Creating More Agile Systems for Future Public Health Emergencies

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Marcel Botha, CEO of 10XBeta, discusses shortcomings in the US' emergency plans for rapid innovation and manufacturing during public health crises, highlighting the need for innovation pipelines, supply chain resilience, and regulatory clarity. He also emphasizes the importance of localized manufacturing, public-private partnerships, and advanced manufacturing techniques like AI and additive manufacturing. Botha notes the success of the Spiro Wave project in reducing ventilator size and the need for better coordination and funding structures. He also advocates for a more agile and collaborative approach to ensure rapid response in future emergencies.

Pharmaceutical Executive: The Spiro Wave project demonstrated the potential for rapid development and deployment of critical medical devices. What key lessons from that experience can be applied to creating more agile and responsive systems for future public health emergencies?

Marcel Botha: It's very important to do a postmortem of how we responded, what worked, and what failed during the first pandemic and then build pre-approved emergency innovation frameworks of how one might respond to the next disaster. Regardless of whether it is a natural, man-made, or viral disaster—they all have different outcomes and costs of human life. The challenge remains clear, we as a society need to have clear, actionable steps that we can follow when we want to have impact in record time, without the level of waste we saw during the pandemic because of all the wheel spinning and inertia to get going.

In line with bringing manufacturing stateside, building ecosystems, and relying on advanced manufacturing, we need to think about manufacturing similarly to how we think about products. Can we build modern, modular, distributed networks of manufacturing? Can we do it in a way where we build a system of resilience and reliance, where the economic framework for collaboration between everyday competitors is clear and actionable for when we go into emergency mode?

It's fine to be competing on the battlefield, very much like a game of rugby, but afterwards, let's have a drink together. If we have to get on the same page for the collective good, we do that, and then we can trash talk each other next week's game. To make society work, we need to understand when we're competing, when we're collaborating, and when we are celebrating. There needs to be healthy constructs to do all of those things in our society. It can't just be compete, compete, compete; and fail the rest of the time.

We see more of the public private partnerships now, but it’s still not fast enough. There were some rapid response innovation consortia set up between us and the city during the pandemic, but we want to see more of that. We want to go back to the product typologies, more open sourcing, and rapid prototyping ecosystems in place that we can leverage for fast manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, which we have been following since grad school days, has evolved to the point where we can now make metal, plastic, electronics, wire, harness, installations, everything using additive techniques.

There's no reason why we can't leverage these different technologies during a mission-critical or disaster relief response. However, there's always the cost benefit analysis that you have to take of the technology, time it takes to execute, and the response that you have to adhere by.