Synthetic Craft: Engineering the Future of Biology-Based Water Sensors
What role does synthetic biology play in ensuring the safety and quality of our water supply?
David Lloyd, the CEO and co-founder of FREDSense Technologies, and host Ravi Kurani discuss FREDSense's mission and the role of synthetic biology in their work. He explains how FREDsense uses synthetic biology to develop sensors that analyze water and generate actionable data, helping bridge the gap between existing analytics solutions and the needs of boots-on-the-ground personnel. He also talked about the company's iterative customer discovery process, which involved extensive interviews and market testing to ensure the sensors met users' needs. David also touches on the issue of PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), often referred to as "Forever Chemicals," and the importance of understanding their presence in water to treat and eliminate them effectively.
- 🔬 FREDsense uses synthetic biology to develop sensors that analyze water and provide valuable data for decision-making.
- 🌉 They aim to bridge the gap between the capabilities of existing analytics solutions and the day-to-day needs of field personnel.
- 🔄 The product development process at FREDsense involved extensive customer discovery, including interviews and market testing, to ensure the sensors meet users' needs.
- 💧 The company is actively involved in addressing the issue of PFAS, or "Forever Chemicals," in water and understands the importance of detecting their presence for effective treatment.
Listen on:
Meet David
David Lloyd is the CEO and co-founder of FREDsense Technologies, a company that leverages synthetic biology to create sensors for water analysis. His background is in synthetic biology, with a particular interest in how next-generation biotechnology can impact the world. David's journey into biochemistry was influenced by his father, an organic chemist who taught college-level chemistry. Throughout his career, David has been instrumental in guiding FREDsense's customer discovery process, which includes extensive interviews and market testing. He is also dedicated to addressing the presence of PFAS, or "Forever Chemicals," in water, underscoring the relevance of his company's work in everyday life.
The book, movie, or show
We ask everyone for their favorite book, movie, or show. This is what David had to say!
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Transcript
00:00
David Lloyd
And we've got the whole toolkit build out to be able to essentially explore how we can build our own sort of system. So we've gone all the way from just trying to understand the base of who we are and what is in our world to now we've got a whole toolkit that's been around for a decade really as a low cost solution now of you can go and build systems based off of biology to solve some kind of a challenge. We make something that is truly synthetic and move that into an application, whether it's a business application or just something that we can use to affect our world.
00:36
Ravi Kurani
Wow, I actually really love that analogy. I never thought about symbio as like a code base or even like a word processing document, but I kind of hear what you're saying. We finally first figured out that there's something called a word document, right? Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, the Business of Water, where we talk about technology, business, and finance and how it all looks around and feels around the world of water.
01:01
David Lloyd
Today.
01:01
Ravi Kurani
We have one of my really good friends, David Lloyd.
01:04
David Lloyd
Hi, I'm David Lloyd, CEO and co founder of FREDSense Technologies. We build portable tools to help utilities and consultants answer that age old question of do you know what's in your water? We do that using bacteria and synthetic biology to measure all the types of contaminants that you might find within a water system.
01:25
Ravi Kurani
David Lloyd probably one of the most intelligent people that I know. He's from the other side of the border up in Canada. And without further ado, I'm actually going to go ahead and hand it over to you, David. If you could just kind of tell us who you are, what you do, what is FREDSense the company that you're a part of? And yeah, I'll go ahead and hand the mic right over to you.
01:44
David Lloyd
Yeah. Thanks, Ravi. So excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Steven Lloyd. I'm the CEO and one of the co founders of Red Sense. I have a background in synthetic biology and how you can use next generation biotechnology to impact the world around us. And water, I think, is one of the most impactful spaces where we can do that. And I'm very thankful to lead a company called FREDSense Technologies. We build synthetic biology solutions and biotech solutions for the water space. So we take technologies that you'd oftentimes see in the life science area or biotech area, import that into simple to use kits and water quality tools for utilities or water management professionals to be able to answer that fundamental question of what's found in your water. There's a big gap right now between how we can do that with existing analytics solutions and what really boots on the ground people are trying to accomplish in their day to day lives.
02:47
David Lloyd
So we're trying to bridge that gap of using disruptive technology to get everyone's data needs met. So, yeah, we've been doing that for several years now with a group of really passionate scientists, engineers, and professionals, and they study Calgary, Canada. So excited to talk more about it.
