Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from Webinar Vet welcoming you to another episode of Et Chat. Really super excited today to have Eve Hanks on the line. Eve is the founder and CEO of My RNA which is doing amazing work in the whole area of biotechnology.

So it's great to have you on Eve. Obviously also a veterinary surgeon qualified from Edinburgh. Tell us a little bit about.

The journey from, you know, perhaps why you wanted to be a vet and how the journey sort of started and got you to the point where you're now running a, a big biotech company. Thanks so much Anthony for having me on and, and yeah, delighted to share a little bit of the backstory. I think I, from a veterinary point of view, I have a similar background to many people where I had a mixture of a love of animals, but also a love of science.

And for me it was X-Files. So, back in the day watching X-Files and just wanting to be Agent Scully and Mole. Older and investigating scientifically in particular, strange phenomenon, which turned out to be something that led me to vet school.

So, I think I probably have always been a scientist at heart. When I was at vet school, again, similarly to many of my colleagues now, there wasn't a lot of discussion around where that career could take you out with of, you know, the kind of obvious veterinary practise road. And so I went down that road and I was in practise for about 13 or 14 years, good days and bad days, definitely lots of good memories, but quite quickly missed learning, you know, so learning every day is extreme in those first few years.

And then it becomes perhaps a routine vaccine, routine dental, routine vaccine kind of day that, that takes over. So at that point I started with the University of Liverpool and my cert AVP in medicine. Loved that.

And then after that I did eventually end up doing a PhD at the University of Glasgow. So crossed that divide from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Are people still speaking to you from Edinburgh, you went over to Glasgow.

That's right. I didn't lose friends at that point, but, I haven't admitted to all of them that I studied at Glasgow, but yeah, so, so it was great. That was where I first discovered immunology, molecular biology, and molecular diagnostics.

So, moving on from that, I then took a job in clinical pathology. At Scotland's Rural College, so still in Scotland at that point, and when I was at SRUC working on clinical pathology, that's really the part of pathology that's most interesting because things are still alive. You can still save lives during.

By the time you've graduated to pathology, everything's already dead and, and you know, there's no true emergencies there, but the Climp path side was really interesting, and so a couple of years working there led me to spin out a new diagnostic testing company called My RNA. And here we are, you know, now, obviously living in, in France, you've got a company with employees all over the world. Tell us a little bit about what are the areas particularly that my RNA are interested in and and you know what are the projects that you're involved in at the moment that are getting you excited.

Yeah, my RNA as a company now is 6 years old, just over 6 years old. So the projects that I get involved with are not at all what I would have thought I would have worked on, when I was in veterinary practise. So, I'm working on things like investments, financial projections, I'll work on, you know, a variety of different projects, across the organisation.

So it's a really interesting and varied day. And now there's 35 of us who work in 9 different countries. So there's a lot going on in the day to day.

But in terms of my journey as a company, as you see, I moved to France, so that was one move, and we're an international company, but I also, I was very lucky to get involved in some really passion areas, I suppose for me, in terms of our projects, so. When we look at diagnostics and when I first set the company up, one of the main areas for me that I felt was lacking in clinical pathology was the correct and early diagnosis of chronic disease. So that's in a nutshell, why this started.

And when you look at protein-based diagnostics, so all of our enzymes, all of those kind of tests we know well, pro BMP for heart disease, for example, when we look at these types of protein diagnostics, they're really quite good at telling us about damage. But of course that damage has to occur for us to see the positives. So I was super interested in that area before that when damage was underway or was programmed to be underway, but hadn't yet caused suffering to that animal or hadn't yet taken that animal down a pathway that was hard to reverse.

And in that space, we can work in the scientific community with what's known as epigenetic markers, and that's what we do at Maarni. Then of course we can go back in time even more to the actual genetic blueprint of an animal, and in the scientific community there's a lot of advances in genetic medicine of course too, but we don't really cross into that area at the moment. So I focused on epigenetics and I said, how can I harness nucleotides, like little pieces of RNA for example, to look at disease processes and spot it early.

And the only way I could do that was not what I expected to, to launch, the only way I could do that was to combine RNA markers, biomarkers. Markers, the molecular pathway signals that they give us with artificial intelligence. So, I became a tech entrepreneur, slightly by mistake.

