In Conversation with Abraham Lin, co-founder and CEO, Orbits Oncology
David is a biopharmaceutical researcher with more than 10 years of experience in drug discovery, spanning cancer research, virology, and cell and gene therapy. His primary focus is preclinical cancer research for small molecule therapeutics, informed by his study of targeted therapeutics in lung cancer in the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory at UCSF. He holds a B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and a M.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UCLA. David is the Marketing Director of CBA in 2024.
Disclaimer: David works at Cellentia Bio, which Abraham references during the chat, and Cellentia works with Orbits Oncology. CBA is not affiliated with, nor does it endorse, any corporate entities.
Below is the transcript of my interview with Abraham Lin, one of our speakers for the upcoming CBA Annual Conference 2024. He talks about nuclear engineering, his AI/ML technology at Orbits Oncology, and how his Ph.D. translates to entrepreneurship.
Please note that the transcript has been edited for clarity.
David: Can you start by introducing yourself, your research and your company?
Abraham: My name is Abraham Lin. I’m an adjunct faculty at the University of Antwerp and also the co-founder and CEO of Orbits Oncology. With Orbits Oncology, we spun out technology from the University of Antwerp, and we are now building a digital AI-powered platform to analyze advanced cancer models. The goal is to bring patients insights early into the drug making process, and match the right therapies to the right patients.
David: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in biotech?
Abraham: I’ve had a pretty diverse background, starting out in nuclear engineering. I was working on a lot of space applications and I even interned at NASA for a little bit. But then for my PhD, I decided to transition into biomedical engineering to really develop technology that has more direct healthcare impact. And then afterwards, I spent about 6 years working in oncology to really bring engineering solutions into the cancer field and help patients
David: Was there any particular reason why oncology drew your focus?
Abraham: Cancer is a really scary thing. I wanted to be a part of the solution. During my Ph.D., I saw how biotechnology could be applied for cancer therapy as well as cancer immunotherapy, where you use treatments to not only kill the cancer cells, but also stimulate your body to fight against cancer. And so that was really attractive to me, and I wanted to focus my time and energy there, and work on bringing technology forward to help cancer patients.
David: Tell us a little bit about the platform you guys are working on at Orbits Oncology.
Abraham: The core mission is to dramatically change how cancer drugs are being made. Right now a lot of cancer research is being done in the lab with cells and mice and other animals, and it takes years for them to reach patients. And then when they finally do reach patients a lot of times in the clinical trials they fail in humans, because humans aren’t cells in a petri dish, and they’re not mice in a lab. So a lot of research, especially from the lab that I was in, was focused on patient-derived organoids, which are a very advanced type of human-like cancer model. Because they come directly from patients, they can almost recreate a patient tumor in the lab, and because they can be continuously grown and re-used, hundreds of drugs can be screened on these patient-in-the-lab type models. The difficulty with them is that they’re very complex and very hard to analyze. Our company has built a digital platform to analyze these cancer models. The goal is really to predict patient drug responses in these models, and help biopharma filter out which drugs are going to fail when they move to the clinic, and which drugs they should really push through to clinical trials, and determine which patient populations will respond best to them.
David: Can you talk a little bit about your current success, such as how your technology applies to these samples—these patient-derived organoids—and where you see that going in the future?
Abraham: Yeah, so some of our scientific success include publishing a clinical trial with our technology and being recognized by Nature Awards – Spinoff Prize. We also were selected by Merck, out of 300-plus companies, to participate in their accelerator program to develop our technology for biopharma. A lot of biopharma and a lot of drug screening facilities are starting to switch over to organoids. And that’s because it’s becoming more and more apparent that other types of cancer models just don’t represent humans, whereas organoids really have a strong chance of capturing and predicting patient responses in the lab. The way we work with companies is that when they are screening their drugs on organoid samples, they generate enormous amounts of image data. Our platform takes this image data and we run our proprietary AI algorithms, using computer vision and data processing, to extract what is going on with those organoids from those images, and derive clinical responses. So based on the organoid responses, we’re trying to look at: what is the mechanism of the drug—how is it working?—as well as which patient population is responding best—who should receive this drug? We even try to identify things like, are there any factors that we can use to identify the responsive populations or are more patients more prone to develop drug resistance.
David: That’s some really advanced stuff. How did you get into the AI side? What did you get into the AI side of things in the first place?
Abraham: I think for me, I’m always about solving problems. As an engineer and from training as an engineer, you learn to take the tools around you and build solutions. That’s kind of been the running theme of my career. I was taking technology for plasma engines from NASA and space propulsion and translating it for biomedical applications. Then with our work leading to Orbits Oncology, we took AI technology for robotics and self-driving cars and turned them into solutions for cancer research and tumor characterization. We’re taking all these different tools and using it for organoid analysis and developing predictive algorithms for patients.
