Kara Santamaria

Like whether it's developing specific exogenous compounds to bind to receptors in the body, or it's actually developing new proteins

proteins, for example, or, you know, just working towards that intersection between what is already in the body, what is endogenous to the body, what is outside of the body that we can make like drugs, but also...

Yeah, exogenous.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Like drugs.

But also, I think even the word drug at this point, Steve, would you agree is sort of like, we need almost like a bigger word than the word drug, because now we're talking about all sorts of like synthetic biological compounds, and different elements and smart drugs and, and even potentially biological weapons that all sort of act like drugs in a way.

Right, that's therapeutic.

Well, then let's look at the flip side of that, because the way that biological therapeutics work, and there's myriad ways that they can work, depending on, like you mentioned, if we're talking about monoclonal antibodies or we're talking about synthesizing new proteins, blah, blah, blah.

But I think the key word that you mentioned there, and that's what makes them kind of fit within that drug or be related to that drug category, is therapeutic.

But of course...

any technology, any protocol that we use to make something that could help could also potentially harm, right?

And not just because of side effects or because it wasn't tested in full, but intentionally developing compounds that when they bind to certain receptors in the

cause downstream changes to, you know, the genetic coding will intentionally cause harm.

So now we're talking about bioweapons, right?

So what this data scientist talks about, basically, is that for all of our kind of biomedical history, we had benchwork.

Anybody who's ever worked in a bio lab has done classic traditional bench work and they've had to learn how to use all the machines.

They've had to learn how to test the pH and the osmolarity and, you know, pull out all the different buffers and compounds and mix together things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And this is like...

This is part of the experience of working in a lab.