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Close to the Edge Episode 10:
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Close to the Edge Episode 10:
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Howdy, and thanks for taking the time to watch Close To The Edge, the new video series from GEN Edge, where we invite leading biotech executives to discuss their science, technology, and their business strategy. I'm Alex Philippidis, a senior business editor with GEN, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, the publication covering the biotech industry for 40 years.
KEVIN DAVIES: I'm Kevin Davies, executive editor of GEN Biotechnology, GEN's new peer-review journal launching in early 2022, publishing exceptional original research across the world of biology and biotechnology, and currently accepting manuscript submissions. More details at www.genbiotechjournal.com. Close To The Edge is the flagship video series of GEN Edge, our new premium subscription channel from GEN providing in-depth exclusive news interviews and analysis of key trends in the biotech industry coupled with a range of multimedia offerings, notably this one.
KEVIN DAVIES: More details of our free subscription trial offer at genengnews.com/genedge.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: On today's episode, episode 10, our guest is Glen de Vries, the life sciences and health care vice chair for Dassault Systemes, and before that, the co-founder and co-CEO of Medidata Solutions, the pioneering developer of clinical trial software solutions aimed at powering smarter treatments and healthier people as they call it. If you think you've seen Glen's beaming face recently, or if that name rings a bell, there's a good reason. He was one of the four crew members aboard the second flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: The Jeff Bezos-owned spacecraft boldly went where few have gone before. Recently with guest of honor William Shatner, Star Trek's Captain Kirk, becoming the oldest person ever to go into space, astronaut Glen de Vries, welcome to Close To The Edge.
GLEN DE VRIES: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, excited to be with you guys.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: We will indeed talk about your two decades in biotech, which is a story in its own right, but we've got to hear more about your recent exploits. You've said you've been passionate about aviation in space for as long as you can remember. What sparked your interest in flying and space travel?
GLEN DE VRIES: I like to support things with empirical evidence. And if you recognized my face or name, as you said, it's been such an interesting week because I have been contacted by people I haven't spoken to for 40 years, and saying, hey, I can't believe you're going to space. I remember you talking about this when we were in second grade. So it really is something that I've always wanted to do. And I will tell you, kind of, fast-forwarding, one of the strangest, most amazing things that I realized in the last week, I went up almost exactly a week ago, is I have spent so many nights going to bed and closing my eyes and thinking about space and fantasizing about going to space, and now when I get in bed, I close my eyes, and I replay going to space.
GLEN DE VRIES: And it's just an incredible thing to have experienced. So I always loved everything in science. I love physics, and I love chemistry. And I love biology, which to me, was a culmination of everything in foundational science that I loved as a kid and as a teenager and as a university student. But that came with everything in the science section of the library, very much inclusive of every book I could absorb about astronomy, cosmology, space exploration, engineering.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so this was something that in my professional life, I went towards the medical and the molecular. But in my personal life, I kept the aviation and the aerospace, and the planetary and interplanetary as a huge interest. So when something became an opportunity to actually take that private passion and maybe even combine it with some of my professional interests from a stem advocacy perspective and trying to get people to think the right way about technology and innovation, I jumped at the chance to go flying.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Was there a real-life space flight that sort of sparked your interest in space, Apollo, Skylab, something?
GLEN DE VRIES: I have very vivid memories of Skylab that was probably really-- Apollo I was too young. I obviously read everything about it and absorbed it. And I think Skylab, the shuttle program, was just hugely inspirational to me. There was this book that was available in a physical bookstore. Remember when we had those? And it was called The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual, and I still have a copy of it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And it had excerpts from NASA flight manuals and all these diagrams of the space shuttle, and it wasn't in any way narrative. It was literally just procedures and pictures. And I would sit at home pouring over it. And so I think the shuttle program is really important for me, and then everything that happened. And honestly, I will tell you recently I was, of course, riveted to the screen when we, and I mean like the biggest royal we you could think of, like humanity got an aircraft, a rotorcraft, on another planet, and I don't think everybody was watching.
GLEN DE VRIES: And you bring up the Apollo program. I'm pretty sure everybody was watching when we put people on the moon. I know sometimes it's more exciting when a person is involved. But actually, things like the early shuttle launches, I think the world needs that. I think people need to be inspired about space and the potential for it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so hopefully, next time we have another civilization milestone of something like having something fly on another planet, we do have everybody watching. I would love to be whatever small part I can play and be pushing for people to really get excited about science that way.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Is that just sort of harder to do compared to 50 plus years ago when Apollo and people gathered around the TV set for whatever reason? And how do you bring people together? It's hard to do that for anything, let alone a space mission.
GLEN DE VRIES: Well, honestly, I think there's two elements to that. One, is digital, and, yes, maybe people gathered around the TV to watch the news in a different way. But the fact of the matter is everybody is connected and maybe sometimes for worse rather than for better. But we do have these networks as fabric that connects everybody literally around the world. And I think maybe that can be an avenue for good.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I'll tell you the other thing, which is I think being an astronaut, getting to see the world from that perspective, and I want to talk about the benefits of the technology as well. But just the experience was something that when we were all younger and thinking about things like the shuttle program, you had to dedicate your life to being somebody who went to space, I think, in an incredibly exciting and admirable way.
GLEN DE VRIES: But I think about it in healthcare and life sciences all the time. Equity and access is something that we need to pay attention to in every aspect of our society of our civilization. And I really feel like space is no different in that regard. I feel like the democratization of space is upon us. One of the people on the crew Chris Boshuizen, who spent his life as a satellite engineer and entrepreneur, kind of says it very well.
GLEN DE VRIES: This is the year the people start going to space, and it took 60 years. That's now before Apollo when Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard went up. Call it 60 years ago. It's just about exactly that. And 600 people have gone to space since then. I'll be somewhere just under, I think, 600. I don't know what my official number is but somewhere in there.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think if you look at SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and the Russian Space Agency, we're going to put a sixth, maybe a tenth, but some call it a sixth of that number of people up next year. And that, to me, feels like the beginning of a Moore's law style curve. And I am not suggesting that everybody is going to have the privilege of going into space in the next two or three years, but I think we're going to have more and more people being able to do it.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think part of the privilege of me being able to go, besides having this incredible journey, is fueling that curve as it goes up. And as I said before, I want as many people to see the world this way as possible because I think it is profoundly changing, but also it's the technology that's important. We are going to continue to push these frontiers of what we can create and do from an engineering and scientific perspective in the new space race, and I mean that in a very positive way.
GLEN DE VRIES: And that's going to create technologies that are beneficial and useful for problems we have to solve on Earth in a way that I think and really hope we can use in an equitable, accessible way to help people all over the planet. So all that stuff, I think, answers that question of how do we get people excited? Well, I think it's actually a really exciting time.
GLEN DE VRIES: And at least I'm going to go out and keep shouting that from the mountaintops, so people can realize that and get excited about it.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: You mentioned equitable space travel as a goal. I know you were the second paying customer for Blue Origin. The cost of a seat is not disclosed. But Virgin Galactic, which you mentioned, said this summer it'll charge a minimum $450,000 a ticket. Is the sky indeed the limit for space travel?
GLEN DE VRIES: So think about this for a sec, and I'm not suggesting that these prices are low. I will tell you that it was worth it. And if you look at the way industries evolve, again, I think it's the privilege of being able to go is obviously being able to afford to go. I wrote a check to do it. But it's creating that environment where it begins to get more and more possible from a cost perspective.
GLEN DE VRIES: How long did it take from barnstorming to commercial travel across oceans? Not long. And that's where I think what we see from this kind of exponential growth perspective, we've seen it in so many other industries, becomes really exciting. And I have an interesting parallel if you guys are interested in terms of what we see in life sciences.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I think I'm now seeing that happening in the space industry. So one of the things that excites me from an accessibility and access perspective, and I've been in the life sciences industry for 2 and 1/2 decades now, is and I'm going to use acronyms in the United States, but the model, the stack applies to every country in the world. You have regulators like the FDA, who create a fabric base that makes sure that public interest and safety are taken into account.
GLEN DE VRIES: Then you have the kind of core fabric of intellectual capital. You have academic institutions. You have organizations, like the NIH or the NCI, that create a huge amount of new knowledge and distribute that around what is then on top of that supported by that fabric in industry. And can you imagine if we were waiting for regulators and governments to create vaccines for a pandemic?
GLEN DE VRIES: No. They had played a huge role in terms of generating the intellectual capital and the framework for regulation. But it is the Pfizers and Modernas and Johnson & Johnsons and Novavaxes of the world that form that industry that creates this virtuous cycle of innovation. Go back to what we were just talking about the shuttle program and Skylab and Apollo.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was governments competing. They were competing, and frankly, a lot of that was the Cold War and for probably not virtuous cycle reasons. And you had the governments, and you had some organizations that did a spectacular amount of work, like NASA from an intellectual capital perspective and creating that fabric for innovation, but not the industry.
GLEN DE VRIES: Well, now, we have the FAA, and we have NASA, and we have SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and Axiom and companies that are coming into this space, which will, I think, create that virtuous cycle. And so I offer that example hopefully as evidence that this hope is not just hope. There's actually a strategy there where I think there's a path where this industry creates something where so many people can go to space.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so when I hear Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin talking about their mission, which is to have millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth, I'd actually personally add for the benefit of Earth the way we would like to live on Earth and keep and preserve it. But that doesn't seem far-fetched to me when you think about that structure.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Thinking of Blue Origin, how did you get involved with Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos?
GLEN DE VRIES: There was an auction that people may know. They asked people to bid on this. I'm sure I wound up on the prospect list, thanks to that. And, again, in talking to them, I hoped that part of what motivated them was that I would be what I'm doing now, a real advocate for this, and hopefully, help explain why this is so important. And, again, when they called and said, would you like to go on a flight? I don't think it took a millisecond for me to process that again.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was a dream come true and at the center of what I emotionally from a humanity standpoint and intellectually from a scientific innovation standpoint really believe in, so I just jumped right on it.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And so then you were, in fact-- was advocacy a condition for coming in and getting the auction or getting on the mission?
