Sherine Abdelmawla, PhD, founded Akanocure Pharmaceuticals to combine chemistry and AI in a platform for discovering effective drugs that can be easily produced at scale. The first use case is a cancer therapy. Great chat with a compelling founder.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Sherine Abdelmawla
What Akanocure Pharmaceuticals is Doing
"... The challenge is ... logistically speaking, manufacturing antibodies, they have problems with pharmacokinetics. Can we have a small molecule that can do the job of that antibody? ..."
Collaboration in the Lab Vs. Collaboration in the Field
The Business Model for Akanocure
"... interrupting the process that the cancer uses for hijacking the production of lipid fats to create its own version, a lipid shell that has particular features that make it really hard to detect the cancer..."
Sherine's Backstory
Why Research?
“...Science is hard enough, but on top of it, doing science with inadequate resources…”
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Akanocure”
Guest: Sherine Abdelmawla
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup, came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today, we are privileged to have an interview with a founder who is located in West Lafayette, Indiana. Her name is Sherine Abdelmawla. Say hi, Sherine.
Sal Daher Introduces Sherine Abdelmawla, PhD and Thanks Wade Lange for the Connection
Sherine Abdelmawla: Hi. [chuckles] Thanks for having me.
Sal Daher: Sherine Abdelmawla, PhD, is the founder of Akanocure Pharmaceuticals, and what Akanocure is doing, it's creating a platform to make it easier to design and to manufacture certain types of drugs that are really effective, certain molecules that can address really hard-to-drug targets. These are protein-on-protein interactions. I'm very grateful to Wade Lange for connecting us. I had a chat with Sherine and I found her very compelling. She herself is very compelling, and her work is very compelling. I thought it'd be really interesting to have this conversation about this really tremendous life science company that's being built near the campus of Purdue University.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Thank you so much for having me. That's so kind of you.
Sal Daher: Well, [chuckles] it is really delightful. Sherine, tell us a little bit about the problem that you're solving. Explain to people who are not in the pharmaceutical industry why what you're doing matters.
What Akanocure Pharmaceuticals is Doing
Sherine Abdelmawla: When we started, our platform originated at Purdue. At Purdue, they worked on it for over 30 years. We took the platform because it was addressing something very-- I would say, something nobody else is addressing right now. If you think of drug discovery as a triangle, the three apexes, first apex is can we find the target and define it really well for cancer, for other diseases. We've done that really well, everybody's done-- The second apex is, can we design? You'll find a lot of AI programs right now that can design really well, but the problem is now, can you manufacture? Can you actually have this compelling chemistry or amazing chemistry that when you take an AI to help you design, you have no restriction on what you can design because you can make any?
Can you have that transformative chemistry that can help you not just design a molecule, but completely optimize it to make it drug-like? If you optimize it, can you actually manufacture it on a large scale? Because if you make this really complex molecule really cool, very structurally diverse, very complex, very biologically relevant, that's going to be a complex molecule. Can you make it? Can you manufacture it? If you have that transformative chemistry that addresses all these three components, then you have that third apex.
I think that most people dismiss it or don't pay a lot of attention to it. They end up designing still molecules that don't have a lot of high success rate. We're aiming to increase the success rate of finding hits against some druggable targets.
Sal Daher: Okay. Your platform, is it software-based? Is it based in a particular type of chemistry?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, it is a synthesis-based platform. When we synthesize, we combine it with available AI. We figure out which target we're going after. We use AI to map the active side or the allosteric side or whichever part of that target that we're going after. We map it, we design molecules using AI, and then our platform helps us make those molecules and test them. After we test, we optimize. We do another round of AI, another round of synthesis, and then we manufacture whatever it is that we decide is our need molecule.
Sal Daher: Okay. You're kind of in a dialogue between the artificial intelligence world and the chemistry world to try to come up with some common ground that can actually produce at scale.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, if you see how people do use AI to design, there's a step in the AI process where they come up with a number of molecules. Then if it's not synthetically tractable, they will eliminate that. They end up eliminating a number of options that could be really good. We're trying to help where we're not eliminating anything, because we have the chemistry to address however complex the molecule is.
Sal Daher: Very interesting. To recapitulate, we have a triangle of addressing oncology targets. Right now we're pretty good at identifying the targets to be addressed in the cancers. We are pretty good at coming up with potential solutions for those. That's the second corner of the triangle, and the third corner of the triangle, which you're working on to solve, and that's the one which is not currently working very well, is just making sure that these solutions can be produced at scale.
