306. Meet the VC Backed Scientist Making Precision Medicine Accessible w/ Pahini Pandya | Panakeia

0:00Amardeep Parmar:So great to have you here Pahini. Today we're going to be talking all about how you've grown Panakia. Can you tell us what Panakia does? Sure. Thanks so much for having me here. It's been a long time coming and I'm glad we finally got to do this together. In terms of Panakia, I founded the company from my own personal journey. back when I was doing my cancer focused PhD I had a cancer scare and I had to wait for more than a month to get an all clear because we were waiting for results of lab tests and these were some of the simplest of the tests that I was doing to understand how cancer spread through the body and that's when I had the realization that some of the more complex assays which I was using to unlock biology at a much, much deeper scale would take several decades to translate to the real world and they would be probably not be accessible to many patients, right?

0:58And that for me was a big, big realization because I joined academia because I wanted to have a very big impact on several millions of people, if not more. And so that's where I started reconsidering what I could do And at the same time, it was also a problem I couldn't look away from because I knew I potentially, by virtue of the research that I was doing, had a solution that could alleviate the challenges around lab testing, which includes, you know, doctors or researchers having very, very limited patient sample to get deep insights from. So, you know, if you use it in the wrong way, that's a precious resource lost forever.

1:41it takes very long to actually get results and obviously this is very very expensive so collectively these all limit accessibility of a lot of the complex molecular assays that we have in research in drug discovery and development and in clinical decision making and so what I did was go out gain some experience and founded Panacke in late 2018 with the vision of making precision medicine accessible to patients and doctors all over the world by alleviating the challenges around lab tests. And what we've done is essentially reverse engineered my PhD, which focused on understanding how biology results in different shapes of cancer cells and tissues.

2:25And we've developed an AI-driven software that can take in routine bright field pictures of cells and tissues, which are standard in hospitals as well as in research, we can analyze the shapes of the cancer cells and tissues using AI to infer the underlying biology. So you can get same information as a lab tests entirely digitally in minutes and obviously in a much more cost-effective way, but also because this is digital, you don't destroy the tissue. So you can get much, much more information, collectively solving all of the challenges that we've had. And it's been a fantastic seven years so far.

3:06Amardeep Parmar:Wow, yeah. And switching from the PhD to making it a business as well, how did that work? Like, how do you now think about how do you have to change the way you think in order to make that viable and to grow to where it is today? Yeah, and I think that was one of the biggest considerations I had when I was thinking, okay, what do I do besides my PhD, which will allow me to achieve three things that I essentially wanted. And the three things that were most important for me was I wanted to be able to make a big, big, big impact in a reasonable time frame, right? It had to be in my lifetime, but also in a meaningful way for patients and their families.

3:48They don't have several years to wait for. second was something that would give me lifelong learning and the ability to push boundaries like never before and the third one was which was quite important for me was I it had to you know leverage my science I had invested nearly 10 years in research at King's and then at Cambridge really building that expertise so I wanted to be able to use that in a much more direct sense And what that meant was I ruled out all other options and entrepreneurship was the only option left. So it wasn't a decision I took lightly. I come from a Gujarati family. So a lot of my family members, especially in the extended family, have run their own businesses.

4:37And I know how hard it is, how challenging it is. Most of the times things don't go right. It's probably the 1 % to 5 % that actually goes right, which delivers some phenomenal returns. So it wasn't a decision I took lightly. I thought I probably needed some experience. So I undertook a couple of courses, including a course in entrepreneurship run by Stanford called Stanford Ignite. I was lucky enough to have been accepted to that and I managed to get in some funding to be able to support my participation in the program. Similarly, when I was in Cambridge, I also had the opportunity to participate in quite a few programs.

