Ross Youngs, Founder & CEO of Biosortia

Julio Martinez-Clark (00:01.497)
Welcome back to another episode of the Global Trial Accelerators Podcast. Today, we have Ross Youngs, CEO and founder of BioSortia. Ross brings over 35 years of groundbreaking innovation to our conversation, holding more than 75 patents worldwide and pioneering the revolutionary field of microbial mining. His company, BioSortia, is the only organization in the world

practicing industrial scale microbiome mining, unlocking the hidden chemistry of unculturable microorganisms that represent 99 % of microbial life. So Ross, it's great to have you here. I hope I pronounced your company's name correctly and I made a great introduction to the exciting things that you're doing.

Ross Youngs (00:57.038)
It's a pleasure to be here and we pronounce it biosorcia, but as long as people find us, we're happy about that.

Julio Martinez-Clark (01:05.262)
Biosorcia, excellent, good. All right, so let's get started talking about your journey. How is it that you got to where you are?

Ross Youngs (01:20.094)
So, you know, it's a winding road journey, which many have, but I've also seen people have straight paths.

My journey itself really started in environmental science and then switched to engineering and then got involved in high-tech manufacturing for the optical and video disc world. And then I became an entrepreneur. I invented, created, marketed products, even hit the Inc 500 five times in a row, which is a rarity. think only 88 companies have ever hit the Inc 500.

five times in a row, build an enterprise that ultimately was doing fantastic. And then the technology changed all of that. And we went from 100 % of our sales in a current technology to zero sales in that technology virtually overnight. had to survive that tremendous impact of

Julio Martinez-Clark (01:59.842)
Yeah

Ross Youngs (02:25.678)
losing all those customers and all those sales and we really rebuilt a company. And along that process, one of the things we were looking at was different technologies. And it was those different technologies and all of that experience that brought me to that industrial scale microbiome mining and why the world needs that for humanity and for the future.

Julio Martinez-Clark (02:33.059)
Hmm.

Ross Youngs (02:55.632)
of humanity.

Julio Martinez-Clark (02:59.008)
Excellent. So Ross, I've been reading a lot about what you guys are doing and before we get into that, first of all, it looks like what you guys are doing is really revolutionary. It's a breakthrough technology that has the potential to transform drug discovery, agriculture, biotechnology, et cetera. And so I'm looking forward to hearing more details about

the breakthrough technology that you are moving forward. But before we get into that, what trends do you see happening? As you know, the spirit of the podcast is to talk about how to accelerate global clinical research. What trends do you see happening in the research industry in general or in your specific niche? What can you tell us about it?

Ross Youngs (03:55.694)
So in our space, we end up getting molecules from nature. And with that, we've got to understand what they are.

And we start computationally because we do so at a volume that's unmanageable. In one execution of our technology, we virtually triple the number of accessible microbial molecules. And that's basically in all of human research history. We tripled that number with just one execution.

The only way we can dig through this really is having the AI tools that have emerged rapidly and are accessible. And then the only way we can move molecules forward with any kind of speed or efficiency is again using those AI tools. So we've been able, you know, I printed out a list of the tools that we're using just in

Julio Martinez-Clark (04:41.421)
Yeah.

Ross Youngs (05:05.265)
AI, preclinical, early, early stage understanding of these molecules. And I look back at what people used to do without these tools. And I'm blown away the fact that we have these new tools available to us to accelerate, give you an idea of how that can accelerate in one day.

We can pull a molecule that's unknown and novel out of a microbiome. We can process it to a high probability canonical smile string. Then we can.

basically look at its, add me, look at its toxicity, look at its, what kind of targets it hits. can protein dock it and ultimately we can then derivatize it and then we can improve it and then we can make it more drugable and we can get to in one day what might've taken a team.

a year and a half to process. And then we end up with a complete initial program on a molecule that actually is a small molecule with a different mechanism of action, a first in class opportunity in a highly sought after new area of drug discovery.

And then as you know, the tools that are available, certainly we've got to get into the biology and we have to do the chemistry and the analysis. But the fact that we've been accelerated and reduced tens of thousands of man hour time is one of the areas we're so excited about because we don't have that.

Ross Youngs (07:18.072)
handicap of looking at a target and going how are we going to fit it knowing there could be billions of ways to fit that target. We go to nature.

and basically say, nature, what did you make over 4 billion years to hit targets? Tell us what it is. We retain the key active portion of it using tools, and then we make sure it's actually an optimized lead computationally. So it's exciting for us to be able to fly through some of these opportunities and then be able to

present these for their next steps. And that's really...

It's exciting because we know the computational tools to now do the predictions, especially as we do the analytical work we need to do, is going to give us a much higher understanding of how speedy we can get it through the clinic itself and what the probabilities are. And the fact that we're starting with nature's pre-optimized small molecules to do all of this, we've

got a let's say a much faster path and a lower cost so we're excited about the tools in the future and where we're particularly positioned.