What you're doing is you have a particular chemistry platform that allows you to interact with the solutions that AI comes up with and quickly discover if those can be synthesized and at scale, not only synthesized in a lab situation, but also done in a process that can be scaled up for production. This is really very compelling because right now in the space of cell therapy, there are tremendous shortages of actual therapy. People are just not able to produce the cell therapies at the volume necessary to meet the demand that exists right now. There are a lot of companies working on how to create workflows to make that doable.
Now that you explain this, I find it very compelling because very frequently companies come out with these all-or-nothing situations where you have a therapy, and does your therapy work or doesn't it work? What you have here is you're offering a process and you're looking for the use case, which is the most compelling, the most immediate use case. Do you have the low-hanging fruit use case that you are going after? Would you care to describe that? Are you at freedom to describe that?
"... The challenge is ... logistically speaking, manufacturing antibodies, they have problems with pharmacokinetics. Can we have a small molecule that can do the job of that antibody? ..."
Sherine Abdelmawla: Sure. It's on our website, so that I can describe. For cancer, for example, and immunology maybe, we're working with an enzyme called ACC. ACC is an enzyme and we're targeting a domain in that enzyme that has to dimerize for activity. Traditionally, if you want to prevent two big proteins from interacting, you need an antibody, because an antibody is big enough to come in between two proteins.
You cannot match the specificity of an antibody. You get less side effects, and you get a molecule that works really well. The challenge is, like you said, logistically speaking, manufacturing antibodies, they have problems with pharmacokinetics. Cannot be given orally. Can we have a small molecule that can do the job of that antibody? That's what we're trying to do.
Sal Daher: Antibodies are typically proteins.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes.
Sal Daher: Basically, you're trying to create a protein that can interpose itself between two proteins that are of interest and prevent the two of them interacting.
Sherine Abdelmawla: No, we're trying to create a small molecule. Instead of having an antibody do that, we're trying to find a small molecule that would do the job of an antibody. Basically, you get the best of both worlds. You get that specificity of the antibody, the less side effects, but you get the pharmacokinetics of a small molecule, the ease by which you can optimize it, manufacture it.
Sal Daher: You're taking the antibody which is a complex molecular structure out of the picture. You're creating a small molecule which can do essentially the same thing; can gunk up the works in the interaction between these two proteins in such a way that it stops the process that you're trying to stop.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yeah, we went through a round of AI design. We looked at that target map, the allosteric site we're going after, created a pharmacophoric model, pharmacophore model, designed a batch of molecules, and went through docking and virtual screening of those.
Sal Daher: Would you unpack that a little bit? Pharmaco[phore] model, this is a model for drug discovery, drug behavior?
Sherine Abdelmawla: No. We looked at that allosteric side, and we made, let's say, a framework of what the molecule that would work well in interacting with that target should look like. We need that type of interaction, interaction number one, number two, number three, number four, number five. If we have all those, we'll have a good molecule. Then we design a number of molecules and we score them against that model. How many of these molecules will have as many of those interactions? Then we give them a score and the ones with the highest score, these are the ones that we took for docking.
Sal Daher: Is this design process deterministic or is it probabilistic just throwing together mixes of things, or are you coming up with rational designs that you think will work?
Sherine Abdelmawla: No. That's a completely rational design.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Sherine Abdelmawla: With ACC, we're lucky because there's a crystal structure of that protein. There's also crystal structure of it with an inhibitor, so we have a very good idea of what a good molecule should look like. Lucky enough also, there's a lot of work that has been done on protein-protein interaction. What should a small molecule look like for it to be good at protein-protein interactions? This has all been published. We know what a molecule should like, how greasy it should be, how definitive it should be, how water-loving it should be.
Sal Daher: You have cheat notes.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Even, we know the shape of it because people realize you cannot keep thinking 2D when you're gathering after a 3D target because that's biology 3D. We know what the shape of the molecules that can do protein-protein interaction should be. We're not shooting in the dark 100%, with that target, at least. We design molecules that will have that shape. We know the framework, we know where what parts of that, the allosteric site we want to target.
We did that and we tested that-- we came up with several scaffolds, and we made them, we tested them. Alongside when we were doing that, a lot of major pharmaceutical companies were working on the same enzyme. Lucky enough, I always say, I love if there's a journal for negative results because then you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to make the same mistake again.
Sal Daher: That is such a brilliant suggestion. Absolutely, you should have people posting-- see, this is a thing that nobody gets-- there is no incentive in the academic world to post your failures.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes.
Collaboration in the Lab Vs. Collaboration in the Field
Sal Daher: This is absolutely brilliant. Some of the people working on the problem right now, we have a problem that the inputs into scientific research are ever-growing, faster and faster, but the number of breakthrough discoveries are flat. You've got this curve climbing up, more and more money is being thrown at problems, and the results are flat. We don't have a slope in that curve. That's zero slope. I can't help but think that this is along the problem of results that cannot be produced. I think it would be the ultimate modesty if when you published the paper with the results, you came out and said, "By the way, these are all the hundred things that we tried that didn't work."