5:22I think I leveraged that ecosystem to the best of its, to the best of my abilities and to the best of the offerings they had to offer. So there were quite a lot of competitive programs. Stanford Business School also runs a program called Ignite, which teaches you about the fundamentals of business. They have a program called Impulse, where postdocs, and I think now, if I'm correct, PhDs in Cambridge, can actually get funded places onto the program. So I discovered I just went out, got myself involved in a lot of those things. I also did consulting. I also was involved with a bunch of different startups so I worked within startups and I as well as worked with startups collectively all of these things gave me the confidence to go and found out my found out found my own startup so I had started dabbling in a startup on the side which had reached a point where we realized we wouldn't be able to take it further with the co-founder I had and I was very certain that I wanted to build a fast growing startup which would be capital intensive which meant I would need the right sort of capital I didn't have the right sort of networks and I wanted to do so with a founder who had complementary expertise in AI who could help me build the sort of solutions because I had a rough idea of what space I wanted to work in where I would be able to give a lot of value.

6:53But I didn't have, you know, very specific science or technology that I wanted to push forward. So, and it was quite, I would say, serendipitous in the sense that I had an invite from EF at that point in time to say, hey, we're hosting a mixer, we'd love to invite you and we'd love to invite you to apply for our next cohort. and that's essentially how the journey got started. I reached out. I was lucky to know a few people who knew a few people who had attended EF and I was like how was your experience? What do they look for? You know how is their selection criteria? And then I made the application and I was super thrilled when I got accepted because I knew that EF was one of the few places which at that point in time would be able to support me in three key aspects.

7:47First one was actually giving me a stipend because otherwise there was no way I'd be able to take the leap for doing this full-time, but I knew I wanted to do it full-time. Second was it would allow me to have the opportunity of finding the right co-founder. And third, if we were successful, they would unlock or plug us into a broader network of investors, also provide us with the right sort of information frameworks around fundraising, something which I had never, ever done before. And true to that, it delivered. So that was essentially my journey. But throughout this journey, there was a lot of proactive outreach, a lot of proactive learning.

8:29I also did come to the realization that I could have probably jumped into my entrepreneurial journey much earlier um but that's probably a different

8:38Amardeep Parmar:conversation so like in terms of like actually so you said like you've gone through ef you've gone through these different courses yeah when you think about making this like a business and you said getting the right type of capital how did you go about that how did you go about like okay day one you've got you and your co-founder yeah you now need to like make the plan of how you're going to go to raise capital and fund this yeah so i think uh one of the things was i was very clear that we probably need VC capital before I even joined EF. And that was one of the more intentional reasons why I joined EF, because I realized I did not have those networks.

9:12I had been looking at the AI space for quite a while. I knew that there was a huge potential for AI to be applied in very unique ways, where it was not nice to have or it was a must have. And that's essentially what we're doing, right? We're essentially giving people superpowers, by being able to extract information that so far they've just not been able to extract by the human eye. And so I knew that there was a huge opportunity there. And that's why I really needed to focus on getting access to VC capital, which is very narrowed down to EF. Once I found my co-founder, which was also a very structured process, we essentially started we did what we call what EF told us about which was the mom test so we read the book but we mapped yeah exactly we mapped out the patient journey all of the stakeholders in it and we interviewed every single stakeholder narrowed down to pathology because that's where both the founders had very very unique expertise where they could deliver very big outsized results.

10:23And we actually narrowed down on the problem as well. And that was through a lot of interviews. And then what we did was we essentially knew that if you wanted to build a business, one of the most basic things you needed to show was actually getting customers, right? And when you're building a health tech, it's not that easy. You're not going to get customers, but what can you get them to give you that's very hard. And in our first few conversations itself, we had a few very senior KPI leaders saying to us, oh, if you can build this, I will help you get the data to build this. And we had people willing to put in their reputation, their time and bring in the resources that was necessary to build this without us having built anything.

11:08That's how we got started. Then we obviously very quickly put together a business plan, which has massively changed. But then that allowed us to go to investors and start pitching the business to raise the early capital that we needed to get going and start building the solutions.