Julio Martinez-Clark (08:50.033)
Excellent, excellent. All right. So basically you're saying that the bigger trend here is the technological advancement of the world, I mean, in the US mostly, that allow us here in the United States to have access to artificial intelligence engines and platforms and technology.

that very few countries have access to. Is that the biggest trend that you see happening?

Ross Youngs (09:24.91)
I think that is one of the highest speed and productivity. So when you talk about efficiency and effectiveness, that's available to us now. And we're seeing results of this daily. So you don't hear a lot about programs being created with success that do a complete de novo design against the target. But what you do hear a lot of is you hear

They've taken a molecule that they know something about and found out that it can now hit another target. And that you're hearing about weekly. So it's proof in the reality that a lot of people don't like that hunting for what it does. But quite frankly,

Julio Martinez-Clark (10:05.715)
I see.

Ross Youngs (10:20.106)
it's highly productive rather than guessing how to do it.

Julio Martinez-Clark (10:25.684)
Hmm, interesting. All right, so as you can imagine, we have listeners from all walks of life. And of course, most of them are probably in the research industry, medical device development, biopharma development. But you're bringing a very interesting topic. And I've been in the industry for about 20 years, and I'm still understanding what you guys do.

So, and I'm sure you guys are onto something really, really big, but reading your bio, I also noticed that one of your achievements was receiving a $6 million ARPA e-grant, earning the Earth and Young Ohio Entrepreneur of the Year award and being named the US Small Business Administration's National Businessperson of the Year by

Vice President Al Gore. So I'm sure your breakthrough technology is something that is worth understanding and talking about. And that's one of the reasons I invited you to the podcast because it really, really intrigued me when I saw your website, your LinkedIn profile. And to be honest with you, I couldn't grasp what you guys do until I did a...

Chagy P.T. prompt where I ask Chagy P.T. tell me exactly in simple terms in language that a high schooler will understand what exactly Ross does and why Sotya does. So I'm going to try to moving on to the next segment of the interview, Ross, I'm going to try to explain what Chagy P.T. told me and tell me if it is accurate or not because I just want to make sure I understand it.

and the audience understand it. here we go. I loved it because I mean, Chagypti comes up with some funny ways of describing things. So imagine you're looking for treasure, but instead of gold and silver, you're hunting for tiny molecules that could become life-saving medicines. That's essentially what Biosorcia does.

Julio Martinez-Clark (12:53.245)
They are like underwater treasure hunters, but for medicines. Is that accurate?

Ross Youngs (13:00.526)
It's very, very accurate. we have the lucky thing for us, treasure everywhere.

Julio Martinez-Clark (13:08.936)
Yeah, okay. So look at what he says. The basic idea is the title of the section. Think of it like this. In lakes, rivers, and oceans, there are trillions of microscopic living things called microbes. For instance, bacteria, algae. How do you pronounce it? Algae? And other tiny organisms. Algae, yeah. These microbes naturally make chemical compounds.

Ross Youngs (13:29.08)
I'll check.

Julio Martinez-Clark (13:36.914)
Kind of like how your body makes different chemicals to keep you healthy. So for decades, scientists have known that many of our best medicines originally came from this tiny organism. In fact, about half of the drugs in your pharmacy started from compounds that microbes make naturally. And here's the problem that you guys are solving.

The problem is scientists could only grow about 1 % of these microbes in labs, in lab dishes to study them. So what makes you guys different at Biosorcia is instead of trying to grow these microbes in a lab, which doesn't work for 99 % of them, Biosorcia goes directly to nature and collects them while they're still alive and active in their natural homes, like lakes and oceans. So.

I mean, goes on and on, but is that what you guys do?

Julio Martinez-Clark (14:45.956)
sure.

Julio Martinez-Clark (14:57.265)
Wow.

Julio Martinez-Clark (15:04.177)
Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. So your clients are pharmaceutical companies, R &D departments of big pharma companies or smaller biotechs. What's the business model of a company like yours, Ross?

Ross Youngs (15:23.832)
So we boldly predict that we will be one of the top 10 IP producers in life sciences. We can't develop everything. In fact, we may have to choose if we develop anything. But what we can do is we can bring these early de-risk

Julio Martinez-Clark (15:33.649)
Hey.

Ross Youngs (15:46.36)
pre-optimized molecules, not only for therapeutics, but for diagnostics opportunities, like you said, agrochemical, cosmetic, nutritional, oil, gas, mining, industrial, anywhere where there is the opportunity to improve processes with the secrets of nature. That's really where we'll be playing. And there were visions like this that

Julio Martinez-Clark (16:11.984)
Amazing.

Ross Youngs (16:16.374)
existed for 50 years. One of those companies back in the early 1990s tried to do it genomically even then, but the problem is trying to use genomics to completely understand what the results of that code is.