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes. Actually, when we started our company, there was a colleague who actually wanted to do a tech-- he was trying to have a database of negative results. I don't think he had enough interest, so it didn't move forward.
Sal Daher: It is vanity, always vanity. The problem is everybody wants to pretend that they get the problem right from the first try, the great geniuses. Beginning from Socrates, "all that I know is I know nothing", the idea of humble search for knowledge.
Sherine Abdelmawla: If you think of science as collaborative rather than competitive, people would be more willing to share, "Okay, here's what didn't work," so you don't have to do it again or spend the time doing that. I think the last few years with how people had collaborated to come up with the COVID, it was so refreshing. If it continues to be like that, I think we'll be able to move faster. Now we know we can move faster on everything, right?
Sal Daher: It works in the lab. Your bench mate can tell you, "Oh, geez, I tried that one." At that scale, it goes on. What I'm saying, what could be extremely powerful is what you're suggesting, a journal of negative results of you publishing, "We tried this experiment that didn't work. We tried this experiment," and then people can even go out and replicate and try to do the experiment again and confirm that it doesn't work, and maybe figure out why it doesn't work.
Mathematicians are a little bit like that. Mathematicians tend to have problems that nobody has solved and they work on the problems that nobody can solve. The physical scientists tend to work-- biological sciences tend to pretend that they can solve every problem, and mathematicians admit-- Fermat's Last Theorem, it required centuries before it could be proved.
Sherine Abdelmawla: With maths, it's number. It's like one plus one equals two. You can't get around it. With biology, they teach us never to say never because there's always a way around the biological system.
Sal Daher: When you get to these proofs that are just massive, there's room for human error. It may take a decade to really be sure that the proof is correct. This is fascinating. Takes us a little afield of what we were, but I think it's a worthwhile discussion.
Sherine Abdelmawla: It helped us a lot. When we were working on ACC, it was a hot molecule when we started and everybody was doing ACC inhibitors, and then it went to the clinic and it had some side effects. Now, we know the side effects is you cannot just make an ACC inhibitor. ACC has two different types of-- let's say, subtypes of enzyme or isozymes, ACC1, ACC2. For us, we want ACC1, but we don't want to inhibit ACC2 because that's where somehow serious side effects come from. We had to go back to the drawing board midway because it's easy to design a non-selective inhibitor. We had to go back to the drawing board and scrap everything. "Okay, now we need to find a specific ACC inhibit--"
Now, that's not easy. These two enzymes are very similar, 70% homology, I think, so it's really not an easy task, but again, you have AI. We're no longer making those millions of molecules, libraries, and trying to screen them against our target-- which takes so long. Most of these libraries will be redundant. You cannot make a library of a thousand molecules that's so complex, each one of them, so we tended to have libraries that are very boring, very redundant, no complexity, no diversity.
The hits were so low, and that's why people at one point had lost faith in small molecules. It's like you cannot get a small molecule that works really well. We want to bring that back, that faith, where we're going to make these molecules that are extremely complex, extremely diverse, very biologically relevant, but we're not going to waste time to make a million of them. We have the tools now, we have AI. There's no reason why each have to work in a silo. We have to combine what's known now. That's what we're doing, and we found an ACC1 inhibitor. It's really cool now that you see the results.
Sal Daher: Speaking of working in silos, we were talking grandly about scientific collaboration and everything else. Let's take the other side of it. We're talking about being a business. That means how can you silo this information, make it so that nobody can use it except for you, what kind of intellectual property protection do you have?
Sherine Abdelmawla: For our platform, originally there is an IP that came out of Purdue, we licensed that exclusively. We filed-- because when we took the platform, it's a platform that can make cool molecules, but the first step was we wanted to optimize all the procedures so that they're scalable. We needed to be able to scale, we needed to be able to have a very modular way of making things, so you can assemble the molecules so quickly.
Right now, everybody even at the government level, we talked to them in there. We want to get away from stockpiling everything. When we need those compounds we can make them really quickly. We wanted something like that. We wanted a modular synthesis, something that can work really fast, very efficient, environmentally friendly. That was a patent that we worked on it for a couple of years and filed a patent on that. That got accepted in the US. It's still pending in Europe and Canada and Asia.
There's another patent we will file at the end of this year, which relates to optimization. We wanted to be able to expand the platform where when we find a hit molecule, can we optimize it to make it drug-like? That's another process. We have to change the structure a lot, to end up with a molecule that will work well as a drug. That's the one we will file end of this year. That was funded by a Phase I and Phase II NSF grant. Our Phase II ends the end of this year, so we'll take our data and file a third patent with the platform. As far as the ACC molecules, I'm actually getting ready to send our lawyer some compounds and some data to file. Hopefully, it should have a provisional patent within the next month or so.
