Today, we are off to Colorado,
where there's one of the biggest
coronavirus testing experiments there is.
A husband and wife team, Lou Reese and Mei Mei Hu,
happen to be executives at a biotech company
which is trying to test every single person
in San Miguel County in Colorado, which includes Telluride.
The company's also trying to develop
a vaccine for the virus,
so let's head out and talk to Lou and Mei Mei.
Your company makes vaccines for animals and for humans.
You've been working on a vaccine
for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Yeah, so, if it were any other time, Ashlee,
you and I would be talking right now
about how we're gonna move forward
with our registrational trials
for Alzheimer's in the States, but instead,
today we're all hands-on deck on COVID.
You're in Telluride, it's part of San Miguel County,
and you have a test, a blood test,
and you're looking to test all 8,000 people
in San Miguel County, is that the basics?
Yeah, testing is such a big issue.
If you look at the countries
that have kind of dealt with this the best
is testing is one of the core principles.
And what it does is it brings knowledge.
A lot of the tests that we read about
in the news right now,
it's like the nasal swab and it's mostly looking at
do you have COVID-19 right now, in this moment.
But you have a blood test which shows
not only if you have it now,
but also if you've already had it
and developed antibodies against it.
So, antibody tests are what we use to screen blood banks,
for instance, it's the same type of technology.
So, people come in, they get their blood drawn.
Those all get collected,
and then those samples, those specimens,
get flown to labs to then process.
And then, the lab reports the results back to the county.
The idea is how do you screen
large swaths of populations quickly,
find and trace down the ones
that are potentially infected, to quarantine them,
and then also find the ones that have developed antibodies,
some level of immunity, and get them back out.
That's the trick.
You're in this part of Colorado that's super spread out.
I think there's like,
two and a half public health officials
for these 8,000 people.
So, it's tricky, right?
'Cause I know they were looking for volunteers.
I mean, you have to teach people how to do a blood draw.
And so it played out pretty smoothly?
Has it been even harder than you thought, or?
One of the reasons why we did it here,
in San Miguel County was because
there's not even a hospital in San Miguel County.
But, the medical community here, and the EMTs,
knew what they were doing with the blood drawing component.
Also, we did it here because it's a visionary community,
and I think that the community saw what the opportunity was
to get the data, and it was hilarious
how awesome and supportive they've been.
You guys are doing this for free,
and paying for all these tests.
And then, I should add, it's voluntary.
It's not like people have to do this.
But do we know when, like,
what's your goal for how long this will take,
and how many people you'll get?
I think they've done a really good job
in terms of getting people through,
so, I think it's almost averaging like a thousand a day.
So, we should have results sometime next week,
and then we do it all over again.
Because you want to sort of test once,
and then test a couple of weeks later.
Yeah, because seroconversion,
which is what happens when your body
decides to develop antibodies, doesn't happen overnight.
It takes some time after your body's exposed to the virus
to be able to develop antibodies.
So, we want to be able to catch that.
That's why we want to wait at least 14 days between,
to make sure if someone has been infected
that they seroconverted, and we can identify it.
And then, so, you guys have a couple of things going on.
I mean, so not only are you doing this,
you also, back when SARS was a huge concern,
you've done vaccine work around that,
and so, it seems like you were pretty quickly able
to spin up some tests around a possible vaccine
here, for the novel coronavirus.
So, we've tested a number of different constructs.
We're actually looking at them right now.
They look pretty promising.
They're in animals.
And our hope is to get them into humans early summer.
Are we any closer to sort of knowing
when we'll get the data from the animal test?
It's still ongoing.
And then, Lou, not to put you on the spot,
but, I know you were saying that,
if the animal test came back, if the data came back good,
you would sort of think about
using the vaccine at that point, right, on a personal level?
I totally, no, not putting me on the spot at all.
I'm totally down as long as it doesn't damage
like its FDA path or anything like that.
Right now, we got a little bit of interim data,
and I would say they're one step closer
to having the one or two
that we'd like to pull the trigger on for human trials,
and I'm like first in line.
I'm before there's a line.
And so, you look at this data from the animal trials,
and then if it looks safe,
you can kind of progress immediately in the human trials?
Yeah, then it's really about
how the FDA wants to deal with these trials, right?
But these are emergency times, these are unprecedented.
So, all we know is that we're going to try to get
the best vaccine into humans right now, make sure it's safe.
And one of the benefits of our platform in our company
is that we have scaled up,
we have a commercially validated platform.
I think, scaling up and delivering
is gonna be just as difficult
as finding a really efficacious vaccine,
that can be distributed to the masses.
It's hard to keep track of all the different vaccines
and approaches that are being taken right now.
But how optimistic should people be?
'Cause, I just don't want to give people false hope or,
I just want to set expectations in the right spot.
Yeah. So, the example that I give people is that,
remember a few years ago,
when we're reading about pigs that were dying in China,
by like the thousands and millions and stuff?
There was a mutation to foot and mouth disease.
And within a month of finding out,
then being charged with solving that,
we made 100 million brand new vaccines
to a brand-new strain, that worked, and solved the problem.
So, the answer is, these things can go really, really fast.
A lot of things have to work out together,
but I think there's going to be a lot of push to solve it.
Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of
different vaccines going on.
I mean, there's over 20 efforts
that are just listed right now,
and they're probably more efforts
that we don't even know about.
The good news is that
there are lots of people working on it,
and when you have lots of people working on it,
that means more shots on goal,
which means that you should feel good,
and hopeful that something will come out.
This is like a challenge for humanity.
I don't care if it's us,
I don't care if it's another company
with a different technology,
I just want it to work and be able to scale up,
and for us to get back to a new normal,
where we could still think about going out,
having 4th of July parties, having concerts and stuff.
So, I was just thinking about,
like when you get all the data from San Miguel County,
is that something you would, like sort of analyze yourself,
or is that something that goes up
on a website that everybody can see?
It's definitely all anonymized.
The people who are positive
are notified directly by the med center.
So, there will be quarantines, or like isolation,
based on who's infected, and then hopefully
the rest of the community can feel safer about coming out.
One thing that is weird, Ashlee,
that's strange about doing this,
it's one thing to deploy it in distant places,
even if you know those places really well,
it's another, when you're deploying it in like right there,
and everybody's like in it.
It's really amazing.
Well, thank you guys,
and I just really appreciate your time.
All right, thanks, Ashlee, appreciate it
Thanks, Ashlee, talk to you later.