So, we focus on chronic disease, of course. So we look at things like early diagnosis of heart disease, kidney disease, skin disease, for example, cancer would be another. And things like osteoarthritis, and we work with blood and urine samples to do that, and we use machine learning models to tell us as much information as possible.

So for example, tell us the stage of disease that's present, not just what disease, and tell us the likelihood that that patient is stable and then tell us what we could maybe use in the future in terms of treatments to help that animal. So when you package all of that together, it's known as precision medicine or personalised medicine. So that's the area, it's kind of tech heavy, nucleotide medicine and moving towards personalised medicine.

Yeah I think a lot of degrees sort of moved into that whole biotechs well biotechnology space where they were you know looking at micro micro level and now of course you're bringing AI into it, so I presume you know within your team there's not just biologists and sort of chemists and scientists but a lot of computer engineers as well. Bioinformatics, exactly, that's it exactly. So, I think the for us now because we're mature in this model, we've got about 50,000 different data points in our machine learning models, which is mind blowing for me.

So, you know, even just on our cardiac programme, we've got 2000 patients that have given samples to just the cardiac part of the company. So the the ability to get the best out of that data is so important and certainly for us, if we weren't doing the machine learning models, we weren't doing the bioinformatics, and we weren't, I suppose, using that AI, we couldn't have advanced as quickly as we have. So I would admit that.

I wasn't maybe the most tech savvy, and I imagined when I was first looking into this, that we would have like rooms full of servers, you know, like something from The Matrix, and, but actually it's done in the cloud on a laptop in a nanosecond, so things are probably more advanced than I had realised back in the day. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and the pace of change is, is happening all the time and I suppose. Having that belief in a kind of incremental change actually suddenly something happens and, and there is a a quick spurt in progress isn't there, in that sense.

And that's what we're really seeing with all the AI stuff at the moment, isn't it? I think, I think that's it. And, and the other thing as well is that AI has so many layers.

So we're seeing lots of stuff at the moment where, for example, the AI side of things could be note taking, you know, and that's so removed from what we're doing in bioinformatics. But at the moment everyone says, yeah, it's such and such with AI. So I think, I think we probably.

Probably as an industry have a good point now in time where we need to see which means, you know, so it's AI, but that means machine learning or it's AI and that means, you know, scribe, for example. So I think all of that is really important for us to classify a bit more because when I was in practise, I didn't have any idea of what that meant, you know, in terms of, of AI, whereas now, I understand the, the, the nuances a little bit more of what that whole sector means. Yeah, I think it's really interesting that we're seeing that progress and as you say with chronic disease rather than early stage rather than when the damage is being done, so presumably also in agricultural disease in diseases like, Yonis which are chronic diseases, if we can find them earlier, diagnose them earlier, hopefully we can end up with more efficient production systems which when we are short of protein, you know, for many people in the world, the the actual efficiency of farming is, is important, isn't it, with methane er you know sort of emissions and so on.

Yeah, exactly. I think chronic disease in agriculture is a problem, but in particular for me, it was endemic disease, you know, these diseases that from a farm level, we as vets, farmers just have to live with, like that's a horrendous way to run a business model, you know, to have 20% of your productivity lost to endemic disease, such as tuberculosis, Yoni, you're right to point out. But one of the problems that we have with a disease like Yoni's is that diagnosing it isn't actually that helpful on its own.

So when we look at a cat or dog, diagnosis, information is power, knowledge is, is key, you know, but when we look at a herd management plan, it's not actually the presence of the disease that's necessarily the problem in endemic situations, it's the cohorts of cattle who go on to have clinical disease, not subclinical or clear the disease. So, there's been a lot of innovation and diagnostics that's taken forward the idea if we could just spot yonis earlier, then we could kill every single cow with yonis. But what those innovations have very usefully shown is that almost all cows in the UK, for example, will have been exposed to yoni's disease.

So it's not possible for us to in actual fact, eradicate it. At this stage, so what we need to do is spot which cows have been exposed and then start to predict what they're going to do, start to stratify the risk. And when you're using molecular biomarkers and machine learning, that's when you can start to recognise patterns of early disease that leads a cow to clinical yonis, for early disease, early immunity or immune.

Responses might look like in a cat that has HCM and goes on to die suddenly or in a dog with cancer that goes on to metastasize, for example. So, so it's more trying to get more out of a diagnostic so that we can see this exists, this is real, but in this instance, you need to act or actually this is a stable situation, you can make your choice. So almost with that testing, knowing that maybe one cow was.