11:25Amardeep Parmar:What were your biggest lessons from that time of trying to get those early investors on board? Oh, lots of lots of lessons. I think my first biggest lesson, and this was something our board chair told me when he first joined, is business is all about the people. So I had massively underappreciated how it is people who develop the technology, people who fund the technology, people who buy the technology, right? So it's about understanding, building those relationships with the right sort of people. At the end of the day, I think that is also, you have a few other aspects and considerations around that.

12:05It's about how you build the trust and how you build the relationship. Communication matters a lot more often than not. Better to over communicate than to under communicate. But I think the third part was also about believing in myself. What I realized was a loss of the experience and expertise I had built during my time in academia and research was very transferable to running a business and to building a business. So things like applying for grants and fundraising are things that academics do on a daily basis, Right. So I had been prepared quite well for it. I just had to believe it. And I had to really double down on honing those skills in a very, in a, I would say, slightly different sort of a setting than what I was used to.

12:54Amardeep Parmar:You said the business plan completely changed over time, too. Yeah. What was the original kind of business model and why is it today? Yeah. So I think the one of the and I think pivots are a normal part of any startups. When we initially launched the company, our focus was very much on a specific cancer. It was breast cancer. And we really wanted to build a one-click solution that would be able to diagnose breast cancer, but also inform its treatment. And we very quickly realized there were quite a lot of companies which are doing work on diagnosing cancers. But more importantly, the value that we offered to the initial customer, which was pathologists in clinical settings was much lower because we'd probably save them minutes.

13:38Whereas if we replaced the vet lab tests, we'd save them weeks. That's a huge, huge saving from a time perspective, but also from a resource perspective. And so we decided to double down on that and then really start focusing on that, replacing the vet lab piece which I was inherently very well suited to doing but then we built a team around us which also allowed us to deliver on that and quite well we're now doing two cancers we have two products that have regulatory approvals.

14:15Amardeep Parmar:Hello hello I hope you've enjoyed the show so far I'm Amrit Parma co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show for those of you don't know, Bayh HQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events, 200 people have been for our impact programs, and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events, go to bayhq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now, and the link is in the bio.

14:55Amardeep Parmar:Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. And when you go about selling that, so you said about how people believed in what you're doing, they're giving you the data. How do you go about pricing something like this? Because that's one of the most difficult things in healthcare sometimes, is that how do you navigate that? And obviously, I guess you've got different markets, you have to do things in different ways. Yeah, so you hit the nail on the head. different markets you have to have different pricing early and that's why focus is very very important so from very early on we knew that we'd focus first on the UK markets and then we'd start looking at other markets within the UK markets we actually did a lot of market research working with hospitals really trying to understand what the vet lab assay cost in a clinical setting I had a very good sense of what it costs in a research setting we also had friends who were able to give us ideas and insights in terms of what it would cost if you were in pharma and drug development.

15:52So it allowed us to then figure out, okay, since we're starting on the diagnostic side, this is what the regulated product should work. But then because we are also building regulated products for clinical use, there's a very important health economic component. So that can also help you inform the pricing. So we had some preliminary pricing ideas based on what the base costs were and what we thought additional impact and cost savings would be. And we wanted to deliver it in such a way that whatever pricing we set, the hospital still saved money by using our assay, right? So it wasn't just a faster assay.

16:29It was also much more resource effective assay because of that accessibility component. And then we got formal, proper, independent health economics done which is now informing how we should further refine our pricing and then we take a similar sort of an approach in every market we go and you mentioned the team as well

16:48Amardeep Parmar:and growing up the team earlier so somebody's been on the podcast before mariam obviously worked for you for a little while right yes and she sings your praises whenever i mention you and going from kind of the research backgrounds then like now being ceo and growing out a team have you been able to get the right people on board and get people like mariam to be even after years after she's worked for you to still be thinking so highly of you yeah can i just say mariam is phenomenal i think we both really really um admire and respect each other uh she she's definitely a unique founder and when when we first met her uh i knew she'd she'd be doing amazing things um So, I think it starts very, very early on, right?