03:05
Ravi Kurani
Cool. Awesome. Yeah, I've actually just even a few things in what you just said that I want to kind of double click into first for the audience out there, what is synthetic biology?
03:15
David Lloyd
Right.
03:15
Ravi Kurani
I think those are two words that people may not know. Can you explain that in kind of lay people's terms?
03:21
David Lloyd
Yeah, absolutely. So the way I like to think about it and most people are probably familiar with the idea of biotechnology, so using biology as a tool of some kind to influence the world, to help build products or services that are out there. Think about synthetic biology as sort of taking the engineering side to biotech and then building those types of systems and tools out for the world. So what we try to do oftentimes as scientists is we like to take biological systems apart and understand how everything works. So we like to understand how DNA, proteins, or these other different kinds of components that you might find inside of bacteria, people, plants, how they all work. Synthetic biology is trying to take an engineering approach to how can we create tools out of that DNA, out of that protein that we can use in a standardized way to build things.
04:12
David Lloyd
So just like you would buy a Phillips head screwdriver and a screw, and it doesn't matter where you go, you can buy those tools and you can put together a bookcase or something like that. Synthetic biology is trying to do that same thing. So how can we think about biology as an actual toolkit that we can use to engineer solutions across all sorts of industries and applications? Got it. Cool.
04:34
Ravi Kurani
And for kind of exploring that a little bit, what are some examples of that? That's like, super cool. I love how you say deconstructing biology to figure out its moving parts and then kind of reconstructing them into tools like this Phillips screwdriver to then go ahead and fix problems. I don't want to go too much into depth in this, but can you give us kind of the history of what's, like, the first experiment? When did somebody come across and be like, oh, let's deconstruct the biological system and figure out how it works to then reconstruct it forward?
05:03
David Lloyd
Yeah, it's such a cool development, and it sort of evolved from a lot of the early days of just understanding the building blocks of how we're made. And I think one of the biggest examples of a really pinnacle time in biotechnology that started to advance this idea of what symbiote could be was when we started to learn how to read, write, and edit DNA. So just like how we code in computers, how we build out these kinds of systems were fundamental to our understanding of how we can use genetics based or bio based systems to do things. The Human Genome Project I think is one of the biggest examples of something that really started to drive forward our understanding of who we are and what the world is. And it's kind of amazing to see what's happened there. So just our ability to read genetic code has moved from millions and millions of dollars of infrastructure cost and time to just try to understand what even the building blocks are inside of us to now we have the ability to be able to read whole genomes, whole sequences of what organisms are for.
06:20
David Lloyd
Very low cost, very high throughput. We have the ability to kind of look and see what everything is made up. And that's kind of given us the ability now to just get an understanding of what's going on in our world. It's kind of amazing how much we don't understand about the things that just live in the world around us. So we've got that ability to read and then what we started to get better at was chemically and synthetically and even organically start to write DNA. So how do you fundamentally move that from just understanding to now I want to build something, I want to replicate a gene or some kind of system that you can use to have all sorts of applications in the world. And we started to see that really early with sort of hijacking different enzymes and proteins that could cut or paste DNA.
07:10
David Lloyd
Kind of going back to the word processing example. So we've got the ones and zeros in a computer, so now we know what's there. Well, now we can kind of copy words in a document, start to move them around and change things. And we've sort of slowly over the last 50, 60 years built that toolkit up to move from being very expensive to actually something that's really cheap. So you can build a gene for just a few hundred dollars now from a large amount of the biotech infrastructure that exists, a gene that has some kind of function in an organism and we've got the whole toolkit build out to be able to essentially explore how we can build our own sort of system. So we've gone all the way from just trying to understand the base of who we are and what is in our world to now we've got a whole toolkit that's been around for a decade.
07:56
David Lloyd
Really? As a low. Cost solution. Now of you can go and build systems based off of biology to solve some kind of challenge or make something that is truly synthetic and move that into an application, whether it's a business application or just something that we can use to affect our world.
08:16
Ravi Kurani
Wow, I actually really love that analogy. I never thought about synbio as like a code base or even like a word processing document. I kind of hear what you're saying. We finally first figured out that there's something called a Word document, right? And then we opened up the computer and now were able to actually read this Word doc and there was a bunch of words inside there and paragraphs and sentences. And then we're like, cool, now we can read this. Let's go ahead and hit CTRL C Control Paste Control V and take parts and pieces of this thing and then reconstruct other Word documents with parts and pieces of this original one. Right?
