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- [00:00]
Marc Reape
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:04]
Charles Schwab
This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. When is the right time to sell a stock? How do you protect against inflation? Financial decisions can be tricky. Your cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder an original podcast from Charles Schwab can help listen@schwab.com financial decoder in.
- [00:26]
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- [01:32]
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- [01:51]
Marc Reape
Can I get you a refill?
- [01:52]
American Express
You can stay fresh wherever your business travel takes you. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com AmExBusiness hello, odd lots listeners.
- [02:04]
Tracy Alloway
So you are about to listen to an episode that we recorded back in April when there was a lot of news around trade and tariffs. So you might hear us reference that quite heavily. It's a very interesting episode and I think you'll enjoy it. Take a listen.
- [02:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
- [02:39]
Tracy Alloway
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
- [02:43]
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
- [02:44]
Tracy Alloway
Joe, do you remember when you were a kid, presumably you went on road trips like across America?
- [02:51]
Joe Weisenthal
I do.
- [02:52]
Tracy Alloway
Do you remember how filthy cars used to get on road trips because of like hitting millions and thousands of insects? Do you remember this?
- [03:00]
Joe Weisenthal
I thought you were gonna say how cars. How filthy cars get inside. And I was like, my car is filthy inside. It's disgusting. But I do remember that. And I, you know, there are like, weird things, like people, like, you know, like insects. And like, people have talked about how, like, this is like one of those mysteries. It's kind of like chemtrails. Why don't car windshields get filthy anymore?
- [03:21]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah.
- [03:21]
Joe Weisenthal
I didn't know this was ever going to become an odd lots topic, so I'm pleasantly surprised.
- [03:25]
Tracy Alloway
Well, I have a lot of thoughts on this. So one, the buggiest place I ever used to visit was in Arkansas with my grandma in the summer. And I remember, like, the car just being like, disgusting, not only because of insects, but because there are also a lot of armadillos there. And armadillos. I don't know if you know this, but when they're frightened, they jump up. So they tend to get caug in, like truck girls. Anyway, this is probably too much information, but I also. I tried to read a book on insects once and the lack thereof in today's natural world, I guess, and it was called the Insect Crisis. And it's one of the few books that I had to stop reading after like three chapters because I just found it too depressing.
- [04:06]
Joe Weisenthal
By the way, I just want to say a. I like that whenever this episode is getting released, we're recording this April 24th. I appreciate a break from like, oh, we're not talking about serfs every second. Two, you mentioned armadillos. Reminds me of the famous sort of left wing Texas populist Jim Hightower wrote a book There's Nothing in the middle of the Road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. A work of political subversion. So thank you for reminding me of that book.
- [04:32]
Marc Reape
And I need to read that.
- [04:33]
Joe Weisenthal
I don't remember the other thing I was going to say, so keep going.
- [04:35]
Tracy Alloway
Okay. Well, anyway, you know, I'm starting on a depressing topic, which is there has been this notable decline in insects over the past couple of decades. And if you talk to old people like us, Joe and me, we will say that there is a notable lack of insects just when you're out and about and, you know, driving on highways or whatever. But all of that said, this isn't a doom and gloom episode because we're actually gonna be talking about some interesting efforts to kind of arrest that decline. And, you know, Joe and I, we've taken an interest in biotechnology.
- [05:09]
Joe Weisenthal
That's right.
- [05:09]
Tracy Alloway
Recently, especially in the Context of the US vs China. Human biotech is not the only thing out there. There is a pretty big industry around animal and insect biotech. And I know nothing about it pretty much. And I find it very interesting. And we should talk about it.
- [05:26]
Joe Weisenthal
We should. And also, look, pets and animals are a huge industry. And so for when it comes to biotech, non human animals are huge. And of course the other context besides the US versus China in biotech is of course the cutting or the gutting, some would say of sort of core research from the federal government level. So this intersects with industrial and political trends. And so even though it's not a tariff episode, I'm looking forward to it.
- [05:52]
Tracy Alloway
Well, not just that. So, you know, one of the foremost examples of insect species that has been in decline is honeybees.
- [05:59]
Joe Weisenthal
That's right.
- [06:00]
Tracy Alloway
And those are constantly in the news, the lack of honeybees. And we all know if we don't have as many honeybees, well, then we don't have as much honey. But we also don't have as much other types of foods because they are very important pollinators.
