What other areas can you take this into? Like you have the medical field, you have meat, you have coffee. Are there other areas that you're looking at where you want to bring this technology?
So the simple answer is to ask you what is on this planet built from cells. And once you start to think about it, you understand that a lot. But we need to be focused and do one by one. Obviously, therapeutics and pharmaceuticals, that's a big wave that is coming. Regeneration, healing.
YY, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're the CEO of Pluri, and tell us about that. That's a biotech company specializing particularly in 3D cell technology, which is fascinating. Tell us what all that means and how you became the CEO.
Thank you for having me on the show. I'm looking forward to this discussion. For me, becoming a CEO and as I actually came to the biotech industry, it's a little bit of a funny story. I came to this industry because of a graph, which I don't think happens too much in life. I came to the biotech industry because of one graph that showed the change in life expectancy. I saw this graph 20 years ago, which basically said, 'Well, humanity, you have doubled your life expectancy in the last 150 years.' And I said, 'Oh gosh, that can be.' I took a deeper look into that and after a good investigation, I understood that that's the place where I want to be: biotechnology, life science, creating a better future for all of us. The way that I'm doing it in Pluri, and the way that we do it, is using cells. We are using different cell types to create products that all of us need, from healthcare, food security, and more. That's a quite fascinating industry and company that I have, and I feel blessed to work in this industry.
What do you mean by cells? What is 3D cell technology? Give us a breakdown of that.
So 3D technology is a way or technology to grow cells. Let's go one step earlier in the process. The one thing that I know, and it's very obvious but still shocking, is that cells are the building blocks of life. Everything on this planet is built from cells. You are built from cells, I'm built from cells, but also our food, pets, whales, bacteria—every organism on this planet is built from cells. Once I realized that, I felt like in the movie The Matrix, that you start to see the matrix and you see it breaking down. What I've been doing since I got this understanding, almost two decades ago, is creating products out of this tiny organism, the most important one. This is what brought me to the industry: how we create new ways to treat human beings in order to allow ourselves to age gracefully and to be able to continue to treat our patients. You are based in the US, I'm sure you see the healthcare spending going all over the Western world. I understood that we need to find new ways to treat human beings and to reset our healthcare system, basically moving from the sicker system that we have today to a healthcare system. I think that cells, in my opinion, are the most amazing and important agent in order to regenerate our body, for the simple reason that our body is built from cells. So let's treat it with healthy cells to create regeneration and not hospitalization and not extremely invasive treatments that we're using today. We're holding a very dedicated and smart system, our body, in respect, and with the right agent. Since then, I've become a great believer in cells and the ability to create different products out of them.
So you recently did something like the cell-based coffee production where you reduced water usage by 98%. Give us a sense for that accomplishment. That's really interesting.
Yeah, so Pluri, we are based in Israel, headquartered here. Very technological company, about 30 employees, and we have more than one patent for every employee, so like 140 patents in the company. Very strong technology platform. The way that we operate is by creating a kind of collaborative network of companies that all rely on our platform but operate as a standalone unit. We always use the same platform, the three-dimensional expansion platform that can expand cells in a very effective way. We are actually seeking places where there is a need for cell-based production. By identifying the need, we always operate in the same manner: we identify the need, we find a collaborative partner that knows how to do the go-to-market, and we open an activity that's solely focused in that industry. This is a strategy that we started to implement a few years ago, and we were able to do it quite effectively, creating companies for different applications. One of the most interesting industries that we operate in today is around our subsidiary that we call CoffeeSite. I actually got a call from one of the largest coffee companies in the world a few years ago, about 18 months ago, and they told me, 'Hey Yaky, we are following your technology and we're seeing your IP and we're seeing that you are actually expert in cell expansion. Can you do cultivated coffee?' I literally started to laugh on the Zoom. I told them, 'Well, why the hell do you need cultivated coffee? What's wrong with the nice green plant?' And they said, 'Yeah, you know, in like 20 years we're going to lose half of the global production of coffee because of climate change. We already see the phenomena and that's going to come big time.' And I love coffee, and I said, 'Okay, we're not going to let it happen.' We did a proof of concept to see if we can use the same method that we are growing placenta cells for therapeutics, or we are using animal cells—we have also a company in cultivated meat that we partner with a few of the largest companies in the world. We said, can we grow the same thing on plants? So taking a biopsy from a coffee plant once and using then our machine, this bioreactor system that can grow cells very effectively, in order to create coffee on a high scale but not correlated to weather, rain, or whatnot. And we did it. We were able to show that we can grow cells on mass, and we built this beautiful company, CoffeeSite, that will operate around coffee as well as cocoa. Because whatever I told you about coffee, same thing about cocoa. We are not maybe fully aware of it, but you can see it on the prices. Coffee prices went like five times higher in the last five years. So the prices are going through the roof because the change of climate creates less production, it means that you're going to pay more, and it means that humanity probably needs to find new ways to produce what we used to take from other land. But today it's a little bit more difficult with the number of people that we have and the massive climate change that we currently witness. That's my life, quite interesting.