GLEN DE VRIES: A condition, I have no idea. You would have to talk to the Blue Origin people about that. But the fact of the matter is that's one of the things that I feel really passionately about. It could be about resources on Earth. I do a bunch of stuff with water.org. It could be about education, which hopefully, the things I said about academic institutions and the organizations that provide intellectual fabric and industries, I think that is so foundational.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's the societal hierarchy of need requires education, then these are things. And then in healthcare, and in my professional life in terms of equity and access and how you have to think about that life sciences, advocacy is something that I think is really important to do when you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can do stuff where people can hear you.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so it's my privilege, again, to be able to incorporate thinking about space into those things. And, honestly, I thought this would happen. But I didn't realize how much conviction I would have about it once I saw Earth from space to come down and make sure that I really can put as much fuel, not just behind the space program or the space race, but behind this idea of getting everybody excited about those virtuous cycles that I possibly can.
GLEN DE VRIES: That is part of the rest of Glen's life.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Did you consider other options for space tourism?
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, I don't think it's a secret I've had a Virgin Galactic seat since my 40th birthday. It was my 40th birthday gift to myself, so I spent nine years plus waiting to go. And I don't think this is a zero-sum game today in the space industry. Again, I think everybody who's out there trying to do good work in terms of this progression of where humanity can reach is rooting for everybody else.
GLEN DE VRIES: The fact of the matter is I had an opportunity to go with Blue. I jumped at it. I think Blue has an amazing vehicle, an amazing safety program. I actually think the flight profile is really interesting, just what you get to see and experience in and of itself. And so delighted that I got to go with them.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And how does that access increase? How do you get more people? How do you get the seats lower, the cost of the seats lower if nothing else?
GLEN DE VRIES: First, you get the cost of the seats lower. I mean, that obviously is part of it. You also, I think, in generating some excitement when you see somebody like Bill Shatner, who a lot of people said like, oh, you went to space with Captain Kirk. No, I went to space with Bill Shatner, who happens to have played Captain Kirk, who is a lovely man. But let's not have it be lost on everybody that people, myself included, saw this iconic character for the last 55 years on small screen, big screen, who now, the person who portrayed them, has gone to space.
GLEN DE VRIES: That is science fiction becoming science fact. In life sciences, 25 years ago, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, we weren't talking about messenger RNA-based therapies and vaccines as something that was going to be available on the market. That was a crazy idea. More than a billion people are going to have them or have them already. And so this idea of the progression of things that are potential to things that are real I think can be inspiring.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so as the prices come down and as people get inspired, I think what we're going to see are organizations not just doing pure space travel but organizations that allow people to experience space, to learn more about space, to feel like they're part of the space program, to go up in a plane and fly zero gravity microgravity parabolic arcs, and do a vacation with your family that does that, maybe instead of going skiing.
GLEN DE VRIES: I'm not saying that one is better than the other. But my point is I think that there will be experiences, and there'll be interests that will coincide. And I have this kind of-- I don't how better to phrase it than fantasy. As a kid growing up in New York City, I remember when we were in school, they put us on the Circle Line, and we went around Manhattan, and we saw all the neighborhoods.
GLEN DE VRIES: I don't think it's impossible in some period of time, maybe even in the remainder of my lifetime, that there are kids in high school who'll see the world from space, not on the Circle Line. And however quickly that happens, when it happens, I am so convinced that that's going to have this, again, virtuous cycle effect on the way people think about the planet and divisions between people that it's worth getting there.
GLEN DE VRIES: And that's why it is with nothing but pride that I say it was worth it. It was expensive. It's part of getting us there if that makes sense.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: You said you went to space with William Shatner. What was it like training with him and then flying with him ultimately?
GLEN DE VRIES: So Bill, and Audrey, and Chris, the three people I went with, are all awesome people. I really made friends for life and not just them. Kevin and Sarah, and the people at CapCom, and our crew member number seven, like, I don't think you can do something like this and not bond with people. And I happened to meet amazing people doing it. But I actually have been lucky enough to meet some astronauts who have done shuttle flights and Soyuz flights along the way in my life.
GLEN DE VRIES: And one of the things that I've heard thematically from them is for every moment you're in space, there's a lot of moments getting ready for it on the ground. And going on the Blue Origin flight, even though it's only 10 minutes, is no different. You spend days with these people, and you get to know them and get ready together. And you go on a simulator, and you practice everything and every motion you're going to make because being in microgravity, it's not like the human body is set up for microgravity.
GLEN DE VRIES: You have to use all your limbs differently. You rehearse things. I just had a great time. I was in such a great group. And Chris is an engineer and entrepreneur in the space industry, making satellites. So he came with so much knowledge about the industry and experience. Audrey works at Blue Origin and runs all of their operations and all the vehicle maintenance.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was like flying with somebody who was an encyclopedia of the vehicle that we were in. And Bill was somebody who has spent their entire life, OK, yes, playing Captain Kirk, but his job is expression. And he's done it not only on screens but on stage and in music and in ways that those of us who came from science and engineering don't naturally think about. And actually, I'll tell you I don't mean to make an advertisement for my alma mater, but I'm a Carnegie Mellon trustee, and I can't help myself.
GLEN DE VRIES: One of the things that I love about that school is, it's got great engineering and great science and great humanities and great arts and performance, and you can't, if you want to inspire people, just have the science. You need to have the people who understand expression and understand getting emotion out to all be in an experience together to get that complete view of it. And whether by luck or I hope by design, we had that in our crew.
GLEN DE VRIES: And Bill was a huge part of that from an expression perspective. We were really lucky.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: How long did all that training take?
GLEN DE VRIES: It was a few days. Well, let me put it differently. It was a few days literally with Blue Origin. I love aviation. I have a pilot's license. I know how to communicate when you're doing aerospace things. I have been interested in space and had that Virgin Galactic ticket for a long time. I am deeply involved with the Zero-G Corporation that flies that parabolic arc plane.
GLEN DE VRIES: I've done a ton of training on that, so I was prepared for some of the physical experiences. I've done some high gravity environment training, both in high-performance aircraft, also in a facility where they spin you around in a centrifuge. So this is something I've been preparing for a long time, even when I didn't realize there was a literal flight coming up. But the actual Blue Origin thing includes a few days of training.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Over to you, Kevin.
KEVIN DAVIES: Thank you, Alex. Glen, take us through the events of October the 13th. Actually, the night before, did you get any sleep?
GLEN DE VRIES: Yeah, actually, I got sleep. It was interrupted by me waking up a lot of times, going, is it time to go? Is it time to go? We go back to sleep. And it was an amazing day. Actually, maybe I can take you relatively briefly, not in chronological order.
KEVIN DAVIES: Yeah, please.
GLEN DE VRIES: I was intellectually and physically prepared for the top of the arc before and after apogee. Everybody on my flight we all had the same mission plan, which was to look out the window as much as possible. It was different than anything I'd experienced in an aircraft microgravity environment. The view was just stunning beyond description. I don't know if it's my mind playing tricks on me, or literally, the colors look different, but the colors look different.
GLEN DE VRIES: At one point, I orientated myself, kind of, what is upside down based on Earth's orientation. It felt just fine up there in front of my window, and there's just this blackness of space. You don't see stars. They're just washed out from the sun reflecting off the Earth, and this curved horizon of the Earth and blue and white and yellow and green and brown. And it just was so vivid and amazing.
GLEN DE VRIES: And this thin little blue line, which is the atmosphere that we live in, that you're seeing from the side, which is hauntingly almost terrifyingly small. If you don't want to feel like climate change is an urgent problem, don't go to space because you will feel that. So I wasn't really able to understand how overwhelming it would be.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think I've said it before, like, the human body is designed for 1G. We've evolved in this environment, and we operate in it. It's a foreign environment. I'm not sure the human brain has evolved to really understand things from this view and perspective. And I'll be processing it for a long time.
KEVIN DAVIES: I was watching, obviously, not because you were on it necessarily, but because of your friend Bill Shatner was on it, and there are a couple of delays while you were wheeling up into the cockpit and then into the ship. Did that make you any extra nervous, or did they tell you this was likely to happen?
GLEN DE VRIES: No, actually quite the opposite. Chris Boshuizen the crew member, who is the most industry experienced from a satellite perspective, we were joking that he was filling out his astronaut bingo card. Like we had a date for the weather, check there. We had a hold that we were in before we got in the ship. We got a hold when we were in the vehicle. And actually, no. I mean, if you delay a flight because of weather, and you can be in a single-engine airplane, or you can be in a rocket ship doing that, you're doing that because you want to be safe.
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, any kind of delay like that, that's part of doing this kind of trip. And, no, it didn't make me more nervous.
KEVIN DAVIES: Tell us about liftoff and the G-forces that you experienced.
GLEN DE VRIES: So that's why it's kind of interesting to go out of chronological order, because as I said before, the flight profile of New Shepard is so interesting. And I should have been more intellectually and emotionally prepared for that part of the flight. And it all took me by surprise. You're looking at this window, and I've seen it in movies or sometimes in animations, like looking at an object, and you just zoom out.
GLEN DE VRIES: And you're seeing cactus and roads and things like human scale out the window. You're six stories up. And all of a sudden, something really interesting happens. Of course, it's loud, and you see the lights, but you start accelerating. You're going very slowly at first, and the speed that objects move is like normal speed that you use to perception from the angles that things change.
GLEN DE VRIES: You keep accelerating, accelerating, accelerating as you are now zooming out so far that the angles are not the angles you're used to. It's almost like the perception of speed out the window and the seat of your pants in no way match. And when you see frontal systems disappear below you and angles and with shadows under clouds that you're not used to, that was an extraordinary moment. And the textures of the ground changes.
GLEN DE VRIES: I'm really good usually looking out of windows of planes and being like, oh, that's that, that's that, but nothing. I completely lost track of where everything was. And then we have our apogee, and actually, it's kind of an interesting part of the story. Bill suggested that when we're up there, we're all looking at the window, let's come together as a crew, and have a moment of camaraderie. They don't stream out because there's no gravity, but you could see everybody's eyes are wet.
