116. The beauty of innovation

Welcome everybody on today's episode. We're looking into innovation in all its beauty. We can now look into previous trials, previous life science discovery journeys that for some recent stalled and maybe looking to it again, but they're the different filter and the different eyes. Today we will hear from two guests who will tell us how passion for innovation in life sciences can make a real impact on the world. Innovation for me is when something is truly unique and truly unique cannot come from the main year machine that only weighs of problem-solving. That is what matters on today's episode of Discovery Matters. So my name is Helene Astegard and I am the founder and CEO of a company called Ventures Accelerated. Ventures Accelerated helps startups and growth companies in life sciences grow faster by connecting them with the right investors, partners and markets. And so how did Helena make her way to the role, the lofty role of CEO in this organization? She grew up in Uppsala, north of Stockholm in the 1990s and according to Helena, when it came to biotech, there was no better place or time. In the 90s that's a lot of biotech, pharmacy, that was what was hot and you. And I was I think always quite interested in science in general and going into biotech specifically, I am quite certain that it actually had to do with the whole atmosphere or where I grew up in this biotech hub of Uppsala. I can just see it. Uppsala in the 90s, spice girls replacing Aber finally on the radio, biotech in the labs. We're going to stay focused today on animation right. How did she end up working in the field? Let's say it was an unconventional route. I don't think there's anything traditional about my career. It's been a bit of a zig-zag pattern. I'm trained engineering in biotechnology but quite soon pivoted into going into public sector but still working their life sciences. And that's how I started to kind of look into life sciences from a more holistic overarching standpoint and really diving into how the ecosystem works and those things. And yeah, that's how it all started. What does Helena think has been the most transformative scientific innovation recently? Well, now we knew I don't think you're going to be surprised by her answer. It's going to be artificial intelligence. Yeah, you got it. I'm really intrigued of how AI is creating a revolution for us in life sciences in every single way. It cuts through everything I would say. It's everything from being able to find new drugs in a more efficient way and be able to really reap the benefits of this tradition of data and health data that we have in the Nordics. But it also goes into, for instance, women's health, the whole different than women and how we can now look into previous trials, previous life science discovery journeys that for some recent stalled and maybe looking to it again, but the different filter and the different eyes. And all of that is being powered by the force of AI. Helena says that she and her team at Ventures accelerated use AI to get more precise about who they work with. We do what we call precision partnering. So basically we have our own proprietary AI platform that we've built to be able to filter out a noise. So that whoever is looking for the right type of capital or the right partner, you will be able to do that so much more efficiently if you use AI to find that target. Let's look a little into this idea of balancing artificial intelligence, I guess. It's similar to any other kind of innovation. You can't have to ride forward with creativity or the time they have to be guardrails, right? How does Helena work to establish those? If we zoom out and we look at innovation, science and innovation, from a more historic standpoint, I mean over the decade, we will always be excited to diving to the new and unknown and whatever is a revolution everyone wants to be associated with it. So absolutely, there is a risk that you just run forward and in this without really considering the risks or backdrops. To be honest, when I think of the AI revolution, it's so complex for us to fully grasp, I think. Risk is certainly a hurdle or a call it a challenge for innovators, but I wanted to know what else was making an uphill effort for innovators and here is what Helena said. I think right now, the biggest hurdle for life science innovation is that there's been quite a few years of financial winter. So it's a really, really tough world to live in for a life science company. I even wish I were to, it has four funerals and a wedding because there are so many life science companies not just in Nordics, but all over. They have been living on nothing for so long that's quite a few of them now. They just can't make it any longer. But on the other hand, those that really do succeed, what we see would be larger ticket sizes, better partnerships and deals. So that's that marriage that actually that wedding that actually happens might be a more successful one. Now when you have so many small innovative startups that are fighting for their existence, it can be hard to cut through all the noise. So what I see and that worries me is that of course quite a few of these small innovative companies, not everyone is meant to eventually reach the market. That's just the circle of life in biotech. But I think too many are being sheltered out right now and maybe not for the right reasons. That's something that I think ventures accelerated can help them. So we might be overlooking some gems out there and she's worried about. We most certainly are, yeah. But we're optimistic on this podcast, so what is she excited about? To start with, I hope that all the