Sal Daher: Now, these patents are on the composition of the compounds. Are they on the process for manufacturing them?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes. For the platform, we made sure the patent that came out of Purdue was the process, and that's why we wanted to file our own too, our compositional matter. We wanted to own the building blocks, those structures that we use to assemble the final molecules. They are compositional and of course, for the drug molecules, they'll be compositional matter.
Sal Daher: Very good. What is it that-- well, not that necessarily you'd have a business model right now, but what do you think would be the business model for Akanocure Pharmaceuticals?
The Business Model for Akanocure
Sherine Abdelmawla: We want to do drug development in the traditional way. Hopefully, we raise-- we have our molecules, we raise enough funding to take it to clinical proof of concept. At that time hopefully, we have a collaboration with a major pharmaceutical company, some strategic partner that we can learn from, so either they acquire us, hopefully.
Sal Daher: Inshallah. [chuckles]
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, or we learn from them enough that we can keep adding to our pipeline and develop on our own, but that's the business world. There are a couple of indications, for example, that-- we worked on an antifungal project and we weren't interested in developing antifungal, so we were trying to license these molecules out and we have an industrial partner. We own the molecules, so the way we do it is, we design it, we manufacture it, we test it and if it works well and somebody's interested in it and we license it. It's still the traditional way of upfront payments, milestones, and hopefully loyalty.
Sal Daher: Right.
Sherine Abdelmawla: We don't do service because a lot of the times when--
Sal Daher: They want to turn you into a CRO? Contractor research organization.
Sherine Abdelmawla: That's something that we were not interested in doing, at least for now.
Sal Daher: You're spot on, Sherine, in this because they want to have things on the cheap. If they hire you as a CRO, they basically pay you to meet your expenses and a little more. You don't create any intellectual property in what they're doing because they own the entire intellectual property. A collaboration, you're going to have significant resources, enough resources that you can build infrastructure to have other uses. I've seen this in the case of SQZ Biotech, which is now public. They were put on the map by the collaboration with Roche, and it is a collaboration because they were they're sharing the IP.
In that case, they were helping Roche manufacture cell therapy, which it would take them a long time. It took them something like three weeks to produce a dose when they were beginning a clinical trial. Now they produce a dose within 24 hours. It's much faster, it's 21 times faster and it is manufacturable at scale. This is cell therapy, of course, you're talking about small molecules, and finding and manufacturing particularly effective small molecules. Okay. Is there a particular application that you think is the closest, lowest-hanging fruit that you would like to discuss?
"... interrupting the process that the cancer uses for hijacking the production of lipid fats to create its own version, a lipid shell that has particular features that make it really hard to detect the cancer..."
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, we're interested in oncology. For example, you look at cancer and sometimes you see a cancer cell under the microscope and you see how bad or ugly it looks. What cancer does, it comes in, and the way-- ACC enzyme helps our body make lipids or fats, right?
Sal Daher: Right.
Sherine Abdelmawla: That's not really operational in normal cells. Our normal cells would get the fat supply from the diet and we use those fats to make those membranes around ourselves. Cancer needs to reprogram our cells for its own benefit. It comes in, hijacks the ACC enzyme or the lipid synthesis machinery itself, and starts making different kinds of lipids, and it changes the way the membrane looks.
That's why it looks ugly and then that membrane now can help it evade immune response. It can help it evade or be resistant to chemotherapy, a number of things. It was shown also that this helps the cancer be metastatic, it helps cancer be a lot more mobile, it helps it to be invasive. If we can shut down this process, then you can revert the cancer back to a normal cell that it becomes susceptible that-- it was shown, it becomes susceptible all of a sudden to chemotherapy.
Sal Daher: Ah, you're interrupting the process that the cancer uses for hijacking the production of lipid fats to create its own version, a lipid shell that has particular features that make it really hard to detect the cancer?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes. Especially that's, as I said, not operational in normal cells. You're only targeting cancer. But of course, ACC has-- there's a reason our body has it. It's operational to a certain number of cells.
Sal Daher: This lipid production mechanism exists in a cell, but it's not used by the cell because the cell acquires the lipids from the diet.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes.
Sal Daher: If you shut that down, it doesn't damage the cell because the cell can use the lipids from the diet, but it does prevent the cancer from taking over the cells.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes.
Sal Daher: It perhaps makes the cells resistant to the cancer. Is that what you're doing?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Okay. Cancer is us, right? It's our own cells that became rogue.