Not being affected dreadfully by yonis, whereas another one is becoming sicker and sicker and it's possibly the right time, To let it go, not only because it won't. Produce meat, milk at the sort of level that you want it, but I, I think also things like methane levels go up in these sick cows more than healthy cows don't they? We think so, so the ideal, what we're trying to work on is to do that but do it like before er the cow is sick, so do this like when the cows a year old, so that we haven't put that cost, that sunk cost into into cattle.

And we can predict, for example, with microRNAs in, in the human field as well, the course of a disease, so there's no reason that that can't be built into agriculture. And if we can do that, we can test the herd, decide who to keep, decide who not to keep, and then we build resilience as well for future generations, so. With that, the amount of methane produced per kilo of meat and per per litre of milk should fall relatively drastically across different endemic diseases.

But in order to do it efficiently, we need the data, of course, and these things take a few years. So although we're a few years in, we've still got a little bit of work to do. This sounds like another podcast or a webinar when you're when you're ready to present.

I know obviously you know as a scientist with a PhD and you know you're surprised now that your work is around investment and financial planning, but as a lifelong learner, er you're now doing an MBA. What what are the sort of, you know, and obviously the science behind everything that you're doing is massively important, but also er you know. As a founder, a CEO, you know, who had a good idea but is now turning it into a business, a bit like I did with Webinarvet 16 years ago, that can be a really tough transition, you know, dealing with teams, you know, people often say, oh gosh, you know, the animals are easy to work with, it's the, you know, it's the team and, and so on, I think the team can be the big blessing, it depends on how you look at it, doesn't it, so if you think that everybody is an idiot then, Usually that's how they kind of turn out to you, you're the problem rather than them, so how have you managed to build the team, you know, in such a short time, 35 people, and hopefully keep it quite, culturally sort of happy and content, you know, so that they can work at, advancing the vision of the business.

Yeah, that's such a good question, and I don't, I'm not going to claim to have done that in some sort of single-handed form. I think my RNA now really belongs to the team, you know, it's, it's not, it's not my baby. When we, when you talk, I, it takes me straight back, Anthony, when you talk about you, you launching webinar vets and those years ago, it's almost quite a load.

Only initial journey, isn't it, and hard to relate it to people, hard to kind of find the support you need, but you're in a big growth journey. So, you know, it's always good to, to have those networks. But as people come on and they make it theirs, and they bring their ideas and their cultural thoughts to it, that's when I think it becomes a real living, breathing, you know, organism if you like, and then I'm super proud, we're super proud of myity in that sense, we take.

The culture very seriously, a lot of what I learned in my MBA about leadership, management, project management, financial management, obviously, always good to stay in business and be, have a bit of liquidity around us. All of that has been really, really useful, but can only be applied if these ideas are put into practise by our staff. And our workers are like, literally the most flexible people I've ever met.

They are completely fine with us changing slightly our tact, change slightly our minds, sometimes changing our messaging, changing our areas of focus to different priorities as we move forward. They are super well adapted and adjusted to that, but they also bring their own ideas and, and deepen everything, you know, in terms of making the whole impact more profound. So I thought at first it might be nice to solve chronic disease and pick it up early, but because we've got this team, we know now the use cases and as we talked about yonis is one, but in another instance, if we go to heart disease, for example, we understand now that it.

It would be really important to pick up B1 stage heart disease and differentiate from B2 to help drive when a medication should be given because the impact is this for a dog and it lives this much longer. So, you know, those types of things are brought because we can work together as a team, so. I think in terms of the, the way we found everyone, there always has been a very high visibility around my RNA that we didn't do this in stealth mode.

We did the shouting from the rooftops about what we wanted to do because we want to collaborate openly with universities, the whole supply chain, laboratories, the veterinary industry, the key opinion leaders, the specialists, etc. So, and because of that, I think we attracted the right people to us. But because of that also, there's a lot of credibility about the science because all of these collaborators we have, we consider to be like an extension of our workers, and they have all managed to give us their expertise that we've captured within what we.

