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David Ormesher, the CEO of CGLife, and I had a conversation about communicating science broadly to the public and within the scientific community. David went immediately to the power of storytelling in making science approachable. He highlighted the hero’s journey, the narrative arc used in literature and film, as a powerful tool to engage various audiences, whether they are scientists, physicians, patients, or the general public.
That narrative of the hero’s journey applies to patients and caregivers as well as scientist looking for breakthroughs. Not only can it help demystify science but it can also create emotional connections that make complex scientific concepts more relatable and engaging for the general public.
I think it’s important for society to understand and appreciate the work of scientists as well as understand how science is done especially when the details might not seem immediately relevant to them. By highlighting the human element and the persistence required in scientific exploration, we can help the public understand that scientists are ordinary people with an extraordinary commitment to solving complex problems. This can shift the public perception from seeing science as something inaccessible to recognizing it as a collective effort aimed at improving lives as well as simply appreciating the universe we live in.
What does this mean for life science marketers? David gave us a complete primer on the journey of a new medical product from inception to market launch. I was roughly aware of the roles various teams play in bringing a new drug to market. He covered the spectrum and filled in the details for me. Market insight, brand development, and market shaping involves understanding the needs of both physicians and patients, conducting extensive research, and building awareness through unbranded communications. As has come up several times over the years on this podcast, the importance of early engagement with healthcare professionals and patients before a product is approved can not be overstated. It helps ensure that by the time a drug is approved, there is demand and a well-informed audience.
It's that ability to personalize content that is also key. And this is where not only the agencies of the future that we need to help shepherd these products from clinical development through approval, launch and growth, they need to understand the science. They also need to understand that digital component of targeting, segmentation, (and) personalization.
Data and analytics play a critical role in this process. By capturing and analyzing data from the early stages, companies can refine their marketing strategies, personalize content, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. This data-driven approach ensures that the communication is relevant and impactful, reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.
One aspect I found particularly interesting was the preparation for day zero – the day the FDA approves a new drug. David described having all the marketing materials ready, including a “day one” website and direct email marketing. At the same time, a launch team needs to be prepared to very quickly make any changes required for labeling, etc. when the approval comes along.
Finally, we touched on the challenges of educating physicians about the latest medical advancements. For a doctor who completed medical school 20 years ago, and has been seeing patients all day every day, keeping up to date is near impossible. Highly targeted communications including bite-sized, relevant, and easily accessible content, such as short video interviews and 3D animations can help physicians keep up with the latest developments.
As marketers, there is plenty of work to be done to keep both the public and people in the healthcare sector educated on the value of the science being done, ultimately helping patients find the treatments they need.
Your deepest insights are your best brandin

I kept hearing about the use of organoids in clinical trials and elsewhere and was curious to know more. Luckily, I connected with Samantha Nicholson, the Global Technical Marketing Manager for Cell Culture at Millipore Sigma. She has a very cool job. Samantha is a hub, as she calls it, bringing together scientists to make progress in this exciting new area of research. She described her role, the applications of organoids, and their implications for future scientific research and healthcare.
Organoids, as Samantha explained, are critical in basic research like organogenesis and developmental biology, offering insights into organ functions and disease modeling. Beyond that, their utility spans from drug discovery, where they aid in understanding drug effects and disease development, to pharmacogenetics and even regenerative medicine, potentially leading to breakthroughs like synthetic organs or alternative meat production.
Organoids are not just a mix of cells from a particular organ, they mimic the structure and function of the organ itself. She gave the example of a colon and an organoid having a mucosal layer, an absorptive layer, and a muscle layer , derived from a specific subset of adult stem cells. This allows them to model diseases and organ functions more accurately than traditional 2D cell cultures.
Perhaps most interesting is how organoids can significantly improve the inclusivity and diversity of clinical trials. Historically, clinical trials have suffered from a lack of diversity, often excluding women and other demographic groups. Organoids can be developed from tissue samples from diverse populations worldwide, allowing for a broader understanding of how diseases and treatments affect different demographic groups without the ethical and logistical complexities of human trials.
We'll also be able to do patient stratification. So we're able to look at specific metabolic profiles or racial profiles or genetic mutational landscapes and thentest those drugs in those patients as a stratified process.