GLEN DE VRIES: I mean, it was really emotional. And then you get back in your seat, and I've never experienced speed like that. Sarah Knights, who was our crew member number seven, I think she was the one who was saying at first you throw a rock in a lake, and the rock hits the lake and then very slowly sinks to the bottom. Well, we're the rock, and the lake is the atmosphere.
GLEN DE VRIES: And when you start hitting the atmosphere, the wind noise is going by the capsule. It was an incredible sense of speed, and now the horizon is straight again, and now you're starting to see things in recognizable scale. And the main chutes come out. And at this point in the flight, it's very gentle. It's the last couple of thousand feet. We're just floating down over the desert.
GLEN DE VRIES: And Chris suggests, before we get out of the capsule, let's take one more moment together. And we land, and Jeff Bezos opens the hatch and welcomes us back to Earth, and we stand up. We hadn't even talked about this part of the flight. Everything else we had kind of rehearsed together. And we stand up, and we just get into this group hug. We're pressing our foreheads together. We're all crying.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was a very human experience. And I think some of that being unprepared for the intellectual, emotional parts of all of that flight and how in a good way quickly it happened just created this kind of intensity between us, which I will take with me forever
KEVIN DAVIES: How long were you above the Karman line? And does a little voice come in your ears from mission control saying congratulations?
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, if you look at one of the videos, you can hear me, it's my voice going, Karman line. I was the one who was, kind of, assigned in the crew to make sure at apogee, at the top part of the orbit, we got that moment, so I was watching the numbers when we went up Karman line. You know what? You're over the Karman line for whatever it is, a minute and change.
GLEN DE VRIES: It doesn't matter what line you're over. I mean, I think that experience of seeing everything zoom out and having a moment of seeing the Earth and zoom back in, that's the experience. You don't feel anything when you go through the Karman line.
KEVIN DAVIES: Right. Shatner was quoted as saying the Earth looked so fragile when you were up there. Did you agree with that?
GLEN DE VRIES: I do. I mean, like I said, if you don't want to worry about climate change, don't go to space. You really get that sense of fragility, and it's hard to be articulate about it. I think we're just as people kind of unprepared for it. But the word home, and when you sometimes use that word and feel it in your heart and your gut, that's what it feels like. And you see how nurturing it is, and you see this beauty in it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I think when you look at what we need to do as a civilization, we could probably pave this thing and all live in domes. I don't really want to live that way. We need to treat Earth as a nature preserve for lack of a better term, and we need to do that in a hurry. And you get a very visceral sense of the urgency of that when you see it up there. It does look fragile.
KEVIN DAVIES: Did it get warm at all coming back into the atmosphere? You mentioned sort of the wind picking up and you're-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
GLEN DE VRIES: No, you're basically in a closed environment. I think it was like Fahrenheit 64 degrees when we got into the capsule, and I think it was probably 64 degrees outside.
KEVIN DAVIES: Probably. Now, of course, there's been some pushback with space tourism and the efforts of the billionaire set who are pioneering this industry. And I just wanted to throw a quote at you and get your response. One of the criticisms I read came from Prince William the Duke of Cambridge, not a noted astronaut. But he said we need some of the world's greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.
KEVIN DAVIES: How would you respond to that?
GLEN DE VRIES: Well, I would respond to him that then he should be behind the space industry. And you know maybe it's the fault of people like me for not advocating enough for him to really understand that. I hope one day he does, and everybody does. Things emerge from technologies that are really important. By the way, if it wasn't for the empire created by the family that he's from, we wouldn't have navigational systems and clocks the way we have them today. So the way we think about time being accessible on our wrists, that actually came from the realization that we could think about latitude and longitude in ways with a chronometer that we couldn't think about otherwise.
GLEN DE VRIES: You don't think about connections like that. And I'm so passionate about foundational science. When people look at quantum physics and think, well, that doesn't matter, well, actually that's how transistors get turned into integrated circuits that keep getting smaller that go in your iPhone that result in us having this world of connectivity whether it's talking to your friends or doing a decentralized clinical trial where we can connect people.
GLEN DE VRIES: By the way, the Apollo technology that was used for maintaining the attitude or understanding the attitude of the capsule is exactly what's in your smartwatch. It's a piezoelectric sensor that is being used. It just got miniaturized, and we're using it to get healthcare data. And when you do basic biological research on things that are happening with DNA and RNA and proteins and pathways in cells, that's how we create therapies for new diseases that we can't cure.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's how we figure out what therapies could be used for diseases that we didn't realize they could be used for. And so I feel like space technology is going to help us get more people into space and help us get things off the planet that will help preserve the planet, but also, it's going to create technologies that help us here. I mean, again, I mentioned before, I'm very passionate about water.
GLEN DE VRIES: The idea that we don't have access to water for everybody on the planet is-- can I say it this way? It's embarrassing for our civilization, and this is an ethical and intellectual problem that we have to solve. Well, when you go to space, I was up there for 10 minutes, but if you go there for a longer period of time, there's no faucet.
GLEN DE VRIES: You need to learn how to manage your water supply and reclaim it and clean it. And those technologies will bleed into and help things that we are doing on Earth just like we learned how to navigate and that affected the way we use time and the way we were thinking about attitudes to spaceships. And that affects how we literally diagnose people who have cardiovascular issues today. These things will work in ways.
GLEN DE VRIES: They'll be emerging benefits from these systems that you can't necessarily predict. Again, I don't care who you are, where you are on the planet. I think that's a worthy thing to understand and appreciate. And I think that this mission and everything that's going on in the space industry is more about solving problems on Earth than it actually literally is around getting a couple of people up above the Karman line.
KEVIN DAVIES: Very well said. Glen, we'll come back to what you can apply and take away from your space experience to your day job back on Earth, running the health and life science businesses with Medidata and now Dassault Systemes. So let's move into that part of the conversation, Alex.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Sure. Thanks, Kevin. And, Glen, let's hear a little bit more about your background and the intersection of your interests in molecular biology and genetics, and computing. We recently interviewed Sujal Patel of Nautilus Biotechnology right here on Close To The Edge, who shared his journey from computing toward molecular biology. Now you went in the other direction, studying molecular biology and genetics at Carnegie Mellon and working as a research scientist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, then studying computer science at NYU.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: How and why did you move from molecular biology into computing?
GLEN DE VRIES: To be fair, as I said, I was always in the science section as a kid, and that also included engineering and the early days of computing. So my interest in physics resulted in making gravitational simulations on my Commodore 64 kind of thing. And so programming myself out of problems was always my first option and actually one of the reasons I loved going to Carnegie Mellon.
GLEN DE VRIES: I studied biology, but it had an amazing computer science program, and I could do that as well. So there I was at Columbia and working on something that actually turns out to be really interesting even in the way we think about diseases today. We were effectively looking for circulating tumor cells to help decide what the best therapy would be for prostate cancer patients.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I was doing all of the analysis by hand, running a-- now all the polymerase chain reaction is all automated. I'm sitting there like programming the cycles and extracting messenger RNA to put it into it. But I had a refrigerator full of samples behind me and a lab bench full of analysis that I was doing, a shared Windows 95 computer at the back of the lab, with Excel spreadsheets and SPSS files. And I had to get in an elevator and go to another building to transcribe data from medical charts or other systems to bring into the research data set.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I looked across a lab bench. And you can just have taken high school biology, you know there's somebody across the Bunsen burners or whatever it is you stare at all day, with a surgical resident, studying urology, etiquette Gucci, who was like me, loved computers, loved programming, was way out of things and thinking about that. And we just realized that all of this infrastructure that was missing in academic research that I was dealing with every day was the same problem in industry research.
GLEN DE VRIES: And through a mutual friend, we found my 22-year-old business partner Tarek Sherif, and we had this formula. Again, maybe a little bit by design, I think probably with a lot of luck, where we understood the science, we understood the medicine, we understood enough about the systems, and we understood how we wanted to create a company around it, and that led to trying to solve this infrastructure problem for research.
GLEN DE VRIES: We just did this to make it easier to go from the idea in the laboratory to the diagnostic or the therapy in the clinic, and we thought that was worthy. And so fast forward a couple of years from the early glints of Medidata in our eyes, and everybody left what they were doing in other parts of science and medicine finance, and that was really how Medidata was born.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And for Medidata, how did it help to create the electronic data capture space once you founded the company? Can you pinpoint that?
GLEN DE VRIES: Honestly, I don't think we created the electronic data capture space. I mean, really, what we were doing was solving that problem I was mentioning with different data sources and transcription. And that was happening in every research project. And honestly, I said I use the same example with Amazon before I was on Jeff Bezos' company's rocket. But back in the late 90s, it's like if you can buy a book online, I think the only thing you could buy on Amazon were books back then, possibly along with Windows 95.
GLEN DE VRIES: But if you can buy a book online, why can't we connect everybody and do research? And I think one of the things that Medidata did maybe uniquely or close to it was we said, let's use existing infrastructure to connect everybody and capture this data. And let's do it in a way that is metadata-driven. Let's not build a system just for one kind of oncology research or endocrinology research.
GLEN DE VRIES: I used the phrase high school chemistry before. Everybody knows how to do clinical research who went to a high school chemistry class. You write down the experiment in pen, so it's in a notebook that everybody can see. And then you actually record the data in pen as you're doing it, and then you do your analysis and your conclusions. And it's transparent, and you can see everything that happened.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's the clinical protocol in the beginning of that high school notebook. The data records are electronically captured, and Medidata's center there, and then you do the analysis. And we just said let's connect all that online in a way that is scalable. And I don't think it was, as I said, uniquely our idea. There are a lot of companies to everyone's credit trying to do it.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think we took an interesting tangent in terms of how to make it happen. I think we can say that we did our part to catalyze an industry around digitizing pharma and thinking about these things. And honestly, I hope that that's part of something whether or not-- kind of like time and somebody in the royal family, it doesn't matter to me whether people connect these actual things literally later.