Sal Daher: Going haywire.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, exactly. You want to bring back that phenotype to the normal cell, but that enzyme is in the body for a reason. It is functional in only certain types of cells, and that's what we wanted to do. We want to make sure that there's some type of tissue specificity we're only going to the cancer. We're not going to where the ACC is actually active and needed and that's where specificity comes.
For example, you don't target ACC2 because that one is active in the heart and skeletal muscle, so we don't have cardiovascular problems when we do that. We design our molecule with a specific pharmacokinetic-- or not pharmacokinetic, I'm sorry, physical-chemical properties so that we can control where it goes. We don't want it to go here, we don't want it to go here. We want it to only go here, and that's what our platform gives us because we can have a very fine control over the design of these molecules, where we can actually have that subtle change in the molecule that addresses that subtle difference in the biology.
Sal Daher: Excellent. To date, you're funded with NSF grants, National Science Foundation grants, and have you raised any private money?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, we did raise like half a million in angel funding when we started, and then we raised close to one and a half million in grant funding. That helped us optimize the platform and expand it, and start doing the initial work on the ACC. We also have an antiviral project going. We started that when COVID started because we know we can-- viruses hijack the cells exactly like cancer. They operate very similarly. Then we have the antifungal project that we have a collaboration, industrial collaboration on, so we have a lot going on.
Sal Daher: [chuckles] I can imagine. Very good. Let me take a moment just to do a little bit of a promotion for my podcast. After that, I want to talk to you about your personal journey.
Sherine Abdelmawla: I'd love to.
Sal Daher: I'm going to take a moment and ask the listeners, if you are enjoying this conversation with Sherine Abdelmawla, PhD, founder and chief executive officer of Akanocure Pharmaceuticals, take a moment to leave a written review of this podcast on Apple Podcast, which is probably the most effective place. They are the places you can review it as well, but Apple is the one I think carries the most weight. If you review within the week after the launch, it will cause that particular episode to have a bump.
If you want to make a vote of confidence in a particular podcast that you listen to, as soon as you listen to it, go right away and do a review because that will promote that podcast. More people will listen to it, more people will become aware of it. I'd be very grateful if we could do that because people like Sherine and some of my other guests really deserves to have a hearing. They're doing very, very interesting stuff.
Sherine, how did you get to this pass? You were born in Egypt, and you got a degree, a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical science, how did you end up at Purdue doing what you're doing?
Sherine's Backstory
Sherine Abdelmawla: Before pharmacy school, I went to American school, so my high school or throughout.
Sal Daher: In Cairo.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, in Cairo. My high school diploma gets printed in the US. [laughs]
Sal Daher: Then sent to Egypt. [laughs]
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes. It's like a tradition. My teachers were American and British. The school was founded by, I think, President Roosevelt. He's the one who actually inaugurated the school.
Sal Daher: Was it Theodore Roosevelt?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes.
Sal Daher: Was it in 1915 or something, or was it--
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, and it got nationalized in the fifties when the army took over, but it's still run by the Evangelical Church. Coming to America was like, that's just the natural transition for me. I'm just going to come and--
Sal Daher: I'm not a Protestant evangelical, but I must say these evangelical Protestants, they do amazing work. I'm a Catholic. Catholic church does this as well, but in Lebanon, there are some of these Protestant groups, they have their schools, they have their institutions connected with America all over the place.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Same in Egypt. You'll have a lot of clinics, and that clinic is like for people who can't afford to go-- and the best doctors will come to that clinic for free, each doctor can come a day, and it was all run by-- and not just evangelical. I mean, we don't really try to make the distinction. It's mostly our nuns and I don't ask if it's Orthodox nun or evangelical nun. They all collaborate. They all collaborate to help. Exactly
Sal Daher: They have Evangelical nuns, Protestants have nuns?
Sherine Abdelmawla: I don't know. I trust the-- I don't know. I'm not -
Sal Daher: My gosh, this is a species I had not run into. Catholic nuns, I was aware of, I knew that there were Anglican nuns.
Sherine Abdelmawla: It's Orthodox, mostly Orthodox in Egypt because it's the Eastern Church. I went to school there for two years only when I was transitioning from one school to the other, so it was Orthodox, the Eastern Church.
Sal Daher: Eastern Orthodox.
Sherine Abdelmawla: My teachers were all nuns. Amazing, really caring, loving people, and they do a lot of charity work, like you said. A lot of those people can't afford doctors, they'll go to these. When they came to Egypt way back, mostly from Europe, they built a lot of schools. The first thing they would do, they will build a school, and they will build a hospital attached to the school. To that day, they are the best schools in Egypt, the best education.