Julio Martinez-Clark (16:18.704)
Okay.

Julio Martinez-Clark (16:22.342)
Hmm.

Ross Youngs (16:35.092)
is a little like reading your email and thinking you can look at the hardware code of a computer to read your email. And that's no offense to the power of genomics. It's massive. It just doesn't have all its dots connected. And what we're doing will help accelerate connecting the dots to what the code

Julio Martinez-Clark (16:44.031)
Hahaha!

Ross Youngs (17:01.868)
does and what it can do because right now that's virtually code can create an infinite set of results but what results is not an infinite set it's actually a very small finite set so we're going to the finite set of results and working with that and that will actually fill in gaps but it's a direct access to the hidden products that nature's made.

Julio Martinez-Clark (17:32.826)
Fascinating. So you have different industries that you can target, not only pharmaceutical, because my research revealed a very concrete application for medicine, but it looks like, as you said earlier, there are other applications where this can be used, which is fantastic.

Ross Youngs (17:58.542)
It is. you know, I mentioned oil, gas and mining. Well, corrosion control is a possibility. You know, just offhand, that's a simple thing to mention in the agriculture world. It's potentially herbicides, pesticides, growth stimulants. It's the things that microbiomes are recognized for doing, but they don't know what within the microbiome is doing it.

Julio Martinez-Clark (18:04.953)
Wow. Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (18:26.991)
Hmm, amazing. So let's talk about a little bit about your company itself. How many employees do you have? How large is the organization?

Ross Youngs (18:40.546)
That's the challenge for somebody that breaks the mold. We really were funded internally and through some angel investors to build out the technology, prove the technology. But when you look at the therapeutics world, which is our best set of partners, up until we had access to AI, we weren't able to provide

Julio Martinez-Clark (18:45.911)
Okay.

Julio Martinez-Clark (18:53.679)
Okay.

Ross Youngs (19:09.816)
confidence that our platform would even work. The first question we got was, OK, what is your first molecule in the clinic? Well, we don't have a molecule in the clinic because nobody has started working with us yet. So we're still a very small group, but we're finding out a necessity being able to utilize AI. We're accelerating rapidly and we're

Julio Martinez-Clark (19:13.229)
Okay.

Julio Martinez-Clark (19:18.498)
Hmm

Julio Martinez-Clark (19:25.962)
Okay. I see.

Ross Youngs (19:38.476)
We're getting ready to come out of what we call pipeline stealth. We've had our messaging out there. What I held up a few minutes ago was one of the products that will come out of pipeline stuff. And we would look for ultimately early partnering with that. And with that, then we will get to the biology.

And we don't only have one program like that. By the time we come out of pipeline stealth, there could be 20 programs available for partnering. And it may be we even end up creating a box around an opportunity and license the broader opportunity of us using our platform to bring these molecules forward. Our goal and our objective is through partnerships to get to that IND.

D and everything about what history has shown us and what we're doing suggests our efficiency at it could be dramatically better than the typical, meaning we will save a tremendous amount of money to get to a de-risk molecule that can move into phase one.

Julio Martinez-Clark (20:55.758)
Fantastic, Ross. So you're actively looking for investors, partners, you're pitching to all these stakeholders to gain traction in your fundraising activities, right?

Ross Youngs (21:08.686)
Yeah, believe it or not, we paused all fundraising five years ago. And we knew we had to get to a new stage. So it's been internally funded since then, our small group of investors just making sure we could survive.

Julio Martinez-Clark (21:23.085)
Okay.

Julio Martinez-Clark (21:30.829)
Okay.

Ross Youngs (21:31.318)
Now what we're doing, like I said, we're getting ready to come out of pipeline stealth and we're able to start to describe where we're at and what we want to do next. That creates assets and everything we do creates assets.

Julio Martinez-Clark (21:45.337)
Yes.

Ross Youngs (21:49.076)
A lot of people don't realize this shit, but the new cryptocurrency law allows us to monetize assets in a way that fundraising for companies is radically different. So it's almost a topic of itself, but the summary is an asset can be tokenized and be

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:02.39)
Okay.

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:06.529)
Yeah, I'm sure.

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:14.307)
Hmm.

Ross Youngs (22:17.064)
available to trade, you don't have to wait for a company to exit. So as we move things forward, we will likely use a tokenization strategy. And as we drive real value in the company, then we will go back to the markets and end up raising funding for the company.

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:43.447)
Wow.

Ross Youngs (22:43.584)
So we have much more options. Imagine my library, which is already double all of the known microbial small molecules. We call that library one, BIOS one. We take that library and tokenize that entire library's opportunity.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:09.696)
Hmm.

