Welcome to Season Four. Join us in kicking-off a new season of the I'm Pharmacy Podcast as we explore the heart and soul of the academic endeavour, innovation. Now, before you roll your eyes about another podcast focusing on innovation, this season goes beyond a re-telling of success, and gets to the bottom of where innovation comes from. We dive deep into where ideas come from, what failures led to success, and the difficulties of taking an innovation from idea to intervention. In our first episode, we chat eureka moments with Dr. Quynh Pham, the Scientific Director and Principal Investigator, Centre for Digital Therapeutics, University Health Network, as well as Dr, Michael LaFlamme, Senior Scientist at the McEwen Stem Cell Institute, University Health Network.
Mina Tadrous 0:00
Step right up, step right up. Welcome to the world of wonder, a world of imagination peer into the future. And you come close. Greetings, trailblazers, visionaries and inquisitive minds, eagerly tuning in from every corner of the globe. I'm Mina Tadrous, your guide through the captivating labyrinth of innovation, and you've just stepped into the electrifying universe of the I am pharmacy podcast, a true place of wonder, and enchantment, we will show you things that will change the way you see the world and live tomorrow. Are you ready for the journey?
Michael LaFlamme 0:51
Welcome to Season Four. This season we explore the heart and soul of the academic endeavor. something near and dear to us here at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, some would even say is in our DNA, our core purpose, innovation. We're not just peering through the keyhole of innovation this season, we're kicking down the door and inviting you into the heart of this very idea. Picture this, a world where ideas are the currency where imagination takes flight. And where innovation isn't just a silly buzzword. It is the beating heart of progress. It is not just about new drugs, apps or flashy tech. More importantly, it is things that change the way of doing being caring, seeing and living. Innovation is the engine that propels us into the future. And this season, we are diving deeper into it. Innovation is not just a concept. It's a force that should be propelling us forward, guiding scientists, thinkers, and innovative pioneers, as they navigate unchartered waters. It's about breaking molds, shattering expectations, solving problems, and going to the very edge of what was once deemed impossible. More importantly, as we navigate this tumultuous time period, filled with so much uncertainty, the thing about innovation that I find so fascinating, is that it gives us hope. It gives us hope for a better tomorrow. And if that's not what our jobs are about, then I don't know what is. But what is innovation really. And I know some of you rolled your eyes the moment I said that word, another podcast about innovation in healthcare. But this season, it's not just about presenting you with innovations. Although we are going to explore some really cool ones. It's about the pathway of innovation. That's what I'm interested in. How do we get there. We want to explore how things go from ideas to reality, and explore every painful step in between. This season, we're not just peeling back the layers, we're diving into the very spirit of the innovative pathway. We're exploring everything from that eureka moment, the champions who champion the ideas, and the failures that pave the road to success. More importantly, I want to look at that journey from experiment to real world impact. Today, innovation isn't just about solving the puzzles. It's about unraveling the mysteries of disease, developing treatments that rewrite and reduce suffering and creating pathways to healthier and a more equitable world. So why does it matter now more than ever, because we are standing at a crossroads of possibility. We have a lot of work to build on a lot of great science. Innovation becomes our compass that points us towards solutions for challenges that loomed large in our collective consciousness. In my opinion, innovation isn't just a luxury. It's a true necessity during this time. More importantly, it's not easy to get innovation moving. There are headwinds, and that's what we're going to explore. We're going to explore the complexity of commercialization, witness how we work through change management in an ever changing world. And we're going to explore some of the ethical and moral dilemmas that come with innovation. How do we ensure fairness in this unjust world? How do we make sure innovation isn't just for the privileged few, but a beacon of hope for all. So get ready, dear listeners, because this season you are in for a treat. Season Four of the on pharmacy Podcast is your ticket to the front row of innovation. Buckle up the journey begins. To kick off the journey in episode one wanted to start big and what's bigger than ideas. Once examples that paint the picture of the journeys innovation take is Starting with those Eureka and breakthrough moments. This episode, we have the pleasure of connecting with two remarkable researchers from right here at the University of Toronto. We'll be spotlighting two remarkable examples, one in the dynamic realm of health applications of technology, and another in the cutting edge field of biotechnology and stem cells.