I've been to those [chuckles] schools all my life. For me, the transition, it's always been ingrained in the culture, but the funny thing is, I went to an American school, but everything I studied was British literature, so I'm very familiar with that.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Fascinating, these cultural currents.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes. I would always have my American teachers exchanged with Egyptian, and we'll always have people who play jazz music in Massachusetts. Actually, we had an institute that would come and play in our school chapel. We're ingrained in the culture. For me, when I was coming-- I knew I wanted to do research, that was hands down, that's what I want to do. I want to do research, and I knew I have to travel because research takes a lot of money, and as much as we have amazing institutions in Egypt, having a lot of money for research is not accessible there.
Sal Daher: No, it--
Sherine Abdelmawla: I knew I had to travel, and America was-- United States was uncomfortable with the culture.
Sal Daher: What prompted your interest in research?
Why Research?
Sherine Abdelmawla: Okay. [laughs]
Sal Daher: A book about Marie Curie or something like that?
[laughter]
Sherine Abdelmawla: I've always liked science. My marks in science were the best all the time. That's what I loved. I absorbed science very fast. I don't even have to study it, it sticks. Anything else, I have to do a lot of effort.
I think I remember when I was 10 years old, there was a book about-- AIDS was just new, and I went to a library, I bought a small book and it was in Arabic, it wasn't even in English, and I captured and I read everything about it. I knew everything about it, except a lot of the terms, the technical terms I couldn't understand, so I took it to my science teacher and I kept asking him to explain things to me, but then I watched a movie called Outbreak, [chuckles] they were working with viruses, and there was an outbreak. I'm like, "Okay, I'm done, I'm going to go the United States, I'm going to study microbiology, and I will work in the CDC."
[laughter]
When I came here, every time I try to work with viruses, I get pushed in cancer. I ended up working in cancer, and I developed a passion for it because, at one point, I worked for a year with actually cancer patients who are on clinical trials. It's heart crushing to see the suffering face-to-face and the ordeals. I developed a passion for cancer, but COVID hit, and all of a sudden, I'm like, "Oh, I have a chance to work with viruses." We launched our antiviral project and I remember when I first came, I'm like, "I want to work in the CDC, I want to work with Ebola and all those BSL-4 viruses," and they're like, "Well, you have to be American to work with those," and I'm like, "Okay."
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Sherine Abdelmawla: Now I'm American and our collaborator works in a BSL-- we collaborate with the University of Texas Medical Branch, they have one of the best BSL.
Sal Daher: Biosafety level four.
Sherine Abdelmawla: I called her in his lab.
Sal Daher: Suits that inflate, you have to walk around like a moon suit or something.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes. Our collaborator said, "I'm going to make your dream come true. I'm inviting you to Texas, and I'll take you on a tour in our BSL-4 and we'll get to wear a suit there," and I'm like, "Yes." [laughter] It's all dreams come true.
Sal Daher: That's so funny.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Making drugs was what I wanted. I got accepted in medical school, and I so wanted to be a surgeon, and I love medicine, but then I thought about it, I'm like, "Yes, I can diagnose, but what after diagnosis? A lot of people can--" I wanted to find a solution.
Sal Daher: You want to do something about it.
Sherine Abdelmawla: You have to actually change what you want because I got enough grades. My grades allowed me to go to any school I wanted. I changed my mind from medical school, took it to pharmacy school. I said, "I'm going to learn to make drugs." When I came here, I wanted a PhD. I wanted to make drugs. Drug discovery is a childhood passion.
Sal Daher: What do your parents do? Were your parents academics?
Sherine Abdelmawla: My dad is an academic. He was a university professor, but he was teaching history. He's pretty into literature. My mom was a housewife. I think they wonder why I'm like that, I guess.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: The scientific genes, where else did they come from?
Sherine Abdelmawla: I think the research gene, my dad would be-- whenever I remember him, back then there was no internet when he was doing his PhD. We had a huge dining table, and this dining table would be lined with books on both sides, high like that, and his head is in between those books because he has to read all that.
[laughter]
When he wrote some books, his books are like that thick. He had that like-- of digging deeper and deeper into knowing anything, everything. I got that from him.
Sal Daher: Very interesting. This is really fascinating, that you've got this tremendous curiosity. Now, explain to me, instead of just being a research scientist, why you decided to go in this weird, painful, difficult path of being an entrepreneur. Was there a model for you that prompted that?
Sherine Abdelmawla: I think what I wanted was the freedom to have that vision and work on it. If you work in a big corporation, you're always following somebody else's vision, somebody else's direction. You can have the coolest research project, but the company says, "Well, it's not of interest anymore," and we'll just continue that.
Sal Daher: Totally. You're at the whim of the gods above. All of a sudden, they rain stuff on you or they just throw lightning at you. Some big executive decides to move the corporation in some direction. All of a sudden, your project is out the door. You have no agency.
