Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Louis Noel, and I will be your host today.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and decision making in scientific and creative fields.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Rowland Pettit. Rowland is a physician scientist with experience in venture capital. He is a resident physician in clinical pathology at Mass General Brigham, a senior associate at Camford Capital, and the Chief Science officer at InformAI, a Houston-based company developing artificial intelligence enabled healthcare tools.

Previously, Rowland was an MD PhD student at Baylor College of Medical and an MBA student at Rice University. I was interested to learn why he earned multiple graduate degrees, so we started our conversation with that before diving into how science is funded. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Louis Noel
You studied biophysics as an undergraduate, then went on to Baylor College of Medicine, where you earned an MD and a PhD in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Why did you choose to pursue an advanced degree in business while already pursuing advanced degrees in science and medicine?

Rowland Pettit
Well, thanks, Louis, and thanks for having me on. I mean, this is this is a really great question. And it was one that I debated at the time. I mean, I definitely do believe in the value of formal education, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I have tremendously benefited from having, you know, incredibly smart people. Take the time to frame things and explain things to me. So, you know, the blanket answer is I was just curious, but the formal answer would be, I really wanted to understand the commercialization process. I had, at that point, done a good amount of medical school, and PhD graduate school. And I had seen a lot of interesting innovation potential, both in science and medicine during training, both certainly in med device coming to market, but I didn’t really understand how people thought about bringing those to market, I was certainly getting to see how people were reacting to that, how they were, you know, performing clinical trials to test it, or think about rolling it out with informed consent and bringing it to patients, or otherwise. But I just wanted to understand that. And so that’s what drove me to pursue the MBA during my MD, PhD.

Louis
I’d like to start with a high-level question. Could you briefly explain how research in science, technology, engineering and math gets funded for both public and private sector projects?

Rowland
Louis, I love this question. This is one area that I do think I’ve had a front row seat in order to see all the areas of funding throughout all stages in the process. And there’s several different ways that we could try to think about this.

So, let’s start with what I would consider more blue sky primary research for the sake of expanding human knowledge of the world. And that oftentimes occurs in academia. There’s plenty of big bio-techs and others that are doing great primary science as well as startups. But the way the majority of the world works, I would still think would be in funding in academia, which oftentimes comes in the forms of grants, then, is commercialization stage funding, which is kind of the bridge where you got a partnership between academia and industry, for some sort of commercialization with the two working together, then there’s return on investment models. So this would be kind of debt based financing, where you might get a grant that has some, you know, requirement to pay back the capital plus a little bit of interest.

And then of course, there’s another area that I’m particular interested in, which is venture capital or private equity, where you’re actually going to commercialize a product fully, and sell a piece of a company in order to realize its value.

So starting in academia, this in theory provides one of the avenues for the greatest degree of research freedom, where, you know, academics could do primary research on fundamental problems without having to be focused on some near term milestone of translation of that science or commercialization of that science. This is just science for the sake of science. And is primarily funded through the government. And the way that works is through grants. These are federal grants delivered through individual agencies. So as part of the Congressional Budget, Congress will pass certain amounts of taxpayer funded dollars that can go to the National Institutes of Health NIH, the National Science Foundation, NSF, or defense specific organizations. And based off of where they put money allocations is where those grants can fund research in those areas.

Usually, grants are reviewed three times a year, and it takes almost a year for them to get executed. So this is a long lead time. It is a good amount of money. You know, if you think about the primary grant, an r1 grant, this could be a multimillion-dollar grant to a PI for three to five years, or a certain research initiative. It’s just a pure investment in primary research. And it funds and actually is what drives the research institutes you see today.

Next would be these commercialization stage fundings. There’s a little bit of a bridge between here where we’re still in the world of grants that you don’t have to pay them back, right. They’re still primary investments in science without some sort of debt or equity-based commitment. So, these are what you might know as the STTR SBIR grants. So, these are like technology transfer grants, etc. And so, this is usually where industry and academia have partnered up, usually industry leads these grants. The idea is, you’re saying, hey, you know, there’s some technology that’s worth pursuing and has clear market potential. And so, you pitch the same organizations, this is still taxpayer funded dollars. It’s still the NIH, NSF or others. And you say, hey, we see this technology that maybe is housed in a university based off of their, you know, IP portfolio, and we want to take it to market. So, we’re going to write a grant similar structure, you still have your six-page, you know, research strategy names, but you also add a six-page kind of market commercialization strategy of saying, here’s how we’re going to bring it to market.

And if you win one of these grants, it could be they have like phase one grants, which is really, you know, smaller grants, 250k type grants for prototyping, or initial, kind of proving out your thesis. And then those can enable phase two grants, which would allow you to fully commercialize the product. And this is an exciting Avenue, because it provides really cool opportunities for small startup companies to be able to pay, you know, big academic research institutions to have access to either their technology or some of their researchers on a part time, you know, grant funded basis to commercialize this together. This is not free money, you know, if there’s definitely reporting necessary, and you have to, meet your milestones and do what you said you could do, but there’s no necessary interest on this payment, you don’t have to pay it back.