Quynh Pham 5:21
My name is Quynh Pham. I am an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the institute of health policy management and evaluation. I teach Health Informatics Research, mostly digital health research and evaluation. And I also serve as the director of the Center for Digital therapeutics at Toronto General Hospital within the University Health Network.
Mina Tadrous 5:48
So I'm always interested in people's stories about how you ended up where you are, and doing, you know, asking the questions that you ask, why don't you just start off this conversation by telling us about your journey to how you became in your current role leading the center? Sure,
Quynh Pham 6:03
I think everybody's path within the field of digital health is kind of circuitous and strange. Because the field is very new. And so nobody, at least in my era, graduated from undergrad or, or high school and really knew they go into digital health, I don't think that field really started. And so I took a bit of a strange path, I suppose I did an undergrad in biochemistry and psychology at the University of Ottawa. And then I really wanted to move out of my parents house. And so I moved to the UK and did a graduate degree in transcultural mental health care. While I was doing grad school, I did an internship for a digital health startup, okay, I think that was sort of my route into digital. I didn't know about the field, I certainly wasn't studying for it. And I just saw an advert that a startup was looking for sort of like a student researcher, to generate some evidence for this panic attack alleviation app that they were building, which at the time, no one was really doing this type of work. Whereas now there's probably 400,000 health apps on the App Store. But back then it was pretty novel breathing retraining exercises, like digitizing that behavior, into a mechanism on your phone that you could use to manage your panic attacks. All of that was really exciting. And I didn't know that you could do work like that in healthcare. And so I came into it really naive. And I think that was a blessing, to be honest, because when you don't know what you don't know, you take more risks. Right? I think that's where innovation in some ways comes? Yeah. When you just don't understand the boundaries of the space that you're working in. I think that can be really freeing, because you just propose really wild things that have no rationale that have never been done before that you borrowed from other fields on the ceiling. Now, we don't do that. Yeah, cuz no one knows, like, what is happening? It's just really new. And, and our team was really young. I don't think you necessarily always plays into it, but certainly with the team. Everybody was under the age of 25. Yeah, I was in grad school. We weren't motivated by money. There wasn't an industry for it. And so we just did great work. Yeah. And I learned a lot. And then I knew I wanted to stay in the field.
Mina Tadrous 8:26
So now tell me about the center. Yeah. And what do you guys do? So the
Quynh Pham 8:31
center has been around for a long time. It was founded 20 years ago by Dr. Alex dad, who was a pain researcher. And he brought together this group of misfits from across the world, who came together with this sort of shared goal or purpose to use technology to improve health. And we've taken that mandate, sort of, I guess, the tagline of creative, collaborative and human centered centered on humans are centered on patients. We've taken that from 20 years ago, and still apply it today. And the work that we do today is to build technology that will help people become partners in their healthcare that will engage them that will empower them to be partners in their health care. And that was taken from another professor, Dr. Kevin Leonard, who since passed away but he was faculty of the center and spent his whole life sort of working on this, this, this movement to have patients more involved in their healthcare and technology being a facilitator for them to be able to do that. And so the work we do now is to basically build software as a medical device. It's a different class of digital health. So a digital therapeutic is often Health Canada or FDA regulated software as a medical device. It has gone Through likely multiple clinical trials to demonstrate evidence in the same way that a drug or a hardware medical device would go through before it's given to patients. And so we build those types of products, those types of innovations within the group. Cool.