17:31It starts with finding the right co-founder, which is why I joined EF. And I was also very clear in terms of the criteria that I needed to have. EF also has additional frameworks that they help you apply in terms of finding the right co-founder, but also building a relationship and trust very, very quickly, right um what was very obvious for me from that early days was i had been in about three teams 3f and what was different about that initial founding team was um we had very complementary expertise so that there was hot there was some overlap but that was more so on the application side of things um but besides that we they're very very different um um my co-founder also had the right sort of expertise to build the initial things that we needed to get us off the ground.

18:26And at the same time, together as a team, we were able to move very, very quickly. It wasn't additive. It was multiplicative, how quickly we were able to move together. And those were some of the things that we started looking for initially when we were building out the team. and nowadays a lot of those key aspects still remain can they can this person fit into the company very quickly are they the right sort of culture fit I would actually emphasize culture fit more over the skills fit because more often than not people so long as they are good and fast learners they can learn skills but the culture fit is very very hard you cannot teach that So I optimize for that.

19:15But a part of our culture then also includes, is this person able to learn fast and execute quickly? And are they willing to learn fast and execute quickly? You need to have that, especially in the early stages when you're growing a company and when you want to build something big, you want to have that hunger, that ambition to be able to grow. So it's not easy. It's not everybody's cup of tea. But I think there are quite a lot of people, very extremely talented people in the world who focus on those aspects and who are willing to put in the amount of work that is needed to get there.

19:50Amardeep Parmar:You talked about the early stages and obviously now you're seven years in, eight years in. How has your role changed and what do you enjoy that you get to do now? What do you miss from the early days too? Oh, yeah. I mean, my role is massively, massively changed. And more so every day, I get realized, like I realize how much of my role is changing from being a founder to being a CEO, right? When you're a founder, you're probably a very scrappy individual who's working with three to four like-minded individuals where the focus is on, you know, let's get this done, let's get this done and let's get it out in the scrappiest way possible.

20:34Right. It also means you're doing a lot of things hands on. You're involved in every single aspect of the business. You know, all of the details. now it's changed to the point where I'm having to start building teams around me a lot of the work is getting delegated to experts who can do that job obviously way way better than I ever could and I recognize that this is actually absolutely important for the company to grow so bringing in the right sort of folks with the right sort of expertise and then just giving them a broad area of guidance and then letting them run with it has been quite an interesting transition for me.

21:18Something that's also for me very, very important is when I bring in folks, I also work very closely with them to make sure that they are set up for success because you want to bring in people, but you also want to make sure that they have the right sort of tools, resources, frameworks, but also the right sort of expectations at times, which means managing external stakeholders and investors so that the team has the room and the space to grow and deliver to the best of their capabilities. So that's been a big, interesting journey. It's also been a lot of learning and I'm constantly taking feedback from pretty much my board, my investors, as well as my team.

22:01Amardeep Parmar:And over that seven years too, right? You can't be going for seven years about having some of different challenges and road bumps along the way. Yeah. What were some of the most difficult periods? Like how did you get through them? Yeah, so I think I define being in a startup as being tied to a roller coaster. The highs are really high and the lows are really low. Some of the, we've had quite a lot of tricky challenges to navigate. So one of the ones was my co-founder departure. I was very lucky enough to have both my co-founder and I actually were very lucky enough to have a group of people, including investors and board surrounding us who helped us navigate through that in a very amicable way, in a very smooth way.

22:44it wasn't easy but it was also important to remember that you know there's a person on the other side and I think they did a phenomenal job of reminding us on that of that aspect and we had some amazing sounding boards as well where we could just be open and be like okay here's how I'm thinking through all of these things and how do I communicate them in the best way possible right but following that this was late this was early so my co-founder left in about second half of 22 and early 23 I was fundraising in a market that was not the best to be fundraising as a solo female BAME founder and that that was a very very challenging experience on its own but to be fair that's where a lot of my networks and my friends pull through as well uh everybody uh from my team to our investors um to people who just wanted us to succeed really really helped us in any and every way they could um but what that allowed us to do was actually raise around uh relatively quickly um at a time where um it was very very tough to raise um and i don't think i would i I always keep saying it takes a village and I don't think I would have been able to do it without my village.

