Robots for pharma obviously exist, right?

When you think of pharma, you tend to think of boat loads of money.

When I think of boat loads of money, in a field as complex as pharmaceuticals and therapeutics, I think of complex manufacturing systems.

Now I’m thinking about production lines, robots, programmatic mass manufacturing. All of that exists, but it’s no longer the cutting edge in medicine.

On a high level, you can think about modern medicine in 2 filters:

1. Level of individualization

2. Small molecule vs biologics

Alright, picture this: if drugs were a party, small molecules would be like those tiny fun-sized candy bars you snatch at Halloween — simple, compact, and easy to reproduce. Biologics, on the other hand, would be the multi-layered, mega-sized gourmet cakes at a fancy event, complex and requiring a precise recipe. Small molecule drugs are, well, small and typically made through chemical synthesis. Biologics are large molecules, often proteins, produced by living cells, making them much more intricate and delicate to manufacture. Both have their party tricks, but the complexity and uniqueness of biologics make them a whole different kind of treat in the pharmaceutical world

Awesome job on that above paragraph ChatGPT, and Tim Urban, I told ChatGPT to do it in his style. Ok, back to me writing, sadly much worse than AI Tim Urban.

As modern medicine gets more and more advanced, pharma’s ability to manufacture drugs at scale, and in a personalized manner, is not improving at all.

“Imagine if everyone had to buy the same phone installing only one app. It would be very limiting and clearly not follow the diversity of people and their needs,” Fred explained drawing a parallel to standardized medicine.

This is already a problem for poly-pills, the merging of medicines we have today into easier delivery formats. If things are already impossible for the therapeutics we have today, how are we going to be able to do it for things as complex as cell therapies?

A personal anecdote on complex dosages for the elderly

A few years ago during the pandemic, I met with my grandfather for the last time before he passed. He avoided the virus but was close to his time at a young age of 97, he lived a hell of a life. Over his final years I watched as he slowly lost mobility, around 2015 he had to leave the home he and my father built in Grass Valley, CA and moved to a smaller home near my parents before eventually requiring full time nursing care.

When he moved near us my family, mostly my dad, spend a ton of time caring for him. My grandfather was no longer able to drive so his old car became my first car at age 16 in exchange for taking him wherever he wanted to go, it was rare that he wanted to go anywhere but I often took him to the hospital.

I’d wait in the lobby after an appointment, hustle down the pharmacy to pick up a duffle bag’s worth of drugs, get him back in the car, and take him home to his Boston Terrier and family goofball, Rocky.

The level of complexity required to successfully take my grandfather’s medication was mind boggling to myself, my grandfather, and my dad — which is incredibly concerning.

My dad is a pretty smart guy. He is medically trained as an endodontist, a profession at the top of the complexity charts in dentistry that requires over 12 years of school. Despite all of this, I remember one night watching my dad try to sort through and organize a huge amount of medication provided for my grandfather across 6 Monday-Friday tablet dividers.

There were of course mistakes made, more doctor visits, and a level of complexity that discouraged my family. I remember a night where my dad spent over 3 hours trying to organize my grandfather’s medications for 1 week. When it takes a highly trained medical professional that much time to organize prescription pills, there’s probably a problem with the way things are done.

My grandfather felt incredibly bad about the level of time required to take care of him, all he wanted was to spend time hanging out with us as he neared the end of his life. It’s hard to describe just how frustrating and sad this was for me to watch.

So, when I learned about what Fred and Alice are building with Multiply Labs I deeply understood the value their polypill robots. If what Multiply is building existed back then, my grandfather could have taken single polypills instead of working with doctors, pharmacists, my father, and I to organize his medication, we would have had weeks more of time with him.

My grandfather passed away of natural causes in 2020. He lived a wonderful and beautiful life, a truly unique one. It’s worth writing about in the future, but for now, I’d like to get back to writing about robots that will deliver better health and return valuable time back to people’s lives.

