People are dying from diseases that humanity could cure.
In this episode of Bite the Orange, Zina Sarif, CEO and Co-Founder of Yendou, discusses the consequences of minimal clinical research in low-income countries and how she is approaching this global issue with a change of pace in the development of multiple drugs, therapies, and personalized medicine. Growing up in Morocco, Zina experienced first-hand the lack of infrastructure destined for clinical research for cancer patients, witnessing little to no diversity or inclusion and a colonial approach from foreign countries regarding support. One of the problems she identified is the time it takes to develop oncology drugs, as it can be up to 12 years, after which the technology is virtually old and expenses are very high, which creates a barrier for people to participate in research. For about seven months now, she has been working at Yendou to match pharmaceutical companies and clinical trials to clinics to deliver drugs to patients in a record four-month period.
Tune in to learn how Zina Sarif is democratizing healthcare and access by improving oncology research, development, and deployment processes!
FULL EPISODE
BTO_Zina Sarif: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
BTO_Zina Sarif: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange. And today we have a very special guest with a very interesting background. And you probably have heard of her and if you've not, you probably heard of Dr. Zina Sarif today. This is the CEO and founder of Yendou. So welcome to the show, Zina.
Zina Sarif:
Thank you, Manny, happy to be here.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So tell us about yourself for those that don't know you.
Zina Sarif:
Yes, I'm Zina, originally from Morocco, moved to Germany 15 years ago, studied chemistry, have been working on cancer drug development for a long time, cooking drugs in the lab. Yes, till one day I realized it doesn't make much sense to keep working in drug discovery. Just, I came across an article that says that clinical trials take so long and it goes that much, and I, my curiosity got me again. I'm like, okay, I have to find out what's happening there. And I moved to the industry of clinical trials, worked there a bit, and for some weird reasons ended up quitting my job, and here we are.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite interesting. I was also an undergrad, I was in a biochemistry major and studied molecular biology, right? I ended up taking the path of medicine that brought me back into the idea of personalized medicine. And that's something about biochemistry and molecular biology that puts you in a point of what personalized medicine is, right, looking at things from an aspect of perspective of working on receptors, right? It's a unique kind of perspective of what you study, which is quite important. And so I don't want, I don't want to downgrade that fact that you have a PhD in this topic here, which is you have to be super curious to actually get a PhD in this particular field.
Zina Sarif:
I think I just love the suffering somehow. I talked to a friend of mine yesterday and he was like, wasn't it hard actually to quit your job and start Yendou? And I was like, since I remember, I always made it hard for myself because I was, I remember I was really good in physical chemistry and analytical chemistry. I used to mentor students, give physical chemistry classes at the university, but I specialized in inorganic chemistry, and inorganic chemistry is all about really understanding 3D structure of crystals and elements, and I am so bad in orientation. So having three-dimensional thinking is totally not my thing and just go through it. But because it was the only thing where you can really work on building new drug compounds, and then we had CRISPR Cas9 merging the needles like, okay, we need to understand biology. So why not study biology on the side, move to a lab, and work on that? And yes, so always following the crazy, for sure.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Now, which is quite interesting. I really enjoy finding scientists that get into the entrepreneurial side of things like myself, and I think it's quite interesting. But what got you specifically interested in cancer research?