08:51
David Lloyd
Kind of a quick question.
08:53
Ravi Kurani
Is there like a toolkit, are there like Lego blocks of those secondary Word documents that you can pull off the shelf just the way that we have like GitHub? Is there sin biohub or something like that's?
09:06
David Lloyd
Actually, it's funny you mentioned that. So there's a lot of different we call them registries and some of them are even called one of the big ones that I was involved with was a student based competition called iGEM being International Genetically Engineered Machines competition. And they developed something called the parts registry, which is just a standardized way of archiving, if you want to think about it. In the word processing analogy, all the sentences, all the words that we can use from a genetic point of view and what all those words and sentences mean, so that you can copy and paste them and put them together in different combinations to have different things happen. And there are oh gosh, at the time that I was involved, there were thousands of different genetic components that were being worked on within that Parts Registry. And now I'm sure there's tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of these unique components that are in the registry and it's all open source and available information so you can actually go and take a look at something, see what others have used it for.
10:15
David Lloyd
And that's one example of more student based competition. But there are a large number of these other systems that have been developed through different institutions and academic groups to just try to codify things, just try to understand, hey, when you have this gene, it encodes for some kind of protein that's going to give an organism this kind of function. And can we biological systems are complex, but can we kind of simplify down to say in a function based way, this is what's going on with this particular gene or word that we're going to use in this sentence and then translate that into whatever we want to?
10:54
Ravi Kurani
Super, super cool. That's awesome. So then if we kind of take this sentences and words analogy, let's fast forward to FREDSense really quick because I think there's obviously a direct tie in between you guys using synthetic bio. Walk us through the kind of nuts and bolts and the words and sentences, if I would, of FREDSense, right? How does the company work? What are you guys building? And how does synthetic bio kind of fit into that?
11:20
David Lloyd
Mo yeah, so we're fundamentally at our roots. It's kind of funny. We are a water company in our ethos and everything that we do. But if you look under the hood of red Sense, we look way more like a biotech company on the inside. And I'm sure to nobody's surprise because we're really utilizing this synthetic biology technology to solve a critical problem that has always existed but really emerged as a critical part of our needs in the water industry in the last decade. And the team and I a long while ago had recognized that there are these great untapped technologies that have been used in the biotechnology sector for quite a while to drive value in the space. So the idea of editing an organism or taking a bacteria and genetically modifying it so that it's able to detect a new compound is sort of well understood.
12:21
David Lloyd
So the technology and systems of kind of going out and examining all those books, examining all those genetic sequences in the world for all these different types of organisms has already been done largely. And we can rely on that information and look through those books and those archives of information to find unique genes and sequences that will turn on and off when a particular chemical is there. That's something that the biotech space have been looking at a lot. If you move over into the water space, the big challenge today there are many, but one of the big things of water quality is that people are really looking for ways to monitor, detect and drive insights around a huge number of different compounds. If you look at the different contaminant lists that are regulated just by the average drinking water utility, there are hundreds and hundreds of different types of contaminants that a utility may need to monitor and report on and know.
13:25
David Lloyd
Isn't in a drinking water source to make sure people are safe and that we're all protected and we have a clean source of drinking water. And that can be more or less difficult depending on what you might have coming into your system. So that's a massive challenge for a utility to just be able to say and understand what's going on within their water system, let alone being able to have the expertise and skill set and technology needed to monitor all of them or many of those different kinds of compounds. So that's where we can use this genetics based approach of saying, well, we can go find different genes that bind to all these different compounds. We can put them into an organism we design and then package that into a kit to make it easy for these operators to ask those kinds of questions and then be able to get the data that they need to drive decision making.
14:15
David Lloyd
And that can just be as much as I know I'm in compliance. I know I'm hitting my regulations. I know that the water I'm producing is safe, or it can even be asking questions around, well, we're treating this water. We're getting all those contaminants out. How efficient is that process? Are we able to optimize this? Can we see money by driving better decision making using this kind of analytics? And that's the big ethos that we have of how can we change fundamentally how we think about water quality and shift this whole idea of, hey, I'm a water treatment operator, or I'm just a utility field person. I can't get that kind of information. I need to send it to a lab, or I need to wait weeks to get that information. We want to be able to say, no, you can get the information you need to make those daily decisions and drive the insights that ultimately you're looking for to keep people safe and your water healthy.
