The French Industrialist Betting on Robotics to Cure Disease (And the Ethical Line He Won’t Cross) | Ep. 316 with Hervé de Malliard President of Maison MGA

to understand when it comes to manufacturing, like, what is China doing right? What can we learn from your experiences there?

But also, you're talking about tech bio, which I've never heard before the phrase, but

I mean, it's obviously something we need in our lives to live longer, to live better. I mean, everyone's talking about AI and robotics and it seems like you're kind of putting a lot of things together. So let's go back to your time with China.

“What were some of the learnings that you had around speed, efficiency, and manufacturing?”

Yeah, well, hello Dan. So very pleased to chat with you today. Yeah, well, I'm an engineer by design, I started by my career in China, and this is back 30 years ago, a bit old now, back 94 to 99, and I was doing the developing the business for French industrial group, which was the nutrition, and what we were proposing to China,

were some chemical reactors, which are useful for the pharmaceutical synthesis. And you know, at that time, China, back 30 years ago, I mean, most everybody, almost

“everybody was driving bicycles, you know, almost no cars there, and they didn't have”

so much, high rise, sky rise, sky, sky, sky, sky, sky, sky, sky, sky, sky in China, it was only the TV tower in China, and I was amazed because the all the industrial firms that I was visiting there, all of them had a very clear vision of where they wanted to go, okay, they were very interested in new technologies and partnering with innovation, new equipment, and basically modernizing the factories, and all these factories were very old, very poor

equipment, very poor performance, very poor capabilities, and the thing that was very, very interesting is that each time one factory would decide to move ahead, they would execute the plant like speedy Gonzalez, I mean, the speed was of the essence everywhere, so once they decide to go, then they make it happen, and very quickly, much far quickly, and what we could do in the West at the time, and at the time 30 years ago, we were much faster

with the West than what we are today, and this was absolutely incredible, so the thing was the speed

and the vision, they were very, very smart, very, very clear, where they were, where they wanted to go, and then execute the plant with a huge amount of speed, and what I can tell you is when I left China in 1999, everything that is happening today was already written in the plant, it was written, they knew at that time that they wanted to, they already understood

“that their industry, our industry, in the US or in Europe is, I mean, the essential brick”

of the industries, the automative industry, and they decided at that time that they would

go after this industry, and basically what you can notice today is that they are actually

executed the plant, and now the electric cause will be way deeper, and others are amongst the best in the world, if not the best, and they make that as an execution plan, and this is very key, and basically it was very clear to me that that plant was clearly driven by some sovereignty, was clearly driven by innovation, by investment, and every time a Chinese company would build a factory state of the art with the modern technology, then they would

duplicate, replicate that, in other provinces, and it's clear that they just executed a plant, and this was a very lessons learned for me, was industry is having a right prospective, nowhere you want to go, and then execute the plant, being very patient in execution, but very

key goal for making it, it's amazing to think only 30 years that advancement has happened, and the fact that they planned it, we could take a lot away, like you said, as business owners,

“we could take a lot understanding away of long-term planning, because I think we get so”

caught in the minutia of day-to-day, we're not always planning 20, 30, 40, 50 years out,

we're just planning in the next five minutes, and I've heard they have each city manufacturers like something different, one day I'd like to go to Shanghai, I've heard it's incredibly advanced technology, and all the robotics, I love BYD, I hate to say it, but it might be my favorite EV car, it's incredible what they've done with that, so you get back to France, and you're in my favorite city in France, which is Leon right now, but you get back

to France, and you start Amazon, MGA, what was the problem that you were solving?