Zina Sarif:
I grew up in Morocco and we had back then two oncology centers, one in the north of the country, in Tangier, and the other one was in the capital in Rabat, where I grew up. And like most people, there is no pre-screening, there is no early diagnosis. Usually, people feel super bad and then they go to the hospital and then you are already stage four metastatic cancer patients, and most of them, they couldn't afford hospital stays. So what happened was African countries, you stay with your family, with friends of your friends. So we always had a high turnover of cancer patients staying at our place. And I remember the first time, it was my uncle and you just see those people coming healthy, they just feel sick. And then to have their first test in the hospital and they stay with you every day and six months later they die and you really watch the process happening. It was scary, I remember back then I didn't want to touch my uncle. I was just like scared that it's, infectious diseases, I didn't want to get sick, and I just had this understanding. I think because it was the disease I had been exposed to the most, but also it made me understand that becoming a doctor is something you can, engineer, the doctor is something your parents want you to become, not really something worthwhile doing. Understanding without the drugs, even physicians can't really save patients, and that's really where it came from. And then, fascinating, I have always been in the cancer space.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite interesting. I found this on Cameroon as well. And I'm African, like yourself, and I suppose I'd be wrong, but actually recently, right, and it's quite interesting. And if you look at things in general, if you look at what happens in Morocco, for example, you look at what happens in Cameroon or Nigeria, places you go and you find out that without, specifically in clinical research, we don't have the right infrastructure in place to begin with, we don't, it's pretty bad. If you just describe what it's like compared to what you know now and we'll get into later. But compared to what you know, for someone listening that doesn't understand that kind of infrastructure, what does a clinical research infrastructure look like when you're growing up, for example, in Morocco?
Zina Sarif:
Yeah, okay, I will really tell you, not even talking about ... or talking about today. I was like, I was at the Embassy of Malawi because I would love to, yeah, build a clinical research infrastructure in different African countries. And we are there, yeah, we are working on that. And breast cancer, if you're a breast cancer patient in Europe, you have your pre-screenings the moment you are 40, you do your mammograms, and then most cases are diagnosed super early. You have a surgery, ... chemo, and then things are fine. People don't die from breast cancer today in high-income countries. And then you look at the WHO data for Malawi, for example, this is realm what I was working on just this morning. You have, 17,000 people have breast cancer. 11,000 to 13,000 die from it because there is no pre-screening infrastructure. There is no like ..., CT scans, like all those things we do to monitor tumor progress, they are just, it's just nonexistent. And this is the difference. It's, I always tell people here, the ... I have been bringing to clinics in the last few years, they do not exist in low-income countries. It's really the privilege of high-income countries. So there is no clinical research infrastructure. There are more like you have clinics where you can, where you get treated, and you always get treated really super late because people cannot afford all those tests that we do today and we don't even have the medicine we have here.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yes, and that is something that's pretty sad, extremely sad, right? I remember working in industry when I was at Novartis and Bayer, even Johnson & Johnson, so this is not picking any particular company, but I'll sit in a room and then they'll do presentations and they'll show us all these global sites in a clinical study, and I'll look at the entire African continent and they'll be like, you know, something that happened up in Egypt, and then they'd be like something in South Africa, but like the whole North and the whole middle chunk is like nonexistent. And I go, but they're almost a billion people in there, there's like tons of people, like the humans live here, right? So it's not just empty, just empty black space. And when I, yeah, go ahead, please.
Zina Sarif:
Yeah. I don't know. This way, like when talking to, yeah, to government responsible in African countries, of course, there is economic interest. There is this interest to, to build an infrastructure. And that's where I think we don't, I don't want us, first, we have a huge issue with diversity in clinical trials, like most clinical trials do not actually, most drugs are not tested in people of colors at all, and then no clinical trials are happening there, but then we go to their commercials to sell those drugs. And then you have those countries who want to build cancer research centers of excellence, but they don't have it, and no one takes them seriously. We always came, I think we always have this colonial arrogance to say we want to help those countries by giving them things. Why not help them build a capability so they can actually care for themselves? And yeah, this is something I'm working on on the side, and helping. With Yendou, I can help them.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And ... in an admission, that's something that I'm actually quite interested in and I say that we don't need handouts, right? We want to have infrastructure in place, right? And support the growth of that because it's not like there are no people that can't afford to pay for these drugs in Africa, right? We have to, we can pay, we just make it a fair price and we can afford but we also want to get included in the research. In a similar thing, yes, even on the side of cardiovascular medicine. My grandmother, that's why I ended up in cardiovascular medicine. My grandmother also had heart failure, right, and I watched her get sick and die, unbelievable. And developing drugs for heart failure that are like this high, it's like the Gucci and like the high-end Fendi, right? That you know, that people are getting from, would never, ever get access to these things, right? And so we look at, at least in heart failure, you have like this chronic health condition, when you're looking at cancers that, how deadly they are, which is very critical, to catch these illnesses in very early stage.
