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

0:04Daniel Robbins:So I'm excited today, Hervé, because we're going to talk through something that I've been wanting 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 now 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?

0:45Hervé de Malliard:Yeah, well, hello, Dan. So I'm very pleased to chat with you today. Yeah, well, I am an engineer by design. I started my career in China. And this is back 30 years ago. Okay, I'm a bit old now. It's back 94 to 99. And I was doing that, basically developing the business for a French industrial group, which was the Dietrich. and what we were proposing to China were some chemical reactors which are used 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 you didn't have so much high-rise, sky-rise, skyscrapers in Shanghai.

1:50Hervé de Malliard:It was only the TV tower in Shanghai. And I was amazed because all the industrial firms that I was visiting there, all of them had a very clear vision of where they wanted to go. 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 with 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.

2:48Hervé de Malliard:So once they decide to go, then they make it happen. And very quickly, much far quickly than what we could do in the West at that time. And at that time, 30 years ago, we were much faster in 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 a plan with a huge amount of speed. And what I can tell you is when I left China in 99, everything that is happening today was already written in the plan. It was written. They knew at that time that they wanted to.

3:36Hervé de Malliard:They already understood that our industry in the US or in Europe is, I mean, the essential brick of the industry is the automotive industry. And they had decided at that time that they would go after this industry. And basically, what you can notice today is that they actually executed the plan and now the electric cars with BYD and others are amongst the best in the world, if not the best. And they made that as an execution plan. And this is very key. And basically, it was very clear to me that that plan 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.

4:42Hervé de Malliard:And it's clear that they just executed a plan. And this was a very lessons learned for me, was industry is having a right perspective, know where you want to go, and then execute a plan, being very patient in execution, but very fast on a day-to-day basis in order to execute that plan. And that has been, I would say, the real kickoff of my career.

5:14Daniel Robbins:I mean, it's amazing to think only 30 years, all that has that advancement is 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 like each city manufactures like something different i 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.

5:55Daniel Robbins:I mean, 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 Lyon right now. But you get back to France and you start Maison MGA. What was the problem that you were solving?

6:09Hervé de Malliard:Well, Maison MGA started a bit later than that. In the meantime, between 1999 and 2010, where I started Maison MGA, what happened is that I've been onboarded back in the industry. And basically, I've been, I would say, coming from machine to integrated system and complex engineering systems, including turnkey greenfield factories. I had to basically get into the complexity of building a greenfield plant. I was very, very impressed at that time because I followed a project which we incorporated in Wuxi, which is 100 kilometers basically from Shanghai. And when we decided to invest and build a greenfield factory in Wuxi, we signed the land and three months after the factory was finished, again, speed.

7:20Hervé de Malliard:but also understanding the complexity of engineering a complete process plant, basically aligning all the necessary bricks for the technology and building that for the future with already a vision of different workflows necessary and basically the process necessary to have it performed. And so I did that for about 10 years, first in the UK and then in France and then built factories all around in the US, everywhere on the five continents. I was running an engineering firm at the time, making a process plant, both for the pharmaceutical industry, making vaccines, mixing plasma, blood plasma fractionation, and all this complex engineering for bioprocessing.

8:20Hervé de Malliard:Those experiences, China, and then making those complex systems engineering, drove me to, we could see at that time that the digital was coming up. Robotics was already deployed in the car industry and some other industries, but very little, very seldom in the life science industry. Almost no robots were there. So I decided to basically put all our energy into those complex systems engineering, into clean environments. So basically putting those complex engineering into clean rooms in order to serve mainly the life science industry. And so that's what we've been doing 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.

9:41And so that's where we are.

9:44Daniel Robbins: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'd love to go. I'd love to, to understand your perspective around how robotics is changing all of these industries. But I think start by what is tech bio?

10:14Hervé de Malliard:So tech bio is, is not like biotech. Biotech is basically you put in a pan, some media and 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 downstream processing, with ultrafiltration, chromatography and those type of things. And then you put this in a vial into a fill and finish process. This is biotech. Biotech has been developed over the past 20, 25 years very intensively into the vaccines business. And basically, the trend in biotech was to make bioreactors bigger and bigger and bigger.

