Freezing Motion and Curing Cancer in a FLASH™

Welcome back to the TibaRay podcast. My name is Justin Starbird. And today I am joined by co-founder, chief medical advisor, and member of the board of directors of TibaRay, Dr.

Bill Loo, co-founder of TibaRay. Bill, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you. It's a pleasure.

It's exciting. This is the first time we get to meet. So, you know, no pressure, right?

Just like jump right in and do a podcast together. Sounds great.

You know, before we get into TibaRay. We talked a little bit to the CEO of TibaRay last week about the mission and vision.

But I want to get a little bit more into your background and what led you to radiation oncology and cancer treatment as a profession and direction after school.

Yeah, yeah, certainly. Radiation oncology is not a specialty that people often hear about, even in medical school. And actually, I didn't know about it when I started medical school.

And so I learned about it really quite by accident. What I did know was that I've always had a love for interdisciplinary specialties where you combine expertise from different areas.

And so my own background, you know, going into medicine was one with a physics and engineering angle to it.

And so looking for ways to bring. Bringing that together into medicine was something that I was interested in, and also an interest and passion for tackling big problems that were unsolved and affecting people's lives.

And what I didn't know at the time, which I think many people don't know, is how large a role that radiotherapy plays in the treatment of cancer.

Actually, in the United States, about two-thirds of patients with cancer benefit from radiotherapy at some point in their treatment course.

And radiation oncology is a specialty that combines those aspects of really high-tech, deep technological innovation and bringing that to patients.

And so that's something that I didn't know going into medicine, but I sort of accidentally discovered because we rotate through different clinical services. As a medical student, can choose to do so as electives. There's a few core ones that everyone does.

And then other specialties that people sort of explore. And at my medical school, which was at UC Davis, there was a particular year where the elective to do a radiation oncology rotation was accidentally dropped from the course catalog.

So they actually sent around a flyer saying, you know, our course was actually accidentally dropped from the catalog. You know, we're here.

And I saw that and I said, hmm, this looks kind of interesting. It looks like an interesting blend of the things that I was, you know, you know, fit my background.

And so I checked it out and really fell in love with it and found that to be, you know, a calling for me career wise.

That's incredible. I didn't realize that that is where it all started. So what, you know, what happened after, after you were, you know, completed school?

I know. So what's a little bit different in medicine is, you know, you get out of the realm of what they're teaching you and then into the real life.

And it's, you know, often, you know, a pretty big difference versus the textbook. So, you know, talk a little bit about your early days in your career.

Yeah. So, you know, once I learned about radiation oncology, I really tried to dive into it. I actually rotated through several departments besides the one at my school at UC Davis.

Actually did a visiting clerkship, as we call it, rotations through the departments at Stanford and at UC San Francisco.

And had a chance to see at these, you know, really leading edge institutions where, you know, lot of the history of, you know, the modern era of radiation oncology was born.

And, you know. But to see that and learn in those environments was very stimulating to me. And so I ended up applying to residency in radiation oncology and matched to Stanford, where I still am now as a faculty member.

That was now 20, 25, 26 years ago, something like that. And yeah, so I've been in it ever since.

And it's been really an incredible journey, because even while I was in training as a resident, and then continuing onward, when I joined the faculty, I had the opportunity and privilege to have as kind of a continuing part of my career, bringing new technologies into the clinic.

So it was really this process of constant innovation, taking technologies, figuring out how to adapt them and use them for the patients that we treat.

And And my own specialty that I've developed over my career has been in the treatment of lung cancer. And one of the themes of our whole field of radiotherapy and lung cancer happened to be kind of the perfect place to develop it was as we make our radiotherapy treatments more and more precise.

You know, really where we've become a precision targeted therapy for cancer over the last few decades, that precision and the technologies involved in achieving it and dealing with this issue of, you know, we're trying to precision sharpshoot at targets in the body that are constantly moving because we are living, breathing beings.

Every part of our body is moving all the time. And that has been one of the important unsolved technological problems.

In our field is how to achieve that precision when treating moving targets. I had the opportunity to be kind of in the thick of that development over my career.

That is incredible and fortuitous to see the flyer have the passion and turn it into a career. I mean, every day must be exciting to wake up and look at new ways to solve these problems.

Yeah, absolutely. And to see how the field has evolved, particularly in lung cancer. Lung cancer is actually the deadliest cancer in terms of more people dying of lung cancer than any other cancer.

Even though it's not the most common cancer, it is the deadliest in terms of just the mortality. And that has evolved a lot, actually, over the last couple of decades.