“No, Amazon MGA started a bit later than that, in the meantime between 99 and 2010 where I started”

Amazon MGA, what happened is that I've been onboarded back in the industry, and basically

I've been coming from machine to integrated system and complex engineering systems, including Don Kee, Greenfield factories, and I had to basically get into the complexity of building a greenfield plan, I was very, very impressed at that time, because I followed a project which we incorporated in WUSI, which is 100 kilometers, basically from Shanghai, and when we decided to invest and build a greenfield factory in WUSI, we signed the land and three

months after the factory was finished, against speed, but also understanding the complexity

of engineering, your complete process planned, basically aligning all the necessary breaks

for the technology, and building that for the future with already a vision of different work flows necessary, and basically the process necessary to have it a performance. And so I did that for about 10 years, first in the UK and then France and then build factories all around in the US everywhere on the five continents, I was running an engineering firm at the time, making a so-process plan, both for the pharmaceutical industry, making vaccines,

mixing plasma, blood plus one fractionation, and all these complex engineering for bio-processing. Those experiences, China, and then making those complex systems in engineering drove me to, we could see at that time that digital was coming up, robotics was already deployed, in the care industry and some other industries, but very little, very seldom in the life science industry, almost no robots, so I decided to basically put all our energy into those complex

systems in engineering, into clean environments, so basically putting those complex engineering

“into canoes in order to serve mainly the life science industry, and so that's what we've been”

doing with the with MGA, so putting robots, tailor-made machines, instruments in order to address those complex engineering, and put more and more robotics also with all the digitalization, which was already happening back 15 years ago, and so that's where we are. Yeah, can you talk more about, and thank you for sharing that this tech bio, why is tech bio even important, and I'm very interested about robotics.

I feel like everyone is talking about, you know, we will all have robots in our homes, like you're going to look outside and robots will just be walking around everywhere, so I love to go, I love to to understand your perspective around how robotics is changing

biotech is basically, you put in a pan, a familiar, then you basically are growing life into a pan,

“this is biotech, bioprocessing, so you make first cell culture, and then you clarify the”

cell culture with down-fing processing, we'll craft information, chromatography, and those type of things, and then you put this in a vile into a feeling-finish process, this is biotech. Biotech has been developed over the past 20 to 25 years, very intensively into the vaccines, this business, and basically, the trend in biotech was to make bioreactors bigger and bigger, and this is an, and of course, the ultimate of this is those, the mRNA vaccines that we have

been developed very, very fast during COVID, and that has given a very huge, I would say,

“acceleration into this biotech business, and then what happened is that, opening the mRNA application,”

also in parallel to that has been developed all these cell engine therapies, and basically the

volumes, which we consider for those type of biotech therapies, are down to a single vile, one vile, one patient, so I mean, those big bioreactors are no longer relevant, and then take biotech is basically putting all the engineering capability, the complex engineering capability, to personalize medicine, and basically reverse the tech, all engineering capabilities, to biotech biology, so basically the engineer doing the engineering for biology, and, and so in tech bio, you have all these instruments,

“processing instruments to make those personalized medicine, you have all the, I would say the”

instruments for IVD, for in-between the agnostic, you have also all these implants, which are have some robots embedded into the body, you have sensors that you can implant in the brain, and you have also all the artificial intelligence that can be used for instance on those heart

diagrams, you know, you can analyze this with the image and then basically detect

errors or or special patterns that can give you some somebody, and further to that, you also with digital, you can have a loop with the patient, because if you develop one particular drug for one patient, you can also through a smart phone, you can also report all the, how we feel on a day-to-day basis through simple questions, and this also helps on improving the treatment for the patient, so basically all this engineering capability, whether hardware,

software, driven to one patient, and looping with the patient, that is, take my, wow, so how do you see, I mean, that's, I mean, the fact that we can put robots and people, and it could maybe solve problems inside them or do surgeries or, you know, whatever other, put it in our brain, what excites you the most about when you think of robotics in tech, bio, healthcare, but what also scares you the most? What we can see now with those generative AI is that you basically can

foresee that some disease are going to be treated, so we are going to find solutions for cancer for all brain disease, so if you prospect, if you make prospective in the next 20 years, 25 years, if we are back in 2050, in 2050 it's very clear that almost all the known disease of today will have treatment, that's very clear. Now, the downside of this is of course some people with regeneration cellular tissues, you can imagine that you can basically replace your heart, if there is a problem,

you can replace your liver, you can replace your muscles, you can replace one eye and so on, so

so this is of course not very acceptable, particularly, I think we will have to define as a society,