GLEN DE VRIES: But I think of life sciences as you're making tools for healthcare. If life sciences companies make better tools than the tools that are in the toolkit of a doctor or a nurse or whatever the caregiver is, it could even be the person themselves, but if you make better tools, you're being a good life sciences company. You're generating real value. And by making those new tools, those become the new tools in healthcare.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so I really get excited about some of these digital ideas that we worked on so long at Medidata. We continue to work on at just those systems becoming this new generation of digital tools that we use to diagnose and treat disease. And I don't mean to loop us back too far, but that's all about that equity and access. We make the better digital tools that are easier to use and easier to scale that come with molecular components, come with medical device components, but all these things now we can give to more people.
GLEN DE VRIES: We can help more people live longer, better lives. That's what I get excited about all the way back to the electronic data capture days.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Medidata's products and offerings include Rave, which recently announced supporting more than 1,000 clinical trials, Patient Cloud, Acorn AI. How quickly or slowly did customers, both in the life sciences and healthcare providers, glom on to or appreciate some of these offerings and embrace them by buying them?
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, I just have to correct one thing. It's actually the medical imaging part of Rave, which is at its thousands. We've run tens of thousands of trials with Rave. And actually, it's apropos to that question because it is different than the way we all used to do this in the research world, and frankly, the way certain things work in healthcare. And I think that the life sciences industry and healthcare is conservative for good reason.
GLEN DE VRIES: If you're a physician practicing, you have somebody's life in your hands. If you are doing a vaccine clinical trial, you literally might have billions of people's lives in your hands, and so I think some of our hesitancy to reinvent everything that we're doing every day is healthy. That said, if you start to bring in new technologies and new ideas, whether biological or digital, there's a way to evaluate them, and there's a way to responsibly make sure that they are valuable.
GLEN DE VRIES: They are safe. They are effective. I was talking about the regulators and the academic and government-funded organizations, and then the industry. I think that the early days of Medidata were really about us in very small circles, finding people who were interested in these new values of getting things through clinical trials faster, getting the medicines and medical devices to the patients they were trying to serve who were waiting incrementally faster and faster still.
GLEN DE VRIES: And then we were able to progress that and do that with more and more of the industry to the point, which is still kind of mind-blowing to me. I think you got kind of a coin toss chance if the drug was approved in the last 10 years that Medidata worked on it. That's exciting to me. And frankly, that's not the end of the story. Then you get into where the digital connectivity emerging value from systems starts to create new possibilities.
GLEN DE VRIES: So we've gotten really good at helping people run individual clinical trials at Medidata. But some of the stuff that we're doing with Medidata and Dassault Systemes now are looking at multiple clinical trials. Can we take all the research that's happening in a challenging rare cancer or a disease, an individual disease, where you might not be able to find enough patients for traditional clinical trial or for an old school pharma company to even have the right return on investment equation to be able to go in and research a cure for that disease and make that possible by bringing bigger data sets and bigger denominators?
GLEN DE VRIES: Again, emerging from the fact that all these people are collaborating on the Dassault Systemes' platform. Again, the mission continues. It's still the same, but powering smarter treatments and healthier people. What does that mean? It means create new tools that work better and get them out to the point that they're being used as quickly as possible.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so slow at first, appropriate hesitancy, people needing to be convinced that it really was different and better, and then you get these again virtuous cycles of innovation. That's, kind of, the Medidata story. And on that one, I've been pounding away at that virtuous cycle for 22 years. So there's still more to come.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: All right. And you mentioned cancer and other diseases. How much did COVID-19 over the last year and a half accelerate adoption or by customers of these?
GLEN DE VRIES: Honestly, there were so many people, who in our company and around it, who were saying we have to use some of these remote technologies more. We have to bring the clinical trials to the patient and not assume that they're going to come to the clinic. And there was an article I still find myself bringing up all the time. It was in Nature Medicine, and it had maps of the world, heat maps. And there were parts of the world which are bright because where I am in downtown Manhattan, I can walk to three different academic medical centers in the next 15 minutes.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's the bright part of the map. There's a lot of planet Earth in every continent where those maps are dark. Even with a car, you can't get to a hospital in a day. And all of a sudden, COVID-19 happens, and everybody who even lives somewhere like I do, the maps went dark because either you weren't allowed to or because you maybe had something that made you immunocompromised.
GLEN DE VRIES: You certainly wouldn't want to go somewhere where there's all these people with an infectious disease that could get you sick. You couldn't be in the same room at the same time as a health care provider. And a lot of clinical trials, honestly, in different therapeutic areas, came to a grinding halt because of that. And I think a really difficult lesson is one that we've all now gone through and learned that assumption was a bad one, but it wasn't just a bad lesson.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think it turned into kind of a teachable moment for health care and for life sciences. And people realize, oh, we do have these things we can do in telemedicine. We do have these things we can do in a decentralized clinical trial where we enrol patients from their home, and we send them the drug that we need. And we give them an app, or we put sensors on their body to measure what's going on with them instead of bringing them into the clinic.
GLEN DE VRIES: Frankly, in some cases, that's just better science, too, because we're not getting the bias or the kind of staccato rate that we get data in a traditional clinical trial where it's just people coming into the office once a week, once a month. You get these continuous flows of data. But we're doing that now at scale because we realize those assumptions were bad. And in a good way, I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think these digital technologies that accelerated because of COVID are going to stay moving very, very quickly. And again, I don't think the phrase silver lining is appropriate around a pandemic and some of the ridiculous tragedy that we are still dealing with around the planet, but at least we will have things working differently and better as we come out of this.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I think that actually makes it an exciting time in life sciences.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Right. Over to you, Kevin.
KEVIN DAVIES: Thank you, Alex. Just a few minutes, Glen, before we close. This has been a really fun and interesting conversation. Tell us just a little bit more about Medidata's acquisition by Dassault. How did that come about? Was it a surprise approach, or was this something you'd been engineering for a while?
GLEN DE VRIES: Yeah, so I will be fully candid with you guys. When I first heard the word Dassault because I love planes and aviation, I was like cool. And I realized no, no, it's not that Dassault. It's not the people who make the jets. And Dassault Systemes is actually an extraordinary company. And when we learned more about them as they learned more about us, we actually realized that these were individual companies that were truly kindred spirits.
GLEN DE VRIES: We all deeply cared about science. We all deeply cared about doing things with a long time horizon that provide real societal benefit. And I think Dassault Systemes was born out of aviation Dassault and transformed-- now, this is over the last four decades-- transformed the way people thought about making a plane, making a car, managing a city. And the company was really looking for a way to take this transformation that they'd done so successfully and really help make it work in life sciences and health care in a new way.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I will paraphrase Bernard Charles, who was the CEO of Dassault Systemes. Dassault Systemes is used call it eight out of 10 planes and nine out of 10 cars to design what's actually delivered. And all those cars work, and all those planes fly the first time. And we still have a pretty poor track record in life sciences of our success rate of getting through a pre-clinical and phase one and phase two and phase three and then actually have something on the market that works the way we expected.
GLEN DE VRIES: We can and should do a better job. And by stringing together, now with Medidata as part of this value chain, everything from the moment you're designing the molecule or the medical device, you're evaluating not just does it work and who we thought it was going to work in, but can we create this hypothesis-generating environment, a virtuous cycle where we really learn how to provide that therapy to the right patients at the right time and change that overall equation of the delivery of health care.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's an exciting opportunity. And so, for me, now being able to with Tarek, look at that strategy and how we can make this new reality or this new concept real, and we're all about that at Dassault Systemes. We build things in the virtual world, so we can help deliver them in the real world that much better. That's what we're doing now, and it's such an exciting kind of next stage of my career.
GLEN DE VRIES: So it's another dream come true.
KEVIN DAVIES: Yeah, well, we spent a lot of time earlier in the interview talking about this extraordinary experience that you had. Do you take anything from what happened last week and think about ways that you engage with your team, with your company? You know, it sounds kind of hokey, but is there anything that you can potentially use to change your management style? Let us know.
GLEN DE VRIES: I will tell you I really think that I had a lot of passion about innovation, how you think about doing things differently and better, and how you think about these ideas of equity and access in health care. I certainly thought about that in regards to protecting the Earth and the environment too. That was more of a personal interest than a professional one. I certainly spent a lot of my time and energy from a philanthropic perspective on education.
GLEN DE VRIES: I have come down from seeing the Earth up there with an amount of conviction that I just didn't realize I could have. I'm a quantitative person. And there was a qualitative researcher who gave me this anecdote. You can look at the kind of bell curve of human intelligence. Look at the average and look at standard deviations and think you know people.
GLEN DE VRIES: But if you just get that one data point that somebody was as smart as Albert Einstein, that anecdote tells you something that you didn't really know if you just looked at that curve from too far a distance. I learned something about how important these things that we're doing around equity and access and health care and the environment and educating people around the planet are. I didn't realize I could have that much conviction until I went somewhere that I wasn't really intellectually or emotionally prepared to understand it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so I really hope to bring that passion to as many people as I can possibly touch. So thank you guys for having me on. Maybe I was able to do a little bit of that on your show.
KEVIN DAVIES: Absolutely. And I hope that-- you've been in the queue for the Virgin flight, for what, nine years now, so hopefully, they will get that together.
GLEN DE VRIES: Maybe I can do that too.
KEVIN DAVIES: That's great. Alex, I'll let you close things out.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Wouldn't you know it? Our time is drawing to a close for this episode of Close To The Edge. Thanks to our special guest Glen de Vries for making the time and joining us. Check out GEN Edge for other Close To The Edge interviews with outstanding chief executives, including who we just mentioned, Sujal Patel of Nautilus, John Evans of Beam Therapeutics, Daphne Zohar of PureTech Health, serial entrepreneur Nessan Bermingham, and Ted Love of Global Blood Therapeutics.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: GEN Edge is where biotech gets down to business with exclusive in-depth reports from the GEN team. Please consider a free trial subscription. You can find GEN Edge on GEN's website at genengnews.com. Close To The Edge is produced by Bobby Grandone. I'm Alex Philippidis with Kevin Davis, thanking you again for taking the time. Take care. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Howdy, and thanks for taking the time to watch Close To The Edge, the new video series from GEN Edge, where we invite leading biotech executives to discuss their science, technology, and their business strategy. I'm Alex Philippidis, a senior business editor with GEN, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, the publication covering the biotech industry for 40 years.