Zina Sarif:
Yes, yeah, definitely. And then there are other indications like ..., injuries or whatever, where here you have trauma centers, the patient is handed over directly after the, yeah, like, and it's great we have it, but we can't bring it elsewhere. It's not rocket science. People are, they're educated, they, just let us build the capabilities and let them do the work. Just show them how, and then.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Call me in another mission, I'm happy to help. With that being said, with all those experiences, and what you've gone through on the journey, which I fully support and fully understand, how do you come up with, first of all, so tell us about Yendou, right? And I'll start off by learning about what Yendou stands for. I did read the background piece when I was doing my research, but I think it'll be great for the audience to hear.
Zina Sarif:
Yes, Yendou, and it's a really the first three syllable of Jennifer and Duodna. Jennifer Doudna was the biochemist who has been awarded the novel Nobel Prize for a CRISPR Cas9 personalized medicine. I truly believe that personalized medicine is the future, and Yendou should help make it a global mission and not a local mission. And that's where the name Yendou comes from.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I love that. I'm a big fan of CRISPR Cas9, by the way, myself, right? I can't wait, I think there's a huge potential in that, I think especially coming from that biochemistry kind of angle, I think the idea of personalized medicine actually makes a lot of sense, right? A lot of people in that space and I think that's where things are definitely going, what we could do with those genes and everything else or gene editing. But with that being said, so tell us about your current company, and so what is your mission? What is the problem and what are you trying to solve?
Zina Sarif:
Yes, so today, as I mentioned at the beginning, clinical trials takes up to 12 years, in oncology, between 10 and 12 years, which means when the drug gets approved and it's accessible to every patient in high-income countries, it's a technology from the past because we have this like 12 years old. And I always say you can compare it to, imagine if it takes 12 years for, yeah, for a smartphone company to develop a smartphone. If Apple, number one, came to 2012, something like that.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Right, 2012.
Zina Sarif:
Yeah, and now we get iPhone, and then let's take the technology standard we have today. We won't have it within the next 100 years. And this is the reason why we are not and we haven't been able to cure diseases because the pace of drug development, of clinical trials is blocking us from moving faster. Because once there is a drug in the market, there is competition in the market to improve on the drug. Through those improvements and those competitions, everyone benefits, and that's how we have innovation. And so today it takes so long. And for me, this bothered me. I have been working, I joined Parexel first and then AstraZeneca trying to understand why it takes so long and then coming to the realization that everyone talks about different things. We talk about patient experience, we talk about physician experience. And from my side, I think, but who cares about cure? Apparently, we are so distracted by the noise, marketing, and branding, how we can offer experiences, but I believe that the job of drug developers is to deliver cures to patients. And I truly believe that if I am a cancer patient and you offer a cure or telemedicine, I will take cure over telemedicine. But we have more and more companies working on whatever fancy toys we can use within research, but not on what matters. And that's actually where I decided it was time to take the lead and work on improving their infrastructure. The deal that we want is, shorten the timeline to seven years. I think if we shorten the timeline to seven years, we decrease the budget down to 300 million, we can get more people involved in clinical research. I want clinical trials to be cheap. That's every, research institutes can afford on a clinical trial. And I truly believe if we have, if we build an environment where research is affordable, we can cure all diseases that are not induced by aging or infections, something like COVID, whatever. And we have to think about 70% of global death is not aging-induced. People die from diseases that we can cure, not because they got old or because they got infected by a pandemic. So that's actually what we are working on.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Now, which is quite good. I like the passion that you have for that. Have you thought about the idea of patient-driven research or even endpoints coming from local communities? Because I'm positive that someone lives in New York or someone lives in Berlin or someone lives in Malawi or in Cameroon or Morocco, different interests and different endpoints, so what you're looking for. We know we all respond differently to therapies, especially in the world of personalized medicine, and so there are different tumors that could be, the tumor could act different in different parts of the world, right, based on the individual, right? So what do you think is the best approach to that?