So we can compare female and male, Caucasian versus African versus Middle Eastern, for example. And we can also start to develop patient-specific models. So we can take, for example, someone who has hereditary cholesterol and compare it to somebody who has developed cholesterol. And what does that mutational profile, differences in that mutational profile, what does that mean for those people?
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As someone whose last job in a lab was studying host pathogen interactions, I got pretty excited when she told me about the applications in this area. Organoids may fill the goldilocks region between expensive experiments in small animals like mice and the limitations of 2D cell cultures with representing a single cell type. I could have used this 25 years ago!
We briefly dove into process of creating organoids, starting from the isolation of stem cells from a tissue biopsy or through induced pluripotent stem cells. This involves cultivating these cells in specialized media to promote growth and differentiation, mimicking the natural growth environment of cells within the human body.
Despite the promising applications, there are challenges in organoid technology concerning the variability and reproducibility of organoids. The size and shape of organoids can vary, which complicates their use in high-throughput screenings and other standardized tests. Achieving full functionality and maturation of organoids remains a hurdle, as they often lack certain cell types found in natural organs, such as immune or endothelial cells.
When I asked her what is next in the world of organoids, Samantha was optimistic about their potential to democratize drug development and reduce reliance on animal models. She believes that advancing organoid technology could lead to more personalized and effective treatments, enhancing the inclusivity and ethical standards of biomedical research.
Your deepest in

By now, I imagine most of you have interacted with ChatGPT in some way. You can use it to summarize a document, brainstorm a campaign or plan a vacation away from technology. The capabilities are mind-boggling and the BS (if you detect it) is amusing. All that aside, how can you use an internal vertical GPT to serve your customers?
I spoke to Ian Birkby, CEO of AZONetwork about Azthena, the internal vertical GPT they built as an AI assistant deployed on their various websites to help users find relevant news and product information. If you are not familiar with AZONetwork, Chat GPT describes them like this:
The AZoNetwork is a company that specializes in digital marketing and content solutions within the science, healthcare, and technology sectors. They provide a range of services aimed at connecting scientific, medical, and technology communities globally. These services include content creation, marketing strategies, and communication solutions designed to disseminate knowledge and promote products through various online platforms. AZoNetwork operates several websites that publish articles, news, and resources relevant to professionals in these fields, helping them to stay informed about the latest developments and technologies.

As a media and marketing company, AZONetwork has a lot of content, over a million assets, by Ian’s estimate. This is the content was used to train Azthena to to answer users queries.
The value of this type of GPT is that the data it has been trained on has been reviewed and vetted by humans in the course of publication over many years. The same can’t be said for everything one finds on the internet, some of which ends up in the answers to your ChatGPT queries, not to mention outright hallucinations.
General LLMs, if I'm going to exaggerate, are a mile wide and a few inches deep. We're trying to be, you know, maybe 12 inches wide, but three foot deep… - Ian Birkby
Azthena took nine months to build. That was impressive to me given that includes putting some structure around all of their content.
The quality of the output should enhance the customer experience by providing specific answers to queries along with relevant references.
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Ian and I discussed what this will mean for companies, buyers and human creativity broadly.
External GPTs trained on the same broad collections of data may all end up homogenized. How will you differentiate your company to be a source of unique and valuable (essential) information? Building your own specialized GPT is one possible answer.
We agreed that the buyer’s journey will change. Once people adapt to the new approach (this will take some time but too much), they’ll expect to find answers and recommended next steps regarding what to look for or look at along the way to a purchase. No more clicking through multiple links hoping to find the best information. As I write that last sentence, I’m stunned at how quickly we are spoiled by new technologies. I’m old enough to remember mailing away to get a catalog or brochure from one vendor! If you are a marketer, you should be thinking about what comes next.
In reaction to this change, big information providers e.g. The Guardian, etc. are blocking crawlers from sucking up their information. Models built on search might also change. Will we have to pay for things that were free for the last 20 years?
Finally, I asked Ian about the future of human creativity.