Mina Tadrous 10:18
I think people, when you say, digital health, yeah, can be very broad, for sure. And what they think about and I think, obviously, everyone has phones and smartphones, and there's apps. And so maybe you can walk us through an example, maybe something that's a little bit more mature. Yeah. And tell us about that journey of where your center steps in. So
Quynh Pham 10:38
a lot of our ideas come from an expert in the field. So I think I'll walk you through the journey of one of our products called medley, which is probably the most mature one. And it's the most widely known of and so that project was started 13 years ago, as a maybe 1213 years ago as a PhD project by Dr. Emily Seto, who's now an Associate professor at IHPME. And it was also sort of the brainchild of Dr. Joe Cafazzo. And then Dr. Heather Ross, who is a Order of Canada winning globally renowned cardiologist is currently climbing a mountain somewhere with like a patient whose life she saved. So it was sort of this confluence of a lot of people with shared interest. But Emily, you know, had the time, the capacity, the expertise to carry this project through as a PhD project. But it sort of revolved around this idea that we could help people living with heart failure to better manage their condition, if they were able to report their symptoms, both in terms of entering something into a Blackberry at the time. So answering a series of prompted questions as well as entering biometric data. So their weight, their blood pressure, their heart rate, and Emily, through her thesis were created sort of this rules based expert system, this algorithm that would take in all of these inputs, and then based on calculation, generate alerts based on this sort of mixture of all these different data points. And the alerts would tell you as a clinician, if your patients were fine, so in a green state, or if there was some cause for concern, or if they should basically go to the emergency department, yeah, a prompt for that would be like I fainted this morning, or yesterday or something. Or it could be something like my ankles are swollen, or I had trouble sleeping last night, I'm fatigued, I'm in pain, you know, I feel like a tightness in my chest, things of that nature. And so that rules based expert system has gone through multiple iterations. It's also gone through multiple trials. So at least this was randomized controlled trial a decade ago, there's been multiple trials since then, because the technology has changed. So we went off the Blackberry, and are now on, you know, Android and iOS, even with newer modalities, like, you know, the Amazon Alexa, so being able to speak into, you know, a smart speaker, instead of entering the data manually for people who have difficulty using a phone or Braille. And then other modalities that we're constantly improving over time. But that was the start of that work. So sort of bringing together you know, globally renowned cardiology expertise with, obviously an extremely bright engineering student who was Emily, and then an expert in human factors in engineering, who was Joe, and having all these people at the table pushing this idea forward to the end of the PhD, but then continuing to fund it through grants through philanthropy through now what we're doing is spinning out a company. Yeah, for a medley and so that's medley therapeutics with the support of our commercialization office. Right. So that's the venture we'll be embarking on in 2024. So exciting adventure. Yeah, it's been a long journey. So you know, 10 years from from ideation. I mean, we've had impact, at least, you know, it's sort of in the fifth year, we were already able to demonstrate impact, but you're looking at impact within the context of a closed trial, or a pilot study, or, you know, a program within the hospital. And I think when we talk about impact, what the impact we could have in this field, we could scale to every hospital to Canada, right? What I mean, with the power of technology, 10
Michael LaFlamme 14:35
years is like, yeah, it's like drug life, you know, like, about, like, how long it takes a drug because one of the seasons, we covered that. Like, that's a long time, a long time, to actually make sure that the evidence base is strong and everything and but this is not the standard in the industry. No, because, you know, like, just, you know, a couple of months ago, I was my dad, whatever, and we wanted to go find an app to support it. Cardiovascular Health. Yeah. And it was the Wild West. Absolutely. So like the ads, you're getting what they promised and what they actually do, which ones are wanting you to pay? Then you're going to pay you don't know what you're getting? And there's
Quynh Pham 15:11
1000s. Totally. And it's so frustrating because the consumer,
Michael LaFlamme 15:16
right, can you imagine a patient being like telling them, like, you know, in the pharmacy, someone comes in and like, oh, I should get an app to help support that? Yeah, keep track of whatever. Yeah. How are patients gonna navigate this? Absolutely.
Quynh Pham 15:26
And especially those who I would say the majority of people who are living with a chronic condition are older. Yeah. And not always digitally literate? Not always health literate? Yeah. Not always proficient in English, right? How are you supposed to filter through the really poor quality of apps on the App Store? And so I think that's where at least at the Center for Digital therapeutics, we want to separate ourselves from that, like, we're not in the business of making wellness apps, we make applications that you have to be prescribed health
Michael LaFlamme 15:56
and wellness are all put into the same category. Yeah. It's kind of the idea of like, what's truly innovative, and then what's just them, creating something it's not really that innovative. I think there's like that's, that's the problem in digital, the digital space, I find, like the process to being innovative isn't just about the idea. No, it's the actual execution. Yeah. What struck me in the conversation with Dr. Fan, was the process to innovation that her team took that was different from many people in the same space. I wanted to further explore if there was parallels to this process in innovation in the biotechnology world. To explore this, I spoke with Dr. Michael aflam.