David: It makes sense: if all this technology is out there, why not apply it where there are unmet patient needs?
Abraham: Exactly. All the solutions are there. You just have to see how the pieces come together, and make something that can be impactful.
David: Right. Talking more about how you got into this technology and onto the entrepreneurship side, how was the transition from the academic research side of things, taking things out of the lab and building it into a company?
Abraham: That’s a great question. I had been planning to go down the academia route and even had a couple of soft offers for professorship positions, but my ultimate goal has always been to do something that had large social impacts. As I was going down the professorship route, I realized that we could publish a lot of high impact papers, we can write a lot of grants, but the deeper you get into the science, the farther you can get away from application and using it for patients. I realized the missing piece was that translational aspect, and that became something that I wanted to learn. Before committing to spinning out Orbits Oncology, I took a lot of time to understand what that process is like. What I realized was the scientific process applies very much in the same way for entrepreneurship. You have a hypothesis for what kind of value you can deliver as a technology or business. You test it with your customers and you listen and observe to their feedback. And you iterate on that and rework it, until you finally have a product that really solves a problem that people want solved. It’s a very different world, the entrepreneurial side versus the academic side, but a lot of the same principles can still apply. If I have learned anything during my career, it’s how to use the scientific method and apply it in different settings, whether it’s space research, biomedical engineering, or oncology. Now, it’s just being applied to the business world.
David: That’s so great to hear. A lot of scientists can get frustrated with the business side of things. At the end of the day, the scientific method applies to almost everything. You change one thing, then you see if that makes a difference. I’m glad to hear that you’re able to take the rigorous training from the academic side and really make a difference on the business side, too.
Abraham: And you won’t get it right the first time. Like when you run an experiment, you probably won’t get it right the first time. But if you have the resilience to get back up, to get back out there and do it again, and to iterate, you can ultimately reach something that works.
David: Absolutely. Great to hear that the science really translates. I’m wondering if there are other applications you’re hoping to do, like non-oncology applications with organoids, things like that. How does the future look for Orbits?
Abraham: That’s a great question. I think there’s two big potential avenues. Organoids are being used a lot in cancer research, but they’re also used in other types of research, including neurodegenerative diseases and diabetes as well. So there is definitely a possibility that we can expand our computer vision and AI algorithms for drug discovery in other diseases, too. The other option that we’re keeping our eyes and minds open to is personalized medicine. The vision that I would imagine, or the world that I would imagine, would be if a cancer patient comes into the clinic, a doctor could take a piece of their tumor, grows organoids [from the tumor], and then screens a lot of available drugs on their organoids, and then we would provide analysis of the responses and give the doctors a recommendation on what would work best for this patient. So really, this would be a much more personalized, and maybe even more individualized, medicine. Of course, there are a lot more regulatory barriers, as there should be, as well as reimbursement barriers, but also some technical challenges on getting those organoids out and growing them and then doing the screening. We are definitely evaluating the other potential applications of our technology, but that would be a dream, to be able to benefit patients in the hospital.
David: It’s great to hear that you’re aiming to go straight to the patients if you can. Is there any career advice you would give for folks that are thinking about taking that next step, maybe finishing up their Ph.D., thinking about their research and wondering, can I make a company out of my new technology? Any lessons learned or advice for them?
Abraham: Well, my advice is… it’s hard. It’s a lot of work. You thought your Ph.D. was hard… Get ready. It’s going to be difficult. The resilience has to be there. The tenacity has to be there. And what’s very important is that you have to be humble. You have to accept that you’re going to learn a lot of new things, accept that there will be times that you will fail, and you just have to get up the next day and do it again. But accept that you don’t know all the right things, and learn as much as possible from the people around you.
David: Right. That’s great life advice, too, but great to hear about in terms of starting a new company. Can you give us a quick preview of what you will be talking about at the Annual Conference? For folks to get a quick taste of what you’re going to show them.
Abraham: We’ve published quite a few scientific papers on our technology, as well as a clinical trial where our technology was used for pancreatic cancer patients. I really want to demonstrate how just using organoids in your research is not enough. If you use the wrong analysis on these very complex models, you really don’t get all the information and you miss critical patient-relevant information. For these complex models, you really need to match it with complex and sophisticated analysis. So I really want to demonstrate the importance of having the right analysis with your models, and how only in this way, together, we really can improve personalized medicine and drug discovery. We’ll present some of our work there from the University of Antwerp and show some of the science.
David: I’m very much looking forward to seeing a lot of the data. Curious if you can give us a few quick, high-level stats on your AI technology. How many parameters are you running?
