, particularly for your father in law.
Yeah.
I mean, it's two generations of our family have, you know, put all of our wealth, all of our capital, we've all mortgaged our houses at different points in the process, you know, where you're between fundraising.
Yeah.
Uh, and you know, we're, we're all in.
That's, that's for sure.
And, uh, for the scientific team, it's really interesting to look at the, the scientific team.
You've, you know, the average age there is, you know, in the 60s.
You know, we've got a, some new fresh blood there.
But, um, There's no way to really manage a team that are all past retirement age.
They're here for reasons that aren't financial.
They're not about their career.
They're here to bring this all the way to people.
You know, it's one thing to work on something in a petri dish or, you know, with rats.
It's something else to get it all the way through the FDA and get it out into the community.
I mean, I don't need to, uh, remind everyone how terrible the disease is, but, you know, half a billion people are diagnosed.
There's probably another billion that are undiagnosed.
Every 4.
2 seconds, someone dies of diabetes somewhere in the world.
20 amputations a day happen in Canada based off diabetes.
200...
In the U.
S.
alone, so it's the number one cause of blindness.
It leads to all these other diseases like coronary heart disease.
We know that there's a link with cancer.
It's really one of the more expensive diseases that we, that our healthcare system has to handle.
You know, if you project the cost, the rising cost of diabetes, it's going to eclipse the GDP of our countries by the end of the century.
So there's something that has to happen.
There's something that has to change.
And, um, sometimes it feels like we're all alone out here working to do this and to bring it to market.
And now, a quick word from our sponsor.
Business Without Bullshit is brought to you by Uri Clark.
Straight talking financial and legal advice since 1935.
You can find us at Uriclark.
com Is there something that you think is bullshit in your industry?
And if so, what is it?
Two things, we talked about venture capitalists, you know, the idea that these guys are, you know, they have some type of, uh, crystal ball they can see into the future and they know exactly where to bet.
And, uh, and the idea of venture, even the word venture kind of means to lead on an adventure.
And the funny thing about venture capitalists is every time...
We approach them, they ask, Who's leading this round?
Like, who else is in this round?
I'm like, well, aren't you the leader?
They never want to be the ones.
Yeah, are you the leader or are you the follower?
That's what you call them, follow capitalists.
But, um, the other thing that is bullshit is the perception of pharma companies.
Now, I don't want to upset the four or five pharma companies that we're talking to and in constant dialogue with in order for them to help us do distribution.
But in the last 20 years, there's been a financialization of the, of the pharma companies, meaning that, you know, their, their stock is traded, traded on Wall Street, just like everyone else's.
And, uh, the financial analysts say, hey, you know what you could do in order to increase your profitability is to stop doing breaking research.
So pharma companies aren't out there doing this groundbreaking research.
Because it costs too much, presumably.
It costs too much.
It costs too much because 90 percent of those things don't, don't go forward.
And then the ones that do go forward, you know, one out of three.
Might not make it all the way through the FDA trial, so maybe it's like one out of a thousand of these crazy experiments that your funding will actually turn into something.
And so what they've done now is they've given all those facilities over the last 20 years, they've given all the facilities to the universities.
They provide grants to the universities.
Um, they have innovation parks, accelerator programs, those types of things.
But basically they've just stepped back from that entire basic science portion of the pipeline and just outsourced it.
To the startup community, and they just wait.
So it's kind of innovation through acquisition.
They just wait for a company like, like Symar to pop up.
And go, Oh, they've got something interesting.
Wait, we'll watch them for 10 years and see if they're trending in the right direction.
And then we'll purchase them.
Is that Symar's long term goal you've just given away there?
Right.
So, I mean, uh, you know, uh, we're a small family company.
We know how to do science.
We know how to, we've learned how to take things through the regulatory path.
We don't.
fool ourselves into thinking that we're a global pharma company with the ability to manufacture in all these regions and to do distribution.
And so if you want manufacturing and distribution, that's still the pharma companies.
Those guys are great at pumping out pills and convincing the doctors to prescribe them.
You know, that's a distribution network.
The bullshit part of it is that they're not the scientists that are sitting there with the test tubes and discovering, Eureka!
I've discovered something new and And the fact that they say that we have to spend all this money to do that research is also bullshit, because they don't do that.
And plus, all their adverts are men in white coats with goggles on.
Exactly.
Looking in test tubes, right?
You know what it should be?
It should be men in pinstripe suits because it's all the lawyers.
It's just lawyers, you know, making contracts.
Seems fine to me.
Yeah, yeah, and a machine, a machine that's just punching out the pills at a billion pills an hour, right?