KEVIN DAVIES: I'm Kevin Davies, executive editor of GEN Biotechnology, GEN's new peer-review journal launching in early 2022, publishing exceptional original research across the world of biology and biotechnology, and currently accepting manuscript submissions. More details at www.genbiotechjournal.com. Close To The Edge is the flagship video series of GEN Edge, our new premium subscription channel from GEN providing in-depth exclusive news interviews and analysis of key trends in the biotech industry coupled with a range of multimedia offerings, notably this one.
KEVIN DAVIES: More details of our free subscription trial offer at genengnews.com/genedge.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: On today's episode, episode 10, our guest is Glen de Vries, the life sciences and health care vice chair for Dassault Systemes, and before that, the co-founder and co-CEO of Medidata Solutions, the pioneering developer of clinical trial software solutions aimed at powering smarter treatments and healthier people as they call it. If you think you've seen Glen's beaming face recently, or if that name rings a bell, there's a good reason. He was one of the four crew members aboard the second flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: The Jeff Bezos-owned spacecraft boldly went where few have gone before. Recently with guest of honor William Shatner, Star Trek's Captain Kirk, becoming the oldest person ever to go into space, astronaut Glen de Vries, welcome to Close To The Edge.
GLEN DE VRIES: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, excited to be with you guys.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: We will indeed talk about your two decades in biotech, which is a story in its own right, but we've got to hear more about your recent exploits. You've said you've been passionate about aviation in space for as long as you can remember. What sparked your interest in flying and space travel?
GLEN DE VRIES: I like to support things with empirical evidence. And if you recognized my face or name, as you said, it's been such an interesting week because I have been contacted by people I haven't spoken to for 40 years, and saying, hey, I can't believe you're going to space. I remember you talking about this when we were in second grade. So it really is something that I've always wanted to do. And I will tell you, kind of, fast-forwarding, one of the strangest, most amazing things that I realized in the last week, I went up almost exactly a week ago, is I have spent so many nights going to bed and closing my eyes and thinking about space and fantasizing about going to space, and now when I get in bed, I close my eyes, and I replay going to space.
GLEN DE VRIES: And it's just an incredible thing to have experienced. So I always loved everything in science. I love physics, and I love chemistry. And I love biology, which to me, was a culmination of everything in foundational science that I loved as a kid and as a teenager and as a university student. But that came with everything in the science section of the library, very much inclusive of every book I could absorb about astronomy, cosmology, space exploration, engineering.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so this was something that in my professional life, I went towards the medical and the molecular. But in my personal life, I kept the aviation and the aerospace, and the planetary and interplanetary as a huge interest. So when something became an opportunity to actually take that private passion and maybe even combine it with some of my professional interests from a stem advocacy perspective and trying to get people to think the right way about technology and innovation, I jumped at the chance to go flying.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Was there a real-life space flight that sort of sparked your interest in space, Apollo, Skylab, something?
GLEN DE VRIES: I have very vivid memories of Skylab that was probably really-- Apollo I was too young. I obviously read everything about it and absorbed it. And I think Skylab, the shuttle program, was just hugely inspirational to me. There was this book that was available in a physical bookstore. Remember when we had those? And it was called The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual, and I still have a copy of it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And it had excerpts from NASA flight manuals and all these diagrams of the space shuttle, and it wasn't in any way narrative. It was literally just procedures and pictures. And I would sit at home pouring over it. And so I think the shuttle program is really important for me, and then everything that happened. And honestly, I will tell you recently I was, of course, riveted to the screen when we, and I mean like the biggest royal we you could think of, like humanity got an aircraft, a rotorcraft, on another planet, and I don't think everybody was watching.
GLEN DE VRIES: And you bring up the Apollo program. I'm pretty sure everybody was watching when we put people on the moon. I know sometimes it's more exciting when a person is involved. But actually, things like the early shuttle launches, I think the world needs that. I think people need to be inspired about space and the potential for it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so hopefully, next time we have another civilization milestone of something like having something fly on another planet, we do have everybody watching. I would love to be whatever small part I can play and be pushing for people to really get excited about science that way.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Is that just sort of harder to do compared to 50 plus years ago when Apollo and people gathered around the TV set for whatever reason? And how do you bring people together? It's hard to do that for anything, let alone a space mission.
GLEN DE VRIES: Well, honestly, I think there's two elements to that. One, is digital, and, yes, maybe people gathered around the TV to watch the news in a different way. But the fact of the matter is everybody is connected and maybe sometimes for worse rather than for better. But we do have these networks as fabric that connects everybody literally around the world. And I think maybe that can be an avenue for good.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I'll tell you the other thing, which is I think being an astronaut, getting to see the world from that perspective, and I want to talk about the benefits of the technology as well. But just the experience was something that when we were all younger and thinking about things like the shuttle program, you had to dedicate your life to being somebody who went to space, I think, in an incredibly exciting and admirable way.
GLEN DE VRIES: But I think about it in healthcare and life sciences all the time. Equity and access is something that we need to pay attention to in every aspect of our society of our civilization. And I really feel like space is no different in that regard. I feel like the democratization of space is upon us. One of the people on the crew Chris Boshuizen, who spent his life as a satellite engineer and entrepreneur, kind of says it very well.
GLEN DE VRIES: This is the year the people start going to space, and it took 60 years. That's now before Apollo when Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard went up. Call it 60 years ago. It's just about exactly that. And 600 people have gone to space since then. I'll be somewhere just under, I think, 600. I don't know what my official number is but somewhere in there.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think if you look at SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and the Russian Space Agency, we're going to put a sixth, maybe a tenth, but some call it a sixth of that number of people up next year. And that, to me, feels like the beginning of a Moore's law style curve. And I am not suggesting that everybody is going to have the privilege of going into space in the next two or three years, but I think we're going to have more and more people being able to do it.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think part of the privilege of me being able to go, besides having this incredible journey, is fueling that curve as it goes up. And as I said before, I want as many people to see the world this way as possible because I think it is profoundly changing, but also it's the technology that's important. We are going to continue to push these frontiers of what we can create and do from an engineering and scientific perspective in the new space race, and I mean that in a very positive way.
GLEN DE VRIES: And that's going to create technologies that are beneficial and useful for problems we have to solve on Earth in a way that I think and really hope we can use in an equitable, accessible way to help people all over the planet. So all that stuff, I think, answers that question of how do we get people excited? Well, I think it's actually a really exciting time.
GLEN DE VRIES: And at least I'm going to go out and keep shouting that from the mountaintops, so people can realize that and get excited about it.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: You mentioned equitable space travel as a goal. I know you were the second paying customer for Blue Origin. The cost of a seat is not disclosed. But Virgin Galactic, which you mentioned, said this summer it'll charge a minimum $450,000 a ticket. Is the sky indeed the limit for space travel?
GLEN DE VRIES: So think about this for a sec, and I'm not suggesting that these prices are low. I will tell you that it was worth it. And if you look at the way industries evolve, again, I think it's the privilege of being able to go is obviously being able to afford to go. I wrote a check to do it. But it's creating that environment where it begins to get more and more possible from a cost perspective.
GLEN DE VRIES: How long did it take from barnstorming to commercial travel across oceans? Not long. And that's where I think what we see from this kind of exponential growth perspective, we've seen it in so many other industries, becomes really exciting. And I have an interesting parallel if you guys are interested in terms of what we see in life sciences.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I think I'm now seeing that happening in the space industry. So one of the things that excites me from an accessibility and access perspective, and I've been in the life sciences industry for 2 and 1/2 decades now, is and I'm going to use acronyms in the United States, but the model, the stack applies to every country in the world. You have regulators like the FDA, who create a fabric base that makes sure that public interest and safety are taken into account.
GLEN DE VRIES: Then you have the kind of core fabric of intellectual capital. You have academic institutions. You have organizations, like the NIH or the NCI, that create a huge amount of new knowledge and distribute that around what is then on top of that supported by that fabric in industry. And can you imagine if we were waiting for regulators and governments to create vaccines for a pandemic?
GLEN DE VRIES: No. They had played a huge role in terms of generating the intellectual capital and the framework for regulation. But it is the Pfizers and Modernas and Johnson & Johnsons and Novavaxes of the world that form that industry that creates this virtuous cycle of innovation. Go back to what we were just talking about the shuttle program and Skylab and Apollo.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was governments competing. They were competing, and frankly, a lot of that was the Cold War and for probably not virtuous cycle reasons. And you had the governments, and you had some organizations that did a spectacular amount of work, like NASA from an intellectual capital perspective and creating that fabric for innovation, but not the industry.
GLEN DE VRIES: Well, now, we have the FAA, and we have NASA, and we have SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and Axiom and companies that are coming into this space, which will, I think, create that virtuous cycle. And so I offer that example hopefully as evidence that this hope is not just hope. There's actually a strategy there where I think there's a path where this industry creates something where so many people can go to space.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so when I hear Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin talking about their mission, which is to have millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth, I'd actually personally add for the benefit of Earth the way we would like to live on Earth and keep and preserve it. But that doesn't seem far-fetched to me when you think about that structure.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Thinking of Blue Origin, how did you get involved with Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos?
GLEN DE VRIES: There was an auction that people may know. They asked people to bid on this. I'm sure I wound up on the prospect list, thanks to that. And, again, in talking to them, I hoped that part of what motivated them was that I would be what I'm doing now, a real advocate for this, and hopefully, help explain why this is so important. And, again, when they called and said, would you like to go on a flight? I don't think it took a millisecond for me to process that again.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was a dream come true and at the center of what I emotionally from a humanity standpoint and intellectually from a scientific innovation standpoint really believe in, so I just jumped right on it.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And so then you were, in fact-- was advocacy a condition for coming in and getting the auction or getting on the mission?