15:12
Ravi Kurani
I love that so much. And kind of going back to what you said earlier, right? There is a big gap in the way that people currently measure water chemistry and kind of what you guys can do from like a water quality perspective to really build efficient feedback loops so we don't end up with issues with our drinking water. Right. And we've seen that plenty. And obviously, in a lot of the kind of developed world, I did work india before and kind of saw that firsthand, but what we thought was kind of safe water here in Canada and the US. Also is becoming questionable. And so that's super interesting that you say. That one kind of question that I have, or two, actually. I would love to learn kind of what is the Usability of a kit?
15:57
David Lloyd
Right?
15:57
Ravi Kurani
Because when I think of a sensor, you think of dropping, you think of your nest thermostat on the wall in your home, and it bolts to the wall, and it measures temperature.
16:05
David Lloyd
Right?
16:06
Ravi Kurani
People know what a temperature sensor looked like. They kind of know what other various sensors in the world look like. When you're designing an organism, does this come packaged as a solution? Does the solution degrade? Walk us through. What does this kit look like?
16:20
David Lloyd
Yeah, that's such a great question. It's a different sort of mindset to be in when you're designing around something that grows and develops and you need to keep alive inside of your system. So zooming. I'm going to zoom all the way in because that's where we've kind of been talking about. Now, what we've done is we put some genetic elements into an organism, into a bacteria that we use and essentially given it the superpower of when you see compound X. So maybe it's arsenic, iron, or lead or something like that. We need you to start producing a new chemical that we can detect. And what we've figured out is how to very sensitively detect some of these changes that this organism is making in response to a chemical using electrochemistry. We don't use light, we don't use color change or anything like that. We actually use current changes, electrochemistry, things that are pretty common to the environmental space.
17:17
David Lloyd
So PH meters, conductivity meters, all that kind of technology that we use. So we've got these systems, and the great thing about them is that living organisms replicate. So we grow our sensors as opposed to needing to build them on that kind of level. So we get bats and we let the organism chew on some sugars and other mixtures, and we get a bunch of them. And then what we can do is we put them into Regent packs and we call them cartridges. And so they're these small they hold very little water disposable systems, and each one of them contains the organism inside of a chamber that we dry down and sort of solidify so that the organism stays stable. So you've got this little reagent pack now with everything that you need to do a test. And it's just a little consumable. So you can think of it totally like this analogy, but you can kind of think about it as the sort of Keurig pod of water testing.
18:13
David Lloyd
As analogy, you got something that came with all the components that you need inside of it to do a test. And so we ship those out, and then you can fill that with water and put them into a detector unit that we've specially designed for testing these organisms. And you just slot it in and the whole system works autonomously to drive all the insights and data that you need in order to test your water. We spent a lot of time really thinking about form factor and design, because organisms can be finicky and data analysis can be complicated. And we want to simplify everything as much as we can for the user so that they can just get data that they need to make decisions. So we've done a lot of things like designing quality control data sets and making everything autonomous inside of the detector unit, driving things through portable battery packs so that you can take these anywhere, and you don't have to worry about being plugged into a wall, gathering GPS data and time data.
19:17
David Lloyd
So when you get the output and you see, okay, the test is done, you don't just get sort of a single reading. A big problem with a lot of other tests that we found was that it's easy to just kind of have to look at a color or on a strip and compare that to a wheel, and the end user has to do all the interpretation and there's questions and yeah, you know what I'm talking about here, right? We wanted to try to take all of that complexity out. So you just get a report of we think there's this much of that contaminating your water. This is why we think that these are the controls we ran. This is why we think that number is accurate. Or we think there's something in your water that you need to look at because it's causing an issue with the test.
20:03
David Lloyd
And this is when you ran it. This is where you ran it. Package that all up. So that all you have to do as an end user is look at it and then make a decision on what you want to do with your process. So it's a full workflow, sort of cradle to grave up. How do we design solutions and methods and technology to how is that going to represent itself within an actual use case to drive the data? Because ultimately, at the end of the day, we're hardware companies, but we're really data companies. We're producing insights and so the hardware is just how we get to that endpoint and we want to make it as simple as possible to drive that kind of decision making.
20:45
Ravi Kurani
I love that so much. That's so awesome. I love this cradle to grave analogy, too, of just you don't leave it in the middle, right? You don't just give them the data. You give them the recommendation. You give them the insight. And then more importantly, you combine other elements like the geo data, right? Where were you? What time of day was it? That information is so important because you're right, if you look at the existing methodology of a test strip where somebody's just looking at a color wheel and then writes it down on a logbook, that becomes problematic. I want to go back a little bit to that curie example. I love this analogy of you basically give the bacteria superpowers and you're like, hey, when you see this compound arsenic, go ahead and emit X current, right, or X millivolt signal that you guys then pick up.
