What you’ll hear in this episode:

• What an antibody is
• How software modeling antibodies can help scientists develop new pharmaceuticals
• About Dr. Monica Berrondo’s entrepreneurial journey 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, you may have been hearing a lot about antibodies in the news, but do we really know what scientists mean when they’re talking about antibodies? Dr. Monica Berrondo, Ph.D, is an antibody expert and founder of Macromoltek, a molecular modeling software company. She makes it simple. An antibody is a protein that the body produces to fight off disease. Typically, if you’re infected with a virus or bacteria the body will produce antibodies specific to fighting off that particular disease, but that takes time. That’s where Macromoltek, Dr. Berrondo, and her team were able to develop a molecular modeling software that allows scientists to forgo the body’s natural waiting period and model completely new, custom made antibodies that scientists are able to use to develop new pharmaceuticals. 

Macromoltek didn’t come out of the blue. Dr. Berrondo has a truly entrepreneurial spirit. She tells host Dan Dillard, “I think ever since I was really young I knew I wanted to start a company. I didn’t have any idea what. Obviously, I hadn’t figured out it was gonna be in molecular simulations at all… But I was like, ‘One day I’m gonna have a company.’”

Now, Macromoltek is a part of the Austin Community College Bioscience Incubator which provides a fully equipped and affordable lab space to the Austin life science community. Their lab facility is coupled with a business incubator that allows Central Texas biotech companies to accelerate and thrive in the industry. 

Listen to the second installment of Science In The Mall, Y’all to hear more about Dr. Berrondo’s partnership with the ACC Bioscience Incubator. If you like what you hear, leave us a review and share it with a friend!

Science In the Mall, Y’all is a founding_media podcast created in partnership with the ACC Bioscience Incubator. 

Host: Dan Dillard, founding_media

Guest: Dr. Monica Berrondo, Ph.D, Macromoltek

One of the things that shocked me was how expensive it was to get a drug to market.

Transcript:

