Joshua Wang: PHD to Founder, Killing Cancer Using Trickery & Backlash vs. Personal Truth - E202

Joshua Wang, PhD is the Founder & CEO of VerImmune, an early biotechnology startup company developing a novel virus-inspired particle (ViP) technology platform that can be used as a delivery system to target multiple diseases. VerImmune’s first focus will be in Oncology whereby the ViP will enable the redirection of immune memory from past infections or childhood vaccinations to target cancer.

His initial primary interest was in vaccine development and that led him to pursue an education at Imperial College London, UK and then later graduate training at Johns Hopkins. It was during this period where Joshua caught the “entrepreneurial bug.” Joshua also previously worked as a Venture Labs fellow at Flagship Pioneering, a world class venture creation firm focused on developing innovative companies with first-in-class medicines to serve critical unmet needs.

Joshua considers himself an “accidental" bio-entrepreneur. He never intended to pursue biotech or start a business in drug development. Through serendipity and chance however, he found himself on this life-changing journey which has given him the privilege of developing potentially game changing treatment options to patients through the co-founding several startups, advising fellow aspiring founders, securing early-stage financing, partnerships with pharmaceuticals and operating early-stage biotech companies.

Jeremy Au: (00:30)
Hi Joshua. Really excited to have you on the show. It's been so many years that we've known each other since our Boston days as founders, and I think it's been amazing to see your growth not just from a company perspective, but also your personal growth as a leader during this time. So, I’ll love for you, Joshua, to share a little bit about yourself.
 

Joshua Wang: (00:47)
Yeah. Jeremy, thanks for inviting me on the show. It's really a great honour. Just to quickly introduce myself, you said my name, Josh; Joshua Wang. Four things about me as key takeaways. Number one, I'm a Singaporean, born and raised. I've actually been away for 16 years now, but most of my life I was a Singaporean.
I mean, I still am. Number two, I consider myself a vaccine scientist. That's my technical training. That's what I studied in my education. Three, currently, I am the founding CEO of a game changing company called VerImmune. This is a biotech company pioneering this new modality to target cancer by repurposing your acquired immunity and really excited about what we're doing here at VerImmune.
We are currently at growth stage. We just recently closed our seed round. We have some partnership, so we're really looking to rock and roll. In some many interesting ways, I consider myself an accidental bio entrepreneur, so happy to talk about that later. Finally, I think this is what I'm most proud of - I am a father just like you.
I have a ten month old and so it's been a great privilege and pleasure to watch him, my kid grow up. He's ten months old now. So, yeah. So just to summarise, in all – Singaporean, vaccine scientist, accidental entrepreneur, founder and father.
 

Jeremy Au: (02:15)
Yeah, no. Amazing. And I think being a father. Yeah. It is a pleasure, a privilege, and pressure. So, I think you’re spot on. So, yeah, the blooper was perfect. I think what's interesting obviously is I got to go to the beginning which is that, you know, you've loved biology for a long, long time and vaccines and you studied it at Imperial College London and then later at John Hopkins.
So, what triggered that love for biology and biotech?
 

Joshua Wang: (02:44)
Yeah, that's a good question. And that love actually stemmed from the fact that in biology actually that, you know, if you think about it, there's actually always an exception to the norm. That's why I like biology, actually. I remember in my earliest days, you know, people used to tell me, you know, because I like the sciences in general, but biology is my favourite.
And physics actually was my least. Part of it actually was because people would tell me and my teachers that, you know, physics is common sense – laws of the universe are governed by physics and they're not wrong. But it kind of felt like you felt trapped in this realm. I'm sure there's stuff in physics where it's not the norm and there’s outliers, but you kind of felt like physics.
Everything is locked in this box in its place. But for biology, there was always an exception. Life will find a way. As you know, the Jurassic Park movie likes to say you go to the volcano. It's all hot, but you can still find some bacteria living there. I don't know how it mutated its genome to be able to survive there.
If you go to the deep oceans, there's no oxygen, but somehow, you know, you can find life there. And so I really liked the fact that there might be some unknown rules…that outlier in biology, and it fascinated me and excited me. And so I was drawn to it, that science, essentially, and I didn't know this at a time, but I was always actually interested in drug development, like how to create new medicines to help people.
I just didn't really understand it or defining it so succinctly. I just I found that to my path slowly as I gravitated towards entrepreneurship. But back then, you know, it was more holistic. I was more like, well, there's always an exception to the rule in biology, and I like that, you know? So it's like there's always an outlier.
And that's what attracted me to it that; the rules were still waiting to be written. I guess in a way.
 