companies that we work know that they have been able to reach their goals and its groundbreaking innovation in every single case. And when looking into the future, if Helena were to pick one thing to focus on, it would be precision medicine. In fact, precision everything. Hopefully it's not something just for the few. It's not something that is a luxury or extremely expensive. So I hope that it's just as obvious as adapting your glasses to your specific eyesight. Obviously we are different. Our biologics would be different. And the whole different thing women when it comes to women's health. What I would hope is that we don't even think about it in terms of different in women. We're like, well, we're all bodies of different biology, hormones, everything. And that we have found ways to movely interact with that and make sure that drugs are also rich right dosage and all those things. Actually, one of the companies that we work with on those is they are well on track to be able to deliver this in a way that will be not so expensive, more accessible to be able to make sure that if you need a certain, for instance, ADHD medication, it's not the same every day. And it's not the same for a big person and a small person. Okay, so personalizing not just doses, but doses in the moment in time. Cool. So, and then I grew up in Upsilinder 90s. She's made a career in biotech in a historic hub for science. And with that in mind, what's the advice that she would give to somebody setting out on the power to help shape the future of the will help. One is the traditional follow your heart. Make sure that you really work with the things that excite you that make you tick. Passion is important. Otherwise you can't have the grit that you need to push through because things will be hard in any career path. So, passion and following your heart. But then I also think that it's very important to not be afraid to have more clever people around you, especially if you are a young leader and you work with experts. In our mind of business, no one can know it all. It's not meant to be like that. This is always going to be a teamwork. And I think that it's crucial to not be too much of a one-man show in this industry. You really have to be able to embrace that you will never be to expert in everything. You will never be the one who is. And you shouldn't be afraid of that. You should embrace being in environments where you can always learn and be impressed by the people you have around you. [Music] Our next guest is going to tell us more about the business end of innovation as a world. I am Lisa Lindstrom, an entrepreneur who is currently an entrepreneur because I am not part of a wide-in-the-net work called EY or Ernst & Young, where I am the business reinvention leader. That means I help companies to find the mixed generation of themselves. As a distinguished innovator and entrepreneur, Lisa has received the Royal Patriotic Society's Enterprise Medal and has served as an industry advisor to the government as well as chairman of the Swedish Education Broadcasting Company. And one of those CVs that makes you just kind of like. Oh, bad about things you've ever done. Yeah. Right? Or not done. Or not done exactly. But she focused on a specific part of innovation. Where I'm finding that very interesting is to look into a little bit more traditional companies, manufacturing companies. When the world's resources are scarce, what is it that they should do going forward? So personally, I just find that very interesting. About the parts of that, I find almost all the organist they have assets that they are currently not using, that they could look into your use of. Lisa says the commonality between all the people she gets to work with through her job is that they all look to solve problems. So you hear about a challenge and then you immediately come up with an idea. I think that the challenge is that that, you know, submission is very often based on the things that you brought into the moment. So when I say that you need to say in that discomfort is that it's not comfortable to stay in a problem. But that is what we need to do to go to the root cause of sonaring, particularly wicked or complex problems. So that it's comfort, not going into that, a lonely mode of just brainstorming, but go deeper. What could it be behind this? And then what could it be behind this? Sitting with discomfort. I like that. It's almost therapeutic. I'm just going to sit with that discomfort. And she gives us an example of using this when she's working with a life science company. So I worked with a company who came up with a new invention and the problem that they wanted to have son this, how do we make sure that the industry understands that we now have this new invention? And I've simply looked into the website and it looks like exactly. Because it was the new numbers, approving what all these great science led to. So we said to them, "Stay in this problem for a little while and just understand your core target group. What is it that they are reading? Where do they learn about new inventions?" And we learned that the action they are really good in metaphors and seeing pictures and visualizing in their heads what a new invention would do to help them. So we then came up with a highly visual language explaining what this new technology could do in a very visual way, in the storytelling kind of way, which led to a fantastic IPO of the company because not only did the scientist understand, but actually the market also understood what this is. I think that sometimes we go to kind of, "Oh, the target group is like this, then let's solve the problem like this." But we sometimes