https://youtu.be/-7x5kBxJ5ig
Ben Larman, Scientific Founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Infinity Bio, is driven by a passion for advancing human health by decoding the complexities of the immune system.
We discuss Ben’s Antibody Reactomics Framework and his Complex Data Delivery Framework. The Antibody Reactomics Framework leverages DNA barcoding to analyze immune responses, providing researchers with groundbreaking insights into human health and disease mechanisms. The Complex Data Delivery Framework streamlines the process of communicating scientific findings by focusing on understanding customer needs, analyzing data, presenting positive results, and combining findings to deliver customized insights. He also shares how AI is transforming biomedical research and the importance of refining a biotech company’s narrative to effectively engage diverse audiences.
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Simplify Complexity with Ben Larman
Good day, dear listener, Steve Breda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Ben Larman, the Scientific Founder and CSO of Infinity Bio, a technology company that measures individual immune responses against all known human viruses, autoimmune conditions and allergies. Ben, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Steve. Great to be here.
My favorite question for you. So what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your company?
Great. Well, yeah, I'll start by saying I guess I became an immunologist by training because I believe there is an incredible opportunity to improve human health by better understanding immune responses and the immune system. The immune system is incredibly complex. It's sort of, we're just scratching the surface now in terms of our understanding and how it's connected to so many different health conditions ranging, as you mentioned, from infections to cancer, to autoimmune disease, to allergies. The ability to move technology forward in a way that allows us to take better measurements and understand human immune responses at a population scale, that's always motivated me. And so that's what we formed Infinity Bio to accomplish by being able to read antibodies.
Okay. And when you read antibodies, so how does that inform you? How does it help you fight immune conditions? I guess you can call it.
Yeah, so antibodies, I think we all sort of have seen the cartoons of these Y-shaped molecules. I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is the massive abundance and diversity of these molecules in our blood at all times. So there’s roughly 100 trillion antibody molecules in every drop of blood, and they really store the information from all of our prior immune responses, going back to your vaccinations in childhood. And one way to think about them, they're expressed by cells in our immune system in response to very specific targets. They have these ridges and bumps on them, and that's what allows them to very specifically recognize their target, whether it's flu or a cancer antigen. And so what we've done is to create a technology that you can think of like a record player where the record, your old vinyl records with those grooves and bumps read out by a needle, that's sort of what we're doing with molecules, reading out those bumps and grooves to know what they bind to and get a picture of your immune system. Antibodies are really a wonderful window into your immune system and everything that it has tried to accomplish over your lifetime.
So that's an amazing complexity. You said trillions of antibodies in a drop of blood.
Yeah.
That's very, very minuscule and very numerous. So how do you measure this data or process even this data? How do you then communicate this data is about?
And actually you develop a framework around this. So can you tell me a little bit about how that came about and what's its significance is and how does it work?
Yeah, so the approach that we've taken and that I've sort of worked on si...