GLEN DE VRIES: A condition, I have no idea. You would have to talk to the Blue Origin people about that. But the fact of the matter is that's one of the things that I feel really passionately about. It could be about resources on Earth. I do a bunch of stuff with water.org. It could be about education, which hopefully, the things I said about academic institutions and the organizations that provide intellectual fabric and industries, I think that is so foundational.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's the societal hierarchy of need requires education, then these are things. And then in healthcare, and in my professional life in terms of equity and access and how you have to think about that life sciences, advocacy is something that I think is really important to do when you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can do stuff where people can hear you.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so it's my privilege, again, to be able to incorporate thinking about space into those things. And, honestly, I thought this would happen. But I didn't realize how much conviction I would have about it once I saw Earth from space to come down and make sure that I really can put as much fuel, not just behind the space program or the space race, but behind this idea of getting everybody excited about those virtuous cycles that I possibly can.
GLEN DE VRIES: That is part of the rest of Glen's life.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Did you consider other options for space tourism?
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, I don't think it's a secret I've had a Virgin Galactic seat since my 40th birthday. It was my 40th birthday gift to myself, so I spent nine years plus waiting to go. And I don't think this is a zero-sum game today in the space industry. Again, I think everybody who's out there trying to do good work in terms of this progression of where humanity can reach is rooting for everybody else.
GLEN DE VRIES: The fact of the matter is I had an opportunity to go with Blue. I jumped at it. I think Blue has an amazing vehicle, an amazing safety program. I actually think the flight profile is really interesting, just what you get to see and experience in and of itself. And so delighted that I got to go with them.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And how does that access increase? How do you get more people? How do you get the seats lower, the cost of the seats lower if nothing else?
GLEN DE VRIES: First, you get the cost of the seats lower. I mean, that obviously is part of it. You also, I think, in generating some excitement when you see somebody like Bill Shatner, who a lot of people said like, oh, you went to space with Captain Kirk. No, I went to space with Bill Shatner, who happens to have played Captain Kirk, who is a lovely man. But let's not have it be lost on everybody that people, myself included, saw this iconic character for the last 55 years on small screen, big screen, who now, the person who portrayed them, has gone to space.
GLEN DE VRIES: That is science fiction becoming science fact. In life sciences, 25 years ago, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, we weren't talking about messenger RNA-based therapies and vaccines as something that was going to be available on the market. That was a crazy idea. More than a billion people are going to have them or have them already. And so this idea of the progression of things that are potential to things that are real I think can be inspiring.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so as the prices come down and as people get inspired, I think what we're going to see are organizations not just doing pure space travel but organizations that allow people to experience space, to learn more about space, to feel like they're part of the space program, to go up in a plane and fly zero gravity microgravity parabolic arcs, and do a vacation with your family that does that, maybe instead of going skiing.
GLEN DE VRIES: I'm not saying that one is better than the other. But my point is I think that there will be experiences, and there'll be interests that will coincide. And I have this kind of-- I don't how better to phrase it than fantasy. As a kid growing up in New York City, I remember when we were in school, they put us on the Circle Line, and we went around Manhattan, and we saw all the neighborhoods.
GLEN DE VRIES: I don't think it's impossible in some period of time, maybe even in the remainder of my lifetime, that there are kids in high school who'll see the world from space, not on the Circle Line. And however quickly that happens, when it happens, I am so convinced that that's going to have this, again, virtuous cycle effect on the way people think about the planet and divisions between people that it's worth getting there.
GLEN DE VRIES: And that's why it is with nothing but pride that I say it was worth it. It was expensive. It's part of getting us there if that makes sense.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: You said you went to space with William Shatner. What was it like training with him and then flying with him ultimately?
GLEN DE VRIES: So Bill, and Audrey, and Chris, the three people I went with, are all awesome people. I really made friends for life and not just them. Kevin and Sarah, and the people at CapCom, and our crew member number seven, like, I don't think you can do something like this and not bond with people. And I happened to meet amazing people doing it. But I actually have been lucky enough to meet some astronauts who have done shuttle flights and Soyuz flights along the way in my life.
GLEN DE VRIES: And one of the things that I've heard thematically from them is for every moment you're in space, there's a lot of moments getting ready for it on the ground. And going on the Blue Origin flight, even though it's only 10 minutes, is no different. You spend days with these people, and you get to know them and get ready together. And you go on a simulator, and you practice everything and every motion you're going to make because being in microgravity, it's not like the human body is set up for microgravity.
GLEN DE VRIES: You have to use all your limbs differently. You rehearse things. I just had a great time. I was in such a great group. And Chris is an engineer and entrepreneur in the space industry, making satellites. So he came with so much knowledge about the industry and experience. Audrey works at Blue Origin and runs all of their operations and all the vehicle maintenance.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was like flying with somebody who was an encyclopedia of the vehicle that we were in. And Bill was somebody who has spent their entire life, OK, yes, playing Captain Kirk, but his job is expression. And he's done it not only on screens but on stage and in music and in ways that those of us who came from science and engineering don't naturally think about. And actually, I'll tell you I don't mean to make an advertisement for my alma mater, but I'm a Carnegie Mellon trustee, and I can't help myself.
GLEN DE VRIES: One of the things that I love about that school is, it's got great engineering and great science and great humanities and great arts and performance, and you can't, if you want to inspire people, just have the science. You need to have the people who understand expression and understand getting emotion out to all be in an experience together to get that complete view of it. And whether by luck or I hope by design, we had that in our crew.
GLEN DE VRIES: And Bill was a huge part of that from an expression perspective. We were really lucky.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: How long did all that training take?
GLEN DE VRIES: It was a few days. Well, let me put it differently. It was a few days literally with Blue Origin. I love aviation. I have a pilot's license. I know how to communicate when you're doing aerospace things. I have been interested in space and had that Virgin Galactic ticket for a long time. I am deeply involved with the Zero-G Corporation that flies that parabolic arc plane.
GLEN DE VRIES: I've done a ton of training on that, so I was prepared for some of the physical experiences. I've done some high gravity environment training, both in high-performance aircraft, also in a facility where they spin you around in a centrifuge. So this is something I've been preparing for a long time, even when I didn't realize there was a literal flight coming up. But the actual Blue Origin thing includes a few days of training.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Over to you, Kevin.
KEVIN DAVIES: Thank you, Alex. Glen, take us through the events of October the 13th. Actually, the night before, did you get any sleep?
GLEN DE VRIES: Yeah, actually, I got sleep. It was interrupted by me waking up a lot of times, going, is it time to go? Is it time to go? We go back to sleep. And it was an amazing day. Actually, maybe I can take you relatively briefly, not in chronological order.
KEVIN DAVIES: Yeah, please.
GLEN DE VRIES: I was intellectually and physically prepared for the top of the arc before and after apogee. Everybody on my flight we all had the same mission plan, which was to look out the window as much as possible. It was different than anything I'd experienced in an aircraft microgravity environment. The view was just stunning beyond description. I don't know if it's my mind playing tricks on me, or literally, the colors look different, but the colors look different.
GLEN DE VRIES: At one point, I orientated myself, kind of, what is upside down based on Earth's orientation. It felt just fine up there in front of my window, and there's just this blackness of space. You don't see stars. They're just washed out from the sun reflecting off the Earth, and this curved horizon of the Earth and blue and white and yellow and green and brown. And it just was so vivid and amazing.
GLEN DE VRIES: And this thin little blue line, which is the atmosphere that we live in, that you're seeing from the side, which is hauntingly almost terrifyingly small. If you don't want to feel like climate change is an urgent problem, don't go to space because you will feel that. So I wasn't really able to understand how overwhelming it would be.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think I've said it before, like, the human body is designed for 1G. We've evolved in this environment, and we operate in it. It's a foreign environment. I'm not sure the human brain has evolved to really understand things from this view and perspective. And I'll be processing it for a long time.
KEVIN DAVIES: I was watching, obviously, not because you were on it necessarily, but because of your friend Bill Shatner was on it, and there are a couple of delays while you were wheeling up into the cockpit and then into the ship. Did that make you any extra nervous, or did they tell you this was likely to happen?
GLEN DE VRIES: No, actually quite the opposite. Chris Boshuizen the crew member, who is the most industry experienced from a satellite perspective, we were joking that he was filling out his astronaut bingo card. Like we had a date for the weather, check there. We had a hold that we were in before we got in the ship. We got a hold when we were in the vehicle. And actually, no. I mean, if you delay a flight because of weather, and you can be in a single-engine airplane, or you can be in a rocket ship doing that, you're doing that because you want to be safe.
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, any kind of delay like that, that's part of doing this kind of trip. And, no, it didn't make me more nervous.
KEVIN DAVIES: Tell us about liftoff and the G-forces that you experienced.
GLEN DE VRIES: So that's why it's kind of interesting to go out of chronological order, because as I said before, the flight profile of New Shepard is so interesting. And I should have been more intellectually and emotionally prepared for that part of the flight. And it all took me by surprise. You're looking at this window, and I've seen it in movies or sometimes in animations, like looking at an object, and you just zoom out.
GLEN DE VRIES: And you're seeing cactus and roads and things like human scale out the window. You're six stories up. And all of a sudden, something really interesting happens. Of course, it's loud, and you see the lights, but you start accelerating. You're going very slowly at first, and the speed that objects move is like normal speed that you use to perception from the angles that things change.
GLEN DE VRIES: You keep accelerating, accelerating, accelerating as you are now zooming out so far that the angles are not the angles you're used to. It's almost like the perception of speed out the window and the seat of your pants in no way match. And when you see frontal systems disappear below you and angles and with shadows under clouds that you're not used to, that was an extraordinary moment. And the textures of the ground changes.
GLEN DE VRIES: I'm really good usually looking out of windows of planes and being like, oh, that's that, that's that, but nothing. I completely lost track of where everything was. And then we have our apogee, and actually, it's kind of an interesting part of the story. Bill suggested that when we're up there, we're all looking at the window, let's come together as a crew, and have a moment of camaraderie. They don't stream out because there's no gravity, but you could see everybody's eyes are wet.