just need to go a little deeper and understand that people are people. And maybe everyone knows this already. But we still make things, you know, we need to know professional and then we need to make ourselves more complicated because then people will trust us. When it's time, it's the opposite. She also told me about a specific project she worked with, which I think shows her unconventional ways of working with innovation, where the human side of it really comes to the surface. Here it's better that Lisa tells you the story. We once worked with the Allergy Association of the Americas. And of course, Ick the Ken is a brilliant innovation that should have solved a lot of the problems for all of the kids with extreme allergies. They call on us and they said, "We have a challenge here because a lot of parents are so scared of leaving their kids with an ectopen in the backpack or even having their kids to go meet with the friends after school because it might be the kid itself does not know how to use it or the parents around us, not the maladies." So it's almost like, even if you have this brilliant innovation just by having it, it scares people. So there was like a human component to this brilliant innovation that hindered them to let their kids go by themselves. Our unthinking of ectopen would be the perfect way of being an independent kid. Instead, it was like the parents joined them all the time. So we did a lot of investigation of what is it? Why is this? And it's because every kid is different and every kid reacts in a different way. We built a little companion, so basically a little app. So let's say that your kid has extreme allergy and is going to do a sleep over with me. You could simply text me a little link on how to use the ectopen for your particular kid. So a key way, you know, the picture of your kid and the picture of your kid's backpack and where the ectopen was and also then some tips and tricks on how to use it for your kid. And that helped these parents enormously. So it's just a very empathetic innovation that comes with a very scientific innovation. And the combination of the two is what made these parents trust the ectopen. It's just behavioral science, it's remarkable. You and I don't really know that there's always this kind of tension between highly regulated markets in the life sciences to help care and then the demand for innovation but rapid innovation. Yeah, for good reason that tension exists. Absolutely. A patient safety is absolutely critical. So wondering though, if Lisa has advice on how to either resolve or maybe sit with the discomfort of that tension and to celebrate it in some way. Here her advice is something I absolutely endorse. She says, "It close with your legal department." Way, way, way to often we come up with something and then we involve the complies and they give team too late, which means we have already spent all of these time and money into innovating something that is not possible to do. But if you put in the legal department super early, they are very often also really doing the good problem as always. But they are making sure that whatever it is that we are testing, trying, experimenting is legally compliant. So that's kind of my number one trick. That seems culture intuitive, but we know that that's the way to work. It is so much the way to work. And she says after making sure the legal department is always part of the innovation team, one should look into what is truly compliant and this is clever, what is a myth? Because sometimes we trip over ourselves and limit our very own selves. So I've worked a lot with government and municipalities and there are a lot of people who are saying we are not allowed to do these. The regulations is against this. But I have had a way of working where you have the innovation team with legal people embedded. But then you also have a look removes of team. And what I mean with that is that whenever you come up with this, are we allowed to do this? Let's have someone else looking to if that is illegal or not illegal so that you can continue in your flow. Because it's like innovation and ideation and all of this. It's like having fun and having flow and you don't want that look hard stop. So if you can have like a separate team that looks into the compliance of it, that usually also helps a lot. And specifically when they work with government and municipalities, 50% of the time it's actually myths. That's absolutely the case. And people not make up, but they kind of fall into the feeling that you're not allowed to do something because we've never done it before and so on. And we've seen this in many cases which the pover ourselves limit progress. says one of our biggest skills is knowing when to leave an innovation project. Again, coming back to this classic cliche about strategy, it's as much what you do not do as what you do do. Maybe it's because we don't want it or we say, "Oh, fish is going to be challenging," or "People shortcut a lot when it comes to these things." I would say this is a little bit more, maybe in life science, than is a little bit more hardcore on what you allow, but what you're not allowed to do. Most companies that I meet have struggled with almost like found being around ideas that they invested so much money in, so they don't want to leave them. So the trick here is to know when to leave the idea early on. So in the beginning, it's all around what is it that we want to learn about this hypothesis, idea experiment that will take us to the next step. So if you design those learning goals, if you're not reaching the learning goals, give the idea. A little bit later, in that innovation phase, we should go