I'm Michael LaFlamme. I'm a senior scientist in the McEwen Stem Cell Institute, at University Health Network, have a couple other hats. I'm a professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and pathobiology, at University of Toronto. I'm actually a clinician so I do diagnostic work as a pathologist. And I've been active in commercialization in the past. So I'm one of the cofounders of a company called Blue arc therapeutics. So
what kind of questions and research are you trying to develop? And like, what are you trying to develop in your labs in the work that you're doing?
Yeah, so we're focused on a special type of stem cells. So you have their so called adult stem cells that are in your body that are, their normal job is to replace kind of the cell loss that occurs because of wear and tear. But we're working with a different type of stem cells. They're called pluripotent stem cells. They're defined by their ability to differentiate or give rise to, at least in principle, all the cell types you'd find right adult body. There's two types of pluripotent stem cells. There's one type you've probably heard of, because they were in the newspaper for a long time embryonic stem cells, right. So these are cells that you can isolate from, say, embryos that are leftover from in vitro fertilization. And then there's a kind of an equivalent cell type. They're called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. And that's what people work with most now, where you can take an ordinary cell type of somatic cell type, from a skin biopsy a blood sample, what have you, and you can actually reprogram those cells to become the equivalent of embryonic stem cells. And what we contributed. And this is, I guess, one of these eureka moments, we can get to two ways to guide the cells that can become any cell type. And if you just let them to their own devices, you'll get a mixture of cell types, skin, bone, neuron, heart muscle, what have you. We worked out ways to very efficiently guide those cells to cardiomyocytes or heart muscle cells, right? And I guess like one of the early eureka moments in my scientific career was as a postdoctoral fellow. So after residency, this is I show my age, but 2002 It was right.
This was pretty much right after I was in the States after George Bush said you could do work yeah, you know, federally funded work with embryonic stem cells state which had been limited to that point, we're still pretty limited even afterwards. We were right on it. So we got those cells quite early on. And the eureka moment is, you know, you have this flask of cells, and they're, you know, depending on the size of the flask, these were pretty large. We had like hundreds of millions of cells growing Wow. And a little cluster of cells is beating in like the corner of it. And that's the fun thing about cardiomyocytes is they do something you get immediate, you know, feedback, right? Because they they contract, right? Spontaneous contractile activity, and so like we're high fiving in the lab, look, we've got it. We've got cardiomyocytes, and some of the earliest work we did was, you know, like you could literally dissect out those little beading areas, and if you grabbed grabbed enough of them, yeah, you could get enough cells To do transplantation work, which is what we do to this day, like trying to use these cardiomyocytes from pluripotent stem cells to re muscular eyes, injured hearts, right? So we do now. Now, you know, we have much better ways of making these cells. So we could literally make these cells by the billions in the laboratory, we make them in bio reactors. So, you know, basically kind of stirred vats of the cells. And you know, the people in the lab are considering a failure if they're not getting 95%, pure cardiomyocyte populations. And, you know, I think back to that day, we, we saw, it was probably 1/10 of 1%. cardiomyocytes, right. So,
Mina Tadrous 20:41
and that was a process problem that you guys solved. That was a process and we
Michael LaFlamme 20:44
you know, we and others in the field have songs for years, right? Yeah.
Mina Tadrous 20:49
So I'm sure everyone listening is like, okay, so you grew cells of a specific time? The natural next question is like, what are you going to do with them?
Michael LaFlamme 20:57
Yes, so people have been using the cells for for sort of three applications, but we're almost exclusively focused on one. Okay, so. So there's people that are interested in using these cells as just a model of human heart development, right. So you can study cardiac developmental biology in the dish. And we, you know, we know some things, but most of that hasn't been done in the human system. It's been done
Mina Tadrous 21:21
anyway. So if you have a new drug or something you want to see or react to those things could well that's that's the second thing.