GLEN DE VRIES: I mean, it was really emotional. And then you get back in your seat, and I've never experienced speed like that. Sarah Knights, who was our crew member number seven, I think she was the one who was saying at first you throw a rock in a lake, and the rock hits the lake and then very slowly sinks to the bottom. Well, we're the rock, and the lake is the atmosphere.
GLEN DE VRIES: And when you start hitting the atmosphere, the wind noise is going by the capsule. It was an incredible sense of speed, and now the horizon is straight again, and now you're starting to see things in recognizable scale. And the main chutes come out. And at this point in the flight, it's very gentle. It's the last couple of thousand feet. We're just floating down over the desert.
GLEN DE VRIES: And Chris suggests, before we get out of the capsule, let's take one more moment together. And we land, and Jeff Bezos opens the hatch and welcomes us back to Earth, and we stand up. We hadn't even talked about this part of the flight. Everything else we had kind of rehearsed together. And we stand up, and we just get into this group hug. We're pressing our foreheads together. We're all crying.
GLEN DE VRIES: It was a very human experience. And I think some of that being unprepared for the intellectual, emotional parts of all of that flight and how in a good way quickly it happened just created this kind of intensity between us, which I will take with me forever
KEVIN DAVIES: How long were you above the Karman line? And does a little voice come in your ears from mission control saying congratulations?
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, if you look at one of the videos, you can hear me, it's my voice going, Karman line. I was the one who was, kind of, assigned in the crew to make sure at apogee, at the top part of the orbit, we got that moment, so I was watching the numbers when we went up Karman line. You know what? You're over the Karman line for whatever it is, a minute and change.
GLEN DE VRIES: It doesn't matter what line you're over. I mean, I think that experience of seeing everything zoom out and having a moment of seeing the Earth and zoom back in, that's the experience. You don't feel anything when you go through the Karman line.
KEVIN DAVIES: Right. Shatner was quoted as saying the Earth looked so fragile when you were up there. Did you agree with that?
GLEN DE VRIES: I do. I mean, like I said, if you don't want to worry about climate change, don't go to space. You really get that sense of fragility, and it's hard to be articulate about it. I think we're just as people kind of unprepared for it. But the word home, and when you sometimes use that word and feel it in your heart and your gut, that's what it feels like. And you see how nurturing it is, and you see this beauty in it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I think when you look at what we need to do as a civilization, we could probably pave this thing and all live in domes. I don't really want to live that way. We need to treat Earth as a nature preserve for lack of a better term, and we need to do that in a hurry. And you get a very visceral sense of the urgency of that when you see it up there. It does look fragile.
KEVIN DAVIES: Did it get warm at all coming back into the atmosphere? You mentioned sort of the wind picking up and you're-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
GLEN DE VRIES: No, you're basically in a closed environment. I think it was like Fahrenheit 64 degrees when we got into the capsule, and I think it was probably 64 degrees outside.
KEVIN DAVIES: Probably. Now, of course, there's been some pushback with space tourism and the efforts of the billionaire set who are pioneering this industry. And I just wanted to throw a quote at you and get your response. One of the criticisms I read came from Prince William the Duke of Cambridge, not a noted astronaut. But he said we need some of the world's greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.
KEVIN DAVIES: How would you respond to that?
GLEN DE VRIES: Well, I would respond to him that then he should be behind the space industry. And you know maybe it's the fault of people like me for not advocating enough for him to really understand that. I hope one day he does, and everybody does. Things emerge from technologies that are really important. By the way, if it wasn't for the empire created by the family that he's from, we wouldn't have navigational systems and clocks the way we have them today. So the way we think about time being accessible on our wrists, that actually came from the realization that we could think about latitude and longitude in ways with a chronometer that we couldn't think about otherwise.
GLEN DE VRIES: You don't think about connections like that. And I'm so passionate about foundational science. When people look at quantum physics and think, well, that doesn't matter, well, actually that's how transistors get turned into integrated circuits that keep getting smaller that go in your iPhone that result in us having this world of connectivity whether it's talking to your friends or doing a decentralized clinical trial where we can connect people.
GLEN DE VRIES: By the way, the Apollo technology that was used for maintaining the attitude or understanding the attitude of the capsule is exactly what's in your smartwatch. It's a piezoelectric sensor that is being used. It just got miniaturized, and we're using it to get healthcare data. And when you do basic biological research on things that are happening with DNA and RNA and proteins and pathways in cells, that's how we create therapies for new diseases that we can't cure.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's how we figure out what therapies could be used for diseases that we didn't realize they could be used for. And so I feel like space technology is going to help us get more people into space and help us get things off the planet that will help preserve the planet, but also, it's going to create technologies that help us here. I mean, again, I mentioned before, I'm very passionate about water.
GLEN DE VRIES: The idea that we don't have access to water for everybody on the planet is-- can I say it this way? It's embarrassing for our civilization, and this is an ethical and intellectual problem that we have to solve. Well, when you go to space, I was up there for 10 minutes, but if you go there for a longer period of time, there's no faucet.
GLEN DE VRIES: You need to learn how to manage your water supply and reclaim it and clean it. And those technologies will bleed into and help things that we are doing on Earth just like we learned how to navigate and that affected the way we use time and the way we were thinking about attitudes to spaceships. And that affects how we literally diagnose people who have cardiovascular issues today. These things will work in ways.
GLEN DE VRIES: They'll be emerging benefits from these systems that you can't necessarily predict. Again, I don't care who you are, where you are on the planet. I think that's a worthy thing to understand and appreciate. And I think that this mission and everything that's going on in the space industry is more about solving problems on Earth than it actually literally is around getting a couple of people up above the Karman line.
KEVIN DAVIES: Very well said. Glen, we'll come back to what you can apply and take away from your space experience to your day job back on Earth, running the health and life science businesses with Medidata and now Dassault Systemes. So let's move into that part of the conversation, Alex.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Sure. Thanks, Kevin. And, Glen, let's hear a little bit more about your background and the intersection of your interests in molecular biology and genetics, and computing. We recently interviewed Sujal Patel of Nautilus Biotechnology right here on Close To The Edge, who shared his journey from computing toward molecular biology. Now you went in the other direction, studying molecular biology and genetics at Carnegie Mellon and working as a research scientist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, then studying computer science at NYU.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: How and why did you move from molecular biology into computing?
GLEN DE VRIES: To be fair, as I said, I was always in the science section as a kid, and that also included engineering and the early days of computing. So my interest in physics resulted in making gravitational simulations on my Commodore 64 kind of thing. And so programming myself out of problems was always my first option and actually one of the reasons I loved going to Carnegie Mellon.
GLEN DE VRIES: I studied biology, but it had an amazing computer science program, and I could do that as well. So there I was at Columbia and working on something that actually turns out to be really interesting even in the way we think about diseases today. We were effectively looking for circulating tumor cells to help decide what the best therapy would be for prostate cancer patients.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I was doing all of the analysis by hand, running a-- now all the polymerase chain reaction is all automated. I'm sitting there like programming the cycles and extracting messenger RNA to put it into it. But I had a refrigerator full of samples behind me and a lab bench full of analysis that I was doing, a shared Windows 95 computer at the back of the lab, with Excel spreadsheets and SPSS files. And I had to get in an elevator and go to another building to transcribe data from medical charts or other systems to bring into the research data set.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I looked across a lab bench. And you can just have taken high school biology, you know there's somebody across the Bunsen burners or whatever it is you stare at all day, with a surgical resident, studying urology, etiquette Gucci, who was like me, loved computers, loved programming, was way out of things and thinking about that. And we just realized that all of this infrastructure that was missing in academic research that I was dealing with every day was the same problem in industry research.
GLEN DE VRIES: And through a mutual friend, we found my 22-year-old business partner Tarek Sherif, and we had this formula. Again, maybe a little bit by design, I think probably with a lot of luck, where we understood the science, we understood the medicine, we understood enough about the systems, and we understood how we wanted to create a company around it, and that led to trying to solve this infrastructure problem for research.
GLEN DE VRIES: We just did this to make it easier to go from the idea in the laboratory to the diagnostic or the therapy in the clinic, and we thought that was worthy. And so fast forward a couple of years from the early glints of Medidata in our eyes, and everybody left what they were doing in other parts of science and medicine finance, and that was really how Medidata was born.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And for Medidata, how did it help to create the electronic data capture space once you founded the company? Can you pinpoint that?
GLEN DE VRIES: Honestly, I don't think we created the electronic data capture space. I mean, really, what we were doing was solving that problem I was mentioning with different data sources and transcription. And that was happening in every research project. And honestly, I said I use the same example with Amazon before I was on Jeff Bezos' company's rocket. But back in the late 90s, it's like if you can buy a book online, I think the only thing you could buy on Amazon were books back then, possibly along with Windows 95.
GLEN DE VRIES: But if you can buy a book online, why can't we connect everybody and do research? And I think one of the things that Medidata did maybe uniquely or close to it was we said, let's use existing infrastructure to connect everybody and capture this data. And let's do it in a way that is metadata-driven. Let's not build a system just for one kind of oncology research or endocrinology research.
GLEN DE VRIES: I used the phrase high school chemistry before. Everybody knows how to do clinical research who went to a high school chemistry class. You write down the experiment in pen, so it's in a notebook that everybody can see. And then you actually record the data in pen as you're doing it, and then you do your analysis and your conclusions. And it's transparent, and you can see everything that happened.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's the clinical protocol in the beginning of that high school notebook. The data records are electronically captured, and Medidata's center there, and then you do the analysis. And we just said let's connect all that online in a way that is scalable. And I don't think it was, as I said, uniquely our idea. There are a lot of companies to everyone's credit trying to do it.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think we took an interesting tangent in terms of how to make it happen. I think we can say that we did our part to catalyze an industry around digitizing pharma and thinking about these things. And honestly, I hope that that's part of something whether or not-- kind of like time and somebody in the royal family, it doesn't matter to me whether people connect these actual things literally later.