21:37
Ravi Kurani
Does the Keurig pod, does the dried up teria have a lifespan to it? Like, can you only use it once? Does it regenerate by itself or do you kind of use it once and then you have to throw it out? Or is it different for kind of each test that you guys make it off of?
21:50
David Lloyd
Yeah, so there was a lot of work we did in the early stage of product development to really try to understand form factor fit and how that aligns with the technology because there's lots of different kinds of water quality solutions for different types of applications that are really necessary. And what we decided to land on and what we thought was the right opportunity for our technology system was to develop a portable analyzer that you could carry around and take with you to multiple different locations. That was reagent and cartridge based for a single use application. And a big reason for that was that we found a couple of things. One was that for a small utility or a medium sized utility, it was very difficult to justify cost to buy large online instrumentation or expensive real time systems that you had to put over a large area.
22:50
David Lloyd
So if you're a small community, maybe you've got groundwater wells, you really might only be able to afford a couple of water quality instruments, especially when you think about the burden of operator time and ensuring that those things are going to be calibrated and working. So when went in and did a lot of this discovery and really understood what some of the products were very purposeful in how we designed that system. And because our technology grows and we stabilize it by through this kind of drying down process that we take it through, we also recognized that the components needed to be used within a certain amount of time. So our components are stable for about six months. You can refrigerate them and get them long term storage potential, all of that. And so that makes it easy. And then by having this more platform based portable kit system, it allows you to really figure out where you want to use the technology and apply it over an area versus having to be focused in one particular data stream that you're going to produce one particular water system.
23:57
David Lloyd
So we're very purposeful in that. And the other added benefit to that. And this kind of goes back to the fact that there are these hundreds and hundreds of contaminants that we have to monitor. You're very rarely asking the question, I just want to know one thing and then I'm good. I really want to understand a whole bunch of things so that I can put that data together and drive some bigger decisions. And so by having this sort of portable base unit and the disposables, you can pick the different sensors that you want and put them all into the same solution to drive those insights.
24:30
Ravi Kurani
Got it? Got it. Super cool. And one thing I actually really admire of the FREDsense team and kind of what you guys have done is people probably didn't notice it in what you were just talking about right now, but there was a ton of interviewing, a ton of product development. Can you walk us through? And for a lot of the folks out there that might be part of larger companies interviewing and this kind of constant Iterative abilities is a little bit different than their current day to day. Right? Walk us through what that process looks like just from the product development. Who did you guys interview? How do they interview? And I think the really interesting thing is, was there any paths that you started to go down where you were like, that's not a good idea?
25:10
David Lloyd
Right?
25:11
Ravi Kurani
We don't want this really big lab based thing. We need to go portable. I think it's super interesting to kind of understand how those insights come about when you run a product development process.
25:20
David Lloyd
Oh, gosh, yeah, and I probably do it completely different now than how we did it before. So many learnings through getting out there and just understanding. And I love early startup innovation space like this because it causes you to be so iterative causes you to have to think so carefully about generating customer insights, generating that voice of what you're really designing for. And in the early days of FREDSense bit of history on us, we came out of a technology competition. So we came out of this iGEM competition where we developed this idea of the biosensor platform first and then decided, okay, there's so much potential in this technology, we want to go and commercialize it and take it forward. And we had that age old problem that I think a lot of startups get into where they develop tools. So you've got the hammer and you are looking for a nail.
26:25
David Lloyd
You're looking for that right market. There's so many things that you could apply it to and it can be daunting and difficult. And to understand exactly how do you match value proposition, how do you match those solutions that you need to the core platform? And so where we actually started at the beginning of all of this is we developed the technology in collaboration with a number of industry stakeholders in the Alberta ecosystem. And here in Alberta, Canada, we have a large amount of oil and gas influence. So were really tailored towards how we could help support with environmental applications, to monitoring. So were doing a lot of tailings monitoring. We were looking at environmental impacts or effluent water that might be going to some kind of discharge. And so were looking at the oil and gas space and saying, okay, this is our market, this is what we're going to design for.