- [06:12]
Joe Weisenthal
You know, I just. One last thing for me, when I was in college, I lived in a vegan, a vegan co op at the University of State.
- [06:18]
Tracy Alloway
Did you have a beehive?
- [06:19]
Joe Weisenthal
No, but I had this business idea, oh, we should have hand pollinated produce and sell it to grocery stores as saying this is the only true vegan produce you can have because we don't even use bees in the process. I never did it, but I thought that'd be a good business.
- [06:33]
Tracy Alloway
Oh my God. Have you ever hand pollinated something?
- [06:36]
Joe Weisenthal
No.
- [06:36]
Tracy Alloway
It's fun.
- [06:37]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh, so you can do it?
- [06:38]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, I mean, you got like a little, like feather little rag and you sort of spread the pollen around while doing your best like, bzz impression. You have to be in the mindset of a bee.
- [06:46]
Joe Weisenthal
If I were back at, you know, 22 years old, I'd make a big radical stand about only eating hand pollinated produce.
- [06:52]
Tracy Alloway
Don't make the bees work.
- [06:53]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, that's right.
- [06:54]
Tracy Alloway
Okay. All right. Clearly we could talk about bees and insects and armadillos for probably another hour or so. But why don't we get straight to our guest? We have the perfect guest. We're gonna be speaking with Annette Kleiser. She is the CEO over at Dallin Animal Health, which has been doing some really, really interesting things in the field of animal biotech. So, Annette, thank you so much for coming on aut.
- [07:15]
Marc Reape
Thank you so much for having me. It's A pleasure to be here.
- [07:18]
Tracy Alloway
I'm very excited to talk about something other than the tariffs for a start. And I do like talking about the natural world, but, like, first off, why don't we just kind of add some context to where we are? Why is animal biotech an important field to be investing in?
- [07:35]
Marc Reape
Well, a lot of what we depend on in food and aquaculture. You talked about pets, of course. They're, you know, companions. They're very, very important to us. But a lot of what we eat depends on animals. So not just the typical production animals that we think about, which, you know, the cows or chickens, but also, you know, fish or shrimp. And then one of the most important workhorses probably that we have is the honeybee, because our most nutritious foods wouldn't grow, wouldn't exist if it wasn't for these little animals that buzz around and pollinate them. So apples, and it's actually the most nutritious foods that we have, wouldn't exist, whether it's almonds or pumpkins or onions. So they're extremely important. And we need to protect all of these animals, not just our companion animals, but also these really important production animals, livestock, everything that falls under it. And so biotech has a big role to play, not just on the human side, but also on the animal side.
- [08:49]
Joe Weisenthal
Why don't you tell us what Dallin Animal Health does and your role there and give us some background about your work specifically.
- [08:56]
Marc Reape
Yeah, happy to do so. So Dalan Animal Health focuses on these animals. So we are a biotech company. We're about six and a half years old, so we're relatively young still. But we focus on what we call underser animals, which are primarily insects, invertebrates. And we developed the world's first vaccine for honeybees to protect them from diseases. They get diseases. They get sick just like any other animals, just like we do. They get viral infections, they get bacterial infections. And despite the fact that they are so important for our survival and so not just food production, but biodiversity. You had mentioned that the whole insect declines are extremely, extremely important. Important in a bigger picture. There is nothing, or there was nothing out there to really help them fend off diseases. And so we decided to set out and change that and decide, you know, these animals, they need, they need the protection, they need our care. And we can't just complain about insects. We also need to, we need to protect them. And so that's what we do.
- [10:12]
Tracy Alloway
I have so many questions already, but perhaps my biggest one is how does honeybee vaccination actually Work, Because I imagine you're not all going out there with tiny little syringes and inoculating millions of bees, which would kind of defeat the purpose of having all these pollinators do our work for us. How does it work?
- [10:33]
Marc Reape
Yeah, we want to be kind to them, we want to be careful. And you had. Some of us are older and when I was a child, I remember how the nurse came to school and gave us a sugar cube with the polio vaccine on it. And this is very similar. The queen gets a sugar paste to eat in her early stages before she gets introduced into the new colony. And we just mix the vaccine. It's a. It's an oral vaccine, it's a liquid. We mix it into that sugar paste and she takes it up by eating.
- [11:09]
Tracy Alloway
In a nutshell, and then she spreads it, I guess, to her offspring.