Jeremy Au: (04:33)
I love biology too you know, I was pre-med. I wanted to be a vaccine scientist when I was a kid because I saw Doctor David, man of the year for, you know, HIV and AIDS vaccine, not vaccine, HIV and AIDS, you know, drug cocktail mixed work. And I wanted to be a vaccine scientist, but I realised that the lab was not for me.
The PhD route seemed like a bummer. I mean, what's interesting is that you chose to become a Ph.D., right? You double down on that pathway. So tell us more about what is it like to be a Ph.D.?
 

Joshua Wang: (05:07)
Most fundamentally, I think it’s a path of objective thinking because and I think I'll speak more to life sciences and biomedical PhDs because I'm sure there’s generalities, but I prefer to just speak about stuff that I've gone through. So I believe it's a lot about objective thinking, a lot about thinking about frameworks in some ways of a problem and about how can you go about solving that problem and answering questions around that specific problem.
I think that's root and essence. You know, that's what actually a Ph.D. is all about. My wife likes to joke about this but Ph.D. stands for Doctor of Philosophy. I think if we go back to what actually the early days of Ph.D. is really all about, just thinking in thought experiments and really being able to address certain questions and give good answers, I guess.
And that's what you do in your PhD. You have a thesis topic which is the central question, and then you spend years taking that question apart and, you know, trying to show data or I guess evidence or you know, whatever to address that. That's very important to remember because especially in the life sciences, you know, sometimes when you have a Ph.D. project, it doesn't always go well.
Sometimes, you are doing research, right? So sometimes the research fails. You don't get what you want. But at the end of the day, I think you need to remember, you were trying to answer a question and unfortunately that question led to a result where everything is negative. Let's say you were trying to figure out whether X correlates with Y.
In a perfect scenario. It does. And then, you know, you have all this data and publications to show that it correlates together. In reality, because it's research sometimes it doesn't and even though you have all the data to show that it doesn't correlate, it's not exactly great. Nobody really publishes negative data but I think it's important for the PhD candidate to remember that and they should be proud of themselves that they actually did everything correctly to show that X doesn't correlate to Y and it's through that iterative process. You know that if they did everything correctly, I think they should be proud of themselves because at the end of the day, when you leave your Ph.D., you should have that skills of being able to objectively think and approach and address a question and that's the real skills you get from those, you know, four, five, six years of additional education.
 

Jeremy Au: (07:26)
And what's interesting is that you did this Ph.D. so many years and you chose not to go to academia and you chose to become a founder, right?
And that's an uncommon pathway regardless of anything, right? So how did you catch this entrepreneurship bug? What was that choice in that leap?
 

Joshua Wang: (07:44)
It’s ironic actually because everything that I, you know, my entire life choice was actually I was trying to escape entrepreneurship. So I'm going to answer your questions in two parts. I'll tell you why I find this ironic because I actually grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. I actually saw paths that would take me away from it.
And my father himself has run three businesses, and I saw two of them fail. And so I, you know, from a very young age, I was like, I don't want to do this. I went in very close to microbiology but what I don't tell, what people don't know actually is before that, I actually went to do an undergraduate course in business, also in the UK but three months in I was like, no, this is not for me and I actually quit and waited for nine months to restart my microbiology course. Everything was making me focus more on going into doing the life sciences and really focusing on vaccines, vaccine and using viruses as platforms to target the different diseases. So that’s the first part I thought was ironic that I was trying to avoid it, but as I did my Ph.D., I started to realise that academic life was not what I wanted.
I wanted to make sure that I continue to pursue my…at that point, I didn't realise this. I was trying to get myself to be part of the drug development industry. I just didn't really understand it back then. I just knew I wanted to work on vaccines, but I didn't want to work within the framework of academia and part of this is also because I was in a very translational Ph.D. lab, my mentor made many different kinds of exciting therapeutics and vaccines. At that point of time, how these technologies would get out to the market is big pharma or a biotech company or the government would come in to license it and so I saw how he would have these technologies. There was one particular example where he had this very fascinating technology that a big, big global pharma licenced and it just sat on a shelf and it was sort of trapped there and there was nothing he could do because it was the university's technology, you know, he'd given up the rights and it was just sad and I was thinking to myself and this might sound presumptuous, but I was thinking, well, you know, I want to go and be able to do what my mentor did also, but should the off chance be that I become a successful academic and I actually have all these cool products, I don't want a situation where it's stuck there on a shelf, you know, I want to see it go all the way.

