Episode 50: How AI is Changing Treatment for Food Allergies with Ukko CEO Anat Binur
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In this episode you’ll discover:
The food allergy and treatment landscape
Protein design opening a new landscape of treatment possibilities
Shifting from investing to the operational side of startups and navigating the world of biotech as a female CEO
Keep scrolling for a transcript of this episode.
Key Takeaways
The treatment for food allergy is difficult because it requires a balancing act between efficacy and safety. This is because food proteins that are needed to train the body to reduce its allergic reactions are often also the cause of allergic reactions.
Through breakthroughs in protein design, Ukko has shown that it is possible to isolate the two parts of a protein and create a new one that can be used for more effective and safer immunotherapy, essentially removing the harmful part of the protein and keeping the part that trains your body to reduce its allergic reaction.
The best thing that VCs can do is to experience the operational side, it makes you a much better VC on so many levels. It shifts your empathy and your understanding of what the CEO is going through. If you make the move from VC to founder, you will have great tools that will also make you a better fundraiser.
Learn more from Carrie and Rebecca:
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“I think that the best thing VCs can actually do is experience the operating side. There’s something about understanding the roller coaster, the experience, the day to day of this person who just walked into your room - this is their blood, sweat and tears”
Learn More
Website: https://www.ukko.us/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anatbinur/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/abinur
Read the transcript
Announcer (00:01):
You're listening to Decoding Healthcare Innovation with Carrie Nixon and Rebecca Gwilt, A podcast for novel and disruptive healthcare business leaders seeking to transform how we receive and experience healthcare.
Rebecca Gwilt (00:13):
Welcome back everyone to decoding healthcare innovation. I am your co-host, Rebecca Gwilt, co-founder and partner at Nixon Gwilt Law, where we help digital health companies navigate law and policy to build great businesses. Today I am delighted to share with the pod Anat Binur, the co-founder and CEO of Ukko, which is a series feed biotech company that is designing new proteins to treat and manage food allergies. Very top of mind for me as I have a child with food allergy. As a VC turn founder Anat has helped Ukko raise over 50 million and I'm looking forward to thinking her brain today about how AI is changing healthcare, investment in healthcare tech, what it's like building a healthcare business. Welcome to the pod Anat.
Anat Binur (01:02):
Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Rebecca Gwilt (01:06):
You're so welcome. Let's jump right into it. So you've got a really fascinating background, MBA PhD from Columbia and MIT. Just quick shout out to my mom, Liz Rowe, who also owns a master's degree from MIT to VC to startup founder. I'm curious, was this a carefully engineered path for you? I'd love to hear a little bit about their journey.
Anat Binur (01:33):
Of course. No, I'm just kidding. Of course. Not such as life, right. So I think I'm a perfect example of, I always say the connecting the dots, which in retrospect seem to make so much sense and really there's some theme that runs through it As you're going through life, sometimes one thing leads to another and you really understand the value of the way it connects later on. So the first part of my career I was just really passionate about. I think the theme that connects it all for me is very much mission-driven work. So the first part of my career is more in the world of policy and politics in academia in that respect. And then it's slowly evolved and moved into more, as you mentioned, really in some respects randomly into the investing side. And the plan was really to stay there for a very long time and because of one of my best friends and something really cool he was working on caught my attention and really checked all the boxes of things that I just loved investing in as a VCN.
(02:30):
That's the really the origin story Ukko of our current biotech company. I decided to go to what's called the other side of the table. Most time entrepreneurs become VCs. Most VCs don't really want to become entrepreneurs cause they don't want to go back into the rollercoaster. But yeah, absolutely to jump in. But happily for me are the VC that I was at Innovation Endeavors. It's a VC in Palo Alto. I was there for close to five years and happily when I transitioned to start Ukko, they stayed super involved and have invested on my board. So I was lucky to be able to keep both worlds together.
