Making Blood Types Obsolete with Peter Rahfeld, CSO at ABOzymes

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today Joel is talking to Peter, CSO of ABOzymes, and they discuss how Peter's company hopes to make blood types obsolete by being able to change any blood to type O. Learn about the science and the business behind this breakthrough right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So I was hoping we could start the discussion by giving me an overview of what's the big picture mission for the type of work that you're working on.

(Peter at 00:00:48) Okay, so what we really want to achieve is eliminating blood groups, so human blood groups, as a barrier for medical treatment, really. That's the big picture. We're going to have that for blood transfusions and for organ transplantations, because those are the big fields where your blood type is really defining what kind of treatment you can get, in a way of what's available for you to match, what kind of blood transfusions are there, is there a fitting organ for you available? And it all comes down to your blood.

(Peter at 00:01:23) And so it's really our mission to change that, that this is not a thing anymore to be worried about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) So if I need a kidney and I'm one blood type, the person I'm getting the kidney from, I have to match their blood type?

(Peter at 00:01:40) Yes, exactly. So when you think about blood types, that's blood type A, B, AB, and O. And really, O is the one which can go to everybody, whereas A, B is really defined. It cannot be matched subjects, right? And so if you're A, for example, you can only get a kidney from an A person or an O person. But depending on which country you're living, maybe you can only get a kidney from an A person because it's locked in the same blood type. It comes down a little bit to policies too. And what we're going to really do, we're going to say if an organ comes available, we make it O type. It's available for anybody. So this is not anymore a problem. You come in and say, who can I match to? And if they have something available, it's the wrong blood type, you can get it, really. Because it's not only blood type which is important for organ transplantation, but then there's so many other factors. But blood type, it's on top of everything. It says, no, we cannot go there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) So that's the first filter.

(Peter at 00:02:44) Yes, that's absolutely the first filter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:47) So you're going to make it that the blood type isn't... I don't want to say any organ can be given to anybody because there's other filters.

(Peter at 00:02:56) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:56) But you're going to make that filter an even playing field.

(Peter at 00:02:59) Exactly. Because when you're looking on waiting times for organs, then blood type gives a big change to it. If you're A type, you'd have to wait shortest, obviously, depending on the country and the organ itself. And then waiting longer if you're O type, even longer for B type. So depending on blood type, then you have to wait longer than other people potentially, and this is obviously not good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:26) I'm going to ask you all sorts of questions. Eventually, I'll probably get to somewhere where you're not super knowledgeable, but I'm just going to be a kid in the candy shop excited about this. Is that okay?

(Peter at 00:03:36) Go ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) What's the hardest organ to get, or what's the organ that you've got to wait the longest for?

(Peter at 00:03:43) I mean, I don't have those numbers really in my head, but there are organs which are critical for you. I mean, if you're waiting for a kidney, right, you can go to dialysis. So even if you don't have the kidney anymore, you can still be kept alive. It's not the case for heart and lungs, really. There are methods to do that, but they are really tricky. And so this is probably the hardest organs we're talking about when it comes to transplantation, because you have only such a short time frame in which you are able to get it. With kidneys, you can stay alive on dialysis, but also having that happen to you is not pleasant, right? It's a cut into your quality of life, your financial situation, how you can work. And so reducing that waiting for a kidney is also needed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) This technology, it's not just for transplants. You could do it with just donor blood too, right?

(Peter at 00:04:39) Yes, that's actually where we started, really, where we aimed for when we developed the technology initially is changing blood types for the sense of blood donations, right? Because when you think about what's really defining you and your blood type is so-called antigens. And these are just structures on top of your cells which can be recognized by your immune system. And they figure out, hey, that's the wrong one. That's not the one I'm looking for. And then when you see that, then they get obviously annoyed. Blood type is based on antigens, which is based on sugars. And on our blood cells, there's tons of those antigens, and that's the reason for blood type. But then later on, they figured out, hey, those antigens are not only on blood. They're everywhere in your body.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:22) And you can change these now?

(Peter at 00:05:24) Yes, you can change those now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:26) Is it in reality today? Today, you can do it? Have you done this? Has this been done?