- [11:13]
Marc Reape
Right. So insects have this interesting phenomenon that the maternal animal passes on information about a disease that is in the environment to the next generation. And the queen does this via the eggs. So there is a disease in the hive. There are pathogens in the hive. She can't get sick. A lot of these diseases are infant diseases, they're larval diseases. So they threaten the brood just when they emerge from the egg. And so the queen takes these pathogens up and passes little pieces of it to her ovaries. And the developing larvae will see this piece of a pathogen and say, oh, there's something out there. The immune system gets upregulated and before they hatch, and they are protected when they hatch. And this is a mechanism that is widely seen in insects and invertebrates and actually also in chickens and other animals. And so what we do is just use that naturally occurring phenomenon and where we only have to vaccinate the queen or expose the queen to a dead bacteria that can't infect anything and the next generation is protected. It's pretty clever little magic wand that you put over the hive.
- [12:40]
Joe Weisenthal
So within the field of animal biotech, or even more specifically rare animal biotech, or even more specifically B vaccine biotech, I can imagine multiple different areas of what you'd call business or value add creation. So there is the raw science of like, what does the molecular structure of a B vaccine look like? Then I would imagine there is the challenge of turning raw science into something productized that can be distributed and sold at a profit. And then there's the actual sort of distribution of it. So going out to the actual customers, here is a product that exists. Where does your company sit specifically, how much is it at the raw science level and how much is it? The productization of raw science, all of it.
- [13:29]
Marc Reape
I'm laughing. You don't see me laughing, but I'm laughing because that was actually what we were faced with when we decided to do this company. This was very early academic research at the University of Helsinki. When I by accident stumbled across it, the university had brought me in to look at their life science portfolio to see if there's a company that could be spun out, if technology, a patent that could be licensed to an existing company. And typically when you do this, you see a lot of really interesting research. I mean, universities are full with just amazing, amazing research. But often if they are incremental small improvements that are really important to move us forward, but they're rarely these completely out of the box idea.
- [14:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Right, right.
- [14:24]
Marc Reape
Put it this way. And so I stumbled. The researcher happened to be in the office at the university when I was there. And the director called her in and said, you know, Dalia, why don't you tell these folks about your idea for a B vaccine? And I just got really intrigued because, you know, somebody needed to do something. I told myself, and, you know, this.
- [14:44]
Joe Weisenthal
Is your cso founding cso. I'm looking at your website. Dalialfreiter.
- [14:50]
Marc Reape
So she's a professor at the University of Graz. She was at Helsinki and now she's in Graz. And so this was really early research, very early data showing that this might be possible. The company then had to start completely from scratch to find a strain to go out and infected hives, build a strain collection, go to the regulator. There was no regulatory path, there was no development path. Do you conduct clinical trials? Nobody had ever done this before. So there was the whole development of the product that could then go out into the market and then there was no model of how they were not. I mean, if you, if you develop a new shoe, you go to a shoe store and that's where you sell the shoe for a B vaccine that didn't exist. So there was no distribution.
- [15:48]
Tracy Alloway
There's no bee clinics out there.
- [15:50]
Joe Weisenthal
There's no retail down 5th Avenue where you get your insect vaccines. There's no channel.
- [15:56]
Marc Reape
Yeah, you know, if your beehive is sick, you're not going to call a veterinarian and say, well, carry the hive into the veterinary clinic. So can you look at my queen? You know. Right. That doesn't. You, you call your neighbor, you call, you know, your father or your grandfather that had bees. So it's a complete. Even these large beekeepers and in the US when we're talking large beekeepers, they have 70, 100,000, 120,000 colonies. Wow. These are massive operations that are pollinating our crop during this. Our apples, you know, the beautiful apples that you get, you know, with Whole Foods. And it's like they need these big beekeepers, these big producers, but still there is no veterinarian that comes by. There is no, you know, so it didn't exist. So we have. We are creating everything. Dan basically is writing the playbook on how do they develop these products, how do you get them licensed, how do you commercialize them, how do you roll it out, how do you work with the industry? And not just with the industry, with state veterinarians, with. It's much bigger, and these are global problems. I was talking to one state government veterinarian in who was then asking me, well, we don't really know what to do here. What's the opinion of the World Health Organization? And I say, you must be kidding me. He's like, the world health. Let me call them. Let me pick up my phone and figure out what they have to say about this. So really what we had to do is the whole from bench to customer and work. It's exciting when you have an opportunity to do that and to figure it out.
