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**Adam Stacoviak:** ...over a three-month period. And these mini brains, organoids - I'm not sure if that's a term you all came up with or not, but that sounds cool, too... |
**Jerod Santo:** It sounds \[unintelligible 00:12:37.09\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ... of 0.5 millimeters in size, with about 10,000 neurons that function as real brain tissue. So you've found a way to take stem cells, grow them over a three-month period... They used to have a half-life that was even shorter, like a few hours. Now you can actually -- they'll live 100 days. And the... |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes, absolutely. Although now it's for experiments, so we cannot really process information the same way as in digital. But yes, it's available remotely, and we imagine that actually in the future our lab or our biocomputer will be available remotely as a cloud service today. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Not quite AWS yet, but working your way there. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes, absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** How did you get involved in this? Where are you coming from? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** So I come from Poland. I was always on the medical side, let's say. I studied pharmacy and biotechnology, and I always wanted to be a scientist. I enjoy a lot working in the lab. I was very fascinated by cracking my brain, teasing my brain with some ideas and challenges... So I always wanted to be a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you talk about the imaging? I think you mean -- when you say imaging, you're probably referring to like MRIs, like brain scans... Is that right? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes. So actually, I did my research on positron emission tomography. This is something you do using radioactivity. You put some radioactive substance in the body, and this substance goes to some specific places in the body, and you can detect this non-invasively. So you can get the picture, for exam... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** But it's actually similar to MRI. MRI is just a little bit different... So you don't use the radioactivity, and you can see a little bit different things. But the idea is always the same, to look inside without opening the body. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[15:58\] Right. Yeah, the MRIs are a little different... Which one's more accurate? Is the imaging or the MRI more accurate? Does it matter? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Always imaging. I'm not sure it's a good comparison, because I think it really depends on the protocol... Because there are different types of MRI, and also there are different types of PET, so it really depends. It depends on the parameters. And also, they measure different things. Because PET is a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. This imaging -- that's why I asked this question, because this imaging is really kind of like the rage, I would say... |
And my version of the rage may be way different than your scientific version of the rage... But what I mean by that is that there's a lot of study around mental health, ADHD, ADD, trauma - you name it - that folks are trying to image brains in these scenarios. Is that kind of what got you into this curiosity of like ho... |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Well, actually, I was working on something a bit different to what you're talking about... Because you say about different activities of the brain, during different maybe diseases, or maybe different tasks, cognitive tasks... But I was actually working more on inflammation. So I try to visualize mic... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Alzheimer's... That's interesting. Yeah. Inflammation is like the number one issue for most people. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They get inflamed everywhere. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes, my research was actually about the effect of nutrition on inflammation... And it's funny, because I started to put attention on everything, what I eat, after I started to do this research. It's really interesting, because I started to look totally different on my groceries... Because actually, ... |
And I think now, after -- it's maybe almost 10 years since I did these studies... Now I see that there is more and more -- more and more people are talking about this. About an anti-inflammatory diet, about how much is important, what you eat, for also your brain health. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How did that lead you into discovering -- I mean, it kind of seems obvious, but how did that lead into AI and your discovery there? Were you leveraging trained models? Express how you got curious about AI. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Actually, I started my first job in industry. I started in the company which was doing medical imaging. And actually, it was a very good start, because there was at least one thing which I understood at the time... Because I had absolutely no idea about how companies work, and anything about this in... |
\[19:56\] And this company was doing a service of analyzing images from different medical studies, and they talked a lot about AI. Because when you have imaging data, when you have a high number of imaging data, you can analyze them automatically. In some way, you can use AI for that. And actually, that's the way how I... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, being able to scan a lot more - no pun intended really, but just grasp a lot more of these imagings that you're doing, to see the anomalies and see the connection points that you can't really see individually... I mean, that totally maps to me, because the more you can see across different sca... |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yeah, this is a general thing about AI, because it can see much more than us, and can scan a lot in a very short time. |
**Jerod Santo:** So how long have you been working on this problem? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** On FinalSpark I met the founders in 2019, at the conference in London, so I started to work with them, initially on some other projects... So actually, on FinalSpark I could say I'm working like three years, around. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. And there's a platform right now for experiments... You're hoping to get to compute down the road, and a service for that... Is there a straightforward path towards that, or are there like breakthroughs that still need to happen to get from where you are right now to where you guys want to go? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** No, it's a very difficult, very challenging project. That's why we expected to build these real computers in around 10 years. So it's a bit of a challenge when we talk with potential investors... Because it's quite a long-term project, and it's very, very difficult. Because nobody knows how really n... |
So at the moment, as I said, many people do a lot of random experiments. Also us, we do a lot of trial and error. So this is why actually we built an automated laboratory. Initially, the idea was to just be able to do as many experiments as we can. And also, a lot of research on neurons are often inspired by what happe... |
And also, another thing very important is that brain, or neurons, any kind of form of - also our neurons in the lab - they are not stable systems. So a computer you can consider as a stable system. It's a dead matter, so it works today in some way. Tomorrow it will work the same way. But the living tissue is not like t... |
\[23:54\] So for example, today we do some experiments, we send electrical signals to neurons and they can react in one way, and tomorrow they can react to the same signal totally differently. So that's also a big challenge. The fact that living matter is plastic, so it changes behavior, actually also like us and our b... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you talk about how you get them to compute? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** This is actually a challenge. So what we do - we try to send them electrical signals. Because neurons are placed on the electrodes - you can see this on our website, finalspark.com. There is a section Live, you can see the readout. So we send them electrical signals and we measure how they respond. ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you may have one lazy organoid and one very non-lazy organoid. |
**Jerod Santo:** Productive. Yeah. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes, absolutely. It is biological tissue. Sometimes it can vary. Sometimes they can just die. So we are still learning... And yes, so there is also variability. Yes, absolutely. A lot of things. It can be also a lazy organoid. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Or depending on the day. Like, yesterday it was really productive and then today it's lazy. |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes. As I said, every day is dynamic. It's not a stable system. However, we have some success. It's not only so bad. We were able to store one bit of information. So just to give you an idea about the stage at which we are - we stored one bit of information in neurons. That was quite consistent. And... |
**Jerod Santo:** So when you store a bit of information... |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** How do you read it back out again? Or how do you get it back? Or how do you know that it's stored? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes. So actually, that's quite technical, because I can tell you every blob of cells - because there are such a blobs, these neurospheres, organoid, they are 3D structures... And each is placed on the eight electrodes. And all these eight electrodes, they measure activity from neurons. And depending... |
**Jerod Santo:** Consistently across different neurons and across different times? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** Yes. And different days. Because that's always -- in general, in bioscience, every time when you work with biological tissue, this is important, that you have to be able to repeat. Because many things work once or twice, but it's important to be able to repeat your results. Yes, on different days, o... |
**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm. And is the process slow? |
**Ewelina Kurtys:** \[27:59\] Well, to be honest, I cannot tell you how much time it took... No, actually, I don't know. But I guess it's in seconds or milliseconds. But I don't know. But I can say that, in general, neurons are slow, and in general, neurons will be good for tasks which don't have to be fast. Because al... |
**Jerod Santo:** What does this wetware look like? I'm programming my Python experiment, and I'm sending it over the internet, I suppose, or some sort of VPN connection to you guys... |
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