Michael LaFlamme 21:25
And that's probably the biggest area of activity in the field is using the cells for kind of either drug discovery or sort of safety, toxic phase zero, almost. Right, right. So there's a lot of industry interest in like, the pharmaceutical industry, if you've got some new compound to use this as a screen, because, as you know, very well, like, you know, that's probably the most common reason drugs have been withdrawn from the market. Yeah. And he's failed toxicity, usually arrhythmias, right. But there's a third application, which is we what we focused on is using the cells for a therapeutic application for Regenerative Medicine. So and the disease that we've been focused on is myocardial infarction, a heart attack, where you damage the region of your heart. Because the heart is among the if not the least regenerative organs in the body, the muscle that's damaged is replaced by scar tissue. And so our idea is at least conceptually simple, we're going to try to read muscular eyes that scar. And what we've shown in all of these animal models is that the cells can engraft you have to deal with the immune system prevent rejection and their strategies for that. They'll Remus guys in some of those models up to about 50% of the footprint of the infarct scar, the new human heart muscle. One of our other eureka moments is we did the first work to show not only you're getting new muscle that that new muscle actually can electrically integrate with rest the heart and fire and synchrony with it. The way we show that just as an aside as we actually engineered the cells to flash every time the cells fire, basically a genetically encoded calcium sensitive fluorescent protein and interest. So a rise in intracellular calcium is the signal that tells cardiomyocytes to flash and so you get these green beading cells, right? We transplanted those into recipient heart, pointed a camera at the heart. We knew if we saw a flash of green light, the cells were active. And we could line up those flashes of green light with the electrocardiogram Yeah, of the host. And we saw that they were occurring in one to one synchrony. And that was the first proof that we were not just making new muscle, but we're making new muscle that was able to integrate. Yeah. Which doesn't have with any other cell type.
Now people have describedidea, research, execution. All right. Now how do we sell it? Here's Michael.
So okay, let's talk about commercialization. So let's talk about that exciting adventure. You're working in labs for years chipping away at this problem, and you've had a few really great steps forward. At what point are you like, okay, there's something here that we probably want to start thinking about. commercializing, like, what? Talk to me about how that decision is made? Yeah.
Well, I guess I'm a little unusual, and that from the onset of my lab, I was involved in commercialization. Yeah. And if I'm being honest, it was largely a practical thing. It wasn't so much that you know, this is starting back in the early aughts that, you know, we would be able to say to companies, hey, we've got something and in three years you're gonna make, you know, buckets of money. Yeah, ever any is very early in the pipeline then. But stem cell work is expensive. It's still expensive. Yeah, these are very expensive cells to grow. So early on, there was an opportunity to get some sponsored research from a company that was operating in the space paid for some of the original work. To derive human embryonic stem cells, and they approached me, they said, Hey, we know you're interested in the electrical properties of these cells, can we support some research in your laboratory? And so that was probably six months after the start of my laboratory, you know, as an independent faculty member. So it's keeping the lights on, right was was the, you know, the initial motivation. And then later on here, you think about, you know, this is expensive for me to be doing as an academic scientist to do you know, boutique studies, if you will, right dish and an animal models. If you think about this, you know, later on, we talked about all the regulatory hurdles, the way you're gonna have to standardize this and make this a real clinical grade product. And then pushing this through phase one and phase two clinical trials, there's no way I could imagine if we had really generous philanthropy and great, you know, governmental support, maybe you could do the proof of concept phase one clinical trial, that would be the worst time for things to wither on the vine. Right, you don't have the resources to go on to the next step. elementum is key. Yeah, I mean, if you've got to fail, you want to fail early, right. And the worst reason to fail is just you don't have the money to push things for. And then it was shortly after I relocated here to Toronto, that the conversations with the venture capital company versant, came up, they had previously done some large new codes and new new startup companies, with buyer, the big German pharma companies supporting it. And so along with my close collaborator, Gordon Keller, we were able to get them interested. And that became the launch of Blue Rock therapeutics, they brought on two scientists than their their team that had been working, as I mentioned, with dopaminergic neurons for Parkinson's, which is another, you know, attractive target, for the same starting material, the same pluripotent stem cells, you think of these as kind of a platform technology. And so it was by far the biggest commercialization that I I've been involved in, so they launched with over 200 million US as a Series A, so it's a little different problem or set of problems you usually have with a new startup company, or you know, you're chasing money, this is now you've got the money, but now you've got negative
Mina Tadrous 27:32
deliver on the exam. And
Michael LaFlamme 27:35
then a couple years later, they were actually fully bought out from buyer with a capitalization of a billion dollars. So people in tech, get except makes you a unicorn, I guess. Yeah. So an exit. So so it was, it's been exciting to see something go from zero to something like their last count. I think they were a little over 400 employees with like, between 150 and 200. Wow, this year, and just Toronto alone. Yeah. So that's been the most exciting and kind of gratifying part for me is, you know, in some small way, the work you've done in your laboratory has contributed to not just something that could be impactful for patients down the road. But right now,
Mina Tadrous 28:19
Michael's work had a clear line to commercialization. But how does this work in the digital health space? I spoke with Quynh about this. When you think about the journey, maybe the mature product or even products, you're thinking about, where do you see the hurdles to innovation, when you think about from idea to implementation, right? Were the hurdles that you're most worried about?