(Peter at 00:05:32) I mean, what do you mean if have you done it? I mean, we went in the lab. We took blood. We changed it, right? What we didn't do, we didn't put it back into a human.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:41) Oh, no. Have you put it back into any sort of test animal?

(Peter at 00:05:45) With blood, you cannot really... I mean, we're really limited. It's human blood types. There are Japanese monkeys out there which potentially have those, but it's hard to really find a really good animal model. Pigs have some of the same blood type antigens you can use, and so we're actually aiming for that, but we're not there yet. What we did so far was changing blood we actually collected from humans, and then change it. And then one of the tests to figure out, hey, is this now O type blood? And the test we did said yes, that's O type blood. To go back into a human, that's a long story, and we're working hard on that. That's the reason why we created the company, to really go this route and go to the regulatory elements, to ask FDA, hey, what kind of experience do we have to do that you allow us to go there? And on the organ side, we have, luckily, we have a collaboration partner at a university in Toronto, at the University Health Network, and they did for us tests on discarded human lungs. So they had lungs that couldn't be transplanted, and they took them. They used the enzymes we used in our system, and it changed them from A to O. They could really show that on a full human lung. It was pretty impressive. We've been lucky enough to publish it actually this year. It was pretty great. Obviously, they cannot go back into humans either because they just started, and that's a different story. And we will aim for that at some point. But at the moment, that's where we can show it works in lungs, it works in blood, and now we're working really hard on the same things for kidney transplant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:19) How is there not a bunch of urgency around this? Has somebody written you a big check and said make this happen? It sounds like something many people would...

(Peter at 00:07:27) Oh, yeah, absolutely. We have big interest from people on that. But similar skeptic to you, they really want to see how it really works then in a human body, for example. And so we have to do some work to convince everybody that this is a safe technology to use and has the potential we promise around it. But we found people which are obviously interested in giving us already money to move ahead with the studies, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:53) It doesn't sound too complicated. Obviously, it's extremely complicated. But, you know, I've got my brother and stepmom are both physicians, right? So I spend a lot of time with them, family stuff. They're always talking about medical things. And if I called them up right now and I just explained this basic thing, it doesn't sound too complicated. It's like, okay, you've got these antigens and that helps determine blood type or it is what determines blood type. And then you can manipulate these antigens and change the blood type, you know, from their basic med school knowledge that doesn't sound like too hard of a thing. And the reason why I bring that up is because often when you're raising money for things that are highly technical like this, you have to find the people that understand this to actually get someone to write you a check, right?

(Peter at 00:08:39) No, it's true. I mean, especially on the blood side, it's a really nice story. Everybody kind of understands that right away. You tell them blood donations and you have to match the blood type and do it. Oh, yes, that makes total sense. When you dive into the organ space, not a lot of people know that those antigens are also present there. And so you have to start to explain, and it's a little bit more complicated. But in general, yeah, the story is nice to explain to people, and people get it pretty fast, actually, what's going on. And, yeah, it's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:10) Can you convert it to any type, or do you convert it to only the universal type and that's what people accept?

(Peter at 00:09:16) Yes. So what we can do is convert A to O. And the reason for that is how they're structured. So to keep it simple, O blood type, which is an H antigen, is the base level. It has, let's say, three sugars. And on the A blood type, it has one more sugar on top, so four sugars. And the enzymes we discovered, what they can do is they can remove this one sugar. That's the reason why they can modify A to H and therefore to O. And they can do it super specific and effectively, and that's the reason why we have developed this technology and moving ahead with it. That's something we can do. We cannot make A. Nobody wants it anyways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) Got it. Now what country are you operating in? Your company?

(Peter at 00:10:11) Canada. So we founded the company in Canada. We're obviously aiming for the North American market. U.S., clearly, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:20) Health care is expensive here.

(Peter at 00:10:22) That's a good place to be, right? But obviously, we're also looking for Europe and all the big countries because it's a worldwide interest and topic. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:33) So people have given you money already. You've already raised money.