…emotional intelligence… that's definitely an area where, you know, the human has still got a role I think, in that, very pure form of creativity… seeing what nobody else has seen before and thinking something different. You know, that I still think there's mileage in, in humans having a role to play there. However, there's probably 80 percent of the drudgery-related tasks that we all face that are going to end up sitting on the desk of AI.
But for those routine tasks, th

Could bacteriophage be an alternative to antibiotics for Group B Strep (GBS) in pregnant women?
GBS is a commensal bacteria, found harmlessly in the gut of some people. But it is an opportunistic pathogen that can cause significant disease - sepsis, meningitis, lung injury and bacteremia - in newborns exposed to it in the vaginal tract during birth, for example.
Lucy Furfaro is an Emerging Leadership Fellow at the University of Western Australia in Perth. I spoke to her about her research in this area, how she became interested in the microbiology of newborns and their mothers, and the advantages of living in the most remote city on Earth.
Lucy works at the King Edward Memorial Hospital, the referral center for all of Western Australia which covers an area approximately equal to the US west of the Rocky Mountains.
What makes the hospital unique is that it hosts The Raine Study, the world's oldest prospective birth cohort, which has been collecting ongoing health data on mothers and their babies for 35 years.
Preventing infection of newborns is done differently depending on where you are. The standard in Australia and the US is universal screening, typically a swab test. Expectant mothers testing positive for GBS in the vaginal tract (about 1 in 4) are given antibiotics pre-emptively.
The UK and New Zealand take a risk-based approach (e.g., a history of infection) to determine who gets the antibiotic. While antibiotic resistance is not an issue of concern in GBS yet, we know that eventually it can be. Also of interest is what antibiotics do to the microbiome of moms and their babies.
These concerns lead to the consideration of phage as a possible targeted therapy for GBS. At least a few challenges, both scientific and regulatory, remain to be solved.
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Bacteriophage or simply phage are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. They are typically specific to a single type or closely related bacteria. Some are obligately lytic phages that infect a bacterium, replicate inside, lyse the cell and move on to the next bacterium. Others can hedge their bet, taking either the lytic pathway or occasionally integrating their DNA into the DNA of the host bacteria. These temperate phage might later be induced to lyse their host cells and move on.
Ideally, phages chosen for antimicrobial therapies are of the lytic variety. But every phage found to infect Group B Strep so far is a temperate phage. That is either a sampling problem or an interesting biological question of why that is so.
Beyond the biology are the regulatory questions. Are phage biologicals? They aren’t alive. However, neither is an engineered antibody, which is subject to a lot of analysis to confirm its identity.
One possible solution is to avoid using intact phage particles. It involves the engineering of phage lysins, the enzymes that disrupt bacterial cell walls and membranes. These might be delivered in a topical cream to prevent infection at birth avoiding broad spectrum antibiotic resistance and causing minimal disruption to the maternal microbiome.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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When I’m eating blueberries from Chile here in California, I assume that they arrived by air after being picked a couple of days ago. That isn’t necessarily true. Delivery by sea could take weeks from the time they are picked by the grower until they arrive on the shelf at my local grocery store.
In this episode, I talked to Tristan Kaye, Director of Global Marketing and Business Development at It's Fresh about the challenges of shipping fresh produce across the planet while avoiding waste and spoilage.
According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, up to 45 percent of all fresh produce grown is never consumed. For two reasons. One is food loss. So this is through poor infrastructure, lack of appropriate cold chain, mishandling these sorts of things, or food waste.
Another significant challenge in the supply chain is controlling the levels of ethylene, which is a signaling molecule produced in plants for many things, including maturation and ripening. And it doesn’t take much to have an impact on fruit during shipping.
…kiwi fruit can be sensitive down to four or five parts per billion. So to give that a sort of sense of context, a billion seconds is about 33 years. So it's lik if you're looking for ethylene in kiwifruit, that is the equivalent of trying to find five seconds of a 33-yearr period… But it fundamentally affects all of the elements in terms of the fruit and many vegetables that are developed.
