eNuvio co-founder Mark Aurousseau and Mirus Bio COO Geoff Schwartz on the VatorNews podcast

• MA: “Having used a whole bunch of the available tools in the lab, and the frustrations that come with that, I decided, with a couple of co-founders, to start a company. And the idea of the company, which is eNuvio, in the beginning was actually to create research tools that we would have liked to have in the lab when we were in the lab."
• GS: “It's not terribly unusual, in this space, where you're trying to solve certain problems, or you're trying to ask certain questions and understand the answers, that you may not always have the right tools commercially available in the market and so you’ve got to go build your own. It really is an homage to the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention. So, if you don't have the right stuff, and you're smart enough and patient enough, you can go build it. That means also you’re probably not the only person out there with those same challenges and struggles and so it means that if you play your cards right, there's probably more people you can help answer their questions and solve their challenges.” 
• MA: “The goal of an in vitro brain on a chip is trying to reproduce a physiological brain, not inside an organism but on your lab bench, on a chip, in a dish, it could be made of glass or not, and studying that, harnessing the ability of what that gives you, that physiological relevance, that that system will provide to get to answer a certain question. In the drug development space this might be most relevant in what they call cell-based assays, where you're incorporating your cells to make a quote, unquote, brain, or part of a brain, or portion of a brain or modeling something similar to an area of a brain."
• GS: “Cell-based assays, organs on a chip, brain on a chip, help you interrogate, at all levels of the of the genome proteome, all the different sorts of interactions that would naturally take place in a controlled environment. That's easy to manipulate, easy to manage, and is more specific in terms of the outcomes that you're going to generate. From there, you can take that research then back down the chain towards animal studies and, ultimately, to humans but to do it in reverse is a big challenge and that's why the industry has gone the way that it's gone in terms of in vitro.”
• MA: ”Your DNA is a sequence of nucleotides that's specific to you; in certain areas of your entire genome there will be certain sequences that belong to you and that is your genotype, in a very basic sense. Phenotype is something completely different: phenotype is the outcome of something, so what it looks like afterwards. So, if you have a cell that's growing in some system, and it behaves a certain way, that behavior is the phenotype of that cell; another cell line or another mutation would create another phenotype. That could be as a result of many reasons, but it could be genotype-based as well: it could be that those cells come from different genotypes so they express a combination of different proteins, which leads to a different phenotype. So, it's the observation of what those cells do, or how they behave in the experiment.”
• GS: “If you think about what a liver cell looks like versus a heart cell versus a neuron, they all have very distinct shapes. And so, as you go through this in vitro space, you also want to look at well, do the cells look healthy? Do they look like they should be looking? Because, if there are modifications in the genome, or there's modifications in terms of phenotype, or cell cell interaction, that can certainly change the shape, which can also tell you something about what's happening with that cell.”
• MA: "Microfluidics is a very broad, broadly used word, and it encompasses many, many things. Essentially, it's the small channels, microfluidics, that pass fluid through them. So, the 'micro' is the order of size that they're on. Most microfluidics, when you hear that word, it's usually applied to devices that will have channels or fluid passages that are on the hundreds of microns in scale and they have numerous advantages and different shapes and structures that you can build in for different purposes for cell sorting. The size of the fluidics actually matters quite a bit because the challenge in building these is actually exponentially more as you get to smaller and smaller channel sizes.” 
• MA: “Our core tech is actually microfabrication tech, so it's a method of how to make microfluidics that is different from the other companies. However, what makes our products really attractive is that we thought about the end user and all the applications that they would want to do in the future, and made it easy to use, accessible, and flexible. This really comes from the experience that we've had in the lab in the past using the classical devices, being frustrated by them, and knowing what we want to improve with them, and then having to develop the tech, the microfluidic fabrication technology, to go and build that device. So, what makes us unique is that we actually took a top down and bottom approach into making every product. I don't think many companies can say that.”
• GS: “A lot of the tools that are out there, they've been developed for general research purposes, they're not specific to cell type, they're not specific to application type, it's more of a one size fits all. If you're working in a non one size fits all part of the research to therapy continuum, or you're studying certain cell types or certain phenomenon that that's not going to work for, and there's plenty of literature in the public domain to suggest how you should culture neurons and what they like, whether that's from media to physical conditions, etc, then you have to take a tailored approach. It speaks to the genesis of the company, which is, ‘hey, we didn't have the tools that we needed to build them,’ but it also means that not everybody has that capability or that passion, but it does mean that they have a need."
• GS: “When you're dealing with populations of cells, there may be one or two in there that really respond to a compound or a potential therapeutic, but you'd miss it for the noise of all the other cells in there. This is why the industry has largely shifted to single cell analysis at any level, because you're looking for that needle in a haystack because, for as much as traditional screening programs have delivered hits, if you will, so a positive outcome, there are an overwhelming number of false positive that you've got to go back and interrogate but the worst ones are the false negatives, the ones that actually didn't show up because of the experimental design or the state of the cells or the system overall, but actually do work. And you just never know it, and you pass over those.”

Note: Join us for our conversation: The Future of Fertility, May 22 from 4pm PT-6 pm PT online. Panelists: Bambi Francisco Roizen (Founder and CEO, Vator); Dr. Archana Dubey (Chief Medical Officer, United Healthcare); Dr. Jean Gekas (CEO, Genoscience); La Keisha Landrum Pierre (Partner, Emmeline Ventures); Dr. Tammy Mahaney (Suncoast Ventures)