- [18:09]
Charles Schwab
This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. When is the right time to sell a stock? How do you protect against inflation? Are you taking the right risks with your portfolio? Financial decisions can be tricky, and often your own cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help join host Marc Reape as he offers practical solutions to help overcome the cognitive and emotional biases that may affect your investing decisions. Listen@schwab.com FinancialDecoder Some matches are temporary, but.
- [18:44]
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- [19:13]
Bloomberg
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- [19:44]
Tracy Alloway
I have so many questions about this. Not just the regulatory portion of this and the commercialization, but specifically to begin with on the funding side. So you're doing something relatively new and I imagine if you go to a traditional venture capitalist or a traditional investor in biotech and you say, I have a B vaccine, I'm sure some of them are very excited because it's novel and it sounds kind of cool. But on the other hand, it is this kind of a brand new thing and I could see some people being a little bit surprised. What are those conversations like when you're first trying to raise funding?
- [20:19]
Marc Reape
Right. So it has changed a lot over the last six years, thankfully. But in the beginning when I set out, it was really clear we did not fit any investment themes. So we're not animal health because even though bees are classified as livestock, they are not, you know, it's the pets, it's the companion animals which the biggest. But then the traditional ones, the cows and the chickens, but not bees. That just falls outside animal health investment. On the agriculture side, most architect investors will look at microbiomes of trees, drones, surveillance, more precision aquaculture, technology driven AI, those themes. And then you have the food tech investors which are further upstream, right. They look at the honey but they don't look where the honey came from. So we fell into this complete no man's land. There was in food tech, there were a couple of investors that at the time a lot of money was going into alternative protein production to lower, you know, to be more sustainable, lower CO2 impact. And meat.
- [21:39]
Tracy Alloway
Oh yeah, the fake meat, right.
- [21:41]
Marc Reape
The mealworms and grasshoppers for animal feed and human food production. They were really interested in this because they said, well, we had a complete blind spot that these animals could get sick too. But vaccines was not in their target so they couldn't invest in us. So there was literally nobody that. So in the beginning it was heavily angel funded because angels, yes, they want to make money. These are ridiculous individuals that want to make, you know, money with their investments. But they also, they are driven by, they want to do, you know, good in the world with their wealth. So the return expectations are and the time frame is a little bit different. And so they, they really backed this. So we were entirely, entirely angel funded and a lot globally. So not very few us actually European, Canadian grow that came from the agricultural space, from the animal Health, space, but not VCs. And it was in 2022. I don't. You might remember when the market went down, it was a horrible time for everyone, especially startups. Was in a few weeks all the discussions that I had and fundraising, you know, people were jumping off left and right and somebody asked me to speak at a climate and space conference and I said climate and space, but when you're raising money, you take every opportunity you can to spread the word. So I went and there were these amazing talks about refueling stations in space and hotels and whatever you have and these batteries and everything. And then I came with my B vaccine and, and telling the audience that this is great, that because of climate change we have to go to other planets and we have to be prepared for this. But in the meantime we really need to solve this problem because we're never going to be able to solve it here on this planet or any other planet if we don't protect insects. We may not like them, but they are incredibly important for human survival, plant survival. All living organisms need these little, you know, we can do wetland restoration, it doesn't matter if we don't have insects to live in them. And sure enough, at the end of the night I had was approached by several climate investors, VCs, sustainability and climate, that understood the importance of what we were doing and had more flexible investment themes and a longer term horizon. And I was able to get funding. And so now a lot of the investors that we're talking to come from that space.
- [24:45]
Joe Weisenthal
I think this is so fascinating because something that's come up in the podcast before in various contexts is this idea that we think of this wall of capital out there that exists and it's seeking return. But whether it's banks, whether it's VCs, private credit firms, et cetera, there is specialization and there are categories of things. And we talk a lot about this, particularly more often in the context of certain energy techs. Sometimes they call it the missing middle, this idea that there are theoretically profitable investments out there, but it's just not in anyone's specific wheelhouse.
- [25:25]
Tracy Alloway
And no one is in charge of the B vaccine.
- [25:27]
Bloomberg
Yeah.