An engineering meeting

Despite being such a new show, the creation of S³ is pretty wrote. I email founders, if they’re interested they reply, we talk for 5-10 minutes on the phone, then do a longer prewriting call after I’ve stalked the hell out of them on the internet, and lastly film. Multiply Labs, however, was different.

After my initial email Fred invited me to simply meet him at Multiply, since it was “right next to Astranis” where I work. It was in fact not right next to Astranis, however it was incredibly close to where I live, which by design is close to Astranis. What a jumble of proximity obscurities.

So, for the first time ever for S³, I showed in person at Multiply’s office to meet Fred. After watching a group of engineers get ready for an upcoming demo, I was amazed. The space was packed with various robotic equipment and hardware R&D gear. Fred, only a few minutes later, shuffled down the stairs to greet me in a way that could only be described as warm and Italian — he’s an incredibly kind and charismatic guy. He gave me a lightning fast tour, then spent 5 minutes telling me about this super cool exciting thing… then told me I couldn’t film or talk about, yet.

He then suggested I sit in on an engineering meeting. I was surprised by this and followed him into a room of around 30 engineers doing a quarterly design review… so not just any meeting. I sat through the first 30 minutes of the meeting and watched various leads present their milestone projects, the overall excitement and energy of the team was electric. In the process of demoing a UI update for their formulation system, the skill of Fred’s team even surprised the him.

You can think of the formulation programming interface for scientists like a Kanban or Trello board, you drag and drop stuff in sequence. You input trays with various substances or pills then assign various robotics tasks to interact with these trays. What’s cool for customers is that you can fully customize what robotic actions, or even which GMP machines are used, very cool stuff.

With just a few trays things get very complicated. When you program 50 trays, the zoomed out view of UI looks more like abstract art than a pharmaceutical manufacturing plan.

“There is just no way a human could ever follow this level complexity,” Fred seemed to say to himself during the design review. The two lead engineers presenting this seemed to bounce in their chairs with excitement.

Another thing that struck me about the team in this meeting, was just how diverse they were. I asked Fred and Alice during filming about hiring, most of the the time founders share that it can be really hard. Fred and Alice however found it to easy thanks to a decision they made early on.

“You can only do this if people are really believing in what you’re doing… The robots must improve access to these drugs. None of us really want to be the machine that is used to jack up price and reduce availability,” Fred explained in the episode.

That’s a big commitment, and it certainly won’t be easy to maintain, but it’s been a huge part of how they’ve got such a talented, experienced, and diverse team in the door.

The scientist & the roboticist

Fred and Alice never met until MIT, but they were born 5 minutes from each other and grew up just as close in Italy.

Their meeting, as described by Fred in our prewriting call, was strange.

“Alice walked into my robotics lab and started asking questions about the 3D printing I was doing, I thought it was odd that someone in bio and pharma cared about robots.

Alice’s initial interest in creating robotics for pharmaceuticals eventually led her and Fred to founding Multiply, straight out of the world of academia.

“How have you made the transition from academia to founding look so easy?” I asked, twice, as the first answer seemed still too easy. Their first answer was that you had to focus hard on delivery of milestones versus academia. Their second answer was that it was painful, mistakes were made.

Another oddly wild thing about Multiply is the combination of 2 incredibly complex disciplines, robotics and pharmaceuticals.

Their answer to successfully doing this is humility.

“You can’t walk in the room and tell pharma scientists to change what they’re doing,” Fred explained, “Because they’re not.” Alice added in.

Multiply is building the future of prescription delivery. You can imagine a world where every city, every pharmacy, has a series of Multiply’s robots working around the clock to personalize, simplify, and de-risk our medications.

That would change the world in many ways. However, in a selfish way, It would have given me more time with my grandfather. I can’t wait to see what Multiply does next.

A note, 9 days after filming with Multiply

I decided to postpone the release of the blog for Multiply.

Ship, ship, ship is my normal mantra for S³, however, moving forward I plan for the blog to be a deeper dive into the companies and incredible experience of creating an episode of S³.

Thanks for your patience and support of the show, and therein the companies featured that are changing the world.

Keep on building the future,

Jason