This episode is exciting for 2 reasons:

1. Multiply Labs is using S³ to unveil a brand new, a world first actually, product to the world

2. This is the first ever S³ follow-up episode, hence the “II”

My long-term vision for S³ hinges on it being (1) around for a long time, (2) doing follow-up episodes with companies as they develop, and (3) inspiring more people to go and build the future. So this is incredibly exciting to do and to write.

Now, let’s talk about cells and robots!

What’s new?

When we first featured Multiply on S³ 21 weeks ago, Fred Parietti the CEO and Cofounder of Multiply, suggested I read Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

This was interesting to me because the robots I was set to film were not at all related to cellular therapies. So why did Fred ask me to read this? Well, I wasn’t able to talk about it until now, but Fred and the Multiply team gave me an early and very inside look at the state of their now-announced Cellular Therapies Robot.

A cellular therapies robot isn’t just new to Multiply, it’s literally a world’s first. Traditionally, to make cellular therapies, you need a few PhDs doing complex science, math, and very manual work of culturing the cells. So robotizing the process allows for:

• More control and cleanliness, this paper with UCSF Multiply has proven their robotic process for cell cultures is as clean as the best humans

• Cheaper and way higher throughput

• An easy plug-and-play approach for pharma companies — it uses the same industry standard instruments

For more details and to see the robot in action, check out the episode! Fred is more fun to watch and learn about the process than reading my writing. But, before I go, what are cellular therapies? Why are they such a big deal? And why is it such a big deal squared to automate them?

The pinnacle of modern therapies

This section is essentially my reader’s notes from “Song of the Cell,” which I highly, highly recommend you read.

In short, cell therapies are a form of treatment where cells themselves are used as medicine. They work by either (1) activating the body's own immune system to fight diseases such as cancer or (2) by restoring damaged tissues.

In the case of cancer, immune cells are taken from a patient (often T-cells), modified in a lab to better attack cancer cells, and then reintroduced into the patient's body to seek out and destroy the disease. This approach is highly personalized, as the therapy is tailored to the individual's specific cellular makeup.

By leveraging building a new robotic system to automate this work, Multiply Labs will drastically increase the volume of opportunities to use cell therapies in treatment. In effect, this will save lives that otherwise could not have been saved.

Multiply’s big vision

Near the end of the episode, Fred gives a hint at what might be next on Multiply’s road map: continuing to create easy-to-use automated therapy robots to democratize and make cutting-edge therapies more common and affordable.

Pharma is an expensive industry, for a variety of reasons… And in our first time featuring Multiply Fred shared they were able to hire such an incredible team of people as a startup because they promised them something: We’ll never allow our robots’ to make these life-saving therapies more expensive.

It’d be much easier, in many ways, to not care about this. Pass off the automation cost back into the customer’s pocket and enable them to jack up prices to end patients. Despite this, and despite the majority of the pharma industry doing similar, the Multiply team has committed to stopping this from happening. It won’t be easy, but it will certainly be worth it.

Thank you again to Fred and the Mutliply Labs team that stayed late to run this demo. In addition, thank you for trusting myself and S³ to announce this news to the world with you. I’m honored and will do my best to continue growing the reach and quality of S³ in hopes of helping more companies share their advancement with the world. Thanks for being the first 🙂 

Thanks for reading, watching, and listening. Keep on building the future.

— Jason