Armin Tahmasbi | Encapsulate

Transcript of: Armin Tahmasbi Rad | Encapsulate

Alan Olsen: I am here today with Armin Rad, he is the CEO and founder of Encapsulate. Welcome to today’s show!

Armin Rad: Thanks for having me!

Alan Olsen: Armin What lead you to the vision of starting the company Encapsulate?

Armin Rad: My Background is in cancer therapy. I got my PHD from UConn and my whole background (including my undergrad, masters degree and PHD) was in cancer therapy and I have mainly worked on pharmaceutical cancer therapy, but the fact that nowadays we have a lot of progress of coming  up with new type of ingredients that can cure cancer for one patient may not work for some,  so every day we have more and more approved drugs. This fact that we have numerous drugs these days, I as a PHD student my job was to have a look at more new drugs, but the other side, the market needs something different because of the fact that because now we have too many drugs and maybe there is something missing and so when it came time we thought that maybe the focus of our research is not oriented toward what market and clinic really needs, then you know we came up with this type of idea using this technology to find the best solution amongst the drugs that already exist rather than looking at new drugs every day.

Alan Olsen: So when you got your PHD what was the emphasis in?

Armin Rad: so my PHD was in nanomedicine and my background was looking at some type of carrier that we can target to do more. beside of that we have overlooked the system to test their nano medicines, their effectiveness, and how they can cure different types of cancer, so we doubled up that system as a branch off of the main project. but then when we went to the clinic and started working with different ecologists we figured out that that side project actually has a huge impact on the market and there is a huge need for that and with the support of the university and different entrepreneurial ecosystem that we have here in Connecticut we were able to define this as a real product and get it started as a real venture and now we are getting more and more successful every day

Alan Olsen: the name encapsulate, who came up with that name?

Armin Rad: Oh that is the funniest story, so initially our idea was having a system of nanoparticles from my PHD background using that as an encapsulator for different drugs, and then again on the side we have this technology which technically encapsulates its the tumors or patients cancer cells and creates tiny copies of that, so pretty much we were using this term that we can encapsulate this that and then we had a colleague who was a physician he actually came up with this, “Why don’t you name your company encapsulate? because it is a cool name.” and then we stuck with that.

Alan Olsen: There’s a lot of developments in cancer, how do you differentiate yourself, your company from what else is out there?

Armin Rad: What we do is actually, we take a biopsy from patients body and then we use kind of purify or dissociate the cancer cells and then create tiny of copies of the actual tumor which the patient has in their bodies and then we can create models which we can treat them with different possible treatments so advocate the best course of treatment for each treatment for each patient, so before going to any type of kimo therapy the ecologist can know the effectiveness of different drugs and the resistivity and if they can combine different drugs so instead of the current process which is kind of trial and error because the ecologist cannot predict what happens inside patients body so we choose one drug, we treat the patient with that for 3 months and then we check if the tumor is shrinking is size and it can take a few years to create the test for patient. During this time there might be a metastasis there might be severe effects of kimo therapy because they are toxic, we can tell the ecologist the possible effects that my happen inside the patients body for different possible treatments. Knowing the fact that these days we are not in lack of number of drugs for many of types of cancer we have more than 20 approved drugs and the difficulty is choosing the most effective on. We can provide an opportunity for the ecologist to have more information more experiment but in an acerated way very short period of timing in 2 weeks we can let them know the results and then they make the best decision on an individualized basis. the alternative for such system would be genetic testing but what they do is mostly some sort of prediction based on the database that they have so they see the genes of the patients or the type of mutations that we have on the tumor and then based on that we check if the previous database shows any sort of study or any sort of trend in terms of responsiveness of the tumor against against the particular drug however when things get more and more complicated especially after the first cycle of kimo treatment we have combinational therapy which we cannot predict when we have certain combination of mutations at the same time (which happens a lot) things get more and more complex to predict. It isn’t predicable. What we are offering is not prediction it is a acerated  experiment against patients actual tumor and they are showing the fact that this is what is happening inside the patients body the difference is that inside the patient whether we have a larger tumor so it may take longer time for seeing the same effect of the actual experiment.

Alan Olsen: In what stage are you at right now with the company? Do you actually have clinical trials going on?

Armin Rad: So we started our pilot studies with Uconnn health to technically this product can lead up to 20 types of solid tumors so we are not limited to the type of cancer however what we want to focus on is the most prevalent and the most fateful type of cancer. so we started with lung cancer we are working with a couple of ecologists at Uconn health and we just started out pilot studies to prove the fact that whatever we have shown till now in the lab scale can be reproduceable in the clinical stage as well and we are seeking partnership with more hospitals so in terms of the research and actual process, our vision is to start our clinic lab here in Connecticut and give service in pretty much every single patient in the new England area in the beginning and then make it adopted all over the country hopefully in four years, sot that is our region but in addition to that the technology we have has been awarded by international space station and NASA so we have an ultimation system that we are using as a platform for cancer research up in the space station. We hopefully can start giving service to other researchers for this craft which mimics the real tissue of the body much more accurately  than the other alternative.

Alan Olsen: I have been visiting here today with Armin Rad. He is the co-founder and CEO at Encapsulate. And for a person looking for more information on your company how would they do so?

Armin Rad: Thank you very much, they can reach us at LinkedIn and Also we have our website, www.encapulate.bio and we would be quite open to any type of partnership at this stage and thank you very much for having us here

Alan Olsen: Thank You Armin.

We hope you found this interview “Armin Tahmasbi Rad | Encapsulate” enjoyable.

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

Alan Olsen, is the Host of the American Dreams Show and the Managing Partner of GROCO.com.  GROCO is a premier family office and tax advisory firm located in the San Francisco Bay area serving clients all over the world and is a proud sponsor of the American Dreams Show.  For more interviews and information about the American Dreams Show, please visit our home page.

Alan L. Olsen, CPA, Wikipedia Bio

About Encapsulate:

Encapsulate is an automated tumor-on-chip system that grows patients’​ cancer cells ex vivo & tests the efficacy of chemotherapy drugs.

Source: LinkedIn