Rebecca Gwilt (03:05):
Yeah, I always ask about this journey at the beginning of these discussions because I talk to young people who are racked with anxiety about making the right next decision for themselves and their careers because that next right decision is going to be the gateway to them having success or not having success. But so many successful people, including you, have just stuck with what they're interested in and passionate about. And only in hindsight did they see how all of those decisions brought them to where they are. So I love to hear it. I think it's really encouraging for especially folks starting out. So let's talk about Ukko. Tell me a little bit about Ukko. You. Yeah, I definitely want to get to what it's like to be a VC turn startup on there, but I'm fascinated in the technology and of course I am not a technologist, but when I was reading about what Ukko does, I had that moment of like, oh my God, we can do that. That's amazing.
Anat Binur (04:06):
That is, that's true. No VC always asked the why now and Ukko definitely the has good answers as to why now. So yeah, super briefly and simplified, like Ukko is a biotech company and we're focused on solving food allergies and really protein-based allergy in a very unique way because we are creating a new approach to how you think about the possible therapy for allergy, like peanut allergy for example, where you can modulate patient's experience without actually triggering an allergic response. Now this sounds strange a little bit, but it's a new concept in how we think to solve allergy. So I say we're focused first on peanut allergy, but our tech, which is based on a computational protein design platform, that really allows us to go to a protein and design it for specific characteristics that we want. In our case, we want to keep certain good characteristics of a protein.
(04:58):
So for example, peanut proteins have a side to them that can actually teach your immune system to lower its level of reaction and do good, almost train it to get better. But then there are other parts of that same protein that actually trigger an allergic response. So what we know how to do is to isolate between those two parts and create a new protein that can then be used as a therapeutic such that we kind of get rid of the bad and the bad in this case is the part of the protein that's actually triggering the allergy and keep the good, which is the part that's actually training your immune system. So just say that some needed context for this is that really right now if you have a peanut allergy, the only thing you can do or any other food allergy, I'm just using peanut allergy as an example, the only thing you can do is really avoid the peanut walk around is enough and be really careful or go through something called food allergy immunotherapy, which is exposing you to small but growing amounts of the peanut protein itself.
(05:55):
Now this is lifesaving, very, very important, but in this idea, you're actually using the curative compound. Here is the peanut, which is also the thing you're most allergic to, right? So anytime you come to your patient, you have a safety issue because they may react. So you get stuck in the stead lock that forces you to choose all the time between efficacy and safety. You can't necessarily choose the most efficacious routes of administration because they might be dangerous or a little risky. So you end up getting treatments that are very cumbersome for patients. They often take a really long time. You have to start with really low dosages because you're all the time keeping safety as your number one goal. Going back to Ukko because of what I said, because we can go to protein and design it specifically to kind of get rid of the bad, make it safe, but keep the good, keep it in immunogenic teaching your immune system.
(06:49):
We now can do lots of different things in how we treat patients. We can maybe use more effective routes of administration, higher dosages and so on. And so our hope, we're going to have to show this in human trials of course, but our hope is that at the end we'll be able to come up with a safer and efficacious therapy for life-threatening allergies. We're starting with peanut allergy, but it's going to be relevant for any protein-based allergies. So that means all food, allergens, environmental allergens, and even venom allergies like bee stings or wasp things that are really hard allergies to walk around with.
Rebecca Gwilt (07:23):
So is it me or are there more allergies now than there used to be? Right. Is this a growing thing or is this just us becoming more aware of it?
Anat Binur (07:35):
It's a great question and you're totally right. I mean, first I even just share my own story. I grew up in New York, young in Tel Aviv, never had a kid in my class with a peanut allergy or some other sensitivity, and now I'm almost never just like this on a call and then in a dinner or meeting friends somewhere where the people around me, even regardless <inaudible>, have food allergies somehow connected to their lives. So the data also backs us up. Just to give you a sense, in the past few decades there's been arising like 50% and kids with food allergies, and I think the stats now is 1 in 13 kids in a classroom in the US has a food allergy and every three minutes, for example, someone get goes to the emergency room because of a food allergy. So, it's definitely true. That is the reality as to why it's happening. There isn't one clear scientifically backed explanation that all the key leaders in the space will stand behind. So there are some hypotheses that people believe are probably the leading reasons, but there isn't one proven data backed explanation. So there's more unknown than known about this field, which is shocking.