- [25:28]
Joe Weisenthal
So it's not something that someone has specialized in. So even the theoretically profitable on some time horizon investment doesn't happen because there isn't that, I guess, domain knowledge or very specific domain knowledge. Where are you today in terms of both funding, but also in productization and distribution.
- [25:49]
Marc Reape
Right. And I think there's one really important aspect to it. I believe one of the reasons why there Is, you know, you have this specialization and you have these, I mean investors are, they are willing to take risks. Risks, banks are willing to take risks. But there is still going to be an assessment of return. And assessment of return. You can only do if you know the market. If you have understanding of how the market works, how the go to market strategy is, who's going to pay for it. If you are developing a product that the world hasn't seen before, how are you going to price it?
- [26:32]
Joe Weisenthal
It, right?
- [26:32]
Marc Reape
You know, it's a total crystal ball that's in front of you and investors are managing other people's money.
- [26:39]
Joe Weisenthal
Right.
- [26:39]
Marc Reape
You know, it's like they can't, you know, it's a huge hurdle to make the argument we believe that, you know, somebody is going to pay X for this novel product because you know, if you go out and do market research and we've done that and ask, well, if there was a be back in how much would you pay? Right. An investor expects you to do that. And, and, but people have no concept. This is like if you go out, would you pay $1,000 for an iPhone? And you've never seen it. You say, are you?
- [27:09]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, yeah.
- [27:11]
Marc Reape
And so you have to really get, push hard as quickly as possible, get the product out. You know, most Biotech products take 10, 15 years and millions of dollars. We had to do this in rapid time to get there with total focus and show that the market, that there is a need, that we're solving a problem that actually exists and that people are willing to buy it because the problem is so large. So we completed our first year of commercialization, first full season. These animals are seasonal animals. They hibernate over the winter. And then the almond pollination kicks off the new season which just happened in California. So we had a lot of beekeepers interested in it. We had initial sales, we did a lot of, you know, this is high touch. You have to know these people. They have to learn. We were, you know, unknown little company and the first product, who are these people? So we had to overcome this. And so now the second year, year, the season just barely started and we already have like five times as many purchase orders than we had the same time last year, many more customers. I think there was another five to six time increase in customer that come to us. Now people are coming to us, they've heard about it. So there's a lot of, you know, in agriculture, you know, if, if your livelihood depends on it, you won't just purchase a new product and apply it in your entire operation, right? You will it out in, you know, 1% now in a couple of hives, maybe 100 hives. Then the next year you'll say, okay, okay, this is fine. I'm going to test it in 20% of my operation. And then at some point when, once you see that it's really, it really turns the corner for you, then it's when you place, when you, when you adopt it 100%, either you're going adopt it or you're not going to adopt it. And so that is what we are seeing, that the customers that are, with the returning customers that are placed larger orders with more customers coming. So it's, it's going really in the right direction. I mean, this is a licensed product. This is an animal vaccine. It's not a supplement. So it's, we can tell people it is working, preventing, you know, American foul root. But it's a journey. It's a real journey. Ugh.
- [30:14]
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- [30:46]
Bloomberg
Today, a warming planet, complex geopolitics and fierce competition means business operations are under more scrutiny than ever before. Returning to Singapore this July, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit is uniting leaders and investors to explore how sustainability efforts can bolster resilience and mitigate risk. Learn more@Bloomberglive.com SBS Singapore. That's Bloomberg Live Singapore.
- [31:17]
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- [31:48]
Tracy Alloway
The B vaccine is not the only thing you've been working on. You're also working on a shrimp vaccine, which, as far as I understand it operates on similar principles. Would you anticipate that the development and the funding and the commercialization of a shrimp vaccine, would that be easier now that you've done the B Vaccine or is it still the case that, you know, shrimps in aquaculture are completely different to bees operating in commercial hives or in agriculture?
- [32:20]
Marc Reape
Actually, the reason why we chose. So, yes, it's going to be easier. It is easier. So investors that we're talking to now, because, you know, the market in bees, nobody understands, you know, what, what are the losses, you know, how many millions is this actually? What's the impact on, you know, losing three hives? What does, what are the real solid numbers are much more difficult to get to shrimp industry. We know that there are four to seven billion dollars of losses due to disease every single year. These are staggering numbers. One disease wide spot can be a billion dollar in losses a year. This is very well documented. We know it's a 40, 43 or $46 billion industry because the market is much better known because people have tried to develop prophylactic solutions, try to develop vaccines. There is in the last 15 years, the emergence.