(Peter at 00:10:37) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) What type of groups are these that you're raising money from?

(Peter at 00:10:42) Obviously, early on, family and friends and then angel investors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:45) Okay.

(Peter at 00:10:45) And we'll be aiming for the next round soon for VCs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:52) Very cool. And you already have the study or you're publishing the study of what you were able to do with the lungs, and that was done by a third party. That's the basis of science, right?

(Peter at 00:11:01) Yeah. I mean, we came originally from university background, right? And so a lot of university collaborations working on that initially. And now we have to move it one step further. It's the reason why we created the company to really find the funds to do the regulatory stuff, because it's beyond academic research, really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) What's driving your interest in this? Were you just an academic and you're entrepreneurial? Did you just happen to be studying that field?

(Peter at 00:11:26) I mean, kind of the last years, I've just been an academic scientist, which always had in the background the thought, hey, maybe someday we can move something really forward in the real world, what we're working on. And then I got lucky to work actually in this project and found this amazing enzyme. So that was like, this is our chance. This is something where we can change, have an impact really on health care. And we said, let's try it. Let's put it all together and see if we can get it started. And lucky enough, we found people believing in that and helping us creating the company and working on that. So it was pretty amazing, and I'm still really happy that we could actually start it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:07) Now does all of this technology pretty much exist as far as whatever methods you would need to manipulate the structures? Or on your team, are you building any sort of technology to assist with this?

(Peter at 00:12:21) Yes. There are some things we need to develop to, let's say, seamlessly integrate that into the existing structures, to really harvest blood, to collect blood from a donor. And then normally, what happens is you separate. You don't have really whole blood which you transfuse. You separate into plasma, platelets, and blood cell units. And so to really allow the flow of putting enzymes into the modification and then wash them out again, this needs to have some additional development. But, yeah, we're working on that to really improve that because you don't want to have somebody sitting there and washing the blood manually. We're developing the technology for doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:04) Yeah, because eventually, you're going to need to build a factory that does this.

(Peter at 00:13:08) I mean, we would integrate into the national blood collection services, really, especially in Canada. And in the U.S., you have several entities which actually do that throughout the country. We'd work together with them to utilize their systems and say, hey, we have this amazing product. You want to buy it and convert your collected blood into universal blood, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) That's pretty cool. Now there's a whole field that I saw about five years ago on YouTube of them actually modifying inkjet printers to sort of print organs, right? And I haven't researched it in a while, but have you seen that technology? Have you thought about that at all?

(Peter at 00:13:54) Well, I mean, not really seen in person, but I know the technology exists, and it's pretty exciting. And I see in a future, those artificial organs will be really interesting and hopefully, they're succeeding doing that, really. But still on the way there, we need that, really. And we're providing that to get better access to matching organs on this technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:20) That's pretty cool. Have you thought about what you're going to do when you become a billionaire?

(Peter at 00:14:24) That's far. Would be amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) Goodbye, Twitter.

(Peter at 00:14:35) A nice trip to space, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:39) There you go. Yeah. By then, you'll have options. You'll have, you know, SpaceX. You'll have Blue Origin. You can choose how you want to go to space.

(Peter at 00:14:47) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) So what else... This obviously affects a lot. From collecting blood and just doing traditional transfusion type stuff to the organs. What other areas does it impact, or is that pretty much it?

(Peter at 00:15:06) I mean, it has impact on... difficult to describe, but there are internal mechanisms around it, how you manage blood, especially when you're looking, for example, in, and it's a good example for Canada. You have a lot of rural areas with different access to blood products. And there's a whole system around managing that, sending blood out there. They have access to universal blood, and then they have to cycle back towards the cities where they're actually using it a lot. And there's a whole industry behind it, really managing the supplies and trying to match them and figure them out. And we hope to have an impact there on simplifying these processes, really, and make it easier, accessible for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:48) Yeah. Because, I mean, one thing I don't think we've really said is that'll save more lives, right?

(Peter at 00:15:55) We're hoping to have that impact, yes. Yeah. You saw it pretty good within the pandemic situation initially where then you had less access to people and therefore less donations. And this has had an impact on the blood supply.