this is a founding media podcast produced at Austin community college district welcome to science in the mall y’all I’m your host Dan Dillard today we get a little more into the science of it all we’re talking all about antibodies how they work and why they’re important with Dr mark Rundle of maximal tech Monica is an entrepreneur scientists and software engineers her and her team are trying to streamline the bio pharmaceutical research process in order to make new discoveries quickly and efficiently so here’s one example of science happening in the mall we all well Monica bedroom thanks for joining us today on our show this is going to be I’m looking forward to it learning all about antibodies in your path in your career path and what drives you so in reading your backstory one of the things that I found interesting  because I’m always in search intrigued about the honorable path or just the passion that every individual hands and it appears that back in the day you were looking at an issue around anybody’s and and how academia looked at it and versatile it’s the the in the in public  and you saw an issue there won’t even explain what you saw back then and how that slows down your breath sure so I did  I worked during grad school I worked with industries companies like big pharma companies and we were training them on how to use software around building molecular models of their of whatever they were working on and the software that we were using  was this really cool software package that can do everything kind of a thing  but most of what it did was around really academic problem so think like really basic science something new completely new discoveries  where is industry was focused on this like one little sliver of it one little area called antibodies  so antibodies are a type of protein and  focusing on just one protein isn’t as interesting as looking at a vast number of different proteins so  the industry was looking at one thing and I can email is looking at the other and I wanted to focus on what I want to see how we can get this to push medicine so how do we focus on what industry needs so that’s kind of where my idea came from very cool and so your  studies and what your interest was to begin with was what software designers that as an engineer what what was what was your passion as a kid growing up  sure so my my passion is programming software design  and I did a lot of it I started out in in  undergrad in computer science  with the chemistry minor and did a lot of internships around programming and I just hated the application so it’s doing a lot of liquid web development  and I thought it was super boring I didn’t really see a point to it and I got really lucky because when I went back after like a summer internship went back to school and  was talking to like an adviser I had he said well if you’re really interested in like medicine and stuff there’s this really cool field called molecular simulations you should look into that it’s using computers to see how proteins move our our proteins or other molecules move  so look into that and I you know I absolutely fell in love and then switched everything into that direction very very cool and then again going now fast forwarding to use all the identified this issue where there’s a discrepancy between what occurred he was and what industry needed and wanted that lead you to do right so after the kind of thinking about what are the applications would be more closely aligned with what industry needed to like pharma companies biotech companies  I decided that really the focus of most companies when they’re developing a new drugs it’s a it’s a protein it’s gonna be an out of body so we needed some sort of a software that could address antibodies specifically and not think about them as a type of protein but really think about them as their own class of proteins and build everything around that and so I started company to address that we would churn little bit ago about differences between antibodies and other types of proteins you want to just kind of briefly touched the touch on that for the audience for their perspective sure so your your body has a bunch of different proteins  there involved a different pathway so cancer when something goes wrong you either make too many of a protein or your protein has a mutation and then that causes disease and then also when you get infected by some sort of a virus or bacteria they have proteins on the surface of them and what your body does to fight these things off is produces antibodies seven antibodies a type of protein but its main function is to fight off disease and so antibodies are really important and the farm industry discovered this ten for more like thirty years ago and decided  what if we build antibodies very specifically so that we can fight these things off faster so it doesn’t have to depend on your body to recognize it produce antibodies etcetera you get a disease and immediately they give you an out of body that fights it off for you so so most expendable issue seven for your body it may sound like a list of weightlessness design this exact and so the software helps with a simulation of what right here well Sir that so what we do is designed completely new ones so right now the way you get an antibody is you take some some sort of a a mammal normally it’s a mouse you make that mouse sick you wait for that mouse to produce its own antibodies and then you take those antibodies after screen  and like make sure you have the right ones then you have to fix them so that you can inject them because they’re not with mouse antibodies anti human antibodies to take the mouse antibody turn it into a human antibody hello and then that’s your drug  and so what we do is take that whole time line of like the all the metal stuff in the screening and the fixing them and we do that computationally so we designed an out of body it’s gonna be very specific to whatever the disease in your target all on the computer all insult for exactly that social I I can see why you like software but doing this stuff is really really cool right so  using that ninety percent of anybody Sir the same right so anybody’s you know for the most part look the same so they have this Y. shaped  and think of it is like your hands are the tops of the wise in both of your hands are the same yeah  so you have two places to stick to something so essentially two ways to grab on to something with your hands  and it’s only your fingers that change the rest of it looks the same okay for the most part it’s like ninety percent ninety nine percent the same and then  it’s only the fingers that are different for each one and those fingers are what allows it to stick two completely different proteins and different diseases that’s really cool may just just your description of the hands fingers and that makes it easier for us to understand so my next question is around entrepreneurs and so you see a different issue and then you said okay well  there’s the software is not built for this we need to build a software solution used are designed it was unnatural Pathlight sure so I think ever since I was really young guy I knew I wanted to start a company I don’t have any idea what okay obviously I hadn’t figured out it was gonna be and in molecular simulations at all I knew I like medicine didn’t want to be a doctor but I was like one day I’m gonna have a company I’m so I kind of always had that in the back of my mind and so it you know as I was doing these trainings for software I was like what this would be really cool thing to start a company around I always had the intention of you know going working for a pharma company for a while learning everything but I was like but the problem is here now yeah what better time to start is that right now having no idea what I was getting myself into the no one of the most entrepreneurs related into it but there’s a there’s a and maybe you