I mean, that's what I studied so hard for and, you know, build a career towards. That's when I think the whole idea of trying to do it yourself with a team and entrepreneurship actually started to take root and start to take form. It was still a primitive thought at that time, but I started to gravitate towards

doing that.
 

Jeremy Au: (10:23)
What's interesting is that you became a founder with, you know, three months of business experience, right? And many years of experience in biology, although it kind of is uncommon within Ph.D. but I think if you zoom out, actually there's a lot of people who are primarily scientists, engineers who are transitioning to that founder and CEO role, right?
So could you share a little bit more about what challenges you had to overcome or what personal growth you had to do in order to become a founder and leader?
 

Joshua Wang: (10:52)
I would say the biggest thing I had to overcome and I'm still trying to master this is in many ways being brave and having that self-confidence to take responsibility and try. When you start out as a founder of any company, I guess, and you want to push forward, you know, something that you've never done before, I think you're going to get a lot of negative. I won't say negative, but people will tell you that, you know, you can’t do it. I mean, basically, that was what happened when me and my, some of my classmates and my mentors co-found our first Biotech Start-Up, there was a lot of I wouldn't say negative, but I think there was a lot of feedback that, you know, you guys are just too inexperienced, you guys don't know what you're doing. Vaccine development is hard. What I've learnt is, you know, you have to accept that is the truth. We are an inexperienced. Vaccine or drug development in general is hard but if you wanted to do it, you know, you would take that no or rejection and ask them, well, what can I do to be better?
What would make you actually think otherwise? It’s very interesting actually, the moment when somebody tells you no is actually very liberating and is a great opportunity for a lot of founders actually because the person at the other end of the table now has nothing to lose and so you actually can get the best feedback and information from them and you could use that to distil, you can distil that and actually use that to help your company get better.

One of the most available free resource on this planet beyond sunlight is a person's opinion when they say no. And I actually found that to be true. The other thing I think that is so yeah, just wrapping up, the first thing that I think I've grown a lot is having more confidence to take the no’s and to actually be thick skinned enough to ask, well, why no?
I think the second thing is very important that I'm also still trying to master and craft is the skill of discernment. I think as you try to build a company and move forward, you are going to get a lot of feedback, advice and sometimes very well-meaning, well-intentioned advice that actually doesn't apply to your company and doesn't apply to your situation at that point of time and if you take it, you might actually hurt your company. This whole skill of being able to discern, advise, discern the situation, taking a step back and this might not work for everyone, by the way. You know, I'm more, I guess is because I'm a scientist at heart. I'm more data driven. So I like to…maybe I overanalyse.

But I realised that being able to discern and figure out, being able to discern and figure out what is this advice actually telling me and does it really apply to my company at this point in time is very critical because you are making decisions every day that could have long term implications and people are working for your start-up, their rice bowls are directly affected by your decision and so you need to make the best choices at that point of time.
And I think those two things are skills that I'm still trying to craft, still trying to master. I would say I'm getting better at it, but I'm not there yet I would say. There are lot of things also I think you learn as a founder. I was going to share two things but I think I'm just going to throw in one last thing is, one thing I've learnt also along the way is don't be too hard on yourself.
After you get all the feedback and after you do the discernment, you're still working on imperfect information. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I think early on in my Start-Up and Founder career, I was quite hard on myself when something doesn't go well and at the end of the day, you still have to chin up and move forward.
If you wanted to move forward, as you used to tell me, Jeremy, if you want something to happen, you know, you'll find a way. Those are some of the things I guess I've learnt along the way.
 

Jeremy Au: (14:39)
Wow. There's a lot of wisdom there. It feels like frankly night and day difference between when we used to hang out and discuss all of this years ago and where you are today. I guess the past few years have been like dog years, I guess, you know, seven years for every year. In terms of training and experience.
 

Joshua Wang: (14:59)
Yeah. I started VerImmune almost two and a half years ago and it was literally right at the start of the pandemic. So yeah, you're right, it was quite a journey trying to run everything, run the lab remotely, fundraise remotely and build the team remotely. Now everyone's coming back to the lab and everyone’s coming back to the office.
Everyone, you know, seeing each other again. But yeah, it was quite an interesting time. The markets were acting funny and there was a lot of uncertainty but I'm glad we, we as a company and team managed to overcome all of that.
 