24:12Amardeep Parmar:And I guess we look forward to now as well, right, where you are today. What do you hope to be able to, where's this all heading? Like when you're like retired one day and you're sitting on the beach and you're drinking and you're like, oh, yeah, like I built this company and this is like it's changed the world in this way. What would you love to be able to say? Yeah, so I mean, I think my vision for Panacchia is it would become a very, very large, self-sufficient organization that can live past several generations. That's ideally what I would love to be able to build and give to the world and see it take a life of its own.

24:49um yeah that's that's where we hope and we hope that it changes patients lives and ways where both patients doctors but also drug developers and researchers do not have to wait they can get results they can get information in the simplest possible manner the way i think about this is um and this is more on the technical side the way i think about it is how amazon's really solved that last mile challenge, right? You can click a button and you can get a delivery. That's exactly how we want to change how you access biology, whether that's for research, whether that's for drug development or treatment decision making, at the click of a button in, you know, minutes rather than days or weeks.

25:39And you can get complete information. You don't need to be running around trying to bend over backwards to get something that will save somebody's life.

25:48Amardeep Parmar:Do you have any idea of the impact so far? And I guess you must get some stories from people as well, where it's kind of both the numbers, but also, I guess, the personal side of someone being like, well, because of your technology, then I was able to save this patient. Yeah. So in terms of the big stories that we largely get at the moment, these are still mostly from our clinical partners and the feedback has been oh this is phenomenal when we onboard users one of the comments that we've heard quite a few times now is oh is it this easy and and that surprises them they know it's going to be fast but what they don't realize is it's very very simple to use and it integrates into their workflows but it's also the sort of feedback that we're getting from a lot of patients.

26:34So some of our biggest backers are patients and more recently we partnered with Macmillan. That's been phenomenal. That's very cool to our business. And we're super, super thrilled to have the opportunity to work more and deepen our, you know, relationships with patients who we hope will drive how we build out the company and how we scale the company as we grow.

26:58Amardeep Parmar:And with AI as well, right, before we go to the wrap up questions, obviously using AI yourselves, How has the shift in the environment the last couple of years affected you guys? Oh, that's been very exciting. All for the better. I think we were already building an AI first company from the early days. So there's AI as a core part of our technology. But then there is AI, which is now essentially a core part of our workflows in everything that we do that is not AI. So you essentially started off from the center and it has permeated to all aspects of the business, which has allowed us to move even faster.

27:40It's allowed us to start thinking of things, being able to deliver things that perhaps we would have thought would have taken us several years to deliver before in months. I mean, we were just talking about how AI has really changed something as simple as building a website, right? So it's been quite phenomenal. And what it has done is it's built broader stakeholder awareness of AI. So the general public is now more understanding of AI. They ask questions, which is already a much better place to start off with. and obviously that trickles down into additional benefits whether that's you know commercial business growth or whether that's raising investment or whether that's hiring the right sort of talent it plays and gives it gives you a lot of advantages so what we're going to do is every two years we get people back on again right yes so i don't know how we're going to do it now

28:35Amardeep Parmar:because we've got a bookshelf here yes we're going to have either a tv or maybe an ai pretend tv here and we'll play you back this moment. So you're going to be episode 300 and something and then say episode 500 and something. Yes. You come back on here and what would you love to have achieved in that meantime? So about two years time, what would you love to say you've been up to? Yeah, so definitely growing Tanakya. That will be my primary goal. But ideally we'll have established a presence across multiple different countries. across different geographies. And I'll be able to share a lot more of patient stories.