can identify this with work that you do but I believe there’s some sort of internal mechanism in entrepreneurs that will see the world differently the problem solvers and they look here’s a problem that needs to be solved in I’m gonna just jump in and do it first reading for others to do it which is super thank you very untrue that we’ve ever interviewed I’m just fascinated by that Colleen is Colleen and then nothing stops usually go him Scott Scott do it so that’s really cool right mmhm in your let’s talk about some of the challenges you face also has one thing to be like you know this is the promised us fix it but then what was that like what was that process like yeah well I think a big part of it I was I was very young so being taken seriously I was working with pharma companies right so these are these new huge companies that are used to working you know with bankers and whatever and just being taken seriously and and then also like having being able to combine the academic record with learning these new business side of things  so that was really a challenge was getting to that point to where I could be taken seriously and then also Proofpoint so simulations in pharma are really far behind people just don’t trust it and so getting to the point where we had enough data points to show that there is something here and we’re not just making things up really took a long time yeah I could I could I could see that one of the things that as I’m listening to your story on that I think it’s very brave is you just talked about just so it’s almost like a David and Goliath is like on this one vigil I’m going to change the world with this process some of my question is what are some of the things that helped along the way as you know  in ACC’s campus incubator around sciences was that some of that was able to help you work for some of things that were most portfolio mall engine to a so I see see is been really helpful but I think by that point by the time we joined the incubator we were pretty far along to it already kind of gotten over those hurdles missions  but I think a lot of it just comes from the the industry changing the way they look at things so the farmer companies have slowly moved to relying on other companies and looking for who’s doing innovation understanding that they might not be able to keep up as quickly so I think it really is that the industry’s started to turn in that direction that made a difference and then also having like you know keeping in touch with people as they moved into those companies and keeping close contacts on those relationships and it’s really been a lot of relationship building that’s gotten us to where we are life is all about I found a home what’s fascinating to me and and and part of the reason for us doing this podcast as the mobile is to understand that it is accessible from by the the kind of tools and equipment ready for anyone today to have an idea as your idea was and then say oh I don’t have to go spend millions of dollars all this equipment I can go get started right away I think it’s really important for us to understand that imaginations and reimagine he’ll have an imagination one thing and it’s completely different so my imagination for example with pharma companies is this E. R. even it you know do you do all your work within the former company discover something it’s all behind closed doors but we’re saying this the reality is it’s not like that anymore right now they’re looking for innovation outside now they’re welcoming innovation so they’ve opened up those doors but at what at one point could have been that it’s no longer that way so it’s much more accessible right yes much more accessible and then things like incubators of really helped to take off that burden like you said these equipment that’s so expensive making it accessible to small company who has very little funding sort of having over to go out and get like you know ten million dollar pieces of equipment  it’s shared resources between a lot of different companies and we get to take advantage of that use that equipment see what actually works for us before going out and having to put that up front funding ourselves will that speeds up process because now you can focus on the work rate you focus on the design and knowing that I don’t have to go raise the money and take you know a year to raise the money to build equipment and because that’s an entire different process trust me operational report it’s not fun when you in it it is what you could consider slows you down because you’re like I’m gonna spend a year raising money and then move on to the next thing so I think that the tools available to you now or Regis so much different they were ten years ago and you can get things quicker which is the name of the game  I also read that your mom joins you in business can you tell me how that came out yeah sure so around the time I was starting this like I said I was like well I have this idea I want to build it I was like okay I’m going to build the software package but no I love software but in the end I ended up not start studying computer science so I knew how to build academic software I didn’t know how to build this big huge package that was supposed to be usable by lots of different people  and my mom was retiring from I’m working in the software industry so she was a computer well she was a software developer for  financial services company okay  response well for taking Michael fishes and converting them into online banking so well and thank her for online banking while and so she had been working in software for a really long time he was retiring and wanted to do like some consulting projects was able to help me I have this idea  I have like a baby of a project going and I know it’s gonna get big and I don’t want it to get big and unusable so how do you help me build this into something that you know pretested has you know a lot of rigor around to making sure that if you if one person runs a and another person runs and you get the same result right doesn’t break down exactly so software sounds like brown the family right anybody else is offering the family just you know just the two of us but she was the one who taught me how to program so I didn’t you know really great story of that she taught me how to program in twenty years later I taught her biology so we can build this company together in one moment can you share some of the your favorite successes along the way and how long has this company been around been around almost ten years  we did like I said a lot of  that structure prediction stuff so building out how you can take a sequence of a protein and turn it into something you can look at so we did consulting projects for a long time while we were building out kind of that initial package and then we slowly started getting into being able design new things so first we we take antibodies that our company had developed they would give them to us and would be suggests changes so how can you so like I said there’s a process of taking a mouse antibody and making it a human antibody so we could do that computationally so we showed that we could do that very  systematic right exactly and once we got to there were like well you know if we can predict these things when working with project and we slowly started to move more towards design for about three years ago was around when we had that breakthrough look we can design new things and that’s a completely different idea from where we started can you explain the difference between design new things and improve and improve things rarely was it sounds easy when you say about the difference sure so it changes the timeline  that mouse part can kind of go away  that’s normally about nine months so instead of starting nine months later computationally and taking that and fixing it you start at the very beginning constitutionally  and then you can do things like not have