where there's one of the biggest

coronavirus testing experiments there is.

A husband and wife team, Lou Reese and Mei Mei Hu,

happen to be executives at a biotech company

which is trying to test every single person

in San Miguel County in Colorado, which includes Telluride.

The company's also trying to develop

a vaccine for the virus,

so let's head out and talk to Lou and Mei Mei.

Your company makes vaccines for animals and for humans.

You've been working on a vaccine

for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Yeah, so, if it were any other time, Ashlee,

you and I would be talking right now

about how we're gonna move forward

with our registrational trials

for Alzheimer's in the States, but instead,

today we're all hands-on deck on COVID.

You're in Telluride, it's part of San Miguel County,

and you have a test, a blood test,

and you're looking to test all 8,000 people

in San Miguel County, is that the basics?

Yeah, testing is such a big issue.

If you look at the countries

that have kind of dealt with this the best

is testing is one of the core principles.

And what it does is it brings knowledge.

A lot of the tests that we read about

in the news right now,

it's like the nasal swab and it's mostly looking at

do you have COVID-19 right now, in this moment.

But you have a blood test which shows

not only if you have it now,

but also if you've already had it

and developed antibodies against it.

So, antibody tests are what we use to screen blood banks,

for instance, it's the same type of technology.

So, people come in, they get their blood drawn.

Those all get collected,

and then those samples, those specimens,

get flown to labs to then process.

And then, the lab reports the results back to the county.

The idea is how do you screen

large swaths of populations quickly,

find and trace down the ones

that are potentially infected, to quarantine them,

and then also find the ones that have developed antibodies,

some level of immunity, and get them back out.

That's the trick.

You're in this part of Colorado that's super spread out.

I think there's like,

two and a half public health officials

for these 8,000 people.

So, it's tricky, right?

'Cause I know they were looking for volunteers.

I mean, you have to teach people how to do a blood draw.

And so it played out pretty smoothly?

Has it been even harder than you thought, or?

One of the reasons why we did it here,

in San Miguel County was because

there's not even a hospital in San Miguel County.

But, the medical community here, and the EMTs,

knew what they were doing with the blood drawing component.

Also, we did it here because it's a visionary community,

and I think that the community saw what the opportunity was

to get the data, and it was hilarious

how awesome and supportive they've been.

You guys are doing this for free,

and paying for all these tests.

And then, I should add, it's voluntary.

It's not like people have to do this.

But do we know when, like,

what's your goal for how long this will take,

and how many people you'll get?

I think they've done a really good job

in terms of getting people through,

so, I think it's almost averaging like a thousand a day.

So, we should have results sometime next week,

and then we do it all over again.

Because you want to sort of test once,

and then test a couple of weeks later.

Yeah, because seroconversion,

which is what happens when your body

decides to develop antibodies, doesn't happen overnight.

It takes some time after your body's exposed to the virus

to be able to develop antibodies.

So, we want to be able to catch that.

That's why we want to wait at least 14 days between,

to make sure if someone has been infected

that they seroconverted, and we can identify it.

And then, so, you guys have a couple of things going on.

I mean, so not only are you doing this,

you also, back when SARS was a huge concern,

you've done vaccine work around that,

and so, it seems like you were pretty quickly able

to spin up some tests around a possible vaccine

here, for the novel coronavirus.

So, we've tested a number of different constructs.

We're actually looking at them right now.

They look pretty promising.

They're in animals.

And our hope is to get them into humans early summer.

Are we any closer to sort of knowing

when we'll get the data from the animal test?

It's still ongoing.

And then, Lou, not to put you on the spot,

but, I know you were saying that,

if the animal test came back, if the data came back good,

you would sort of think about

using the vaccine at that point, right, on a personal level?

I totally, no, not putting me on the spot at all.

I'm totally down as long as it doesn't damage

like its FDA path or anything like that.

Right now, we got a little bit of interim data,

and I would say they're one step closer

to having the one or two

that we'd like to pull the trigger on for human trials,

and I'm like first in line.

I'm before there's a line.

And so, you look at this data from the animal trials,

and then if it looks safe,

you can kind of progress immediately in the human trials?

Yeah, then it's really about

how the FDA wants to deal with these trials, right?

But these are emergency times, these are unprecedented.

So, all we know is that we're going to try to get

the best vaccine into humans right now, make sure it's safe.

And one of the benefits of our platform in our company

is that we have scaled up,

we have a commercially validated platform.

I think, scaling up and delivering

is gonna be just as difficult

as finding a really efficacious vaccine,

that can be distributed to the masses.

It's hard to keep track of all the different vaccines

and approaches that are being taken right now.

But how optimistic should people be?

'Cause, I just don't want to give people false hope or,

I just want to set expectations in the right spot.

Yeah. So, the example that I give people is that,

remember a few years ago,

when we're reading about pigs that were dying in China,

by like the thousands and millions and stuff?

There was a mutation to foot and mouth disease.

And within a month of finding out,

then being charged with solving that,

we made 100 million brand new vaccines

to a brand-new strain, that worked, and solved the problem.

So, the answer is, these things can go really, really fast.

A lot of things have to work out together,

but I think there's going to be a lot of push to solve it.

Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of

different vaccines going on.

I mean, there's over 20 efforts

that are just listed right now,

and they're probably more efforts

that we don't even know about.

The good news is that

there are lots of people working on it,

and when you have lots of people working on it,

that means more shots on goal,

which means that you should feel good,

and hopeful that something will come out.

This is like a challenge for humanity.

I don't care if it's us,

I don't care if it's another company

with a different technology,

I just want it to work and be able to scale up,

and for us to get back to a new normal,

where we could still think about going out,

having 4th of July parties, having concerts and stuff.

So, I was just thinking about,

like when you get all the data from San Miguel County,

is that something you would, like sort of analyze yourself,

or is that something that goes up

on a website that everybody can see?

It's definitely all anonymized.

The people who are positive

are notified directly by the med center.

So, there will be quarantines, or like isolation,

based on who's infected, and then hopefully

the rest of the community can feel safer about coming out.

One thing that is weird, Ashlee,

that's strange about doing this,

it's one thing to deploy it in distant places,

even if you know those places really well,

it's another, when you're deploying it in like right there,

and everybody's like in it.

It's really amazing.

Well, thank you guys,

and I just really appreciate your time.

All right, thanks, Ashlee, appreciate it

Thanks, Ashlee, talk to you later.