# Episode 485: Making Blood Types Obsolete with Peter Rahfeld, CSO at ABOzymes

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) Is there any sort of laws that are holding you up from moving faster to be able to test things that you want to test that you can't necessarily test right now?

(Peter at 00:16:24) There are always laws to prevent early human testing, and that's okay to have that in place to really ensure everything's safe. So it's not really a barrier. You just need to know what to do, and we're working on that to move around it and move past those kind of requirements, which absolutely makes sense for products like this used in humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:50) Yeah. So they probably have a whole procedure, steps and methods you have to—I mean, back in the thirties, they probably just did it to the humans.

(Peter at 00:17:02) We talked to a few people who worked on blood products early on, and this was a different time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:09) So walk me through real quick, obviously without giving up proprietary information, but what does it actually look like? So you take the blood, it's in maybe a vial, and then you push—how do you manipulate it? Not necessarily at a super low level, but how would it look visually if I were watching someone do this?

(Peter at 00:17:33) We're looking at different ways to apply that, really. But what would be the easiest is there's somebody donating blood, then they get this big bag of blood, and then there's centrifuges and machines to separate it out. You get one yellow bag of plasma, one mixed bag of platelets, and then you have your blood cell concentrate. And that would normally go in the fridge. And what we can do, we just inject the enzyme mix into this bag.

(Peter at 00:18:00) You shake it for an hour or something like this, depending really on how much you put in. And then it's converted to O blood type blood cells. The enzymes are still in there, so we need to wash them out to avoid any potential reaction in the humans. We don't think there is any, but you need to be sure that you don't bring those enzymes in. So you do these wash steps, and then clean red blood cells, O type red blood cells, universal ones, which you can then put in the fridge. And whenever you need them, you can transfuse them. That's pretty much the process for blood.

And on organs, it seems simpler. Normally when an organ is recovered from a donor, it goes into a so-called organ perfusion solution to store it and wash it because we want to get rid of the blood inside and clean it up. And in this washing solution, we can include the enzymes, which then perform a modification of the organ on the transport or sitting there next to the patient waiting to be ready.

(Peter at 00:19:00) And as soon as your organ is converted, you can just transplant that into the person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:08) Oh, so this process is already happening as far as you can inject into the existing workflow. They don't even have to do an entirely new foreign step. They're already putting this liquid in there to wash it, and you can just include your enzymes in there.

(Peter at 00:19:21) Some modification in there, plus a different bottle in there, longer incubation needs to be happening. But you're right. The process—not like we have to invent a completely new workflow with a new machine for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:35) Now how do you make the enzymes?

(Peter at 00:19:37) We are lucky. Those are bacteria enzymes. We actually found the enzymes in the human gut because when we originally started trying to figure out where do we find really effective enzymes to cleave the A and B antigens, we said, hey, the antigens are present everywhere, even in the human gut. And it's easy to get access to the human gut microbiome.

(Peter at 00:20:01) And so this is where we looked for them, found them. And because it's a bacteria enzyme, we can produce them in bacteria, classic industrial fermentation in E. coli, which is the workhorse for producing recombinant produced enzymes. And we do the same thing. It's really straightforward bacteria expression.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) So you just extract them and then sort of clone them?

(Peter at 00:20:27) Yes. So we have, it's called a plasmid, which carries the fragment of gene which we want to produce, and it's in the E. coli. And you have big tanks where you just grow them up, and then you activate them, and they produce for you the enzymes. And you break them open, and then you have to clean them, obviously, to really isolate only the enzymes of your choice, which is the ones we need.

(Peter at 00:20:49) And then you have pure product, and this you can inject into the blood, put into perfusion solutions for organs, and do the conversion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) So your business would be mass manufacturing of these enzymes, and then you would send them to your partners, and they would integrate them into their existing methods.

(Peter at 00:21:07) Yeah. We need to produce them. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) Yeah. So you're just taking existing enzymes and isolating them and growing them. From a business perspective, what stops other people from doing it?