When I started in the field, you know, there was really a huge nihilism about lung cancer. mean, patients would be referred to me from other doctors or seek out a consultation with me, having been told by other doctors, essentially, you know, you have lung cancer.

That's pretty much it. You know, get your affairs in order. And the talk about and really discussing curative treatment of lung cancer almost was not in the vocabulary.

And now we have treatments that really are curative for many patients with lung cancer. And not just lung cancer and cancer overall, but lung cancer is where we've seen a huge amount of progress.

And talking about cure is actually in the dialogue now. Obviously... Obviously... We're not curing nearly as many patients as we, you know, really need to.

And it's a huge area of continued development. But just that progress and the role that radiotherapy has been able to play and, you know, to be able to see these patients and, you know, give them a real shot at, you know, what they're seeking, you know, in terms of treatment of their cancer, that's extremely fulfilling.

Yeah, no kidding. You know, thinking about being at Stanford and the opportunities you mentioned, thinking about the innovations coming to you to, in a way that help you apply them to diagnosis and curative opportunities.

Is that how TibaRay was first started? Talk a little bit about where you were. You're able to sort of take the idea from and turn it into, you know, even a tech transfer.

Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head there. Really, at least in terms of my involvement in it, TibaRay was really born out of clinical insights that were garnered from treating patients and finding new solutions for them.

So, you know, coming back to that idea of sharpshooting at moving targets, that's been the challenge in our field.

And, you know, every technology provider in our space, you know, offers some attempt at a solution in this because it's so important.

And so, again, I've had the privilege over the years of implementing many of these technologies. And working together with colleagues, so I'm a radiation oncologist, I'm a physician, but I work very closely with colleagues who are medical physicists who develop, you know, the physics and engineering aspects of things.

And that's part of my own background and training too. I have a training as a bioengineer, a PhD bioengineer.

And so, you know, I kind of mesh well with the medical physicists in my field. One of them, Peter Maxim, who's also a co-founder of TibaRay, is one who's been a longtime partner of mine, and we've collaborated very closely bringing these technologies into the clinic.

And so how do we deal with moving targets in the body, such as lung tumors? Well, one way is to synchronize the radiation beam with the tumor movement, with breathing.

Basically, as a person breathes in and out, we can synchronize it so the beam only comes on at a certain portion of the breathing cycle.

Rather than having to treat a large area just to encompass the range of motion of the tumor so we don't miss, we can actually treat a more focused area because we're only turning on at a certain portion of the breathing cycles.

That was one technology we brought into the clinic and that various of the vendors, technology providers, you know, have implemented in their products.

We call that respiratory gating. We've even implemented ways of following the tumor with the radiation beam, tracking, and we've implemented solutions like that over time.

And what we learned is a few things. So, first of all, you know, we can, you know, create these very precise treatments, but it's complicated.

It requires. requires a lot of expertise, lot of really understanding how to use the technology properly, and it's, you know, a complex technology.

And so it's difficult to do well, and it's easy to do wrong, you know. And so as a solution for the general, you know, practitioners, it's challenging.

Yeah.

Yeah, sorry. No, you continue.

This is fantastic. I think, you know, it's such an insightful view into what you're looking at every day. So continue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the other thing that we realized is that the reason that we have to go through all of these, you know, kind of complicated solutions is there's a basic assumption.

The assumption is that it takes longer to deliver the radiotherapy, which is, you know, typically takes minutes. continue. I'll

And sometimes many minutes, even, you know, in earlier days, over an hour, you know, so it takes longer to deliver the treatment than for the body to move.

And therefore, we must compensate for that motion. That's always been the fundamental assumption. And yet we also saw as we implemented various technologies and the treatment times were getting shorter, the shorter the time that the treatment is going on, the less patients move.

I mean, you know, they're not as uncomfortable. They're not wiggling around. And also, if you take that to the extreme, you know, the faster you are in treatment, the less opportunity there is to move.

And so what if we could flip the equation around? What if we could get the treatment done, you know, nearly instantaneously?

Then there'd be no motion. There'd be freezing the motion. And that was kind of the insight that triggered this path that ultimately led to...

To a research program, a technology research and development program that ultimately led to TibaRay.

So thinking about that beam that you talked about.

Sorry, something happened to my display. Give me one second. Lost your camera there. Okay, let's see what happened. I think I might need to rejoin the video.

Give me one second. Yeah.

There we go.

Okay. Sorry about that. What happened?

Yeah, no worries. It was good timing in that it was in between questions, so I can go back to asking the question.

So this was the rabbit hole I was talking about. We need to pause and redo.

Sure. All right.