Uh, the other interesting part about pharma is like, When a company makes an announcement that they have now acquired, you know,
a new company that has a breakthrough drug, their stock price goes up by tenfold the amount they're actually acquiring it for.
So in a certain way, you know, their budget to buy a company like us is based off of our hard work and them just being able to market that they've bought this company and they're gonna be able to make But Jillian's off of it.
The example I use is Joe Rogan.
So Joe Rogan is a podcaster.
And he got a hundred million dollars from Spotify to come over.
And everyone was like, this is ridiculous.
You're paying a podcaster a hundred million dollars.
But the day that Spotify announced that they got Joe Rogan, is actually Joe Rogan tweeted, Hey, Spotify just, just had an exclusive offer.
Spotify went up by 1.
7 billion dollars.
So they gave 1 17th of that to Joe Rogan, right?
So where did that money come from?
The money came from.
You know joe rogan plus spotify, you know, so it's it's a it's kind of a a backwards way That it actually works.
And when most people think that pharma is just in there with a big checkbook and they could write a billion dollar check any day of the week and that's not actually how it's happening.
What do you think should be done about it, if anything?
Or you think people just need to open their eyes a little bit to, to who is actually making the, creating the inventions?
First thing that needs to change is that we just need to be able to take it out to the public and allow individuals to be able to invest in this.
I think it's, It's bullshit.
We'll follow the rules, but the rules are bullshit around securities that, you know, I can go out and I can go bet a hundred dollars on, at a horse track, right, or bet it all
on black in some casino, but I can't put a hundred dollars into a company that says they're solving a problem because it's, it's too complicated and you can't understand it.
That's absolute bullshit.
The other thing is that, um, our company wants to, um, Pave the path for other companies like ours.
Other scientists like ours to have a funding method where it's just based off of milestones.
You come in and if you achieve a milestone, then you can you can get more money from the fund at a higher valuation.
And if you don't achieve the milestone, if you're if there's a delay, well, then you can just get money at the previous valuation.
But if we were able to know like if 7 million the bank right now and I could spend it tomorrow launching three more clinical trials, but we've got a husband it.
You know, and be very careful because I don't know when the next 10 million is coming in.
But if we knew that there was 10 million, no matter what, then these 10 year projects would turn into 5 year projects.
The other problem is the regulators, their biggest way of filtering to see if you're serious is by not opening your file for one year.
So you put the application in and they're like, we will not open that application for one year.
If you're still around here in a year, well, then we'll look at it.
And then we'll give you an answer.
And then you might have to wait three or four months for them to take the next step.
So whether you like what happened with COVID.
Or not the reason why they're able to move through those through those regulatory hurdles so quickly is they just took the waiting time out between each one of the review steps.
And so if they were to take the waiting time out of the refuse steps for us, we would be on market in two or three years, but it's eight years of waiting.
And six or eight months of actually doing something, you know that needs to be fixed.
John We're gonna move on to the next bit of the show, which is the five second rule Okay, uh, which is where we're gonna ask you a list of questions to get to know you a little better Great, and you have about five seconds.
It's not It's not set in stone, but you have about five seconds to answer each question.
Okay, I'll try my best.
So what was your first job?
Uh, when I was, uh, 12, I was a paper boy.
What, throwing, throwing the papers onto people's lawns?
Yeah, so we weren't allowed to throw them.
We had to actually walk them up and put them into the little mailbox or into the, into the screen door.
But yeah, bicycle, the whole thing, getting down at 4am.
Okay.
And, uh, riding around town before school.
What was your worst job?
In, uh, in university, I worked at a call centre, an outbound call centre.
We were trying to sell credit cards to people who didn't want them.
It was horrible.
It was terrible.
What was your favourite subject at school?
I really liked history, and I know I'm, I'm, I'm in the minority there.
Oh, same here.
Lawyers love history.
Yeah, no one likes it, but I thought it was great because it was like, uh, it was, it was like, uh, story time.
And you would learn about all these things and be like, Oh, wow!
And then it would come, you know, Eventually you'd catch up to current state and be like, Oh, darn, I can't kind of...
Yeah, I guess it's like binge watching a show on Netflix Where you can just watch one after another and another And then you get up to the kind of current season.
But, yeah, I really like, I just like the stories and how things turned out.
So I always, I always liked it.
Me too.
Uh, what's your special skill?
Well, I'm told that it's, it's the way that I can connect the dots between different subject areas.
And so it really helps to have an analogy to explain a business rule to the scientists, or to explain some scientific thing over to the business folks.
And so just seeing patterns in stories that people wouldn't normally, normally connect.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Well, I kind of wanted to be an astronaut, but I think more specifically, like, I wanted to be like...
Scotty on the, uh, Starship Enterprise.
Don't you need a Scottish accent for that?