(Peter at 00:21:23) You're right. It's naturally occurring enzymes, but we discovered a way to use them in a certain way, allowing us actually to get this really good performance we see for the antigen regeneration. And so the intellectual property around it, how to use it, which buffers, and what to do to get them really effective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:43) Yeah. You've got turbocharged enzymes.

(Peter at 00:21:47) Exactly. Because this technology or the knowledge about the enzymes being able to modify red blood cells is around for quite a while already. In the 1960s, people discovered some enzyme in a coffee bean able to modify the B antigen or the B cells to O. But they were not ideal there. They didn't have the right activity, pH value which are working.

(Peter at 00:22:11) So it took quite a while for people to move ahead and find better ones. And so we just now found the ones you can use for industrial scales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) Oh, very cool. All right. So how many different blood types are there?

(Peter at 00:22:28) I mean, if you're looking at the ABO, you have obviously A, B, O, and AB, but then you have minor blood type factors. There's a lot of things going on really on red blood cells and in general in the immune system in humans. But clinically relevant, most importantly is the ABO group, which is in the end four.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:50) Okay. Because, let's say you're in America or Canada, and you go to the doctor and there's a list of a handful of blood types that they want to know which blood type are you. How many is going to be on that list?

(Peter at 00:23:03) Probably eight because it will ask you if you are, for example, A, then are you positive or negative? Because you get either the Rh factor positive or Rh factor negative. And depending where you are in the world, those ratios shift. Especially when you go to Asia, you find more B antigen people. In Europe and North America more A. It really depends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:30) Okay. So there's A positive and negative, B positive and negative. What's the third one?

(Peter at 00:23:37) O negative and positive and AB O negative.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:41) Okay.

(Peter at 00:23:41) If there's a combination, you use—you have the A antigen, the B antigen, or you can produce both at the same time, then you are AB.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:49) Now is there any blood that you can't convert? Any types that you—or can you convert all of them?

(Peter at 00:23:56) I mean, we're focusing on the As, so A to O, because it's just the biggest population in North America. 40% of the people are A. And so it's just a really good accessible group. We're working also on the B enzyme because our goal is to eliminate all blood types. And so we have good candidates for also modifying the B antigen to O.

(Peter at 00:24:16) So if you combine those, then you can obviously convert A and B.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:21) Yeah. And O is already universal. Right?

(Peter at 00:24:24) Yeah. O is where you want to go. O, universal blood type, that's the gold standard for what you want, really. Obviously, there are rare blood types too around, which is at really low percentage where none of those blood types match really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:44) Like, do they have cool names?

(Peter at 00:24:46) A single common name is Bombay blood type. And those people can only get from the same blood type blood. They cannot get blood from O or any of the other ones. So they are really very limited to find the right matches.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:05) Well, that's wow. So that would be what? You think less than five percent of the population?

(Peter at 00:25:13) Way lower than that. It depends also where you're in the world. But yeah, it's probably—I can make any numbers, it's probably wrong. It's under 0.1% or something like that. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) Yeah, if you don't know. Okay. So what are you really excited about as far as things that we haven't already discussed?

(Peter at 00:25:34) I mean, what I found cool was—we kind of already talked about how we discovered the enzymes initially because it's just such amazing things in the human metagenome, or microbiome, really. Because, I mean, we probably saw a lot of news coming up over the last years how important is that you have a healthy microbiome, which has so much influence on how you digest things, your mental state, on really everything. And then going in and actually finding there the enzymes which can effectively convert blood types is just cool, I find. So I also know how much other really cool enzymes are in there, which you can use for all other interesting things for human health and production.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:21) Yeah. They're just having a party waiting to be discovered. Exactly. Oh, yeah. I had a few issues with energy and stuff several years ago. And I started to research it more to try to figure out what's going on with myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) And, ultimately, the short story is that my stepmom, she owns a medical practice that's a private type practice, and they do everything from weight loss to sports athletes type deal. And we ended up doing a food test, and I was significantly reactive to more than half my diet. So that's what we found, and I eliminated all those foods and so many things changed for me. And it sucks because I love those foods, and they weren't affecting me to the point where I was unable to live life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:23) You know? They were just sucking the energy out of me, and I just stopped eating them. Things like pineapple and stuff. I just stopped eating them, and boom. It was within a couple days, I just felt a huge difference. And so now I just can't eat a lot of that stuff. But I was so surprised because you're right. You see on TV, you see in the stores now, in the past five plus years, the microbiome gut bacteria stuff has become really prominent.