I'm really glad you brought up the treatment and the movement, and you mentioned the beam that you use to track a tumor and how things move.

For TibaRay, you call that a flash, and at what point were you convinced that that flash would fundamentally change what is actually possible?

With radiation therapy, how does that work?

Yeah, great question. And as it turns out, we didn't invent the term flash. It came from a very, you know, kind of fortuitous and kind of coincidental timing and discovery.

So, so we started on this process of trying to develop much faster treatments in order to create this motion freezing precision.

And at that point, Peter and I, you know, realized that one piece of the equation was to generate the beam much more quickly.

And the source of the beam is a linear accelerator. And so we sought out, you know, the best linear accelerator expertise that we could find, which again, being at Stanford, meant that we only had to look down.

What? What? Oh, Road at SLAC National Accelerator Lab, where, as it turned out, my colleague, Sammy Tantawi, who is one of the chief technology scientists there, had made a discovery, a fundamental new discovery in how these particle accelerators work, how the efficiency of converting the input power into beam power was, you know, kind of understood fundamentally for, you really the first time in decades, even though linear accelerators had been around for, you know, like about 60 years, you know, it turned out that there was new fundamental science to learn, and Sammy had just discovered it at the time that we reached out to him.

So that was one piece of the equation is, you know, that generated a lot of excitement is, you know, when we contacted Sammy, he had just made the decision.

Discovery recently, and then he, talking to us, realized, hey, there's this application that, you know, really could take the science that he's developed and make an important real-world application of it that he hadn't, you know, anticipated or really, you know, known about at that time.

So that was a kind of a perfect convergence.

Yeah.

And then that was to solve this, you know, motion and precision problem, which, again, everyone in the field has been trying to solve.

But at, you know, nearly the same time, shortly after we had started down this path, there was a publication that came out from the Curie Institute in France.

And one of the senior authors of that is Professor Vozenen, who is now a close collaborator. Of mine in the basic biology research side of what I do.

And she and her colleagues made a really surprising observation, which is that at least in animal models, like in mice, if you give the same dose of radiotherapy in a short fraction of a second, rather than over several minutes, like we normally do in the clinic, for the same dose, the tumor killing effectiveness is about the same, but the damage to the normal organs is substantially less.

And that was a real surprise. Was there a hypothesis, though, did you have?

Was that something that you were hoping for or, you know, an unintended, you know, benefit?

That is, well, definitely unintended in the sense. It's that, you know, it's not like, you know, the effect of speed hasn't been studied historically.

Right. And, you know, up to a point, we knew that if you slow down the treatment by a lot, you know, like deliver over hours or days rather than minutes, then, yes, the effect, the biological effect can be different.

But we thought, at least based on, you know, kind of historical biology studies that, you know, if you're already treating in the range of a few minutes and so on, you know, the effects of treating much faster than that weren't necessarily going to be that different.

And we actually, you know, as we started looking into, you know, faster treatments for the motion freezing, we actually did look at this in the last...

AB a little bit, but not to the same scale of speed, right? You know, the tools that were available to us at the time limited us a little bit.

And so we saw what we kind of expected. Okay, if we treat in a few seconds, let's say, rather than a few minutes, the effects are about the same.

So that was a surprise when the Curie group published this observation, which they called flash, the flash effect. And initially, the reception to that in the whole field, I think, was one of a little bit of skepticism.

Because, you know, they're publishing this observation that seems to go counter to, you know, many decades of, you know, dogma in the radiobiology world.

And it's a classic adage of it's the way we've always done it. So, you know, why would it be different even though you're in this?

That's Field that is quite literally accelerating an opportunity for curative medicine. mean, sorry, I interrupted. It's just so exciting.

I hear you.

It happens in every walk of life. You just don't always think of it in this respect.

Yeah. And so in science, we refer to this as a paradigm shift, right?

You know, it's an observation.

It's like, how could it be true? And then I think initially there was also this sense among people of, you even if it's true, sort of, so what?

Because there's nothing, there's no technology that can do this in the clinic anyway, you know, treating a fraction of a second, you know, so what's the relevance of this, right?

And yet here we were working on technology exactly towards that goal. And we said, okay, well, if this new biological effect is true, that totally.

It changes the game and the significance of everything that we're doing, because now not only will we achieve the physical precision, but we have a new biological precision targeting cancer.

And that combination really is the holy grail of cancer therapy, right? Anything that you can do that kills cancer without causing a lot of collateral damage, that's what every cancer therapy is about, whether it's surgery, whether it's drug therapy.

This is what we mean by precision medicine, right? And so we saw that and said, okay, you know, I really hope this is for real.