It’s Fresh offers an interesting solution to this challenge. We didn’t go deep into the chemistry of their ethylene control technology. It allows growers to pick fruit a little early and allow it to ripen slowly so that, ideally, it shows up on our local shelves ready to be consumed. Our conversation focused on all the other aspects of the supply chain that illustrate the challenge of getting fruit to market in a condition that consumers expect regardless of where they were grown:
Growers get paid based on what arrives at the destination. They must decide when to harvest their fruit at some interval before ripening, yet they have no control over much of what happens or how long it takes before fruit arrives.
Market pricing and seasonal demand influence the decision of whether to ship by air or sea.
There can be tremendous uncertainties around the time spent in a warehouse at either end. Even shipping routes are facing uncertainty as there is a restriction on what can go through the Panama Canal due to a drought that has Lake Gatun at record low levels. Ships may have to wait in an anchorage at the canal, deliver some containers elsewhere or go around the tip of South America. Conflict near the Suez Canal, or the inability to access the Port of Baltimore might also be a factor right now.
Damaged fruit produces ethylene as a stress response. To top it all off, there is ethylene in the exhaust of internal combustion engines. Warehouses that store fruit may use electric machinery like forklifts, but imagine the challenge of keeping motor exhaust out of your entire supply chain.
The next time you grab a handful of blueberries grown out of season in the other hemisphere, give a thought to all the considerations and decisions that help preserve them from the moment of harvest to the moment you enjoy them.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cclifescience.substack.com

If you have a PhD in life science, are working toward one, or just considering it with an eye toward getting an academic job, the math is not in your favor. There are way more PhDs than the number of academic slots available. How that gets resolved with respect to your career was the core of my discussion with Ali Divan, Founder of Trulitica, where he is helping life science PhDs get into biotech.
Don’t miss the SPECIAL OFFER at the bottom of this post.
For many, there is a mismatch between expectations of what a career in life science might look like and where you end up working. But it’s not all bad. There are good jobs to be had. Just maybe not the ones you expected.
Ali’s job is helping folks reframe their skills (and conversations) to open up new opportunities.
A math problem
Our discussion covered the challenge from several angles. PIs need to generate publications. Historically, that has been done in the process of training scientists who then go on to train more scientists in their own quest for publications.
This has led to an oversupply of scientists looking for academic jobs. Entering graduate school now betting on an uncertain outcome eight years down the road (generously) is risky. But should you give up your dreams of doing science? No. The system is definitely ripe for change. At the same time, it’s important to be open to new possibilities. That’s good advice for anyone looking eight years ahead.
We don't really walk in and go, “Yeah, I'm, I'm going to do some career planning. I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do.” Most of us, we go, “Hey, I'm pretty good at school. I should keep doing it.”
Universities need to change
Check out Ali’s article at the end of this post for details. Ali says some of them are aware:
What I've seen when I started speaking to the deans of graduate schools at universities, they're very well aware of this. And a lot of them, what they say is, “You know, I think we just need to be a little bit more responsible at the time that graduate students are applying and beginning.
We need to tell them what they're signing up for and what the landscape is” so that they don't show up thinking, as I thought, that if you just show up and be excellent and try hard enough, that's enough because (for) everything up to that point in your life, that was enough.
The other challenge for PhD graduates is that university career centers are set up for undergrads. For a new PhD, your PI and whatever network you have created through conferences, your committee etc. is your career center. The problem is that the only job they can likely help you get is one that looks exactly like theirs. Because of the bottleneck or for other reasons, some people will decide to leave academia. But their training (they’re 30+ years old now) has not prepared them.
The rest is up to you
How do you build a good life as a scientist? Isn’t that the real goal? Do good science, make discoveries, solve problems and enjoy all the other things life has to offer?
What should you do if you had planned on a career as academic scientist and now need to look elsewhere? And how do you make that transition? How do you frame the skills you have in a way that’s relevant for employers?
Here’s the good news: Ali says most of what you need is around strategy and communication, not hard skills. You’re only a few months away from being ready.
The way that I help them is we first start out by sort of dismantling some of the practices that are that are so common and valued in academia. And so, as an example, in academia, it's highly valued to debate.
It's highly valued to ask anytime you feel like you have a question or an argument. You just, you put it out. What I generally say is, well, in the industrial setting, when you don't have time, you have to have a very good reason for meetings. It's much more valuable to listen…
That’s just one example of the difference you might find in industry.
Focus on sk