into and could we then make money out of this? I know that in the beginning, do not look for the donors, look for the earnings, and in the end go look for the dollars. And don't hunk the potential. We're too many potential huggers who is like, "Yeah, but if we just fix this and if we just, I know we didn't reach it, but if we, that's the time when you need to kill it." This is basically the concept of avoiding some costs and killing your darlings, right? We heard about how they know works with AI earlier on, but what about Lisa? What are her thoughts on using AI to say support innovation? I say that you can hound the percentage AI for ideation, but it's still you as a person who is either prompting or prioritized or skew or introduce fiction or, you know, so you're still the orchestrator throughout the journey. So I say it as it will be less manual ideation, but yet very manual decision making. If we don't do this, there is a risk that everything will be diluted and be very similar. And innovation for me is when something is truly unique. And truly unique cannot come from the near machine, there are new ways of problem solving. You need to add, you know, something that is pretty weird or something that only a human could come up with, because it's so crazy and not logical at all. That is when the true innovation will appear. So the clumsiness of a person or the unpredictability of being human needs to be there in the innovation process. AI will be a companion with some parts of it, but you still need to be around. I love not celebrating the imperfection. Another nice turn of phrase. Indeed, we have explored innovation today from a scientific and a deeply human and behavioral perspective. Elena and Lisa have shown us that true innovation is not just about technology moving fast. Instead, it is about insight, empathy, and making smart choices in complex systems. We've heard once again the impact of artificial intelligence on changing and accelerating the life sciences from drug discovery to precision medicine. And also we've been reminded of the need for guardrails, long term thinking, and better ways to find overlooked animations during challenging financial types. And even though we've spoken about innovation on this podcast before, you know, there are always different voices and different perspectives on innovation. It's important to keep the topic alive. So what I take from this particular episode is knowing the innovation thrives with passion, collaboration, and the right partnerships. So it is about keeping that curiosity, feeding, just have a healthy, healthy dose of curiosity and collaboration. And I feel, don't you, this is just one of the recurring themes again and again and again, the ever since episode one of this podcast is multidisciplinary collaboration, compassion is what drives the science. It's not linear, it's not perfect, it's not always purely data driven in the end. It's human curiosity, imperfect judgment that turns ideas into real world impact. And with that said, right, it's time for every day is a school day. What have you learned, Connor? I've been looking inspired by previous episodes at positive impacts and movements in global health. And I've learned today the two big things have happened in Latin America. Suriname has eliminated malaria and Brazil has cut vertical HIV transmission and these are two really big wins. So we see reports that Suriname is the first country in the Amazon region to be certified malaria free, sustained vector control that's killing mosquito surveillance, cross-border cooperation, and in parallel, Brazil has been certified for interrupting mother to child transmission of HIV. They might just end up, it's amazing, isn't it? But also they reduce sytlas and hepatitis transmission as well. And these are gains that come alongside broader investments in primary healthcare and genomics surveillance supported by the world bank and the IDB, the international development bank. It just shows you that lullar and middle income countries can hit elimination targets from major infectious diseases when primary care, lab networks and financing all line up will work together. That is a really optimistic, hopeful, nice one. We have to have that stuff. We need to pay attention to what's happening and progressing when so much is perhaps feeling a little bit down. Well, what I learned is a study from the American Society for Microbiology. And it actually popped up into my newsfeed though the source study is from the year 2024, but hey, everything old is new again. And this is about living microbes being discovered in the driest desert on earth, the Atacama desert in Chile. And so they often use this desert as a stand-in for Mars. So this is related to looking for life on other planets. So scientists used a DNA technique that separates DNA from living cells versus dead environmental DNA. And they showed that there are microbes violently colonizing this supposedly dead landscape. And so that makes it a better test bed for detecting life on other planets. So that is super cool. I love the fact that we can simulate Mars on Earth and there's already much there. Yeah, it's fantastic. And there is an incredible voice on this podcast that you do not hear with your ears, but his shapes are podcasted by producing and mixing and making it a finished product. And that is Tom Henley. But me in the meantime, I'm Dodie Axelsen. And I'm Connolly Keppnery. If you rate us on Spotify and give us five stars, it mysteriously helps the podcast. Tom, we're really so grateful. We would and we would thank you also for listening to Discovery Matters brought to you by the front people at Sightiva. Bye for now.