No, I do, I do.
I'm giving it all I can, Captain.
I really liked how, uh, there was a creativity plus a certain amount of engineering, and whenever Scotty got involved, you knew there was like only 10 more minutes left in the episode because he was going to pull it together.
What did your parents want you to be?
They wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up, and as long as I was happy, they would be happy.
And so, I always loved computers, and so I started my, my first career was in, um, software consulting.
It's a little bit like Scotty, but very different than my parents.
My parents, uh, are not technical at all.
I know that in different, you know, different cultures, you know, they want you to be a doctor or a lawyer.
And, um, you know, there's a lot of stories about people becoming the leader of Facebook, the leader of Google, and their mom is still, you know, upset that they're not a medical doctor or whatever.
So I think it's something, as a parent, I can understand.
I just want, I'd like my daughter to be happy and to be engaged, as long as she's engaged in her work, not engaged in marriage.
As long as she's setting goals and achieving them, I think that's the real answer.
And who knows what the future's going to be like with artificial intelligence and, you know, we might all be working for our AI overlords.
So who knows what it's going to be.
So as long as you're setting goals for yourself and achieving them, I think that's really where there's a, there's a fulfillment.
Yeah, I think a lot of kids, to be fair, put a lot more pressure on themselves than their parents do.
I don't know who told it to me, but someone mentioned, uh, when I was young, maybe...
15 or 16.
The perspective that you would have on your deathbed.
What is your deathbed perspective?
And that no one has ever said, I wish I worked harder or skipped more weekends or spent more time in the office.
And so I think, you know, uh, you know, a weekly or daily check in with the, with the deathbed perspective of saying, you know, is this how I was, I'm going to be proud of spending my life.
And so you do need to work at some point cause you want to be proud of, of accomplishments, but.
Holy cow, you also have to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
I mean, you know, you only have one go around.
What is your go to karaoke song?
I'm a terrible singer.
So, uh, if I'm forced to go onto karaoke, I choose the song tequila.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one, but it has one word, so it's Tequila!
Oh yeah, okay.
Uh,
this is one for my other co host who's not here.
Office dogs, business or bullshit?
I think it's business, but I live on the west coast, and as long as the dog is small and quiet, then I've, we've had a few office dogs that were just wonderful to have there in the office.
It's different if it's...
You know, our offices, you know, we were software development company, right?
So we're all working on computers.
And it was just nice to be able to, you know, have a little, a furry friend in there, as long as the, there weren't too many clients around, have you ever been fired?
I haven't been fired, but I definitely gotten to the point where I was.
Highly fireable, you know, I lose lose interest after a few years and in some of these projects and I just managed to kind of a sneak out Comes down so yeah, what's your voice?
I I have a I have a group of Friends that I've known forever and they have like a weekly poker night, which is just like a fantastic Social I love the idea of that.
It's very sort of american Not that you yeah, yeah It is it is I'm a terrible liar.
I'm a terrible bluffer and so I wish I wish I could say it's poker but Yeah, you know, I need to be a better liar.
Maybe this is a bluff for your poker buddies.
Like you're telling them you're a terrible poker player.
I'm terrible.
Why don't we bet hundreds?
So this is where we give you 30 seconds to pitch whatever you like.
It sounds to me like I know what you're going to pitch, but away you go.
Well, I'd like to pitch that, uh, you listen to our podcast inside the breakthrough.
I think that's a, that'll be fun.
Uh, when we are actually, uh, raising money and going live with our regulation, a offering, you'll hear advertisements there.
If you want to come to our website, it's Symar.
S C I M A R dot C A, and, uh, when we're allowed to sell shares, it'll be written all over the website that you can click here, uh, in order to buy shares.
We also have a YouTube channel that's called the Manitoba Moonshot, and that's a documentary series that follows our company and our scientists and our clinicians
out in the field, uh, making this change to, uh, lifestyle interventions, working with communities to understand if they get a, uh, Bad score using our NUPA test.
What you can do now.
And, uh, and just kind of follows the intentions of the company.
Manitoba has the highest prevalence of diabetes in Canada.
And it's the second or third highest in the world.
After Papua New Guinea.
And, and, uh, if we can solve diabetes in our province, then we believe the entire world will come running saying, What can we do?
To export, uh, you know, what you did here in Manitoba to other places.
So the Manitoba Moonshot is a place for us to be able to have an impact that you can see from space.
Fantastic.
I'm not going to say that was more than 30 seconds, but it might have been.
Sorry.
Um, so there you have it.
That was this week's episode of Business Without Bullshit.
Thank you to Gemma, my co host, thank you to John, you were fantastic, and to Dee, and we'll be back with BWB Extra on Thursday.
Until then, it's ciao.