- [33:28]
Tracy Alloway
Wait, what's a. Sorry, what's a prophylactic solution to white spot in shrimp?
- [33:33]
Marc Reape
Oh, vaccine that you give to prevent a disease.
- [33:37]
Tracy Alloway
Ah, okay.
- [33:38]
Marc Reape
So that, you know, make sure you don't get sick before the disease rather than treating once the disease.
- [33:46]
Tracy Alloway
I had a slightly different image in my mind, but go on.
- [33:51]
Marc Reape
Yeah, so it's much better understood. People have tried to develop it. There are many approaches through better feed, through better genetics of the shrimp that are more disease resistant. So there's a lot of money flowing into this, this area and the market is much better understood. And so you can do price calculations much more easily and the return on investment and all the, you know, most of the big animal health companies are looking at this space. They might already be in aquaculture with salmon or tilapia with other species, and might want to expand into this. And then the big feed companies, whether it's, you know, there are a bunch of them, but sell into that industry and understand it very well, and investors, then it makes it much easier for investors to assess the risk profile.
- [34:50]
Joe Weisenthal
What is the state either for your company directly or the peers that you talk to when you go to industry conferences and such. We've talked about it a little bit on this show. The cutback in, in funding for pure science, which is obviously the precursor to having a company. As you said, your co founder had been working on this in a lab in Helsinki. Can you give us a little bit of the landscape of what you see happening on the pure science front and how it compares to Europe and if you have any visibility into it, what's happening in China. But again, I don't know if that's something that you have, but I'm sure you have at least US and Europe visibility into the science funding land landscape.
- [35:33]
Marc Reape
Right. From a company perspective, we so far have not relied on any government money to support science. There are a lot of, you know, sbir and so these grand mechanisms that are out there to fund signs in, you know, product directed science and we've stayed away for it from, from a number of reasons because it's, you know, it can get political and you're always, you know, wherever the, the wind blows and, and we just don't want to get distracted with this. They are very, very, very lucrative funding mechanisms in Europe where the European Union backs innovation and it appears to be why they're very competitive. It's billions of dollars that are dedicated towards that and, and I think that's probably where a lot of research is going to go. I would think if this continues, the lack of resources available to universities in this country, we have to see how this plays out. But from a company perspective, I think from a regulatory environment or from the ease of accessing capital from private markets, I would think US is still leading this regardless independent on what happens, of course. Do we feel it in discussions with investors, the uncertainty in the economic climate before like 2022, every investor would ask if you had more money, can you accelerate?
- [37:12]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:14]
Marc Reape
That question doesn't come that often anymore. Interesting. Can we de risk this a little bit?
- [37:19]
Joe Weisenthal
So the US capital markets are still the best in the world, but they're not trying to basically stuff your pockets full of money the way they were a couple of years ago.
- [37:29]
Marc Reape
That's correct. They're a little bit more, you know, how is this going to play out? I think everybody is in a, you know, holding pattern, but there's definitely money out there to be deployed.
- [37:40]
Joe Weisenthal
Got it.
- [37:41]
Tracy Alloway
So it strikes me that what we've been talking about, obviously very creative solutions to ongoing problems. And you know, people might be aware of the decline of honeybees, but perhaps they're not as aware of the problem of white spot in commercially farmed shrimp. How do you go about actually selecting your next targets?
- [38:04]
Marc Reape
It was a decision based on what do we know the most problematic diseases from the economic impact. And we knew that our approach of vaccination of the queen is effective against a number of diseases. When we tested in the lab and when we see how the vaccine performs in the field, that we said, okay, what are the biggest bacterial and viral diseases for shrimp globally, whether this is in Southeast Asia, whether it's in Ecuador, in China, what are the biggest problems? And that's where white spot just really is at the top. And then early mortality syndrome there on the bacterial side. But white spot is definitely the disease that can wipe out an operation when it hits a farm. When it hits in three to seven days, the entire shrimp are dead and it's rapid and you lose an entire harvest. So for a farmer, and typically you can't clean up right now for bacterial diseases, farmers still use antibiotics because they don't have anything else, you know, chemicals, all kinds of treatments when they see that something is happening. But when white spot happens, it's very, very difficult to clean up the ponds. You pretty much have to abandon them and then find a new spot and make new ponds and that impact on the environment. You know, shrimp is one of the most nutrient rich lean protein that can be grown at large scale and is consumed at, you know, big amounts around the world. And it could be the most sustainably grown protein. It's not, it's not because of the chemicals that are needed because of the mangroves that have to be cut down because of the, the other impacts, because we don't have vaccines to prevent that from happening. And that's why we, you know, we need, we need more shrimp. We picked shrimp also because it is so. And it's such an important protein and growing, the consumption worldwide is growing and it's relatively cost effective to produce. But the impact is just devastating. And rather than saying, okay, let's get rid of all the shrimp product, that's not a solution. Right. We have to just what we did with chickens or cattle, sparrows or honeybees, make them healthier so that the impact on the environment is reduced. And of course, the shrimp don't die, you know, in the pond.