Jeremy Au: (15:21)
Yeah. And what's interesting is that your company is doing something amazing, right? Which is about combining, you know, your previous work in terms of vaccine and immune system, but also using that to go kill cancer, which is an amazing trick and amazing magic there. And I think there's so much promise in that field. Could you share a little bit more for those who don't understand what it means what you're doing?
 

Joshua Wang: (15:50)
Yeah, sure. So what we're doing at VerImmune is essentially we're tricking the body to see cancer as a past infection. So the idea here is that maybe taking a step back, let's talk about the fundamental problem of cancer therapy right now. On one end of the spectrum, people have been trying to create vaccines that target cancer for, I guess, over 30, 40 years now.

And, you know, it's similar to the idea of creating vaccines against infectious diseases. I think everybody's more educated on this now because of COVID, but the whole idea is creating an immune response that would target the virus all the infected cell. And so they are trying to apply this knowledge to target cancer, but it doesn't work very well because cancer fundamentally is a disease from within.
It's due to mutations in your body and whatnot. You're relying on the immune system to target your own self. The immune system has been trained over the years not to target yourself. It targets foreign invaders. So it's very hard to actually create a cancer vaccine to target cancer and cancer happens at any age, but it happens predominantly in the elderly population where your immune system is already a little bit off, its old.
It's not as good as it used to be. So it's hard to create an immune response. On the flipside, there are new technologies now that are trying to unleash dormant anti-cancer responses in your body because, you know, cancer doesn't happen overnight. It happens all the time. But the problem is, like I said, you know, immune response was never trained to actually target yourself.
So you have one end of the spectrum where everyone's focusing on where they're trying to unleash a response that doesn't exist. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people trying to create a response, but it's so hard to create. So for VerImmune I think fundamentally, what we were trying to ask before we even came up with a product or anything was, well, what is it in your body that is lifelong, that is protective and it clears diseases and it was an “aha” moment for us when we realised, oh wait, that's your immunity against certain viruses like measles, chicken pox, your immunity against the flu.

Yeah, unfortunately you get the flu but you sleep it off after two weeks, right? So can we repurpose that kind of immunity and use that to target cancer? Well, how do we do that? You know, can we trick the body to see cancer as the flu? Can we treat the body to see the cancer as chicken pox? And from that idea, you know, we started to work out a plan of action on, well, how can we take that idea and actually convert it into an actual new approach to target cancer?
What kind of platform can we create? How are we going to do this? And I couldn't have done this alone. The scientist who thought about it, I wrote a grant to generate some proof of concept, but I think I went around talking to a lot of people about this and I was very lucky to meet more seasoned biotech business veterans who said, well Josh, this is great science but you need a product development guy.
And that's actually how I met our current COO who helped me a lot and worked with me to mature the company and help do a product development line and everything. But yeah, I'm sort of going off tangent a little bit, but that was essentially the main motivation to start VerImmune. We wanted to find another way to target cancer that was using a totally different way because everybody was just doing the same thing and that frustrated me in many ways.
 

Jeremy Au: (19:05)
That's amazing and cancer obviously afflicts so many people, everybody. And it's, you know number one killer in developed worlds because you know everything else has been figured out from, you know, heart attack to other things. But cancer's really a big one there. And obviously, biotech is obviously a huge, huge, huge source of innovation and the saviour to solve and hopefully knock down cancer by one peg or two pegs or ten pegs.
But what's interesting is that biotech start-ups are known to be hard, right? You know, it's known to be hard, it’s known to be stressful, it’s also very science based. Could you share about why biotech innovation is so hard.
 