And then finally, and this is the one everyone likes to talk about, and it’s one that I’m very interested in, like participating in is the world of venture capital and private equity. Right. So this is a very specific mechanism for funding science. It does come with some constraints, right? So the idea here is, okay, you have some product that you think is not just making an incremental change, this is making a substantial change, that can drive serious market return on the order of not just, you know, principal return, but maybe 10 times the principal return, then you would attract venture capital investors to come to the table and be interested in partnering with you on product development.

So, when you partner with a VC firm, what you’re essentially doing is you would say I’m going to take this technology, I’m going to form a company, right? And you’re going to sell a piece of that company, and all of its future revenue potential, etc. As an equity to this institutional investor. For price. This usually comes with maybe that institutional investor taking a board seat on your company, or kind of getting to participate in other ways. But the main idea is that you have engaged in a partnership that will last until you have some liquidation event A K when some other company buys you and buys out their ownership percentage, or you have an initial public offering, and the public kind of buys out the shares of your company.

Louis
That was fascinating. You’re clearly very knowledgeable about this, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about them. Let’s shift from the business side and the finance powering the innovation to the science behind it. And you’ve also been working in this as a physician scientist, you are involved in cutting edge research, and particularly involved with bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Could you share an overview of those fields and your current work within them?

Rowland
Yeah, absolutely. This is something I’m very passionate about. This is, I think, the cutting edge in terms of what will meaningfully drive change in the life science and biotech ecosystem for the near future. And anybody that interested in a STEM field, I think, has to absolutely take a serious consideration to getting this skill set.

I’ll take a quick aside here, when I was a medical student and was able to join the Ph. D. Do the MD Ph. D training, it was honestly kind of scary at the time, computational biology, bioinformatics. These were like big bad, you know, math and coding-based skills, which I hadn’t really touched in a long time. So it was kind of scary. I had to put a little bit of elbow grease, learn how to code, learn statistics, you know, learn these bioinformatics pipelines, you know, physics-based approaches to understanding protein folding, or whatever. All of that was fascinating and a little bit of an uphill battle. But very exciting and totally worth the time spent. It has enabled me now to sit at the seat of being able to utilize the top technological advances for anything I want.

These are areas that are so exciting and so meaningful in terms of building, meaningful applications for patient care, that if anybody’s interested in science and medicine, I have to encourage it. The thing I’ll put there is that it is more accessible than ever, I have to stress that if you are interested in these fields, you’ve got your own personal tutors, right? I mean, you can go on Chat GBT or Perplexity and just say teach me to code teach me to implement this biostats package, right? You know, anything you’re interested in doing, you got your own personal tutor to where this is a much more accessible field. And I would encourage anybody, even without a math, or physics-based background, like I had to, to learn about it. And of course, you’ll be responsible and need to understand that, but you can learn it in a much easier way.

Louis
I completely agree. I think one of the superpowers of these technologies is not just the you know, science and outcomes it brings, but it is going to empower and democratize this previously higher institution technology to all sorts of people like you mentioned. So, I think that the person perfectly reasonable and, you know, our duty as scientists and engineers to talk about the positive implications that’s gonna have for all sorts of people,

Rowland
I mean, we feel the exact same way. I do view that this is going to be where a lot of the most exciting innovations are currently happening and will happen in the next 10 years for innovation. The basic idea is computational biosciences, those are the areas you need to focus on. It’s really the compute side of understanding how physics, chemistry, biology, applied to health, human disease, agricultural science, you know, etc. So that’s how I would define those fields.

Louis
You clearly have a lot of ideas about this space in your formal education certainly has powered dot. For example, you recently gave a fascinating TED style talk about organ transplant decision making processes. Could you share your process for contemplating ideas and preparing talking points that resonate with diverse audiences?

Rowland
Yeah, sure. And thanks for looking at my LinkedIn and finding that talk. It was one of the projects that I’ve consulted on pretty extensively and one of the ideas that came out of medical school that I pursued and pitched several times and got that STTR kind of commercialization grants for is for improving informatics within transplantation. It’s a very complicated problem that we’ve been working on for several years.

I was invited to give a TED style talk. it wasn’t TED, TED style talk to the kind of the transplantation main conference this past May. And part of that is that they hired a coach to help me prepare this talk which was unbelievable experience. they hired Coach that does all the TED style coaching as well, to help walk me through what that process might look like. I’d love to share here just for anybody that’s trying to prepare a talk.

The first thing was to think about who my audience was, I’ve looked at the technical details of this problem I’ve talked to, you know, just friends and family and neighbors. And so I’ve kind of over the years gotten a sense of what resonates with different people, what are people interested in? Who are you talking to? What do they understand? I truly believe that there’s not that big of a difference in anyone’s intelligence that you’re really talking to. So it’s really just about getting people up to speed, and trying to help them quickly get through the key points of information. So that they can be at the same understanding and then think through rationally what, what might come next.