Zina Sarif:
We get everyone on board.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Democratizing healthcare. That's, so how long Yendou been in business and?
Zina Sarif:
... At least seven months now. Unbelievable, it feels like a short time at the same time.
Emmanuel Fombu:
But ...
Zina Sarif:
... Seven months.
Emmanuel Fombu:
....... First of all, I'm very proud to see female entrepreneurs, that's a good start, right, to begin this, to be in that space, being a female leader in that space should be highly recognized and appreciated in that space. So ... someone is listening, it's a young entrepreneur, a young female entrepreneur that's listening to this, what's it like?
Zina Sarif:
It's a good journey. I think there is a lot, like mostly, I miss people who are fearful and because, oh, quitting your career to start a company, go ground zero. And I always say, if you are educated, you literally have nothing to lose. And this might sound like an ... joke, but I used to tell my friends, okay, what will happen? Let's say Yendou will fail. I have a job at McKinsey. People go to Ivy League universities to have a consulting job. So it's not the worst place I can land then after a failure, but, and this is if you are educated, nothing can happen to you. And then add to it, if you are a, high-income countries, you have the whole social system infrastructure like giving you a cushion, like literally there is nothing that can happen. I don't even know what people ask you for. Yes, and to me, like the worst thing that could happen to me is, I am 120 and not having tried. I think the worst thing is being old and realizing you could have tried. What if I hate, yeah, this is what I fear the most.
Emmanuel Fombu:
That is quite like the rebellious spirit in the piece. I'm thinking I have a kind of spirit, which is what makes me, I'm actually smiling and laughing here when I listen to this, it's beautiful, I like the energy. It feels like I just took a shot of espresso. Right now, my side, like fully be, like fully energized, which is quite fantastic, and where you go. So if ..., how can I join Yendou? If I'm listening then I say, hey, I want to be a, I want to join the Yendou on this seven-month mission. I want to be with Yendou for the next 120 years. So how do I join?
Zina Sarif:
If you are active in clinical research as a biotech pharmaceutical company or as a clinic or as an oncologist, you can just visit us on Yendou.io and then click on Get Early Access, and then you sign up to the platform. If you are someone who is more, who is interested in having a mission, meaning in life, and want to see what are the world problems that we are working on, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn and my name, just add it to the description, Manny. I'm always happy to talk to young talents who want to change the world.
Emmanuel Fombu:
The, perfect, definitely, and what we'll do is on that, the show notes, we'll definitely put a website and your contact information, Zina. But if I look at, so basically what you have is like a marketplace where you could bring clinical research in, you could match, you match patients to studies, you match clinicians to study ....
Zina Sarif:
We match pharmaceutical, okay, we match the portfolio of pharmaceutical companies, clinical trials, to clinics, that's what we do. Because like, usually if you have a clinical trial, it takes up to 18 months to deliver the drug to the clinic so physicians can start prescribing the drug to patients. And what we do is, we shorten this timeline to four months. So yeah, so what we want is bring novel therapies as soon as possible to the patient and that's what we do. So it's, we are not, like it's not available for patients, but we work at the moment with patient recruitment platforms, so we have partnerships to enable patients to have access to those therapies and understand where the patients are. So we can, we go there where the patients are.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Now, correct. So it's more of a B2B kind of business model now, which makes sense, right? So you're doing a B2B piece. So if you, if I'm an investigator anywhere in the world and I can literally come and I can search a study and I could say, hey, I want to participate in that study.