Abraham: One of the stats that we have is from our clinical trial, a small clinical trial, where we gave the patient’s organoid the same drugs that the patient received in the clinic. If you use a traditional analysis, the correlation between the organoids and the patients had an R-square value of 0.2. So there’s in essence, no correlation. Versus if you use our analysis, where we’ve captured all the different features, we get an R-square value of 0.9.
David: Wow.
Abraham: That was something that we were really excited about. It highlights our potential to predict patient responses from organoid responses in the lab, which would really transform how we think about developing drugs and how they are used on patients.
Abraham: And I think the other big stat is for people who work with image data and know how much time and labor it takes to process these complex images and make any sense of it. Our digital platform has automated the entire process of turning organoid images into reports that are understandable. We’ve shown in a pilot with a drug screening facility, that we can process their image data 20x faster they could. They collected over 24,000 images and took 19 days to understand it and make conclusions, whereas we took those images and produced understandable reports in under 24 hours. So I think we’re tackling those two big challenges in the organoid analysis space where researchers want better analysis and also want it faster. I believe we’re able to do that.
David: Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the features that you guys capture compared to traditional assay methods?
Abraham: One of the big features is tumor heterogeneity. Within a patient, the tumor isn’t the same everywhere. There are different mutations, different clones. And traditional ways of analyzing organoids kind of flattens all those unique tumor populations into one readout, which causes you to end up losing a lot of information. Our analysis has much higher resolution, and we can run analysis on the single clone level within the patient. This allows us to identify resistance to therapies, sensitive fractions, and a lot of different aspects of tumor heterogeneity which have been linked to treatment resistance, treatment failures, and more. That is one of the really big wins that we are able to do.
David: Gotcha. What stage is Orbits Oncology at in terms of working with partners and seeking out potential collaborations?
Abraham: We would love to work with biopharma groups using organoids to develop novel drugs. We are establishing partnerships to really prove out that our analysis improves the decision-making process to produce successful and effective drugs for patients. We are also looking to work with CROs that use organoids for drug screening. Places like Cellentia, who offer a proprietary organoid system for drug screening services, are great partners, and we can complement each other very well, where they provide the organoid culturing, and we provide the analysis. Together, we can deliver more patient-relevant insights to their customers. We are in the process of setting up pilots and we’d love more collaborations with biopharma and with CROs. And we’re also in the process of fundraising too.
David: Great. And so if I’m a traditional therapeutics company and I have some high content image data, can I get in contact with you and you’ll let me know is let me know if your analysis is going to work for my drug screening pipeline?
Abraham: Yeah, that’s a great question. We built our analysis to be device-agnostic and facility-agnostic. So we just need images, but then of course there is a certain level of image quality that is needed. But we’re happy to work with you on how you capture those images, so that we can provide the best level of analysis. We have also published an open-access protocol, with videos, on the step-by-step process to set up screening with organoids and capture images. And then we can integrate our analysis platform very easily into your existing workflow, so that you can just capture the images and use our platform to run the analysis and produce results. Definitely feel free to reach out.
David: Awesome. I think that’s what a lot of folks want to hear. They’ve got a problem and you potentially have a solution for them. For the final few questions, we’ll go a little bit further field from science. And I’m stealing this one from a podcast called The Immunology Podcast. If you were not a scientist, and you had to be anything else, any type of career, what would you want to be?
Abraham: Oh man, I have so many different interests. I think most recently, my biggest interest would be fashion design. I think that’s a very interesting place. You can be creative in engineering, you can be creative in science, but there are certain physical laws and engineering boundaries that you’re always limited by. Fashion seems to be a place where you can really have unbounded creativity. So that would be something that I’m interested in. But at the end of the day, I think in the long-term, I would always want to do something that directly impacts people, and helps make society a better place. I think somehow there would be a balance there.
David: That’s a really cool and complex answer, I appreciate it. Final question our way out: if you were in a classroom of 7th and 8th graders, and they’re asking questions about a career in science, about biology, what would your advice be to them?
Abraham: To be honest, I would say not everyone needs to be a scientist. I would say really take your time to learn what you like to do, not what other people tell you is important, and not what other people tell you. Be honest with yourself. Take the time to understand and make a decision, but also don’t be too hard on yourself because you can always change. Take your time.
David: Thank you for a great conversation. This has been a pleasure, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk about Orbits Oncology with me.
Abraham: Absolutely. Great speaking with you.
Orbits Oncology:
• Visit our website (https://www.orbits-oncology.com/)
• Follow on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/orbits-oncology/)
• Watch our demo (https://www.orbits-oncology.com/our-demo)
• Read our publications (https://www.orbits-oncology.com/our-publications)
• Learn more about our clinical trial (https://www.orbits-oncology.com/our-clinical-trial)