Second is, you got to start with a story, if you’re going to try to draw somebody in. You want them to relate. So either a personal story about you in this case, I think what I focused on was just trying to understand what my background is, is why I’m particularly interested in the problem of transplant informatics, why I think that could drive incremental change, and why I’m personally invested in it. These would be the pieces of information that should be intentionally thought about and conveyed very simply.

the other thing would be to use analogies, a really good analogy can totally drive your point home. In the case of transplant informatics, we settled on the analogy of Google Maps. So the idea would be saying, hey, you know, we didn’t really know we needed maps, or Google Maps or whatever you want to use. But as soon as we had it on our iPhones, you know, for, you know, people love using it, right? It didn’t stop us from charting out our own course in the head. But it gave us real time, information of what different courses might look like in terms of time to get their traffic problems along the way. And it would be updated in real time, right? If new information came to the table, it could give you a new route that you might not have thought of before, because that might be the most appropriate route, given the different considerations, right. The other piece of information, that analogy that was helpful was that, you know, you still stay in the driver’s seat, Google Maps isn’t driving you there or picking your route, it just is giving you the most update real time information for your consideration in your decision making to get from A to B, right.

This was the analogy that we thought would resonate really well with the clinicians in the room, because they would be able to think, an information dashboard with high quality, granular decision metrics that integrate all the data available would be helpful to understand which organ goes to which recipient, while still keeps them in the driver’s seat and make an ultimate decisions, and provides insight into how those decisions might be made. A really good analogy can really help bring a diverse audience with different, you know, technical backgrounds to the same place in terms of understanding your problem and why you’re interested in it.

So last thing is you got to speak slow, you know, when you’re giving a formal presentation to an audience, it is never a problem to have a pregnant pause. Speak slowly, and to let people think through what you’re going through and what you’re presenting at the table.

Louis
Thanks for sharing, Rowland. Those are certainly tips. I think we all can implement. I certainly will. I really liked the analogy how that can drive home and the Google Maps when was really good. Like when you said that in the talk, I immediately grasped it. And I think that’s an excellent way of helping to have a diverse audience understand the point you’re talking about? You don’t seem to have much trouble with the words coming out. But is there ever a time when you experienced difficulty putting your ideas into words? And is there a structured or creative process you followed to break through writer’s block?

Rowland
Yeah, I think this problem has been solved, again in 2022, which adds up to I’m not gonna lie. Well, I do view that writer’s block, at least for me, in my experience, it’s not so much that I don’t have ideas. The problem is when I write down an idea, and then immediately start to try to edit it, then I forget the next ideas, right?

And so, what I like to do whenever I have to really do anything, write applications to med school, PhD MBA residency applications, when I am thinking about writing a grant, particularly for grant writing, right? Or when I’m trying to do like an investment memo for a company or if I’m trying to think through, you know, friendly, but polite criticisms of companies, right, if you just try to start writing, you’re not gonna like your writing tone, you’re not gonna like your style, you’re gonna be thinking of ways that you could say things more politely or more friendly or more warmly, right? And you’re gonna get stuck.

And so the one liner is like, and this is kind of cheesy, but this is what I do. I put on dictate either on my phone or on my computer. I put on dictate open a Word document. I just close my eyes and I just tried to answer the question, right, to try to write it all out and just kind of word vomit. I don’t care about grammar. I don’t care about structure. I just do it.

And there is a strange way to I just copy that in the Chat GBT and say structure my thoughts right I just literally say structure these thoughts are or edit for grammar edit minimally edit for clarity and content, you know, whatever, whatever it is charged up to you perplexity those are the two that I kind of like Bard is getting good now too. So just copy it in and edit it and then boom, it comes back with your raw output now in some structured way, and sometimes the way they structure it, I like, and I think, okay, that is good.

You know, previously, I relied on friends, family and parents to do this, where I would send people texts and just bother the heck out of them saying like, Hey, can you edit this email? Can you edit this paragraph? You know, I’ve got this grant, you look at this, whatever. And that was high quality feedback. But it took time, right. I could sit there with BB perplexity chat GBT and just edit for hours and just say, iterate, iterate, iterate. And so, that’s what I think is the key to writer’s block. Close your eyes, hit dictate, word vomit, write, and then say structure my thoughts, and then go from there. And then you’ve got stuff on the page, it’s much easier to write when you’ve got stuff on the page, because when you’re editing, you’re not creating new content.

Louis
I love it. I’m personally a huge fan of dictation. I really think there’s a power of dictation that we haven’t unlocked yet, you know, the idea of talking to yourself. I think is very powerful. I wholeheartedly agree.

Rowland
Yeah, the last thing I’d say there is, I think maintaining a healthy and active network is incredibly important. People in social capital is the best thing that you can maintain and should be protected and also intentionally maintained, and every interaction you have with people is kind of building that.

[music]

We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation with Rowland was learning the details of how finance and communication are vital factors to the advancement of science. I was also excited to plan on trying out Rowland’s many tips for improving my communication and writing abilities.

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.