to change from a mouse antibodies to human antibody we can build it so that is a human and apart from the start and then there are a lot of problems that can arise so something when your body makes antibodies those antibodies only have to be in your body for a very short period of time but when you’re making a medicine you have to be able to put it into a file right and be shelf stable for a long time before you inject a or make it into a pool or whatever you’re going to do with the antibody and so there’s a very big difference between the antibodies animals produce an antibody as a drug and so if you can address those really early on there’s a lot less work to getting it to be a drug or getting it through clinical trials the last time I would imagine two thousand speeds things up right I think it’s fascinating  growing up you know small farm town I grew up in the units never imagine that you can actually change things within the body think about software is like oh yeah you can just to programming but you used to that but very much the things in the body also or the type of program is what I’m gathering from so from the from the very beginning so I can design as a program and then it’s it simulates everything and then that’s what it should do in real life swimmer in very cool what term zoom back to the the question was is there any projects that you’re particularly like I’m also involved in this Rosenbaum that them really proud of that you could share with the audience Sir just is it still to kind of have the same yeah I think they’re still too early  I mean I think we have a lot of really exciting things like we have projects in a number of different diseases some that were working on our souls some that were working on with companies so we’ve now gotten to the point where we have no about a handful of small biotechs that we’re helping to get their products to market and then we have a number of large pharma companies where they you know they come to us and say this is a disease were interested in  design some stuff for us and then we’ll develop it and so we’re really excited about some of those things but unfortunately can’t say much more understand what what will your goals over the next five ten years ago when he trying to you know personally as a business and then what do you want to be in the street breaks personally the reason I started this was to make sure the most more companies could use computational tools so my big goal with the company is to be able to make it easier and effective enough that most apartment can use computational tools to get further right so really reduce a lot of that up front work that’s being done in ways that are less effective  and show that it works across a bunch of different diseases I’m so form these partnerships with as many companies as we can and then as far as business wise I think I mean it I just want to see these drugs get to market right so showing that  that these are effective ways of building new drugs new antibodies and see that they really shorten the time line get it get medicine into hands more quickly and also be able to spread it over more people so one of the things they’re always shocked me is like how expensive it is to get a drug to market and how much money it takes to get there it’s almost a billion dollars to has the goods was talking to another scientist on one of our other programs in them it’s it’s almost like doing a record together go try for different for different   trials and it’s everyone’s like two hundred million dollars in the fifth one will work a billion dollars for the medicine out there so right yeah it’s super expensive drug right well and and that’s why a medicine is so expensive so like you know when I first started this before I knew exactly where everything that went into it I was like well if you could make it cheap you know if you can cut that time line in that costs down into the no quarter of it should be super cheap for it to get a drug and a more hands right so make sure more people have access to drugs and everything  I think there’s a lot more that goes into that maybe there was a little too optimistic but anything that you can do to shorten that timeline really has a huge impact on costs yeah so ultimately yes the the work that you’re doing is going to reduce those costs which is really important zero  I have a question around you know you have the simulation how do you make sure that that this new product you’re building  works the way it does and doesn’t have long term side effects or hurts the Cuban right so that’s where A. B. I. comes into the incubator is where we go and test all these antibodies so initially will build no this simulation of an out of body take that out of what that that so that gives us a sequence and we can use bacteria to produce that  and then we test those in in our lab we get an idea does it work or not so we’re just looking at does it do what we think it does that’s called in vitro work and then once you have an anybody that you know seems to be working you go through animal testing so the first first step of animal testing is just that make sure it’s safe so they have these mice that have a human immune systems other called humanized mice and you contest and while antibodies or whatever other drugs in that mouse and have a pretty good idea that it will be safe for human so that’s like the first thing is just looking at toxicity in mice when making sure it’s actually target whatever the diseases so as sick mouse does it get better  and then I think there are other animals you tested before you finally get to human clinical trials there’s a lot of testing that goes into the product to make sure that it’s going to be safe for humans where do you see medicine the next owners that’s a good question I mean I think a lot of these things that can help speed up would be helpful towards personalized medicine so everybody’s body is different everybody’s diseases are different  you can have the same cancer in ten different people and it’ll be for ten different reasons one and so right now we can build these drugs that are kind of rod end of th can work on those ten different diseases but up but that leads to side effects like maybe it’s or to a difference in how much of the drug you have to give different different people right and so if you could tailor that a little bit better so you have like you know exactly why this person has this disease and what’s different about theirs you can coach that differently than for another person instrument that’s I think that’s kind of like the first step towards personalized medicine is to be able to address those differently are you sigh five I watched a fair amount is what you’re describing to me reminds me of sci fi you know these in twenty years and future thirty years in the future where you have these machines that come diagnose you and figure out what it is you need individually and then you inject you with the available yesterday right he also B. I. th it sounds like we’re going in that direction sure we’re taking baby steps and it happens that way well thank you so much for being on the show I really learned so much and it’s just so nice to take a peek into someone’s like interest their passion their  sociopath what they’ve been able to accomplish in with us in the future going because it helps the rest of the honest kind of all understand the same thing in in the I’m I’m sure there’s people out there like wondering how to get into doing what you’ve done this to her sure in the store is super important so thank you so much for thank you very much for having me thank you again Monica forty just all a bit more about your industry and how it’s changing to learn more about my consulting and the Austin community college’s bioscience incubator please visit the links are shown signs in the mall you’re always greeted partnership between founded media and the ACC bioscience incubator