(Peter at 00:27:55) Yeah. That's true. And yep, and that's where those amazing enzymes are just sitting to be discovered and to hopefully be used to change human blood types and eliminate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) So when you're not manipulating blood, what are you up to? What type of hobbies do you have?

(Peter at 00:28:15) Oh, I love to go bouldering. That's really the one big thing I enjoy. You can go out in the mountains, especially because I was—I'm originally from Germany. But then for my academic development, let's say this way, for my postdoc, I went to Canada to my supervisor where I did the postdoc in his lab. And so Vancouver is a beautiful city, especially if you like hiking.

(Peter at 00:28:40) Amazing mountains around it. And so I started off hiking with my partner there, and it's just what I enjoy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:50) Yes. There's great pictures of different places around that area that are really popular online, the different seasons and how beautiful it looks on the mountainsides. And, yeah, I haven't gone yet, but we're big nature people. I live out in a rural area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:09) And, basically, one of my dreams was—because my wife and I, we enjoy hiking a lot as well. So one of my dreams was to be able to have a property that you could hike on it. So on my property now, it's about five acres, and there's a gentle slope so you can hike down it really easily. Then there's a little stream down there. So every couple days, I just walk around the property, and it's the thing I used to have to go travel to do.

(Peter at 00:29:39) That's amazing. Pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, especially coming from Europe, to actually encounter wildlife is something unique. And then you go out there, and there's actually bears in the woods.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) Yes. Yes. There—I was eating breakfast the other day, and a pack of deer just were walking right through my yard.

(Peter at 00:30:00) Well, that's what I really enjoyed about Canada.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) Absolutely. So did you become a citizen of Canada?

(Peter at 00:30:06) I'm running my PR application. Just waiting for it to go through what's going on. And, yeah, it would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) Excellent. Well, I'll put in a good word. I'll call up Justin. Oh, man. Okay. So is there anything we can do to help?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) I got a real good idea. You've explained to me this concept. I think it's fascinating. We love to have people on. And yesterday, we had on somebody that was built a molecular beverage printer so you can print any drink in the world. I was like, that's cool. And then I was really excited about this week because I got to talk to the molecular beverage printer and then the person who's going to be saving lives and a huge deal. And, yeah. So I'm just super grateful that you came and hung out with me and shared that with me.

(Peter at 00:30:59) Oh, always happy to talk about exciting things, and I think what we're doing is exciting. And so thank you that you actually asked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) Yeah. Is there anything we can do to help at all? If you look at our list of past guests, we have a number of people that are in large companies that touch the medical space as well. So if you want any introductions or if there's anything you think we could do to help, just let us know because this is a good cause. I love what you're doing, and I want to help push it forward.

(Peter at 00:31:29) Absolutely. I will check it out because it's always good to talk to more people and learn more and build a better network. That's the most important thing, really, to move new technologies ahead and be effective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) And are you currently taking investment, private investment?

(Peter at 00:31:46) We finished an investment round a few weeks ago. So at the moment, not. But actually, end of the year, we want to start another round. And so we're looking to find the right people who are interested in the technology and helping us to move things along and helping us to succeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:02) Yeah. Well, I've got—like I said, I've got several doctors in our family, and dude, we do investment stuff together. And so it would be interesting to look over what you're doing from a business standpoint. And, yeah. So keep me in the loop.

(Peter at 00:32:14) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:15) Do get there. That'd be really cool. And, man, thank you so much for coming on and hanging out. Is there any message that we want to get out to the world that we didn't get out there already?

(Peter at 00:32:27) If you're not signed up for organ donation, do it. It's a really good thing for everybody. And go out and donate blood. It's important. So that's really the message.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.