Sherine Abdelmawla: The passion to learn something new. After a while of doing science, I want to learn something new, I want to do something different, and I'm always like that. Maybe I'll transition into something completely different a few years from now. I don't know.
“...Science is hard enough, but on top of it, doing science with inadequate resources…”
Sal Daher: It's not unusual that if you found the company, you may just transition out of the company and let someone take over the more mundane things eventually. You manage to get it off the ground and then the zero to one aspect of it. Then one to end, there are people who specialize in that, that's all they do, and they've done it gazillion times. That's another dimension to keep in mind.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Because the adrenaline is so high at that stage where you're never stable. You're still too early. You're not at this stage where you can just take a sigh of relief and say, "Okay, we're in execution mode right now." That's when you go to the clinic, but that adrenaline high stage is very fascinating, I find it, you're challenging yourself every day. I have to get it done. I need to succeed here. Need to find another-- I need to be resourceful because every day-- we were fine, then we got thrown the curve ball of COVID, and now we got thrown the curve ball of the economy and what's happening with it, and the stock market. You're being dealt-- you're being trained to be extremely, extremely flexible. Mind, body, soul, [laughs] flexible, and resourceful.
Sal Daher: This is really inspiring. It is just the hardest thing to do. Science is hard enough, but on top of it, doing science with inadequate resources. Actually, there's a professor at Harvard Business School, Howard Stevenson, and his definition of a startup is an enterprise that uses resources it doesn't yet command, so basically bootstrap it, I think it's an elegant way of saying you're bootstrapping. You're doing stuff that normal people would have tremendous amounts of money to do, but somehow you perform magic, and you're able to find shortcuts and get 80% done, which you need to do with a whole lot less money than traditional enterprises. Of course, the failure rate is high because you don't have margin for error, but at the same time, successes are brilliant when they succeed.
Sherine Abdelmawla: That's why it was important for us to have that platform under control because you want to have as many shots on goal as you can, how to risk-mitigate is always what we think about. Hopefully-- as I said, midway through working on ACC, it's like, "Oh, okay. We can't have that anymore. We need something different, a specific ACC1 inhibitor, so what are we going to do?" We have a platform that was strong enough to help us like, "Okay, we design," and all that.
The time lost is a factor because sometimes-- the beginning time is not on your side. That's when you have to be resourceful, how can you stay alive for however many months you need to get the data that investors want to see before they can give you a vote of confidence? Especially first-time entrepreneurs, I have to prove-- you have to earn that trust.
Sal Daher: Oh, boy.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Maybe my second one would be easy.
Sal Daher: Oh, you'd be surprised, your second one and third one. For people who didn't invest in your earlier ventures, you succeed in your first one, let me tell you, the second and third people are lining up to give you money. If you weren't around as an investor in the first one, you don't get in the second and third. [laughs]
Sherine Abdelmawla: At least, if you're not successful, because as you said, success rate is-- failure rates, at least you do a decent, honest job that people still have faith in you and they know that you've given it 200%. "It wasn't your fault. We can still trust you with the second one." It's always that.
Sal Daher: Let me tell you, if your venture doesn't succeed with startups, of course, it's much better for everyone if it does succeed, people will invest in you again depending how you wrap it up. I can give you the example of a company called Meenta. What they're doing is basically facilitating people who have testing equipment and people who need to run tests meeting each other, scientific tests, and so forth. There are two co-founders, but the original founder, Gabor Bethlendy, was also a co-founder in a venture that did not succeed.
I invested in the first venture. What I saw in Gabor is this guy who was this unbelievable runner. He's a tremendously tenacious guy, who just wouldn't quit. They gave their best. Not just him, his co-founder, everybody involved as CEO, and the original-- it just wasn't to be. They weren't able to get that original company off the ground.
Let me tell you, not six months after they shut down the first venture, Gabor calls me, "Sal, let's sit down at Darwin's Coffee over here in Cambridge. I got an idea for a new company." I said, "Whoa, gosh, this guy has been through all this pain, and he's up for it. I have to go and sit down with him." Now, they're doing very well with Meenta. Believe it or not, they were almost dead from COVID, and then they made brilliant lemonade from the COVID lemon. They succeeded with COVID and now they're creating a post-COVID existence.
Failure is not final. How you fail is extremely important. Not that you're going to fail, but for people who are listening and you have a startup, how you fail is very, very important. This is a point that is made in one of the really great interviews, I'm trying to think, Tom Eisenmann, he's a professor at Harvard Business School that I interviewed, he has a book. Part of that is about failing well, how to fail. People don't study failure. Your brilliant idea about the experiments that didn't work, Professor Eisenmann has actually written a book about how to fail well.