27:18
David Lloyd
We were looking at sensors within the space. And it wasn't until we really started to have conversations within the industry to really understand, okay, this is one aspect of what we could be building and we want to contribute here, but is this the right market and the real right fit for what kind of solutions are going to be needed? And that became really important when we looked at examining all these other markets. We spent a lot of time going and talking to stakeholders, cold calling up people, asking for time to have a discussion about what was really going on with their water quality, generating insights and then testing things in the market in different markets to understand what could be valuable. So our first customer is actually an inbound lead that came to us because were testing the idea of an arsenic value proposition on our website.
28:14
David Lloyd
And the city contacted us and said we have a major challenge with this. We are looking for solutions. We would absolutely be interested in this. Is this something that is available? And when we sat down and started to have subsequent conversations. Realized, okay, we see this as a market. We see this as a way for us to start delivering value, a first sensor on our platform, and we know it's going to be a right fit for the application and then we could build that out and start to examine different areas. So it took a lot of Pivoting to use the startup lingo to figure out where the right application is. And when you're a small organization, you have to be so particular and careful on how you do that work, because the implication is, of course, just larger in the organization. You need to make sure that you've really connected the dots between what's the value and what is the technology that can be delivered.
29:12
David Lloyd
And for platforms that require longer development times. And what I mean by that more is just when you're in the world of hardware, period, and you can't just code something overnight and try something up. You've got to be so purposeful and careful in that. So I think we learned early and I'm so thankful for this lesson, that customer discovery and that understanding of who you're really delivering value to is probably the most important part of any technology development process. Then, whether you're in a big company or a small company, being connected to the people who you're affecting and developing solutions for or already delivering something for and engaging them and really hearing in their voice what they're trying to tell you, I think is so important. But I'd be curious, Ravi, your perspective on that too, because I know you've done a ton of this work as well.
30:07
David Lloyd
What did you really take away from that and going through the process?
30:11
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Oh my gosh. I think you really hit the nail on the head with making sure that you connect with your customer. It was really important with kind of my other job that I have during the day, which is also building a water sensor, but separately, just in the amount of founders that I mentor from the different programs around the bay. It's funny how scared early stage founders are of rejection because they don't want to go out there and get the know from the customer. But I always tell them, get to the no quicker than you can get out of the building. Right. You need to connect with that customer. And the earlier you get the no, the better because then you're not spending your time building something that the customer would say no to later, that you've then drained financing on and your time.
31:00
Ravi Kurani
Right. And so important to connect with your customer. Down from picking up that phone to running website, changing that word on your website to say, arsenic and getting an inbound lead to. I'm sure you guys have taken a bunch of site visits, right? Like, being in person with somebody, your customer and really figuring out what the problem is just so important and so key into figuring that out.
31:24
David Lloyd
Yeah. And I think one unique thing about water, for anybody who's interested in the space, the water industry is a rush to be second when it comes to adopting new innovative technologies. And for good reason. There's a lot at stake in adopting a new treatment process or a new type of tool and making big decisions that can affect a lot of people. And so because of that, I think there's even more burden than there would regularly be on doing that customer discovery and really understanding the needs because you're going to hit those no's and keeping an eye out for what that's going to be and where it's going to come from and how to pivot away from them. I think it's just going to be so critical in this industry, maybe even more than the traditional startup founder might have to experience.
32:10
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. I have a question. One, it's really interesting seeing the founder story and kind of how they got to where they're at. If you kind of go back to your upbringing and what your parents did, when you're walking down the road, you never see a through line. But when you look back now, Hindsight 2020, do you see a through line? You're like, oh, that thing that I did when I was ten years old. My dad was a biologist. I don't know. What's that story, David?
32:41
David Lloyd
Yeah. I grew up in a place called Medicine Hat, Alberta, about 3 hours out of Calgary, for people who might know the area. My dad was an organic chemist, and I remember growing up, so he taught like 1st, 2nd year chemistry at the college there. I remember saying, I never want to do that. Sounds horrible. Never want to be a chemist. My mom was a teacher and sort of grew up with the idea of science, technology. I was a big nerd. Big surprise, right? Big nerd growing up. So exactly everything you would imagine with that was who I was. And I think it's funny to think about some of the things that we do as kids or in our development that really become more prominent later on. I always had a real connection to water. So I was a lifeguard, a swimmer loving in water, and I think in Alberta.