GLEN DE VRIES: But I think of life sciences as you're making tools for healthcare. If life sciences companies make better tools than the tools that are in the toolkit of a doctor or a nurse or whatever the caregiver is, it could even be the person themselves, but if you make better tools, you're being a good life sciences company. You're generating real value. And by making those new tools, those become the new tools in healthcare.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so I really get excited about some of these digital ideas that we worked on so long at Medidata. We continue to work on at just those systems becoming this new generation of digital tools that we use to diagnose and treat disease. And I don't mean to loop us back too far, but that's all about that equity and access. We make the better digital tools that are easier to use and easier to scale that come with molecular components, come with medical device components, but all these things now we can give to more people.
GLEN DE VRIES: We can help more people live longer, better lives. That's what I get excited about all the way back to the electronic data capture days.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Medidata's products and offerings include Rave, which recently announced supporting more than 1,000 clinical trials, Patient Cloud, Acorn AI. How quickly or slowly did customers, both in the life sciences and healthcare providers, glom on to or appreciate some of these offerings and embrace them by buying them?
GLEN DE VRIES: Actually, I just have to correct one thing. It's actually the medical imaging part of Rave, which is at its thousands. We've run tens of thousands of trials with Rave. And actually, it's apropos to that question because it is different than the way we all used to do this in the research world, and frankly, the way certain things work in healthcare. And I think that the life sciences industry and healthcare is conservative for good reason.
GLEN DE VRIES: If you're a physician practicing, you have somebody's life in your hands. If you are doing a vaccine clinical trial, you literally might have billions of people's lives in your hands, and so I think some of our hesitancy to reinvent everything that we're doing every day is healthy. That said, if you start to bring in new technologies and new ideas, whether biological or digital, there's a way to evaluate them, and there's a way to responsibly make sure that they are valuable.
GLEN DE VRIES: They are safe. They are effective. I was talking about the regulators and the academic and government-funded organizations, and then the industry. I think that the early days of Medidata were really about us in very small circles, finding people who were interested in these new values of getting things through clinical trials faster, getting the medicines and medical devices to the patients they were trying to serve who were waiting incrementally faster and faster still.
GLEN DE VRIES: And then we were able to progress that and do that with more and more of the industry to the point, which is still kind of mind-blowing to me. I think you got kind of a coin toss chance if the drug was approved in the last 10 years that Medidata worked on it. That's exciting to me. And frankly, that's not the end of the story. Then you get into where the digital connectivity emerging value from systems starts to create new possibilities.
GLEN DE VRIES: So we've gotten really good at helping people run individual clinical trials at Medidata. But some of the stuff that we're doing with Medidata and Dassault Systemes now are looking at multiple clinical trials. Can we take all the research that's happening in a challenging rare cancer or a disease, an individual disease, where you might not be able to find enough patients for traditional clinical trial or for an old school pharma company to even have the right return on investment equation to be able to go in and research a cure for that disease and make that possible by bringing bigger data sets and bigger denominators?
GLEN DE VRIES: Again, emerging from the fact that all these people are collaborating on the Dassault Systemes' platform. Again, the mission continues. It's still the same, but powering smarter treatments and healthier people. What does that mean? It means create new tools that work better and get them out to the point that they're being used as quickly as possible.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so slow at first, appropriate hesitancy, people needing to be convinced that it really was different and better, and then you get these again virtuous cycles of innovation. That's, kind of, the Medidata story. And on that one, I've been pounding away at that virtuous cycle for 22 years. So there's still more to come.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: All right. And you mentioned cancer and other diseases. How much did COVID-19 over the last year and a half accelerate adoption or by customers of these?
GLEN DE VRIES: Honestly, there were so many people, who in our company and around it, who were saying we have to use some of these remote technologies more. We have to bring the clinical trials to the patient and not assume that they're going to come to the clinic. And there was an article I still find myself bringing up all the time. It was in Nature Medicine, and it had maps of the world, heat maps. And there were parts of the world which are bright because where I am in downtown Manhattan, I can walk to three different academic medical centers in the next 15 minutes.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's the bright part of the map. There's a lot of planet Earth in every continent where those maps are dark. Even with a car, you can't get to a hospital in a day. And all of a sudden, COVID-19 happens, and everybody who even lives somewhere like I do, the maps went dark because either you weren't allowed to or because you maybe had something that made you immunocompromised.
GLEN DE VRIES: You certainly wouldn't want to go somewhere where there's all these people with an infectious disease that could get you sick. You couldn't be in the same room at the same time as a health care provider. And a lot of clinical trials, honestly, in different therapeutic areas, came to a grinding halt because of that. And I think a really difficult lesson is one that we've all now gone through and learned that assumption was a bad one, but it wasn't just a bad lesson.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think it turned into kind of a teachable moment for health care and for life sciences. And people realize, oh, we do have these things we can do in telemedicine. We do have these things we can do in a decentralized clinical trial where we enrol patients from their home, and we send them the drug that we need. And we give them an app, or we put sensors on their body to measure what's going on with them instead of bringing them into the clinic.
GLEN DE VRIES: Frankly, in some cases, that's just better science, too, because we're not getting the bias or the kind of staccato rate that we get data in a traditional clinical trial where it's just people coming into the office once a week, once a month. You get these continuous flows of data. But we're doing that now at scale because we realize those assumptions were bad. And in a good way, I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle.
GLEN DE VRIES: I think these digital technologies that accelerated because of COVID are going to stay moving very, very quickly. And again, I don't think the phrase silver lining is appropriate around a pandemic and some of the ridiculous tragedy that we are still dealing with around the planet, but at least we will have things working differently and better as we come out of this.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I think that actually makes it an exciting time in life sciences.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Right. Over to you, Kevin.
KEVIN DAVIES: Thank you, Alex. Just a few minutes, Glen, before we close. This has been a really fun and interesting conversation. Tell us just a little bit more about Medidata's acquisition by Dassault. How did that come about? Was it a surprise approach, or was this something you'd been engineering for a while?
GLEN DE VRIES: Yeah, so I will be fully candid with you guys. When I first heard the word Dassault because I love planes and aviation, I was like cool. And I realized no, no, it's not that Dassault. It's not the people who make the jets. And Dassault Systemes is actually an extraordinary company. And when we learned more about them as they learned more about us, we actually realized that these were individual companies that were truly kindred spirits.
GLEN DE VRIES: We all deeply cared about science. We all deeply cared about doing things with a long time horizon that provide real societal benefit. And I think Dassault Systemes was born out of aviation Dassault and transformed-- now, this is over the last four decades-- transformed the way people thought about making a plane, making a car, managing a city. And the company was really looking for a way to take this transformation that they'd done so successfully and really help make it work in life sciences and health care in a new way.
GLEN DE VRIES: And I will paraphrase Bernard Charles, who was the CEO of Dassault Systemes. Dassault Systemes is used call it eight out of 10 planes and nine out of 10 cars to design what's actually delivered. And all those cars work, and all those planes fly the first time. And we still have a pretty poor track record in life sciences of our success rate of getting through a pre-clinical and phase one and phase two and phase three and then actually have something on the market that works the way we expected.
GLEN DE VRIES: We can and should do a better job. And by stringing together, now with Medidata as part of this value chain, everything from the moment you're designing the molecule or the medical device, you're evaluating not just does it work and who we thought it was going to work in, but can we create this hypothesis-generating environment, a virtuous cycle where we really learn how to provide that therapy to the right patients at the right time and change that overall equation of the delivery of health care.
GLEN DE VRIES: That's an exciting opportunity. And so, for me, now being able to with Tarek, look at that strategy and how we can make this new reality or this new concept real, and we're all about that at Dassault Systemes. We build things in the virtual world, so we can help deliver them in the real world that much better. That's what we're doing now, and it's such an exciting kind of next stage of my career.
GLEN DE VRIES: So it's another dream come true.
KEVIN DAVIES: Yeah, well, we spent a lot of time earlier in the interview talking about this extraordinary experience that you had. Do you take anything from what happened last week and think about ways that you engage with your team, with your company? You know, it sounds kind of hokey, but is there anything that you can potentially use to change your management style? Let us know.
GLEN DE VRIES: I will tell you I really think that I had a lot of passion about innovation, how you think about doing things differently and better, and how you think about these ideas of equity and access in health care. I certainly thought about that in regards to protecting the Earth and the environment too. That was more of a personal interest than a professional one. I certainly spent a lot of my time and energy from a philanthropic perspective on education.
GLEN DE VRIES: I have come down from seeing the Earth up there with an amount of conviction that I just didn't realize I could have. I'm a quantitative person. And there was a qualitative researcher who gave me this anecdote. You can look at the kind of bell curve of human intelligence. Look at the average and look at standard deviations and think you know people.
GLEN DE VRIES: But if you just get that one data point that somebody was as smart as Albert Einstein, that anecdote tells you something that you didn't really know if you just looked at that curve from too far a distance. I learned something about how important these things that we're doing around equity and access and health care and the environment and educating people around the planet are. I didn't realize I could have that much conviction until I went somewhere that I wasn't really intellectually or emotionally prepared to understand it.
GLEN DE VRIES: And so I really hope to bring that passion to as many people as I can possibly touch. So thank you guys for having me on. Maybe I was able to do a little bit of that on your show.
KEVIN DAVIES: Absolutely. And I hope that-- you've been in the queue for the Virgin flight, for what, nine years now, so hopefully, they will get that together.
GLEN DE VRIES: Maybe I can do that too.
KEVIN DAVIES: That's great. Alex, I'll let you close things out.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Wouldn't you know it? Our time is drawing to a close for this episode of Close To The Edge. Thanks to our special guest Glen de Vries for making the time and joining us. Check out GEN Edge for other Close To The Edge interviews with outstanding chief executives, including who we just mentioned, Sujal Patel of Nautilus, John Evans of Beam Therapeutics, Daphne Zohar of PureTech Health, serial entrepreneur Nessan Bermingham, and Ted Love of Global Blood Therapeutics.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: GEN Edge is where biotech gets down to business with exclusive in-depth reports from the GEN team. Please consider a free trial subscription. You can find GEN Edge on GEN's website at genengnews.com. Close To The Edge is produced by Bobby Grandone. I'm Alex Philippidis with Kevin Davis, thanking you again for taking the time. Take care. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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