Joshua Wang: (19:43)
I think biotech is hard because of several reasons. And first and foremost, most of the time, you are fundamentally trying to pioneer or develop a new drug or medical device that or I don't know what now these days or even digital stuff that banks on some totally new, new discovered pathway in your body or like some sort of new scientific ground-breaking research.
And so you're banking on that. And obviously not everything has been sort of resolved. It's still researched in a way and a lot of times the research is done on model systems and actually on actual humans. So you actually taking this proof of concept, you're translating into a product and then you actually have to test it in humans.
So you're actually doing this one big gigantic experiment which could fail because not, you know, every single model out there has its recognised limitations. So that's problem number one. Problem number two I think is the regulatory pathways because you actually fundamentally, at the end of the day putting this in people, there is a certain bar that you need to meet, not only in terms of the data but in terms of the quality of the things, you know, the products that you make.
So in my area where it’s more biologics, you know, like drugs and medicine. You have to make sure that you have a high quality, reproducible manufacturing process. You need to show that you have quality systems in place that your product does what it says it’s going to do. You need to be able to scale up that manufacturing and you need to prove that it’s safe.
So there's all these other layers of things that you need to do and you need people who know how to do this to get it done. Compared to tech companies actually, biotech in many ways does require certain level of grey hair experience because you are going to be doing a lot of manufacturing and quality and FDA interactions that they don't teach you in school that you know, you never learn about it, right?
I didn't know about it. I'm still learning about it to be honest. And so that that's a level of difficulty and complexity to, you know, a regular tech company where I won’t say that the regulatory hurdles are less, but I think it's just you could bank on less experience in some ways.
And I think that experience factor also, unfortunately and this is the third point, the experience requirement actually is a factor I think that goes into investor’s minds when they evaluate biotech start-ups. They might see a founder and say, oh, this guy's enthusiastic. You know, he's trustworthy. You know, the science is good but does he have the team and the right experience to actually bring this to the next level?
And if the team doesn't seem to show that they have that, I think it might dissuade the investor from actually taking a chance and the risk. There's all these different layers that make biotech harder. I'm sure there are more but at the top of my mind, these are the top three. So, you know, the science is, needs to be proven in humans. There's a lot of additional regulatory factors and finally, you know, there’s that experience thing that is much more expected and required essentially compared to other realms of tech, technology start-ups
 

Jeremy Au: (22:49)
That's a great explanation and inside view of why biotech is hard. How do you advise founders to overcome those three challenges?
 

Joshua Wang: (23:00)
I think the most important thing is to accept that you really don't know a lot of these things. And I would advise founders, especially aspiring founders, who want to start biotech companies to actually try to surround themselves with advisors and people who actually have done this and not be afraid of seeking out these people and getting their advice as you try to put together your development plan and your plan to scale the company. It’s very critical because there are people out there who have done this before, for sure. It just takes effort from the founder to go and find these people, to get the right advice to move things ahead. And then you can apply, you know what I just mentioned about discernment, about being too hard on yourself and all those things. But I would advise founders to go out and talk to as many exactly the same advice as any start-up founder should get, right? But I think for biotech, it's just so much more necessary, a lot more, I guess resilience is required because sometimes you might not be able to find the right person and it's going to take a while before you do just because, you know, there's so many different kinds of technology out there also.
So that that would probably be one of the key advice I would say and just be prepared that they might give you things that you might not want to hear but discern and try to understand what they’re actually trying to say and how you can apply that to your path, your product.
 

Jeremy Au: (24:22)
Wow. I agree with you that being a start-up founder is hard and yet doing a biotech, a deep tech founder where the science and testing that giant experiment is actually a fundamental hurdle that needs to be overcome and much more thoroughly prepared for with the right experience and right thoughtfulness is quite true. And it must have been a tough time for you as you built these companies.
Could you share with us about a time that you've been Brave?
 

Joshua Wang: (24:47)
Yeah. I told you in the beginning that I was actively looking not to do entrepreneurship, and I was like seeking more of a path of being a vaccine scientist. And I talked and I mentioned to you that, you know, I went to business school actually and after three months, I decided this wasn't for me and I really wanted to pursue an education and training and in the life sciences.
And so I quit my studies. I didn't tell my parents, I just secretly reapplied and waited to be accepted before telling them which obviously they were not very happy. And I think you and I, we are from Singapore, you know, we grew up in a time where, you know, you don't just quit things. You don't just quit. You have to power on whatever you're given.
And so I'm privileged that I was able to study microbiology subsequently. I was lucky that my dad was able to support me in that but fundamentally still, you know, I face quite a backlash. When I came back, everybody was like, why are you a quitter? Why did you do this? And there were times when I was like, well did I do the right…did I make the right decision?
But looking back, this was one of the best decisions that I made in my life because it propelled me towards this training and education that gave me the technical background that I need to subsequently, at end of day, become a founder in this particular vaccine therapeutic space and if I had never made this decision, you know, it would never have…it worked out in the end, right? But had I not been brave, I guess, back then to say, to let go and quit and move to what I believed in, what I truly believed, I believed in and was interested in, I think I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today. And I think back to this moment a lot, because it was a very pure moment where it wasn't really quitting.
It was really like being true to yourself. And I think as a founder, there would be many moments where you would have to make difficult decisions, not like this, but, you know, in some other form or way, making these difficult decisions are hard and sometimes, you know, because you are afraid of the backlash, afraid that people would like you or whatever it is.
But if the intentions are pure, if it's an intention that it makes the most sense and is not self-serving, it’s best for the company, I think it will work out in some way or form. And I think that's, so that's the moment I wanted to share of being brave because I think it subsequently led me to be braver in many ways down the road in terms of making decisions. And I think as founders we had to make a lot of difficult decisions all the time and it requires bravery, I guess, in many ways and being brave enough to accept the consequences. Not every time it will work out. Sometimes it doesn't and you need to power on.
 