33:37
David Lloyd
Grew up with very little appreciation for the idea of water scarcity and water resourcing outside of the community that I was in and how critical that is, and hard for some groups to even get access to. And so in a way, I've always been connected to the water side. And when I went into college, sort of had to figure out where did I want to go? And the plan was I was fascinated with the idea of medicine and health and how to do that. And so, speaking of customer validation, I waited way too long to actually go and shadow someone in that career. And I'll always remember the first time I shadowed a dentist and they had to do a reconnect and went, this is not for me, I'm never going to do this is not going to be my future. And started getting really fascinated with okay, I need to go.
34:25
David Lloyd
What is it that really drives me and that I'm really passionate about? And I love learning. I love learning about more the medical side of how things work and understanding the world. That ultimately was what led me into biochemistry. And it's funny looking back, the things that I would say, no, I'm never going to be a chemist, I'm never going to work in that space, being surrounded by that. And I think just having that influence my dad was always very into science and technology and inspiring that in our family. I think that's ultimately what kind of led me to where I decided to go in biochemistry and synthetic biology. And I was very fortunate that in my undergrad I got involved in this Igen competition that I spoke about earlier. And that for me was sort of the AHA moment of oh my gosh, using biology to solve these big world problems and make a real impact and sort of connecting all these different things that I was passionate about and wanting to do.
35:24
David Lloyd
That was a moment for me that said this is what I want my life to really be about. And I think it's funny full circle, now that we're in the water space, we're using this kind of disruptive technology. I think it's very focused and interesting how it's sort of developed over time.
35:42
Ravi Kurani
Inspiring.
35:42
David Lloyd
That's super cool.
35:44
Ravi Kurani
I actually never knew that story. David, thanks for sharing. We have a few more minutes left. I actually wanted to jump over to what everybody's talking about today, which is PFAS. Can you kind of explain, first of all, just what is PFAS? Why is it bad for us? And then what's the work that FREDsense is doing? How are you guys helping in measure, monitor and correct?
36:05
David Lloyd
Yeah, absolutely. So PFAS is part know, for listeners who might not have heard of PFAS as part of the forever Chemicals umbrella and emerging contaminants. We like to use these big scary words that I don't think are really representative because these aren't really emerging, they've been there for a long time. But they're these challenges that we're starting to see where they're very difficult to detect and treat. Contaminants that we're starting to discover and better define have health impacts to communities and to people and that we are starting to move towards regulations. And PFAS is such an interesting set of compounds. So they're a class of these compounds that were used in sort of non stick coatings or fire retardant material applications and so they're in almost everything. I think it's probably a shorter list of putting together a list of materials that they're not in versus levels that they've been used in and what we found is at very low levels, they compose a pretty severe and pretty concerning health risk.
37:15
David Lloyd
So many states and now the federal government are moving towards regulations on these compounds. And what makes them uniquely difficult to do something about is that we're detecting them at incredibly low levels. So into the part per trillion level. So to give you an idea, a part per million is like a drop of water in a bathtub. A part per billion is a drop of water in Olympic sized swimming pool. A part per trillion is like a drop of water in 20 Olympic sized swimming pools. It's very small amounts of this compound that we need to measure. So the analytics challenge and just trying to understand where is it and how do we detect it, is huge and normal technology. Well, normal existing technologies don't oftentimes work for this class of compound because they're designed to be super stable. They don't react with anything. What they do like to react with and work with and part of their toxicity in the body is that they like to bind proteins.
38:17
David Lloyd
So we are uniquely suited as a water testing technology to help support with monitoring PFAS. So we can detect very small changes in signals, very dilute concentrations, very low concentrations. And we have a mechanism of being able to detect these PFAS compounds. So we're really excited at FREDSense to be able to be part of the solution of Forever Chemicals, because before we can treat them and get rid of them, we need to understand where they are and what's happening with them. So we're going to be launching a portable field kit system for PFAS. We're really excited to be doing that probably in the next couple of quarters year. So you'll start to see some of the work that we're doing to transition PFAS, testing out into the environment and getting into the hands of people who are really trying to understand what to do about this.
39:10
David Lloyd
And that's going to be well in line with what we're seeing from the regulatory side, where we may be moving towards even as close as a year from now to starting to have to test PFAS in drinking water systems, which is going to be really expensive. And we need better solutions for communities to really understand what's going on.
39:29
Ravi Kurani
And from kind of a health perspective, what's the risk of having too much PFAS in your water? And I guess the second question is in the future, when FREDSense is able to actually sense it, how do you correct for that? Do you go through like a cleaning process? Do you filter the water? What does that look like?