Sherine Abdelmawla: When we started this, I said, "I'll take my ego and I'll wrap a big stone to it and I'm going to throw it in the river," so it's tied to that stone and in the bottom of the river because the ups and downs will completely humble you. If you have some ego, you will not be able to fail and learn from it and get back up again. You have to keep it humble. I usually take failure off the table. Failure's not an option. How can I get it done? Eventually, if it happens, I'm going to make sure that I have exhausted every, every option before--
Sal Daher: Every alternative. I'm very inspired by that. Sherine Abdelmawla, PhD, founder of Akanocure Pharmaceuticals, if there are any other parting thoughts that you have, that you want to leave our audience of founders, people who are thinking of founding companies, angel investors, any other thoughts that you want to share with people?
Advice to the Audience
Sherine Abdelmawla: For angel investors or investors in general, our company is in the Midwest, and I think they need to give the Midwest a second thought because there's an insane amount of talent and hard workers and people who are extremely resourceful, people who are very down to earth, head down, do their work. Then they do it and we don't know how to market ourselves. We talk about ourselves because we feel like that's our job. We just do it and we're very humble about it. [chuckles]
That's why maybe you don't hear a lot from people from the Midwest when they start companies. If you come in and listen to their success stories, you'll realize, "Oh my God, how are these people doing that much with that little and not even talking about it?" Really, genuinely good people to work with and very smart scientists. I think that's changing because I'm starting to see outside capital coming to the Midwest looking for resources, but not as much as we want to-- it's happening really well in tech, so the tech sector has actually started booming really well in the Midwest, especially in Indiana, they're doing a good job. They're starting to take a look at the biotech now, it's not-- it's starting.
I hope that investors would actually consider it because a lot of the times-- COVID has shown us now that I can have a headquarters in Massachusetts in Boston to be close to the investors, but operations, for example, it's a ton cheaper to get things done in the Midwest, very economic, and the resources are enormous. I think that would be my plea to the investment.
Sal Daher: I'm on the board of Savran Technologies that has a significant existence in West Lafayette. Çağrı is still a professor at Purdue.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, I know him.
Sal Daher: The founder and CEO. I'm sure you've met Çağrı Savran.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Yes, we communicated through email a couple of times. He's such a nice guy.
Sal Daher: What you're saying is very true. Purdue, in particular, they have 500 faculty members, a top five school of engineering in the country, and they're landlocked, and there are no major centers of angel investing anywhere near, so they have to reach out to people. I don't know about you, but I like to shop where the goods are plentiful and the prices are low. [laughs] That's the thinking. The merchant in me, you can't get the merchant out of the Lebanese. I'm sorry.
Sherine Abdelmawla: Oh, you're Lebanese. Okay, great. Awesome.
Sal Daher: There's always a merchant in there, somewhere, no matter how much--
Sherine Abdelmawla: I won't say the merchants are cheap over there, but they are fairly priced. We know that you cannot overvalue your company. It's just going to hurt you the next step. What's fair is what's fair, versus outrageous outside-- and correction is happening right now.
Sal Daher: Even the Silicon Valley companies are getting cut down to size, evaluations are getting cut down to size.
Sherine Abdelmawla: If you read, there was an amazing article that companies in Indiana are the least across the country who've actually reduced the workforce because, to begin with, we're very efficient. We don't overhire. We don't overspend. We don't over anything. We do things adequately, the way it should be done. I'm biased obviously, [laughs] but that would be my plea to investors.
What I would say to maybe entrepreneurs, people are so-- I'm a woman. I'm ethnic. I'm all that. The one thing I would say is if-- we still get 2% of VC funding, I would say do not have a victim mentality at all. It's just a rabbit hole. Do not feel sorry for yourself. That's just the worst place to be. That means you'll be stuck where you are. The world is moving and you're there. It is what it is. I can't change it right now, so it is what it is. I'm just going to deal with it until I'm in a position to change things. I cannot keep thinking about what I cannot control.
Sal Daher: You're the agent of change, by saying, "I know the odds are stacked against me, but what the heck?"
Sherine Abdelmawla: That's all the fun. It's all the fun. [laughs]
Sal Daher: Such fun.
Sherine Abdelmawla: If it's easy, it'd be boring.
Sal Daher: That's tremendous. Well, Sherine, this has been a really inspiring conversation. I'm very grateful to you for making the time to be on Angel Invest Boston. Thank you, Sherine Abdelmawla.
Sherine Abdelmawla: I enjoyed it so much. Thanks for having me. Hopefully, we get to talk again, and all the best to the podcast.
Sal Daher: Thank you. Thank you. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.