Jeremy Au: (27:31)
Now that you have chosen to be a father of your own as well, with your own child, how would you coach or counsel your children to be thinking about their career and their aspirations?
 

Joshua Wang: (27:44)
Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know, Jeremy. I think the first thing I would do is actually talk to other parents. I’ll talk to other parents and see what they do. I actually don't know the answer to that, to be honest. I would say that if just thinking off the top of my head, I think if my kid came to me and asked and said that he wanted to do that, I think I would be encouraging to them, but I think I would also tell them that as they try to move towards a certain career, if at any point of time they start to realise that it's actually not for them, they should take a step back and ask themselves, why are you suddenly feeling this way? Is it because you don't want to do this anymore? Because it's hard and you are, are you really not wanting to do this particular career path because it's just hard and you're lazy and you don't want to do it? Or are you just truly generally not interested in it? You thought it was something but then it turned out not to be like, you know, you mentioned that you want to be a vaccine scientist yourself, but you realise that academic science isn’t just for you. In a similar way you know, I actually wanted to be a medical doctor also. I actually thought about pre-med and all that stuff, but I realised that I didn't want to be a doctor. I just wanted to be more towards in the field of drug development and biologics. Some people are very lucky. They want to be something and it's…they've never ever question their choices but for, I think the rest of us, as we start to understand what that career, ambition, what the choice is, we start to realise actually that's not exactly what we want and so I think that's what I would advise them.
 

Jeremy Au: (29:16)
And my last question is you shared about being true to yourself and having that personal truth in the face of backlash, why it is important. How does one come to better self-awareness of what that personal truth is?
 

Joshua Wang: (29:29)
That's a good question again Jeremy and I think you’ll know it in some way or form, you'll feel it. You can lie to everybody, but you can lie to yourself in the mirror. After some time, somehow you will know whether it's true or not. I think a lot of times when we talk to people for advice and stuff like that and trying to achieve that personal goal, we actually already have some sort of bias in our mind like this is actually the decision I want to take and you're actually looking for affirmation. You’re not looking for advice. I think it's a difficult skill. It requires one person to know. You’ll know it, I think when the time comes. That's unfortunately how I would put it. I don't know how else to explain this unfortunately.
 

Jeremy Au: (30:13)
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I would love to paraphrase the three big things that I got from this.
The first is thank you for sharing about your journey from PhD to founder. I really appreciated about you sharing your love for biology and how you chose to actually switch from studying business to being a PhD and doing biology. But also, I think your career decision where you decided that you wanted to not be in academia but also be able to translate these innovations and inventions into the real world while also drawing on your family's history of entrepreneurship. So, a really interesting journey there.
The second, of course, is thank you so much for sharing about how you and your team is going about to kill cancer using trickery and I think that was a great explanation about what's going on with biologics, but also with the promise of vaccine therapy. And I also appreciate you giving a very quick overlay about why biotech start-ups are hard not just for individual founder, but also on a structural level, right? In terms of regulations, in terms of the fundamental science and experiments being ran across systems, but also in terms of the amount of experience needed by the system to push forward.
And lastly, thank you so much for sharing about your personal moment where the toughest decision regarding your choice of studies from business to biology but also later on some mind melding of those two again from academia to entrepreneurship, that backlash versus, you know, holding your own personal truth is a really interesting set of decisions about not being hard on yourself and not being hard on your child and being true to yourself is with some clear eye of discernment is a really good advice. So, thank you so much, Josh, for coming on the show.
 

Joshua Wang: (32:00)
Yeah, thanks, Jeremy. Appreciate it and hope someone can learn something from this. Yeah, thank you.