What has it been like to be based in Israel during all of this?
You know, I was born and live in Israel, other than like five years that I lived abroad. I like the land. I breathe better when I'm here in Israel. This is for me like my homeland, and I'm going to do everything for this country. Obviously, we are in not an easy situation in the last year and a month. But Israel, all the Israelis are actually revealing their best. Because from one hand, we are facing severe conditions on our borders. Israel is a nation of creation, of innovation, of providing wealth, health, and prosperity to this world. We see that as our mission. Unfortunately, not always the case with our neighbors. But from one hand, we are facing this severe situation on our borders, but Israel today is at their best. So I speak a lot with my friends, and it means that we just need to be more strong, resilient, smart, and devoted to our mission. I can tell you that not me and none of my friends missed a deadline or didn't deliver a project or asked for anything, because we are here to do it. We're here to deliver, and we're going to do it. Things will get better, and Israel will prosper. This is a unique nation and unique human beings that live here, and I am very optimistic of how the coming few months are going to look like. Especially, I believe that once this war will end, it's going to be quite amazing. The prosperity is going to kick back. But as you can see, I like this country.
What does a typical day look like for you?
A typical day, as much as a typical day can look like for a CEO. I wake up very early in the morning, like 5:00 a.m. I'm already up. I'm a big believer in routines, so I build my routines. There are days that I'm here in Israel and there are days that I'm traveling, which are a little bit different. I'm a scheduled human being, so I plan my week. I know how it looks like. I come here in the morning, I do my morning prayers that give me a good start to the morning, do my sports which give me lots of energy to my body, and I go to the office relatively early. I like to have this quiet hour before I start. I build my routine so every week I have the management team meeting that people know what to do. I meet my staff on a regular basis Sunday and Monday. So before the US market is waking up, for me it's Monday afternoon, I'm actually done with the internal meetings and then I go for the external meetings. I start early, I work relatively until late, and then come back to the family and three lovely daughters. Not all of them are already at home, but some of them left the house. This is how it looks like.
Tell me about cultivated meat.
Cultivated meat is something that we're seeing in the last decade. I think that we understood as human beings we need to be a little bit more kind to the motherland, to Earth. We cannot abuse it the way that we abuse it today for animals and whatnot. People are seeking for solutions: can we grow or get the same product by manufacturing it differently? That's the main concept. I'm in the biotech field for two decades, so for me, when I'm seeing a cow or a chicken, I see them as a bioreactor, like our bioreactors. But this is like God-made bioreactor. They are actually growing cells. This is the one method to grow cells in a very effective way that nature created. But we can grow the same system. We can go under the same concept by using not a box that we call a cow, but a real bioreactor built from stainless steel that we control the environment. What we are doing is taking a biopsy from an animal, any animal, and we can proliferate these cells, grow the cells, expand the cells using our system. The key thing, and this is one of the main advantages that we have, is the ability to have full control on the production. You need to control many, many parameters in order to get the cells to proliferate in a perfect way, and that's the deep science into it. I can tell you, since I'm in this business, I have high appreciation to the human body and to any body. It's an amazing control system. I'm trying to mimic it for 20 years. We are getting very close, we are getting an excellent outcome. But that's something that will allow us to create things very effectively, significantly reduce the different pollutions. You know, livestock is very polluting to this planet. Of course, the animal cruelty that we like to reduce. And that will allow us to consume proteins that are made in a different way. It's not going to take the entire market, but I think it's going to be an important segment that will increase more and more in the coming years. This is what we did in Pluri, creating the technology and the core thing that will allow us to do it in a very effective way, collaborating with the biggest companies in the world to bring these products to market.
