Tissue Dynamics with Professor Yaakov Nahmias
In this episode of the FYI—For Your Innovation podcast, we welcome Professor Yaakov Nahmias from the Hebrew University. Yaakov is an Israeli bioengineer and an award-winning, industry-leading expert in his fields, who has worked in 3D printing and cellular research for the majority of his career. This two-part conversation will cover his work at Tissue Dynamics in the field of drug discovery and the production of cost-effective cultured meat at Future Meat Technologies. In this first part, we explore how Professor Nahmias is helping to advance medical research, drug discovery, and production of new medicines. We hear about his ideas that led to the founding of his company, Tissue Dynamics, and some of the problems that the company aims to fix. Professor Nahmias does a great job of explaining the complex issues of drug discovery. We discuss technological advancements, such as smart organ-on-chip technology, that could allow us to reduce the time it takes to find new drugs. For this and more, tune in! Key Points From This Episode: How Yaakov’s engineering background and philosophy led him to drug discovery The underlying climate that brought about the birth of Tissue Dynamics Reasons for the steep price increase of bringing a new drug to market How Yaakov has focused on trying to alleviate bottlenecks for drugs coming to market Technological advancements that have allowed progress in the field The smart organ-on-chip platform that Tissue Dynamics has built to track studies in real-time How Tissue Dynamics is interpreting the massive amounts of data it processes What Yaakov sees in the near future of health care and drug development Tweetables: “It turns out that a lot of the things that we find in mice don’t really translate and there’s many reasons for that. One is that mice have very different genetics to humans.” — Yaakov Nahmias [0:03:48] “A few years more of organ-on-chip research needs to happen before very reliable models can be used to study human immunology. But it’s there and it is definitely right there at the cutting edge.” — Yaakov Nahmias [0:21:21]