Ross Youngs (23:10.592)
so that real revenue would go into those tokens and into those token holders. Or we could take like the one product, and this is actually a series. Everything's based on a portfolio strategy. Getting the HDAC 11 target with a portfolio of small molecules, has one.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:16.758)
Hmm.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:25.282)
Okay.

Ross Youngs (23:35.788)
what computationally shows is a very interesting active hit. Imagine us tokenizing just that. So we're in a position right now where we're looking at utilizing the new cryptocurrency laws to move us off pause and out of pipeline stuff and then accelerate the company dramatically.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:43.671)
Hmm. Hmm.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:59.818)
Fascinating, fascinating. I wasn't really aware of the opportunity that this crypto law brings to companies like yours. And hopefully this platform... Hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I...

Ross Youngs (24:10.318)
Watch before you know it.

Ross Youngs (24:15.438)
I wrote up a brief. I'll be happy to send it to you.

Julio Martinez-Clark (24:18.977)
Yes, please. Yeah, be fantastic. Regardless, that's what we have Chad GPT now for. Once we have some, once I have some free time, I'm going to look into that, familiarize myself more with that investment model. But anyway, yeah.

Ross Youngs (24:34.062)
And I gotta say that's the advantage of being a generalist. If I got trained through the universities on med chemistry and got my PhD in that, wrote papers on that, did that for 10 years, I would be great at doing that. And it would be really hard to keep up with everything else, but I'm a generalist.

Julio Martinez-Clark (24:46.795)
Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (24:53.802)
Yes, that's true. Yeah.

Ross Youngs (25:01.696)
So I can actually use the experts. I can actually come up with concepts that are very hard to come up with when you specialize. Harvard did a, it's right. And biases develop within niches where a generalist almost never develops bias because they have experienced what the lack of bias does.

Julio Martinez-Clark (25:05.153)
Yes.

Julio Martinez-Clark (25:11.222)
when you are specialized on a niche.

Julio Martinez-Clark (25:27.906)
That's a great point.

Ross Youngs (25:27.948)
But Harvard Business Review published a article years ago where it talked about where does innovation come from. And surprisingly, 50 % from generalists, 50 % from specialists. So there is a place for specialists to accelerate. In the life science world, that's not what they do. In fact, most breakthrough innovation in life sciences came outside of general thought.

Julio Martinez-Clark (25:41.409)
Hmm.

Ross Youngs (25:57.824)
sometimes even outside of the industry. Antibiotics were completely poo-pooed by those in the industry and it had to come from outsiders. When you look at mRNA vaccines, it wasn't the insiders that really pushed that, it was outsiders.

Julio Martinez-Clark (26:08.79)
Wow.

Ross Youngs (26:17.506)
When you talk about genomics, it was not the insiders that pushed it. It was outsiders. Every major advancement in life science did not come from insiders.

Julio Martinez-Clark (26:29.378)
Wow, this is really interesting. I never really thought about it that way.

Ross Youngs (26:35.79)
And that is one you can check in Jack GPT or Super Grok or Gemini or on and on.

Julio Martinez-Clark (26:44.449)
Yes, yes. No, I also was going to say Ross that hopefully platforms, podcasts and other platforms like this amplify your message and amplify what you guys, breakthrough developments that you guys are working on. So we're getting close to the end of the show. Ross, any final words of wisdom for listeners that you want to say now?

Ross Youngs (27:11.598)
I would say for any entrepreneur, especially in the life science world, survival is everything if you believe in what you're doing and how it's going to have an impact. I've been such a believer in how important it is to humanity.

Julio Martinez-Clark (27:18.358)
Mm.

Ross Youngs (27:31.318)
to uncover these secrets that I've really done everything possible to make sure we survive the hardest times we have. And I think we're ready to take it to a next level. And nothing excites me more than to believe the impact we could have with this technology. We'll do everything from open up the industries we talked about.

But potentially solving things like coral bleaching, red tides, harmful algae blooms, and even space development. So why would I say space? I would say space because nowhere on Earth have we ever had an enclosed habitat without outside interference.

Julio Martinez-Clark (28:10.869)
Cut!

Ross Youngs (28:25.762)
to keep everything alive, including people. We have got to have a capability of understanding the unseen at a level we don't today. And that is essentially using microbiomes to do fingerprinting.

Julio Martinez-Clark (28:46.645)
Huh.

Ross Youngs (28:46.826)
and even in diagnostics in the future, having a complete microbiome fingerprinting capability, not just the genomics, but the molecules that are present by the genomics. And that's the microbiome genomics and also the human microbiome.

the human genome itself. You're in a position in the future to uncover and understand things in ways we can never do today. So to me, I think it's critical for the future.

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:20.018)
Excellent, Ross. So Ross, thank you so much for being in the show. I really enjoy our conversation. I'm sure Liz and I did as well.

Ross Youngs (29:29.688)
Thank you, my pleasure.

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:34.432)
Right.