“as a world society, we will have to define some limits where this is not no longer acceptable,”

this we should not do, we should not play with life in terms of what God gave us, and we need to make sure that all these new technology, respect life, respect humanity, and that's I mean a frontier that a border that has to be defined, but in the other hand, you will no longer have those five years old children that die of cancer, and this is absolutely insane in terms of, I mean this cannot be accepted, so if we manage to save lives that have to be saved, this is of course an ultimate

dream and this is where I'm working for, and you were questioning about my vision, about robotics,

“so I see robots as a tool, like of course a pen, very nicely drawing or writing a book,”

or you can also use it for very badly, and it's the same for AI, it's the same for robotics, it's the same for tech bio, so all these have to remain tools for the help of better living of humanity, and this is what I'm striving for, of course do not accept the idea of technology compromising life or compromising what it is, this is my limit. Maybe I want to lift a 300, I don't know about 500, but it kind of reminds me of CRISPR,

like a decade ago, I know CRISPR was kind of just becoming a thing publicly, and they were talking about the ethics, and you know should you clone things, what do you like, there's so many things that they were talking about, but it almost seems like we're in an interesting age where there's so many technologies coming together as one, like there's so many things that, that like you, I mean, you said we could possibly cure cancer and diseases and fix things, how incredible is that

people can live a better life, but of course there's always people that might do something,

you know, bad with it, but the fact that we can do that excites me a lot, so if people want to

“get in touch with you, it's fascinating, right? But if you want to get in touch with you, they want”

to find out more about Mayzone, about what you're working on, maybe some partnerships, learn more, how can they do so? Can give you a few examples of what we've done recently, for instance, we developed an instrument that is working on chips, we did that with the start-up called Stila Technology, which has been acquired by a company in California, which is gold, by a rod, maybe you know, that company, they made an an in vitro diagnostic instrument,

the 9VD instrument, and this allows basically to analyze 8 milliliters of a solution,

explore those 8 milliliters into 20,000 nano droplets, and each of these nano droplets in individually become a PCR reactor, and you can detect a positive or negative, basically, any DNA trace that you would look in that. And that, of course, allows for much more precise diagnosis, and you can, for instance, loop during cancer treatment, the oncologist can basically check whether the particular vile that he has injected in the patient is efficient or not,

and if the cell tumor, the cell, the tumor cell, have been reduced in numbers, or if they have increased, and that, of course, is considerably increasing the efficiency of the treatment of the patient. This is one. Another one we're working with another company that has recently deal with vertex, you know, vertex is a very advanced R&D company in in SELT-RP, and they have

to, basically, the first divisions of the cells, being very, very nicely arranged and freely

“in a capsule, like in a nag, and therefore the quantity of the first division, which are very,”

very critical for SELT-RP, are much improved, and we are developing this this technology for them.

Of course, we work together, but these are the types of instruments that we are working on, and this is extremely exciting because all these IPS-based cell therapy are incredibly promising, I mean, it's clear that we are going to completely change, it's a real game changer in,

in biotaopies. I mean, this is amazing, I can't wait, super exciting, 20, 30 years from now,

our world is going to be so different, like, and I hope it's for the good, and you're going to look back and say, you are a part of that, that's your legacy right there, like you can change the world. I am very optimistic, and I prefer to be optimistic, and being wrong, rather than pessimistic, and being right on, is that a French thing, or is that just you? No, no, no, this is not a French thing, this is something I forgot who said that, it doesn't matter, it's a mindset, the mindset is

“if you make perspective, I think progress can really change our lives, can change also all the”

issues that need to be addressed. There in the draw, a number of innovation that we can really put together and reduce all these carbon footprint of the industry, transport, and I think the big, big

challenge as humanity is to basically make sure that the poor countries increase their life standards

into an acceptable level, and basically the rich countries also increase the standard of living in

“order to live better, longer, happier, and I think we have everything in the draw with all these new”

technology to make this happen, and I'm very excited to see this coming. Hopefully as humans, sometimes we have the habit of screwing things up, so I want to be optimistic like yourself that we are going to do the right thing, it's going to be great. I love the level playing field, like you're saying, certain countries might have issues that with whatever that is, they can solve those with uplifts, that country uplifts the people, hopefully this is going to spread everywhere, but thank you

so much by the way, President of Mate's own, I appreciate your time today, I'm excited for the future.