- [40:59]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah. And so they can survive the industrialized scale at which we seem to farm them nowadays. But Annette, that was so interesting and I love a chance to talk about honeybeen vaccines and shrimp vaccines. So thank you so much for coming on our thoughts.
- [41:16]
Marc Reape
Well, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [41:31]
Tracy Alloway
Joe. I just find this particular area of biotech just really interesting and also more and more relevant. Right. It seems like there's no doubt that there's increased pressure on our food supply and we're having to be more creative in figuring out ways to feed everyone all the things that people seem to want to eat. And usually that means commercialized, industrialized farming. Right. And a lot of those conditions for animals are not great, as we discussed in our chicken series. And so finding ways of keeping them healthier so that they can survive and preferably even thrive in some of those environments, although I'm guessing that's a long shot. But so that they can survive and actually become food and satisfy people's needs. That seems more important than.
- [42:17]
Joe Weisenthal
While we were recording this. Tracy, I beat me. And she says she hates shrimp. I didn't know that. I like shrimp a lot. I want. I could eat a lot of shrimp. You know, I thought that was fascinating, you know, the sort of investing under extreme uncertainty, you know, we should have on the podcast again sometime is we talked to him, remember Bill Janeway? Oh, yeah, the vc. And he talks about, like, he's a venture capitalist and he's also an economist. And he talks about, like, basically, you know, investing under. And this is when. Under extreme uncertainty. And this is extreme, extreme uncertainty. Because it's actual life science, as she said, you have no way of pricing it. You don't know the market size. You don't know what they're going to pay. You don't have a distribution channel because it's not a veterinary medicine where the veterinarians are kind of service salespeople, et cetera. So how you go about pricing that and how you go about from sort of lab to company and make that initial step and then there's. It's not really falls in anyone's category is, to me, just such a fascinating economics question.
- [43:23]
Tracy Alloway
Absolutely. And the one other thing I want to put in here, this is a call to action for listeners, but I've been wanting to do an episode on gender selection technologies in agriculture for a long time. So, you know, there's a huge amount of waste if you're breeding something like cattle or chickens because you don't want a bunch of roosters if you're trying to farm eggs, or you don't want a bunch of bulls if you're trying to produce milk. And I know there are companies working on this particular technology. I don't know the name specifically. I don't know if we can get them to come on the show, but if anyone has any connections to them, please let them know that we want to talk.
- [44:02]
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy, I'm gonna bring this back to World War II history real quickly. This is my other takeaway of reading about the history of what the males are very expendable. Countries lose millions of men and continue to operate. And so it's similar to animals in that respect.
- [44:20]
Tracy Alloway
I'm not gonna say anything shall we leave it there?
- [44:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Let's leave it there.
- [44:24]
Tracy Alloway
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me Tracee Allaway and I'm Joe Weisenthal.
- [44:31]
Joe Weisenthal
You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Annette Kleiser. She's netteclicer. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez, Armenarman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashiell and KalebrookSalebrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlots we have all of our episodes in a daily newsletter and you can chat about all of these topics 24. 7 in our Discord, Discord, GG Oddlots.
- [44:55]
Tracy Alloway
And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when Joe brings up how expendable the males of the species actually are, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcast and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
- [45:48]
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Marc Reape
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Bloomberg
The app Store Today, A warming planet, complex geopolitics and fierce competition means business operations are under more scrutiny than ever before. Returning to Singapore this July, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit is uniting leaders and investors to explore how sustainability efforts can bolster resilience and mitigate risk. Learn more at BloombergLive.com SBS Singapore that's BloombergLive.com SBS Singapore this is an iHeart podcast.