Built, so I think it's, it's been an amazing journey for me personally, it's been tough at times to, to go into that leadership role from what was initially more of a scientific founder role, but it's been like really rewarding, I have to say. Hm. No, I think you've explained that really well that it starts off very much as your idea and your vision, but as people come in, particularly, you know, people that are, You know, cleverer than you, you, you're always trying to get cleverer people than you, then that's when the business can really grow fast when you know you're not the logjam when you have to be involved in everything, but you can actually say no this is a project I can pass to so and so to work on I I I I think you've explained that really well.

So, so what's the what's the future holding, what, what's the what you can tell us on the podcast that you're moving forward with over the next year or two. So I think really the next year or two is probably the most exciting of our years today, because we are going into pre-commercial and then commercial year. Which sounds very well aligned and thought through, but really this is the first of the first of our parts of our journey that relies solely on the veterinary industry and the acceptance, the adoption, the early adopters, the people looking for new science, looking for new ways to bond their clients, like all of that now has to be put into practise.

And I think from that point of view, there isn't really a way to move forward that we can map out fully. We have to, we have to kind of have a few different strategies and then we're at the mercy slightly of how the industry, you know, looks at things as we, as we go forward. So the way we're de-risking that just like corporate talk a little bit, the way we're de-risking the commercial rollout is that we're moving forward with partners.

So the idea is that veterinarians should be able to go on to their normal practise management system, order a microRNA test with other tests if they want, you know, so like pro BMP and microRNAs. And that our partner laboratories provide that testing for them, so it allows that familiarity of workflow to remain in place, but supercharges your diagnostic input when it comes back. So that's what we're working on just to embed that system at the moment into practises, into our early adopter.

Clinics. I'm really excited because this is the moment when all of that scientific work for 6 years is going to be applied. And, you know, we, we've been working really hard.

We've got hundreds and hundreds of patients. We've got 50,000 data points in our models now, like, we've worked across all the different geographies, US, Asia, UK, EU to make sure that we've covered as much of those scientific credibility questions as we can. So now, it's over to, over to the community and it, it's going to actually be used to, to hopefully save lives.

It sounds really exciting, obviously really excited to have been involved with the podcast with you, if people, you know, vets in practise who are listening now, they want to get in contact with you, perhaps we can leave your details, under the podcast in the, in the description so that they can get in touch so, Is that that we're really sort of imminent with that stage now of starting to recruit people to use the tests in an ordinary clinical environment, to start helping them with their diagnosis but also with their prognostication as well. Yes, so there's probably 3 main ways that people can get involved. So we have a waiting list for the commercial rollout, which is the start of next year, which is just commercially available to everyone.

That's, we have about 2500 vets on that at the moment, veterinary clinics, so that's great obviously and moving forward. Then we have our early adopter scheme, so for people who'd like to pilot it. In their clinics and help us to validate the workflows, help us to make sure, you know, that the price points are right, that we're not saying it's going to be a two day turnaround, it's going to be 3, you know, all of these sort of technical questions that is open, so early adopter scheme, and then the last way that people can help us is by collecting samples and getting involved actually.

In the research, so we are running programmes of research, choose your interest area almost because this is such a platform technology. So, if you're really interested in a way, get in, get in touch if you're interested in cancer, if you're interested in kidney, if you're interested in skin, for example, we want to hear from you. But equally, if you also think to yourself, actually, this would be.

So good to diagnose early on a blood sample, let us know, because we run pilot projects all the time too. So whether you want to be involved from research, from early adoption, or just be on the waiting list to know when it's ready, we're always delighted to hear from you and I'm more than happy to share details for anybody who also is perhaps launching their own innovation. And, so that's more a personal call to action if you like.

So for people who are about to go or have just gone on that founder to leader journey or who are thinking about stepping out of veterinary practise into an innovation role, I think there's a lot of help I didn't know was out there, and there's a lot of advice I wish someone had told me. So I think from that point of view, always happy to have those discussions as well. Brilliant, Eve, it's been so good to speak to you.

Bon soir, I think it's probably to get dark with you as well, isn't it, and, yeah, it's been, it's been great, and thank you everyone for listening. You know, we love innovative companies at the webinar Bet, it's one of our value words. Innovation is so important, and doing things just that little bit differently sometimes takes some people a bit of time to get used to, but I think the whole idea of personalised medicine is, is really, really powerful, so.

Best of luck over the next critical 2 years and perhaps we'll get you back in 2 years to hear how you're getting on. Sounds perfect, thank you so much. Thanks, thanks everyone for listening and see you on a podcast or a webinar very soon, take care.