39:47
David Lloyd
Yeah. So there have been a number of community issues that have existed already where elevated levels of PFAS have resulted in some health implications for community members. Some of the sort of unique things around PFAS is that if you have too much in your body. It can actually prevent vaccination from working effectively. It can affect your immune system. It can have cancer implications. It's something that you don't want in your system at all. And because they're so stable, they can bioaccumulate in your body. And I think that's really what's driving a lot of the concern is that it's not so much of you drink one glass of water with a metaphys in it. Oh, gosh. It's not like a metal or something that you're putting in your body that could have a really dramatic effect immediately. But over time, more and more of the PFAS exposure to you as an individual can be detrimental to your health.
40:47
David Lloyd
And that's what they're really concerned about with setting these very low limits around it. And what you were mentioning there Ravi, about, well, what do we do about it once we figure it out? We're lucky that there are some pre existing technologies that we know remove PSAs. So GAC, or activated carbon ion exchange resins, things that you can purchase and even use as a consumer are treatment solutions that can work for PSAs, and that these are systems that also work on a large municipal scale. And there's a lot of work being done right now on new treatment technologies to not just capture and sort of get it out of the water, but also destroy it, which is a really critical part of the whole nexus of what we're going to do about this contaminant. And that's where we all work together. So monitoring is one part of the solution, but treatment is the other, so that you can really build a low cost solution to ultimately keeping these contaminants outside of your water system.
41:51
Ravi Kurani
I had to sneeze really quick.
41:53
David Lloyd
Oh, I do.
41:55
Ravi Kurani
All right, I'm going to put a marker there. Cool. Actually, two last questions. David, I know we're coming close to time here. I love to ask this question. Was I was today years old that I learned x, you've obviously been in this world for a long time. What is something that you know that the audience doesn't know and they can go home and be like, man, I listened to this really cool interview with David and now I know this one little nugget of information.
42:21
David Lloyd
Oh, gosh. I think one thing that has always blown my mind is how we can use synthetic biology to change the world around us. That biology is actually going to be the key to, I think, solving some of the biggest challenges that we have across every industry. And that if you wanted to build an organism or do something now to build something synthetic that can make a difference or detect something or break something down, that you can start producing these kinds of things for less than $100. And so it's sort of a mind shift change for me to start thinking about. This isn't something that's happening in university labs completely locked away and you have to be part of the Ventor Institute who ran the Human Genome Project to get involved in this kind of stuff. This is something that's accessible and something that we're starting to think about.
43:16
David Lloyd
And so maybe you need to think a bit more about how biology and synthetic biology can be applied to what you're doing in your day to day life.
43:25
Ravi Kurani
Super cool. Love that last question. What is a book or movie or Netflix show, whatever it is that you're either watching right now or has had just a monumental impact in kind of the way that you think about things.
43:42
David Lloyd
So I think something that is so key, first of all, so many things. The one that I'm reading right now that I've just really appreciated is I'm reading a book called Radical Candor. And I think the number one most important part of any organization is the people that you support and get to be with you on the journey and being able to work through. I think in the context of everything we've talked about today, just in terms of customers and product development, being able to empower people and have conversations and talk openly and honestly about where you're going has just been the most important part of my personal development. And really, like a lot of the points in this on how do you have open conversations, I think the tagline and you'll have to edit this, if I can't say it, is how to be a good boss without becoming be an open boss without becoming an asshole.
44:43
David Lloyd
And so that's something that I've really been enjoying. And I find that's a lot of what's on my shelf is these books around how do you build great culture, how do you inspire people? Because I think that's the most important skill set that's needed in any organization.
45:00
Ravi Kurani
It's awesome. I love that you're training bacteria to find super polluting compounds, and at the same rate, you're reading books on how to make sure that you treat people properly to actually build the organization that you want. It's awesome. You're building cultures. You're building cultures on both sides. Not to have a pun, but that's awesome.
45:19
David Lloyd
David really cool.
45:19
Ravi Kurani
Love it. David, thanks a ton for coming on the show. This was a super insightful conversation. I learned a ton about synth bio, and I hope the audience is as well. You can find liquid assets wherever you listen to your podcasts, whether that be Apple or on Spotify. You can go to liquidassets CC to learn more. And David's interview will be live on there. David, thanks again for coming on the show.
45:41
David Lloyd
Thanks, Ravi. Have a great day.