11:05Hervé de Malliard:And of course, the ultimate of this is 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 and gene therapies and basically the volumes which we consider for those types of biotherapies are down to a single vial, one vial, one patient. So, I mean, those big bioreactors are no longer relevant. And then tech bio is basically putting all the engineering capability, the complex engineering capability to personalized medicine and basically reverse this tech, all engineering capabilities to bio, to biology.

12:12Hervé de Malliard:So basically the engineer doing the engineering for biology. And so in TechBio, 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 vitro diagnostic. You have also all these implants, which 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 can analyze this with image and then basically detect errors or special patterns that can give you some ID.

13:13Hervé de Malliard: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 his smartphone, he can also report all the answers of how he feels 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 TechBio. Wow.

13:54Daniel Robbins:So how do you see, I mean, the fact that we can put like robots in 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?

14:13Hervé de Malliard:What we can see now with those generative AI is that you basically can foresee that some diseases are going to be treated. So we are going to find solutions for cancer, for all brain disease. So if you make perspective 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.

15:14Hervé de Malliard:So possibly some people could, with a lot of money, they could maybe live 500 years or 1 ,000 years. So this is, of course, not very acceptable ethically. I think we will have to define as a society, as a world society, we will have to define some limits where this is 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 technologies respect life, respect humanity. And that's a frontier, a border that has to be defined. but on the other hand you will no longer have those 5 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 from And you were questioning about my vision about robotics.

16:34Hervé de Malliard:So I see robots as a tool, like, of course, a pen. Very nicely drawing or writing a book. You can also use it 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. I, of course, do not accept the idea of technology compromising life or compromising morality. This is my limit.

17:22Daniel Robbins:Maybe I want to lift to 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 if people want to get in touch with you I mean it's fascinating right but if you want to get in touch with you they want to find out more about Maison about what you're working on maybe some

18:17Hervé de Malliard:partnerships learn more how can they do so the can give you a few examples of what we've done recently for instance we we developed an instrument that is uh working on chips we did that with the startup called stila technology which has been acquired by a company uh in in california which is called bio rad maybe you know that company um they made a an in vitro uh diagnostic instrument an IVD instrument, and this allows basically to analyze 8 milliliters of a solution, explode those 8 milliliters into 20 ,000 nano droplets, and each of these nano droplets individually become a PCR reactor, and you can detect positive or negative, basically, any DNA trace that you would look in that.

19:17Hervé de Malliard:And that, of course, allows for a much more precise diagnostic. And you can, for instance, loop during a cancer treatment. The oncologist can basically check whether the particular vial that he has injected in the patient is efficient or not. and if the cell tumor, 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 another company that has recently dealt with Vertex.

20:09Daniel Robbins:You know Vertex

20:11Hervé de Malliard:is a very advanced R &D company in cell therapy. And they have made a deal with TreeFrog Therapeutics. And here they are making cell encapsulation in order to basically the first divisions of the cells being very, very nicely arranged in 3D in a capsule, like in an egg. And therefore, the quality of the first division, which are very, very critical for cell therapy, are much improved. And we are developing 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 therapies are incredibly promising.

21:05I mean, it's clear that we are going to completely change.

21:11Hervé de Malliard:It's a real game changer in biotherapies.

21:16Daniel Robbins:I mean, this is amazing. I can't wait. Super exciting. 20, 30 years from now, our world is going to be so different. and I hope it's for the good and you're going to look back and say you were a part of it. That's your legacy right there. You completely changed the world.

21:32Hervé de Malliard:I am very optimistic and I prefer to be optimistic and being wrong rather than pessimistic and being right.

21:41Daniel Robbins:Is that a French thing or is that just you?

21:43Hervé de Malliard:No, no, no. This is not a French thing. This is something I forgot who said that but 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

22:07Daniel Robbins:to be addressed.

22:08Hervé de Malliard:There are in the draw a number of innovations that we can really put together and reduce all this carbon footprint of the industry and transport. And I think the big, big challenge as a 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 their 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.

22:58Daniel Robbins: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 the level playing field right like you're saying certain countries might have you know the might have issues that with with whatever that is they they can solve those with uplifts that country, uplifts the people. I mean, hopefully this is going to spread everywhere. But thank you so much, by the way, president of Mates Zone. I appreciate your time today. I'm excited for the future.

23:31Hervé de Malliard:Thank you, Dan. I'm very excited.