Company Turnarounds And AI For Infectious Diseases With Seek Labs' Jared Bauer

Welcome back to the business of biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, chief editor at Life Science Leader. And today, I'm speaking with Jared Bauer, cofounder and CEO at SeekLabs, an AI driven biotech focused on discovering new genetic targets for infectious diseases globally, as well as developing point of care molecular diagnostics and programmable therapies to treat those infectious diseases. SeekLabs has partnered with government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA through the agency's DARPA Connect program and the US Department of Defense's medical CBRN or chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense consortium, as well as the global African swine fever research alliance. Speaking of which, SeekLab's published an interesting paper on a CRISPR based therapeutic for African swine fever last November, which we'll talk about. Jared came to the biotech industry indirectly with a desire to turn around failing companies, a trick he managed to pull off previously with Exxero Medical. I'm excited to chat with Jared about what it takes to turn around a company, why he decided to focus on infectious diseases with Seek Labs, how a technology convergence helped create the company's gene ablation platform, and the role that corporate culture and service plays in a company's health. Thank you so much for being here, Jared. Pleasure to be here, Ben. Thanks for your time. Thanks for joining. You did a short stint at Apple prior to ending entering your MBA program at Boise State, University. I don't have a lot of folks on the podcast that worked for Apple even briefly. I wonder if you could tell me what that was like. So it was a brief stint at Apple, but it was cool. It was a bucket list item for me. I've always been I I am one of those Mac fanboys. I fall deep into that category. Used to spend time on Mac rumors and Mac daily news to see what are they gonna announce next. So when I had a chance to work for Apple, I jumped at that opportunity. I'll just give you kind of two quick anecdotes from my time at Apple. So I got to spend a fair bit of time in Cupertino. And on one of those trips, we got, it was actually for the iPad launch. There was an email that went out late, late at night and it was from Steve Jobs and it was company wide. And so, and and I opened the email immediately. I'd never received an email from Steve Jobs, so I was pretty excited about that. Popped it open and he was inviting us to a town hall. And so the very next morning, I woke up at probably 5AM and drove over to the campus, the old campus, and walked into their town hall, which is what they call their auditorium. Stood in line. I was probably five or number five or six, standing in line and got to go in and hear from …