Quynh Pham 28:46
I would say the biggest hurdle to large scale implementation is just that the groups like mine who are building the solutions, we're not really set up to commercialize that, yeah, we're not Amazon offices that have procurement pathways that are able to do inventory management. You know, I'm mailing out I had staff putting together these Bluetooth weight scale blood pressure cuff kits that we were mailing out to patients, so that they could use medley. That is not an a great use of my staff's time. And how much can I scale that? Yeah, like medley is at Toronto General Hospital in heart failure clinics. 800 people use madly every day. So it's standard of care at Toronto General. But I can't really grow much bigger than that. Right, right. And so my impact or the implementation that I'm going to do is kind of at the local level, right? I continue to operate as a research group, which I always will the center will always be an r&d group. And so I think to overcome that hurdle, you need academic groups that are a little bit more business savvy. So you want to see this collaboration. Between ih PME. So my home Institute and Rodman, for example, you want to see a mixture of different skill sets coming together to solve this problem of scaling innovation. Yeah, because it's not always going to come from Delana, from public health, from health services research, you're going to need people who are able to apply teachings from aviation or from the food industry. Well, to scale these types of, of innovations out into the real world. And to know sort of the market forces that would allow you to do is have an understanding of that I didn't study any role. I don't practice that in my day today. And my lab hit a ceiling with madly where we just couldn't productize it any more than we already. Yeah. And so we needed to commercialize. And I would say that because it's so new, obviously commercializing in drugs, so molecules and things like that, that's sort of a well oiled machine, the relationship between academia and pharmaceuticals. That's not really the case with digital therapeutics. And so you don't really have a pathway to follow. We're building that right now. And so regulatory is a bit murky, you know, depending on if you're a class 123 software as a medical device, right? Yeah, it's very different. What you can say, or what you can claim, well,
Mina Tadrous 31:24
the regulators are also like moving on it, right? Like there. Yeah, there's this like, mood changing as we're speaking Exactly.
Quynh Pham 31:29
And then you have differences between Health Canada, the FDA, election, and you just, it's very dizzying. And also with the advent of artificial intelligence, and you're seeing more of these algorithms being launched with any electronic medical records, this is a new type of innovation, right. And it feels like our attention is so easily diverted it that I don't know that we figured out the app problem, but to the algorithm problem really, really quickly. Yeah. And I feel like as you know, as researchers, we have to stay, we have to sort of keep our eyes on the prize all the time, we need to be in the know, we have to be reading constantly, I try to get us on Twitter, which is now acts like I have to really keep up Yeah, current legislation, because I really feel like it's changing every day.