Zina Sarif:
And that's what I want.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yes.
Zina Sarif:
Because if you are a patient, just imagine you just got diagnosed, you go to your doctor, it says you, hey, I mean, you have a cancer diagnosis. You don't make the decision yourself. What's the best therapy for you? You have no idea. You trust your doctor who tells you what's the best for you. So to me, like my approach to improving patients' experience is delivering all therapeutic options available on the globe to physicians so they can actually offer the best therapies to patients.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite fascinating now because you literally have a marketplace where, today, doesn't exist in a sense where you could have a clinician in Cameroon, ...., Cameroon, because I'm from Cameroon, Cameroon, or you can say Malawi, and you can say, Hey, I have this patient here, that I think could be a good candidate for this particular study. And they could show up on Yendou and I could say, hey, I like this study, and you could actually click and apply for that study to be a site, literally, and then all you have to do is just get dropped, delivered there. So you're basically democratizing healthcare and access, opening up access to people that otherwise wouldn't have access to this, and then one, expanding the number of sites globally that people could do. So that's a great, is it not a great, I hope everyone listening actually understands exactly what Yendou is doing, which is beautiful. How we started off the conversation, you could see how that builds up into the need for this, right, and what drives us towards that direction in a very special way. So if I am a PI, can I just join Yendou?
Zina Sarif:
Yes, literally.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So right now you're only focused on oncology. Do you plan to actually expand into other therapeutic areas?
Zina Sarif:
It's actually interesting. I was thinking it's going to be, it's going to take a time and first focus on oncology. But we have pharmaceutical companies and we have sites coming to us every day from around the globe asking to join because till now they never had the opportunity to have access to clinical trials. So currently we are around mid-March, we are planning to release new features to enable access also for other indications.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So would you, do work with CROs as well?
Zina Sarif:
Yes, probably would be collaborating with them. I think our business model doesn't really fit with theirs. Their business model is you make money per hour, so it makes sense if it takes longer. And I think we will collaborate, but we target biotech companies more. Like biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and then of course, we want them also to build a relationship with the clinics they work with.
Emmanuel Fombu:
It was great. I think that's a great place, I think Zina is probably the most honest and straightforward guest we've ever had on the show, and I think, which is good, which is good. I like the idea of saying it how it is and calling out industries, and I think that's perfectly fine. And if someone wants to challenge that, they should challenge it. I think you're, talking to you, I think everyone could tell it comes from the heart and you're doing something that you're passionate about, and those are the kind of leaders that we want to host on this particular show. And that's why we're called Bite the Orange. We want to talk to innovative entrepreneurs, great minds around the world that are changing the future of medicine to make it a reality. So Zina, once again, thanks for joining us on the show, and I'd love to have you again to track how this journey is going.
Zina Sarif:
Yes, sure. Let's keep in touch.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BiteTheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you can also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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About Zina Sarif:
Zina Sarif was born in Morocco and moved to Germany to study Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Ruprecht-Karls University. She later got a postgraduate degree in Clinical Trials Management and Monitoring at Parexel Academy, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Witten/Herdecke University, where she developed novel targeted therapy approaches to tackle the challenge of acquired resistance to MAPK inhibitors: Zelboraf(Plexxikon), Dabrafenib and Trametinib (Novartis) in melanoma cells.
Things You’ll Learn:
According to WHO data, in Malawi for every 17,000 individuals with breast cancer, about 11,000 to 13,000 will die from it, as there is no pre-screening infrastructure set up.
Jennifer Doudna was a biochemist awarded the novel Nobel Prize for CRISPR/Cas9 personalized medicine development.
Once a drug is in the market, healthy competition becomes a motivator to improve on the drug.
If research becomes affordable, all diseases that are not induced by aging or infections could be cured.
Normally, it can take up to 18 months to deliver a drug for physicians to prescribe to their patients.