Rebecca Gwilt (08:43):
Well, and then we just go fix it, right?
Anat Binur (08:49):
People have been working on it for a long time. I think this is actually a hopeful time for patients. There's lots happening in tech and regulatory advancements are suddenly allowing more and more innovation, which are really, really hopeful for families who have kids with food allergies.
Rebecca Gwilt (09:04):
And I imagine this sort of course that you described, the alternative to this right now requires a lot of time and consistent access to healthcare. And in the US that is not a guarantee, certainly for much of our population. So not only finding a new pathway, but creating accessibility to things that sort of are not accessible currently. I mean, this is lifesaving stuff. Yeah
Anat Binur (09:32):
I totally agree. There's importance in equal equality and distribution in the treatment of food allergy for sure. Current treatments are really arduous for families. They require a lot of years and months and years of going to clinics every few weeks for several days, sometimes flying to another clinic because the treatment can only be done there. It's not easily accessible, but at least in the first step we have a potential approach. And even FDA gave its first approval in 2020 for food allergy drug, and those are really important steps forward in the field.
Rebecca Gwilt (10:10):
Yeah, well, I'll certainly be watching. Okay, so what I read about Ukko is that you use patient data and machine learning to help with the engineering of the food proteins in the manner you described along with the rest of the world. I've become absolutely fascinated with GPT four and how AI is changing the nature of work. And for 10 years I'd worked with clients using AI machine learning in digital health, primarily data analytics solutions and clinical decision support tools and chat boxes, chatbots and the like. But I just returned from a conference in London that was focused on biotech and life sciences, which is a relatively new space to me, and I was surprised to learn how AI is being used in that space. It makes sense to me that it would be used for data purposes, but really there are incredible things happening in the life sciences space, in the biotech space using AI. Yeah. You've obviously incorporated some of this tech at Ukko. I'm interested in your thoughts about what, well, I'm interested in what that actually looks like. What does that mean with your company and your sort of observations about how other companies like yours are using AI tools?
Anat Binur (11:23):
Yeah, I think this is a game changer for how we think about healthcare and in the combination or intersection between biology and the ability to use computational tools, we can really shift the way we think about everything from healthier food to developing better and faster drugs and just creating a more efficient healthcare system at large. I'd say specifically we have a really interesting combination between our computational team and our experimental team and explain more in a sec, but what it allows is really fast iterations and research to get to the best potential solution. So in our case, first our approach. We look at protein characteristics we want, so in our case, we want it to be as much as possible, lower its allity, all the way to be making it safe, but maintain the parts of the protein that are good in the first stage. We take blood samples from all over the world. We've built a massive database. We have partnerships like 18 hospitals all over the world in the US and Europe and Israel, and we use it to really map in a really detailed way, what is it on the protein that's actually triggering allergy and how is one person different than another? In those parts we've discovered really interesting and new data that was unknown previously. So that's step one. But now I
Rebecca Gwilt (12:46):
Imagine, yeah, yeah, I imagine it's an enormous amount of data. It's just generating, it is just enormous amounts of data.
Anat Binur (12:53):
It is a lot of data that you can slice and dice in different ways and exactly, it's a great question because it leads to the second step, which is okay, now we have to get some intelligence out of this and then use that to predict, and this is where AI comes in. Our computational team looks at this, uses algorithms to start predicting based on this data, what are changes do we want that we could make to the protein in the fastest and best way that would hit our metrics. And remember our metrics is we want it to be safer but still maintain the good parts. So then they move quickly to their experiment. Our experimental team, that's the protein design team that now takes this knowledge, kind of starts to re-engineer micro engineer proteins. This is at atomic level, creates lots of different variants and it keeps iterating, testing it back on the sample, sending it back to the computational team. And the ability to predict test, predict, test, predict engineer tests is a very fast iterative cycle that you know what we weren't able to do some years ago and allows us now to get to better results and faster.
Rebecca Gwilt (13:59):
It's just absolutely incredible. The other thing that I heard was that not just in product design and data analysis, which obviously is the use case you were describing, but also in the clinical trial space that AI tools are being used to also identify patients, identify cohorts, certainly take data from clinical trials and at a pretty fast pace, analyze them. Are we going to see a lot? I mean, is it really changing what we can do in biotech, this sort of technology?
Anat Binur (14:36):
Oh, for sure. Yeah, for reasons you touched upon it. It's an intelligence layer that allows us to do something that just we weren't able to do it. It has two parts. We're generating massive amounts of data and then how do you make intelligence of it tied, connect dots really smart ways such that both you can do things that we know how to do but in a more efficient way and then improve on that and then even better create new things that we didn't even think about or connect dots around, whether it's disease or patient data and things like that. So I definitely think it's, and this is going to sound super generic and high level, but obviously as everyone understands it's changing the game. And I think specifically in biology, it's allowing to insert some structure and into a field that before it was maybe a little more desperate or less systematic. And now in combination with some of these tools, you're creating a field that's a little more engineery structured. We can even see the luco has more prediction to it and more like systematized approaches that we can repeat again and again in better ways. So that that's super high level on generic, but it gives a sense of where it can take us and how we can use it.
Rebecca Gwilt (15:47):
Yeah, and I imagine that the capabilities that it creates, you talked about sort of helping a process that exists before, but the capabilities that it creates, it seems like it's going to go into hyperdrive, right? The speed at which this is changing the game, of course using your terminology is incredible. And all of us that are sort of autos of healthcare innovation are just, we're just trying to keep up.
Anat Binur (16:14):
Oh yeah. I mean totally. And as you probably see it from your fields too, it has lots of implications for all the surrounding fields. On the one hand, it's very hopeful and allows us to do a lot of amazing things. On the other hand, everything has to catch up the way regulatory thing systems think about this, the way ethical systems think about this and the constraints we may want to put in place. And it's always a little bit of a catch up game and the cycle and you can see how the systems start to calibrate now and then we move a little more forward and all the systems calibrate again and kind of new fields get generated around this because it suddenly just creates sub subunits of knowledge and then capabilities, information. So it's exciting.
Rebecca Gwilt (16:57):
So let's shift a little bit. So I want to talk about the correction that's happening right now for valuations in the healthcare sector and the difficulty so many companies are having raising their next round of funding. It's such a hot topic everywhere I look. Given your unique background in vc, do you have any insights to share about why it's happening, who it's happening to, and what we can expect to see happen in the next year?
Anat Binur (17:27):
I think there's just been so many people already talking about those predictions and assumptions about why it's happening and some are correct and some are not on. Maybe there were high valuations and companies were IPOing without having enough really to back up some of the valuations that were going on and the IPOs or really large rounds. And then why are we seeing it right now? Beyond that, there's lots of microdynamics, no one knows. I wish we need to predict how long it'll last. I think what I think about more, because I see it all around me and the impact it's having, especially in biotech. Biotech is hit especially hard. And I'd say interestingly, you're seeing a funds still investing really early or really late, but everything that's in the middle is having really in crunch, and that's on as well. Yeah, there are amazing companies that are doing really important things in lifesaving testing, lifesaving have the potential to test lifesaving drugs that are not going to make it because of it.