Mina Tadrous 32:20
Through this journey, and commercialization felt like the mountaintop like in all journeys, it's not always a straight line, as we heard, I wanted to explore the idea of failure, and the paths that it takes and how it looks. Here's Quynh
Quynh Pham 32:35
We really embrace failure, I think that one of sort of our mottos is to fail safely. Because we really want to be the environment where you can make mistakes at it at a research and development stage of innovation, which is where I would position the Center for Digital therapeutics, our goal is to be the safe space for people to come with their really cutting edge ideas and figuring out what doesn't work, we're meant to be able to provide that clarity to people so that they can have a better shot at building something that does work. And so I certainly embrace failure. And I see it very much as we are building a mountain of evidence, no, we're sort of whatever we generate in our group adds to the body adds to the literature of other universities of other centers of industry, you know, people around the world doing really similar work. We're not the first and we won't be the last to innovate in heart failure management, right, madly is not going to be the be all end all. There's not going to be one app that rules them all. Yeah. And so you're going to really see an ecosystem of these types of solutions. And you really want to learn from each other. Yeah. And I think that's good competition is good. And it will lead to improvements in technology over time. And so we've had a lot of ideas that we could not translate into technological form, right, where they really weren't usable. They weren't usable by the people who needed them most. They weren't usable in the moments where they were needed most, I suppose. And so we've learned a lot from that. And we apply, you know, human centered design principles, user centered design principles, human factors, engineering, a lot of theoretical principles to our work, to help us tease out where failure happens. So I would say that we're very failure driven, right? Because through those experiences, maybe not us, but somebody will find success, right. And so I'm, I've always been really motivated by this notion of collaboration rather than competition, even though you know, I think competition for later on, but at least within the scope of our group, all of our greatest ideas have been through collaboration have been through patients coming to us and expressing a concern that we thought we could solve, or US witnessing in Since in the clinic, you know, we have a lot of students who just go in observe what is happening within the hospital and picking up on things that really aren't working well. And then again, like, you know, world leading clinicians coming and sort of expressing issues that they would like to see solved with technology, it all comes down to collaboration and these really creative people who did not study how to build digital health solutions. But we did. And so together, we can build something really impactful. Here's
Mina Tadrous 35:30
Michael's take on failure. How does how does failure fit into your your story? And how do you view it?
Michael LaFlamme 35:37
How long is this podcast? Like? It's a list of all the things we've tried. That's part of the process, right? So I mean, you have these kind of breakthrough moments. Again, we're high fiving. In the lab, like I said, you know, first saw the sales beating, or we saw the sales flashing in animal heart or whatever. But for every one of those, you know, there's dozens of things that you try, it's always increment increment. Yeah. One of the things that was kind of my 2023, New Year's resolution, and I think I'm sticking to it, but it's definitely going to continue on in 2024, it's almost there is is writing up some of the things that we did that failed, those those are hard papers to get published, right? People are like, Why are you telling us this didn't work, but, you know, we've got a couple of them out this year. It's important, just, you know, in the scientific community, right, so somebody else doesn't make the same mistake. So, you know, so sharing that information, I think is, is part of the process. But that's, you learn what not to do? Yeah. And then you know, you have, oh, I always have a whiteboard that's full of ideas in the laboratory, we mark off that one and move down to the next one. So it's, you know, it's like everything else in life is kind of a continuous learning process.
Mina Tadrous 37:05
What a way to kick off season four, is to the exploration of two examples of innovation. We've now seen the journey from idea generation, to commercialization, and seeing all the steps and challenges, including potential failures that occur through this journey. We explored both a digital health tool example and a biotech example illustrating the importance of perseverance and adaptability in the face of all of these setbacks. The process of innovation is not a linear one, but rather a winding path that requires patience and resilience. Both researchers discussed how embracing failures and learning from them can ultimately achieve success and bring their ideas to life. We use these examples to kick off the season. But throughout the season, we'll be diving into each of these steps, and exploring more and more the steps of innovation.
This episode of The im pharmacy podcast was produced by Steve Southon, Kate Richards, and me Mina Tadrous. musical accompaniment was from Steve Southon and Diego Martinez. This episode was edited by Steve Southon. Special thanks to Dr. Quynh Pham and Dr. Michael LaFlamme. Just a quick reminder, make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you don't mind, leave us a five star review. We'll be dropping new episodes every single month. So make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Stay safe and keep asking questions. Catch you on the next episode.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai