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Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Hello and welcome to the Bee Formless Flow Driven CEO Conversations where we are shaping and shifting leadership strategy strategy, business and brand from the inside out and all that life throws at us in between all those lenses, or those four lenses I should say. Today I am welcoming to the show Doc Dr Tamar Gross Grossman. Tamar Grossman. Welcome to the show, Tamar.
Tamar Grossman: Hi, happy to be here.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. I stumbled a bit then. I don't know what is happening to me lately. One minute I'm
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: like fooling and then the next minute I'm like I think because I was wanting
Tamar Grossman: It's okay.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: getting so focused on making sure that I was pronouncing your name right. You know when it's kind of they say you shouldn't what do we we we're always told to think before we speak, but what if we spoke before we thought? And I think once you have it in your head you're it's a lot easier for things to flow.
Tamar Grossman: That's okay. Worst case you can correct yourself and then you can move on, no problem.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. T totally. How is how is life in San Diego? It's Monday evening for you. How is how is was your weekend? How's the side of your week going?
Tamar Grossman: Everything's good. It's nice and sunny in San Diego. American's finest city. That's what we're called. And I agree with that. It's been really great. Start of the week. I'm back from tour around the world from a lot of conferences, board meetings and lots of meetings, and I'm happy to be back.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Hmm. Yeah, nice one. Yeah, there's no place like home, isn't there, after a lot of travel. that hole, when you just hop into bed and you just it's just like this
Tamar Grossman: Yes, I feel that.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Well, the minute you walk in the door and you just go straight, you're just like, I'm just at home. Like you can go to the kitchen. I don't know. There's just something about grounding yourself back at home after travel. I love, I love the novel experiences. I also love coming home to my place. We're gonna have quite the conversation. And before I start with that, Tamar, I want to just say a big kind hello to all the listeners out there. Thank you for continuing to watch Bee Formless Flow Driven CEO Conversations. We are having a number Of different conversations. I have quite a few lined up, and Tamar is is an exceptional one, like everybody else, in terms of just bringing a really diverse conversation to the table. And what I'm loving is, you know, I talk about these four lenses in terms of leadership, strategy, business, and brand. And you know, Tamar's Tamar's a scientist, she's a leader.
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: She's also a founder and an entrepreneur. And there is these four lenses that that cross over amongst all of all of what Tamar's doing. So Tamar, on that note, let's get into
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it. You are the co-founder and CEO of I'm gonna can you please pronounce it because I I know I'm gonna La Jolla Labs. Yes, I had to hear you say that.
Tamar Grossman: La Jolla Labs, La Jolla Labs
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: So co-founder and CEO of La Jolla Labs, bringing more than two decades of experience in biotechnology, genetics, and RNA-based therapeutics to the challenge of developing medicines for rare and complex diseases. And it feels like there's just more and more rare and complex diseases popping up tomorrow. I'll come back
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: to that. He had an important inflection point and it emerged as La Jolla. Labs began evolving from a technology-driven drug discovery company into a developer of RNA-based therapeutics. And that expanded your role, Tamar, from advancing scientific innovation to leading its translation into potential treatments. And so to today, Tamar, you're bring guiding that transformation, bringing together scientific expertise, emerging technologies, and strategic partnerships while navigating the complexities of building a biotechnology business where the stakes extend far beyond commercial success. And so at the heart and soul of your work is a belief that scientific discovery holds its greatest value when it can make a meaningful difference to human lives. Through cap collaboration and innovation, Tamar is working to bring new possibilities to patients and families facing diseases with limited treatment options. Let's start let's start with your journey,
Tamar Grossman: Mm-hmm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: how you you came into this. There's a bit of language here as well for the and for the purpose of the viewers, you know, even explaining explaining what RNA means in terms of the the type of complex and rare diseases that you focus in on. I'd love you to share a little bit about that, please.
Tamar Grossman: Sure. I I'm happy to share my journey and how I ended
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Okay.
Tamar Grossman: up being in this role. I did my postdoc at UCSD where I focus on genetic diseases. My training was biochemistry and for a PhD, and then I moved to UCSD to do my postdoc and focus more on rare disease to genetic diseases and trying to understand the mechanism. I actually use drosophila, which is a fruit fly. And also mice to establish disease models and also ask questions about mechanism of disease. I did that and identified the genes that are causing Down syndrome, congenital heart defe disease. this was an e an effort to look at all the genes on chromosome twenty one because this is a trisomy
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: and no one knew what genes from the chromosome are actually causing the disease. So I was able To narrow it down to two genes that are actually causing the the heart defect of the patients with Down syndrome. And I also worked on multiple other diseases and built models for them. When one day I got a call to the lab, and that was ISIS. Today they are called Ionis for good reasons, but I was recruited by ISIS at first. And they and it's a RNA company developing therapeutics and they needed someone to lead their genomic medicine, a rare disease effort. And of course at that time I was like, No, thank you. I'm going to the academia. I have position lined up for a neuroscience institute and I'm gonna be in academia. And they tried to convince me to come in and give my job talk and talk to people and just just to see how it is. And I went there and I was really intrigued because the scientist and the science level was at such a high level that I got amazing
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, right.
Tamar Grossman: questions and realized that, well, maybe I can do that and I can make drugs and save people's lives, not just do the science behind it. So at that time I stayed for five years as an as a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego. And at the same time worked at Ionis Pharmaceuticals to develop therapeutics. And I did that for ten years. And some of the drugs that I developed there are actually treating patients right now. They are close to being approved. So I'm very proud of the programs that I led there. And after ten years, you have a question?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Inc incredible. No, I just I just said incredible. I've I've got lots of questions, but I'll let you keep going 'cause you're on a roll right now.
Tamar Grossman: It's a long story. And then there was an opportunity to start a rare disease department at a company called Arcturus Therapeutics. They're also in San Diego, and the modality that they use for the RNA therapeutics was different because it also included mRNA, and I was fascinated by mRNA. Now everybody knows what mRNA is.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: But at that time it was all new, and the delivery and the lipid nanoparticles and gene editing was really new. And I figured I can cure any disease in the world if I get those resources and get to build that team there. And I moved to Arcturus and built a team for the rare disease department and use all those really cool technologies and and mRNA and and siRNA and ASO, all those different modalities to develop a pipeline. of different rare disease therapeutics. But unfortunately that was right before COVID and when COVID
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: happened, the company shifted from the focus on the rare diseases to developing a vaccine. So I learned a lot about vaccine development and helped develop a COVID vaccine, which was actually late in the game but was recently approved in in Asia. And that was an mRNA vaccine.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
Tamar Grossman: But I was very you know, frustrated and and kind of like you know, sad that I couldn't continue the work on the rare disease because I felt like it was a mission to
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: help those p those patients and the families. And at that time I
started La Jolla Labs and left the world of vaccine and Arcturus. And and decided to build a platform with my co-founder to enable RNA therapeutics to patients in need. And it took time to raise the initial funds and start building the business. And at that time, I my co-founder ran the company and built it while I moved to Johnson and Johnson to J and J. I took a position there to lead the genomic medicine. I was the global head for RNA, gene therapy. ADCs, LNPs, you name it, a huge portfolio, a huge team globally. and this was a decision I made to really gain experience with a really broader kind of therapeutic areas and also different modalities. And when and I told my co founder when I'm ready, I'm gonna move on and lead the company as we planned initially, once everything was set and we started building the portfolio. And about two years ago I moved full time to La Jolla Labs to lead it as we are transitioning from being a platform company to being a therapeutics company. With the latest exciting news of developing a therapeutics for an ALS patient in a record time of seven months, from when we found
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, incredible.
Tamar Grossman: the mutation to when we gave the drug to the patient and dosed the other member of the family.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Wow, incredible. What a story. What a journey. It seems like you've just been
Tamar Grossman: Ha ha ha
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. Where do I start?
Tamar Grossman: I'm nonstop, yeah. That's how I like it.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I guess my my first question is like you spent two de decades working, you know, at the f forefront of scientific nov innovation and you've just talked about all of that. And now you're leading this company as a co founder, developing potential treatments for people and you've just y talked about ALS. and and you know, obviously one of the most challenging, rare diseases out there. A question for you is how has that how has stepping into that responsibility of going from an employee, so to speak, to being a co-founder, and you're now not just a scientist, you're also a leader. And this just comes back to what I was talking about before on those four lenses in terms of leader, scientist, also founder. What have you noticed about how it's changed for you as a person.
Tamar Grossman: I think it was it was an interesting journey and I think I grew every year with my journey, starting as a scientist, a bench scientist, doing experiments on the bench and learning from my leaders and mentors in trying to grow. Very quickly, I was given direct report. So I the next step in my career was to become a people leader and and learn of how to mentor others and work in a team and build kind of like the goals and and work together to accomplish them. And and that's kind of turned to like being a leader in pharmaceutical companies, different sizes, working from, you know, a small company, a mid size to a big pharma where I was an executive and a leader and it was part of making strategic decision for the company, for the portfolio for how we're gonna move on. But the world of a CEO in biotech and especially a women's CEO in a in a biotech is very different. And there's a lot of adjustment that I needed to think and and learning a lot. I feel like every day I learn something new and grow as a leader. I think there I understand and I know very well my my strength and this is mostly in the science and strategy, but I'm learning a lot about the fundraising and the financing and And and just becoming more engaged with others because as a
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
Tamar Grossman: CEO you sometimes feel lonely and
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
Tamar Grossman: and have a lot of questions. So I built a really big network of colleagues that are CEOs of companies in different sizes that are being great friends and colleagues and helping me with you know, step each step of the way and whenever I have questions. I'm also very active and I mentioned that being a woman CEO is is challenging. Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I was gonna call you I wrote that down, yeah, because I was gonna ask you for me it's you've got this confidence because you're a specialist in your field as a scientist, right? And you know your staff like yeah, you're like a you're this innovative scientist and then you were just and then you called out being a a a woman CEO. Have you had to dig
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: deep to find that confidence? is it because it feels like conf that confidence that you have as a scientist is just innate? And then I think sometimes as leaders we then go into these roles and we're like, Can I do this? Am I capable? You're up against, you know, men at times, there's all these different things. Like, what's that bit been like for you?
Tamar Grossman: Yeah, it's it it didn't come naturally. I was quite shy, believe it or not, in the beginning and was really kind of worried about speaking up and bringing up my ideas and asking questions and presentations and big meetings and and it's just took a while for me to gain the confidence and realize, this is actually a good question. Somebody else has that. It's like, you know, it's it's kind of building this confidence moving forward with kind of responsibilities that are giving to you and and your growth in an organization and also watching leaders. So for me initially in my career it was a very male-dominant kind of environment. So it was really hard to have your voice heard and also sit at the table and make decisions. And as I kind of moved with my career, I've I've had a women supervisors and and it was it was a mentor too that really helped me kind of you know realize that yeah you know people wanna hear what I have to say
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: and I do have something to contribute and I should sit at a table and help with strategy and give my opinion because it's different
sometimes, but it's valuable and people should appreciate it. So it took a while to get to this stage of being confident and and being making sure that I I can influence and kind of make a difference and be part of the decision making. but yeah, it's it took a while.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: There goes your dog. It's okay. It's totally fine, Molly Bubble he's just he's just broken up. He's just now he's barking. It's it's so funny. He's just fucking Yeah, it's a doggy it's a doggy in San Diego, bunny.
Tamar Grossman: The California dog.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: The kids just bucking. It's so funny, they're having their own conversation. It's interesting. It's it's super interesting in terms of just that whole and being a founder as well, because like I mean the stats are out there that, you know, female founders y when you're seeking funding, it's it's it's it's not on par with male founders,
Tamar Grossman: Right.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: etcetera, etcetera. Is your c out of interest, is your co founder a male or a female? Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: Yes, he's a male, yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: And so how do you balance the female and male energy out? have you in terms of in the business? is that something that you
Tamar Grossman: Majority are women in the company. Only one male.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, okay, there you go. Interesting, interesting. But in
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: terms of you two as co founders though, what's that been like in terms of the relationship as a co founder and energetically from yeah, how you work together?
Tamar Grossman: Yeah. So we've been working together for over fifteen years. So star we met at Ionis and we work in the same department. It was a very similar relationship to how we interacted in the past couple of years where my co-founder will build the tools, is more in the software and bioinformatics, and I will be the power user of those tools building the therapeutics. so it was was a complementary like a relationship where we both work towards the same goal, bringing our own expertise. So there are no issues there moving forward and continuing to do that at other companies and also at our own company that we started together and built. and
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, incredible.
Tamar Grossman: and we have got the company to a point where we have an amazing reputation. We have so many families, foundations, even individual patients reaching out to us and asking for for help and developing a therapeutics and we are making it very simple, doing it at cost, basically as a service for the rare disease community, and just developing this therapeutics and some in a record timeline of like less than a year, we can be from finding the mutation to designing the drug and going all the way to d delivering it to the patients in in a year. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: It's incredible, isn't it? Because do you are you seeing and it leads me into my next kind of I guess formless flow f
flowing conversation part, is are you seeing a lot more rare disease pop up these days than say five, ten years ago? Like, I mean, you've been in this game for t two decades, right? What are you seeing? I know it's genes, it's mut mutations. I'm not a scientist, by the way, but I'm just interested
Tamar Grossman: Mm-hmm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: in terms of is there more rare disease popping up now than there ever was and what do you think's contributing to that? Is it I mean from our our our biology and just, you know, I I guess I I d I don't even know what word to use here. Like the evolution of human, the evolution of biology, etc. What are you seeing from a rare disease?
Tamar Grossman: So s yeah, so rare disease back when I started my career, because I was very interested in working on rare disease, and even back at Ionis, like almost 20 years ago, when I started to work, I was focusing and and running a think tank for finding therapeutics and finding disease genes for rare disease. At that time there were like six thousand, seven thousand known diseases. Now we know that there are more than ten thousand. But I think what's happening is that we have a very good sequencing tools and diagnostic tools and a whole battery of kind of scales and and diagnostics that physi that physicians are using. And then it seems like there are more now, but there are probably more specific mutations, maybe some subtypes of rare diseases that are getting diagnosed and characterized. So I think that the advancement in technology and actually the prices of sequencing a whole genome sequence has gone down significantly. So that really allows a lot of undiagnosed diseases and unknown symptoms and dise to be diagnosed by sequencing and then those new diseases or new syndromes are getting diagnosed or getting defined as new d rare disease. So maybe that is what added to their overall growth in number of rare diseases that have been diagnosed. I think with that there's a significant growth in companies focusing on rare diseases, what in the past was very limited and and and the reason those rare diseases are called orphaned or neglected diseases. Now there are a lot of companies that are popping up and and and building kind of platform and therapeutics opportunities for the rare disease. So hopefully in the near future we'll be able to see more of those and more of therapies coming for these patients that have unmet need. Most of them are children. Most of them are Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I was about to ask you that. You've just just frozen, so I'm hoping it's you'll come back shortly. You've just frozen, but you're still talking away, so that's okay. You were just
Tamar Grossman: Yeah. Can you hear me?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I can hear you. You've just you've just frozen on me, but that's okay. I think it's all right.
Tamar Grossman: Okay.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: If I can still hear you, that's fine. You were saying around it's mourning children.
What do you think that is, Tamar?
Tamar Grossman: Well, we were born with those mutations. So not always do we have the presentation of the disease at early stage. Sometimes you know need to wait years before you sh it showed up. Like in the ALS. Most of the patients are maybe from thirty to sixty years old when they're diagnosed. But some of the diseases are quite severe and they start manifesting in childhood. So you see a lot of those And especially now that we have all the diagnostic tools and the sequencing, you can really define and and and kind of find the diagnosis for the disease for the children. So I think that's why bec because we have better diagnostics and better sequencing tools, we're seeing more children that are diagnosed with rare diseases. A lot of those diseases are genetics all genetic diseases, right? So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: there's an inheritance. So they know that they run in the family. And there's a lot of tests that you can do prenatally to see if you're a carrier of those diseases and
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: and and you know, in some cases you can, you know, screen in the embryos and see if the if the the baby would have a
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? There's just so much intricacy
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: to this. Tell me a little bit about I wanna go to emotional versus rational and being practical, right? And and I I I wanna look at this from a lens of b from a scientific, innovative perspective in terms of you're dealing with, you know, rare disease. talked around cost you give it cost to cli to your c your your families, etc. there's gotta be an emotional aspect to this in terms of the sorts of customers, clients that you encounter and some of the rarest diseases that you're dealing with. So there's an emotional part to that and there's also the the practical and rational. There's that side of it. There's also the business side in terms of being an entrepreneur and a founder is also very emotional at times when, you know, don't get your funding or something your funding's being postponed or something happens in the business and yet there's all this so this need to be practical and rational. How do you how do you handle both sides of that? Because
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: it is quite an emotional space you're playing in, and then you've got the founder, you're giggling at me. How do you how do you handle it?
Tamar Grossman: Yeah, it is a lot. And it's not easy to deal with you know, families who are impacted while there's rare disease. They're extraordinary people who are becoming experts in the field and they
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: learn the biology and the science and the medicine and everything in a very short amount of time, become experts, build foundation, they're very strong and motivated individuals because they want to save their child.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: it's a very emotional kind of journey to go with from with the families that we are going through. and my team is is is is doing an amazing job and they're very compassionate and empathic and working closely with them and and trying to help and do a lot of the analysis of the disease, the what we call the target review and we assess the disease, the target, the options that are out there, and we do it for free. We're just doing it as a service to help those families and they can decide if they want to develop a drug with us or not. But we're giving them all the information to really enable
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: them to do that. It's it's very difficult and and they of course want you to move as fast as possible because some of those diseases are quite toxic. So the longer
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: you wait, the more disabled the child will be. So you have to move very, very fast. So this is a very difficult emotional and and we have We've been doing it for five years now, so we've been very experienced in working with these families and foundation and trying to make it easy for them. We're putting brochures and informations and and presentations for them to just help them get immersed. And on a personal level, it's Having an amazing family and support internally here is is really important. Also trying to breathe and do yoga and restore and and take some breaks,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes. Okay.
Tamar Grossman: which I don't do much, but I should to really
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Hmm.
Tamar Grossman: kind of recover from this thing because it can be quite overwhelming.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: we work on like twenty different projects at a time or even more than that. And each project is a family or it's a child that has a disease. So we are all we are also all supporting each other as a team. We have twice a week project meetings and what we call the lab meeting in which we talk about the science, we talk about challenges and we just support each other. We are five women that are all supportive and empathic and and really work real really well together to support each other.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: love that you're supporting and I think it's so important that you call out I wrote down before for you active recovery in terms of the ability to take the time out you know being able to like if you're not you at your best how are you how are you then going to be able to help these families
Tamar Grossman: Exactly.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: ex do you know I mean you can't afford to be making mistakes. What about from a
Tamar Grossman: Exactly.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: what about from a founder perspective in terms of co-founder I should say what do you find is the hardest or most challenging part of being a A co founder and building a business.
Tamar Grossman: I think yeah, I think it's it's the all the the the stuff that you
have to learn very, very fast of our f how to run a business because as a scientist and a enter entrepreneurship is not something you you you're trained
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: on, especially in an academic environment. And also as as a as you know, maybe a a mid sized kind of pharma executive, it's not it's not there. I felt like I learned a lot being a pharma executive when I was at J and J because I was also exposed to many entrepreneurs and startups that will come and and talk to us and try to do strategic partnership and investment. So I learned a lot about that space from from that experience. So that was a really interesting part of my career when I I I learned a lot and and that really prepared me to my entrepreneurship journey and and and I think The challenging part is asking for money and being on the other side of
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: the fence. 'Cause I was used to having all the startup companies come to to me as an executive at J and J and a K O L to you know, to to present to us and see if they're playing and now I'm the one running around trying to impress investors and in pharma to you know, to to encourage them to work with us and do some partnership or investment. So that's that's the challenging part. Not so fun.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: But you've got the yeah, you've got the lived ex
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you've got the lived experience, so you've got the best of both sides, right? in terms of understanding what it's like to be an investor also as well as also now a a founder. So there's kind of something really interesting a about that.
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I've got a couple of final questions for you. I want to come back to brand and and how you came up with the name La Jolla Labs. Is there something in La Jolla Labs that La Jolla as such? Does it mean something? Is it connected to rare disease?
Tamar Grossman: well I I used to live in La Jolla. My co-founder lives in La Hoya. La Jolla means a jewel. So it's the jewel of San Diego and it's it's a beautiful place. We both really, really like it. So we decided to go with the name. And we also wanted to find a name that's easy to remember. because some of those biotech companies have very complicated names that they tell you once and then I forget. So we try to find a name that's kind of makes sense and also has a a positive connotation because it's it's a beautiful place.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, you're also like for me, it's also like a a enabl like you're the jewel if if it if it means jewel of San Diego, you're the jewel of, you know, solving, helping, you know, families, children, etc. with rare diseases, which is like that's you know, you've got to find the the jewel in the you know, it's like the diamond in the rough sort of jewel Yeah. Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: Yeah, it's like looking for the jewel and I yeah, diamond make yeah, yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless:
Yeah, I really like it. I really love it. Final, final question for you. What is gonna be my final question for you, Tamar? Oof. What's next? What's next for La Jolla Labs? Like where are you? I mean, you are
Tamar Grossman: Mm-hmm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you're at you're a pioneer. The business is, you know, looking at solving some really complex rare diseases. Where do you see the business heading in the next 12 months or so?
Tamar Grossman: That's a great question. And we are actually hoping to be able to establish a couple of big partnership with some strategic partners to have a multi target approaches for different diseases that have unmet needs, staying in the rare disease space. we're also going to continue our work in the ALS. We've received man multiple awards about our work in the that kind of highlighted our work in the ALS space.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, congratulations.
Tamar Grossman: And we achieved the Longitude ALS Award from the UK. So we're gonna be continuing working, discovering new targets and developing therapeutics for more ALS patients. It's a devastating disease and there's definitely unmet need. So we're hoping
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Yeah.
Tamar Grossman: to bring more therapies to patients.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, we worked with ALS back in advertising days of quite a few years ago. And it was even like that, I'm talking ten years ago back then, and I was just like, wow. Which which kinda takes me to my final, I guess. What advice would you give to any family out there or any listener right now who knows that something's not quite right with their child or and just i it just something's just not adding up and they've been seeing a lot of different doctors but they're not getting the answers that that they're looking for or don't feel like they're being heard. I mean what would you what advice would you give them when it comes to a mum you know,
Tamar Grossman: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: a mother's intuition knowing there's just something there's just something not adding up here? What would your what would be your best advice for them?
Tamar Grossman: never give up and continue to seek answers. There are experts all over the world. there are no boundaries to getting advice and and work with the experts and and the rare disease and the genetic disease community is is a global one that's highly efficient in finding a solution and finding diagnosis and I think insisting on getting genetic diagnosis and genetic sequencing is key because that helps tremendously to find a disease and find a diagnosis. And and we're also here to help. So if
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I was about to say, how do we h find out more about La Jolla Labs? How do we find out more about you?
Tamar Grossman: yeah, you can reach out to us. we have website, lahoyalabs.com or dot ai, to can reach out to that. we have info at lahoyal labs.com. This is an email that everybody can use and reach out to us and ask questions, and we can we'll be happy to refer refer anyone to the specialists that we work with to help them find solutions and answers.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Thank you so much, Tamar. What a fascinating conversation. I I love what you're doing and you know, what you're creating and and building with La Jolla Labs and the the pioneering of this innovation and, you know, complex disease, rare complex disease. It's it's not for the faint hearted in terms of your dedication and commitment from a team
Tamar Grossman: Mm-hmm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: and a co founder perspective as well. And loving that you're, right ha I got the flag for the for female CEOs out there and and women, founders, etc. So thank
Tamar Grossman: Mm-hmm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you so much for a gorgeous conversation and really appreciate your time. Don't forget to take those little micro mom moments yourself from an active recovery perspective. I also noticed that there's a B up in your bookshelf. I I think I saw a little soft toy. I could be wrong but I did see something.
Tamar Grossman: My my daughter made them, crocheted them for me. Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: They're so cute. Yeah, the little yeah, little little little dinosaur in a bee. I was like, there's a little sign there. So we need we need bees in the world
Tamar Grossman: Yes, yes.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: and so clearly she's put the she's created a bee for you because we need we need bees to solve more problems. So yeah.
Tamar Grossman: Yes. Yes, they're right there. Thank you.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Thank you so much, Tamar. Have a lovely evening and a wonderful week ahead.
Tamar Grossman: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Have a great day. Bye.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You too, thank you, bye.