Joshua Wang: Reprogramming Cancer, Biotech’s Funding Shift & Why AI Will Rewrite Biology – E628
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
47 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A lot of these cancers also unfortunately are very are detected way too late, like variant cancer, pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma, l late stage lung cancer. It's all too late by the time you know some, you know, because of what we have. And and so we're trying to develop this new arm of of how to target cancer. You guys are trying to figure out whether the cancer is still there or you know, can you detect it earlier on? And actually the earlier you detect it, the earlier It is easier to treat it, right? 'Cause I actually think that in the long term, you know, if we could also improve diagnostics. uh, you know, to detect more early disease, that would actually help the therapeutic space, uh, also because
You can go in earlier and you can treat problems earlier, just like anything in life.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on Success. I'm Jeremy Al, Venture Capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesa.com. Stay well and stay brave. Hey Joshua, so excited to have you. Your f first episode with us was in episode two hundred and two and you're off to change the world. So so glad to see you after three years.
Yeah, thanks for having me back on the show. Um I'm glad I'm still around fighting the good fight. How have you been? Yeah. I know you're s celebrating your My birthday today. Big milestone. Thanks again for doing this while I
Hustle in
all the time.
Uh I mean I I think a podcast is a hobby for me, right? So I think it's nice and relaxing. Joshua, could you introduce yourself for those who don't know you?
Yeah, sure. So uh just to recap, I'm Josh Wang. I'm the founder and CEO of Bermune Inc. Yeah. We're a biotech startup focusing on creating this novel delivery system that can target many different kinds of diseases, such as cancer, which is our lead program, but we're also looking at other inflammatory diseases. I'm a vaccine scientist by training. That's my background. Um that's why I did my scientific PhD in. And I'm I'm a Singaporean. I was born and raised. Yeah but I was trained overseas and the last time I was on this podcast I talked about my son and he he's a lot all older now. He's uh I think he calls himself a boy. He's not even a toddler. So yeah, I think things are good.
No, and I think, you know, you have shared such a fascinating story back in episode two hundred and two. Uh you shared about obviously your journey as somebody who's studying business and then you went on to eventually transition and transfer into science at Imperial College. And then you talked about how you became a PhD and then how you eventually became a founder across two different startups. And we also talked about how we met my God, almost over ten years ago. Yeah. Oh my god, time flies, right? Tranquilizing. Time flies. So to recap, we first met each other at the Harvard Innovation Lab. And we were the only two Singaporeans at that point of time. Then um What's your I guess the third was uh Desmond, right?
A couple of us, yeah. There was uh a couple of uh there was another I had a co founder also yeah, so it was a couple of us around there fighting the good fight.
And we were always like, you know, in in Boston it's always like, you know, you're like, I don't want to presume that you're Singaporean, but based on your accent. My accent is
pretty clear.
So you always side-lap. You're like, well, are you Singaporean just in case? So that's how we got to know each other. Yeah. So time flies. Uh and obviously it was in interesting is for you to obviously continue building out this vaccine approach of tricking cancer and your immune system into kind of like nuking each other. So could you explain what the full vision of what your current startup will do if he succeeds?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:01
2
What is VerImmune’s strategy for reprogramming the immune system to fight cancer?
5:01–13:40
3
How does VerImmune use viral‑like markers to make cancer cells visible to immune cells?
13:40–26:19
4
Why does cancer evade the immune system and how does the therapy overcome immune‑suppressive environments?
26:19–47:52
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
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