(18:26):
So I think the bigger question, I don't necessarily have yet good answers, but what I think a lot about is structurally what does it mean about the way we invest and capitalize biotech, right? Because this has huge human value. I ended up in this field because I think it's one of those fields that really intersects deep tech and really big human problems that are so important to solve. So how do we make, whether it's leveraging AI and some new technologies, but something's got to shift so that when there are moments like this, we don't lose out as human beings on possible solutions. So I think those are more structural questions for the way we invest in the space, especially in early stage and preclinical companies.
Rebecca Gwilt (19:15):
So companies in the middle there, not the very early stage, not the very late stage that are sort of faced with a tough funding environment. And some of them may be maybe listening. What advice do you have for what maybe they should be focused on right now to make sure that they sort of make it to the other side? What I'm hearing is folks are reducing workforce and they're trying to slow the burn to make their runway longer. But other than that, do you have any thoughts on what they could be focused on right now?
Anat Binur (19:48):
So I think at this point, because of everything that's going on, the main thing, and I don't think I'm saying anything new to whoever is in this world, you really have to just be as innovative as possible and creative as possible and how you approach this. Hopefully for companies that have really supportive boards, a lot of internal investors are supporting their portfolio and helping them ride out the storm thinking through partnerships and other things are really important as well. So I really think at this point, founders and CEOs just have to be very focused on their priorities, align the vision and mission of their team and make sure that all their management and everyone's very aligned on what is the core things that need to get done and most important to bring value to the company and then just be as creative as you can about it all.
Rebecca Gwilt (20:38):
And is that sort of why you like the operational side? When you were on the investment side, this was the advice that you were probably giving to your portfolio companies. What's the thing you learned when you hit the ground as a founder that you maybe didn't know when you were on the VC side?
Anat Binur (20:59):
I always say I think that the best thing VCs can actually do is experience the operating side. I think it makes you a much better VC on so many levels. There's something about understanding the rollercoaster, the experience, the day-to-day of this person who just walked into your room. This is their blood, sweat, and tears and it's everything from the way you ask the questions, the kind of questions that really matter at the stage of this company, understanding what that founder may be going through as they're pitching. You really shift both the interaction, the relationship, but also I think the how smart and exact and relevant to the stage of the companies that the questions of the diligence are. And I think later on, if you make a decision to invest and you're on the board, it shifts like your empathy and also really your understanding of what the CEO is actually going through right now. So I think having both experiences makes for, if you're a VC that moved to be a founder, I think you have a great tools set of tools in the way you think about problems and you have this great advantage in thinking about fundraising. And I think the other way around, if you were an entrepreneur and a founder and went to become a VC, everything I just said really holds true.
Rebecca Gwilt (22:17):
Yeah, I love that you love that empathy becomes part of the discussion. Certainly in any situation when you can put yourself in the other person's shoes, it helps us sort of pull together and don't the world need more of that.
Anat Binur (22:30):
Yeah. Definitely these days for sure.
Rebecca Gwilt (22:33):
So thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you spending this time with me. I have a whole list of questions we didn't get to, so maybe I'll have to circle back with you another time. I wish you so much luck as you build Ukko. It is so needed by many of us. And thank you to the listeners for listening to Decoding Healthcare Innovation. I'm Rebecca Gwilt. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion with Anat Binur about how AI is changing the world of biotech and what really cool tools are emerging for some of us suffering from allergies. If you haven't already, please subscribe to Decoding Healthcare Innovation, follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. And as always, you can check out the links and resources in the show notes and find out more about our work with Healthcare innovators at nixongwiltlaw.com. Thank you again Anat.
Anat Binur (23:21):
Thanks so much for having me. It was really a great conversation. I appreciate it and talk to you soon.
Rebecca Gwilt (23:27):
Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to Decoding Healthcare Innovations. If you'd like the show, please subscribe, rate and review at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to find out more about Carrie, me or Nixon Gwilt Law, go to nixongwiltlaw.com or click the links in the show notes.