And actually at that point, you know, Peter and I, on the research, know, wet lab side of our work, shifted our focus completely over to studying flash.

And that's what we've been doing for the last, you know, more than a decade. it. clean. like it's It's It's You

Really corroborating and expanding on those original observations. And now many labs are doing this. And we continue to collaborate with Professor Vozenen, who's kind of one of the originators of this field.

And over the last few years, just hundreds of publications coming out from labs all over the world because of the excitement about the flash effect, the potential it has to impact clinical care.

And yet, on the technology side, there's still this gap of being able to truly deliver flash therapy to patients in the clinic and do it with the same kind of spatial precision that we have come to expect from modern radiotherapy over the last several decades.

And so that's the technology gap that TibaRay is kind of was born.

Well, and that was what I wanted to touch on next, and you led right into it, is what does TibaRay do that makes it different than what others are still studying, where you have an application that is now in manufacturing?

Yeah, yeah. Well, so I think, as I mentioned, there's sort of two parallel streams of precision that we want to accomplish in radiotherapy.

One is physical precision, and the way that the field has moved, and it's still true, is that the way, if you want to create a dose in the body that is super sculpted, in other words, you want the high dose that is shaped just like the tumor, all its little nooks and crannies, and you want it to, what we call conform to the tumor, and yet...

All right. Spare and avoid excessive dose to all the other organs in the body. So that's a physical precision problem.

And the way that we achieve that, one way is to bring beams from many different directions where they all converge on where the tumor is.

And then there's sophisticated beam shaping and what we call intensity modulating devices that further sculpt these beam profiles to create these very exquisite 3D doses.

And then you have to solve the motion problem too, right?

So that's the physical precision side of things. And then there's the biological precision. And this is where most people start thinking drugs and so on, which is true.

There are huge revolutions in molecular targeting of tumors with drugs that are designed to attack very specific. biological pathways in tumors based on each tumor's genetic makeup.

So that's one, you know, field that has really, you know, taken off, and in addition, immunotherapy. And so these are biological targeting approaches that people sort of think of first.

And in radiotherapy, over the last few decades, you know, there's been much less progress in true biological specificity of radiotherapy for tumors, killing tumors and sparing normal tissues, until kind of flash kind of came onto the scene back, you know, a little over a decade ago now.

So, so the convergence of those two doesn't really exist in one solution. There are existing Technologies to deliver radiotherapy much faster than what we can do in the clinic in certain ways.

So, for example, the most common type of radiotherapy that we use in the clinic, 98, 99% of patients are treated this way is with high energy x-rays.

And the advantage of x-rays is that they can penetrate deeply into the body. And therefore, if we get multiple beams to cross and focus, we can create this great dose sculpting effect.

There are other types of beams. So electron beams are using electrons as a charged particle. And for the similar energy of the beam, electrons will penetrate, but only superficially into the body.

So they can be used to treat things like skin tumors or things at the surface of the body, but they don't penetrate deeply.

Now, if we use the electron beam directly, there are existing technologies, machines, that can deliver electron treatments in this kind of flash type of speed.

So already a few centers have conducted preliminary or kind of early stage clinical trials using electron beams in flash mode.

So very fast delivery of electron beams, but they can only be used to treat these superficial targets like skin tumors.

So it's kind of a niche, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Similarly, there are proton beams. Proton beams are kind of exciting because they can penetrate deeply into the body. And furthermore, you can, by controlling the energy of the beam, sort of dial in just how deeply they go and then they stop, right?

So in a way they can create even more. The challenge with proton beams is that, first of all, they're not very accessible because it requires big, expensive accelerators.

And in addition, if you want to have these multiple different beam directions coming from, you know, to, you still, even with protons, even though you can kind of dial in the depth, you still need multiple angles to create the most conformal doses.

And so that means a big machine that has to rotate mechanically to treat from these different directions.

Right. And that's not fast.

Right. So from any one direction, actually, it is possible in proton, some of the existing proton machines to sort of crank up the speed, if you will.

But then you get only one direction that's fast. And so you can get, you can start to do flash treatments that way.

And some clinical trials, again, sort Initial technical feasibility clinical trials have been done with proton beams, but then you're kind of either or, right?

You can get flash, or you can use multiple beams to create these very exquisite doses, which is why people kind of wanted to use proton beams in the first place, but you don't get both, right?

And, you know, so then you're essentially saying, with protons, you can do flash, but then you're giving up one of the main reasons why we, you know, wanted to develop proton therapy in the first place, right?

So that combination of being able to deliver the most exquisite, conformal dose distributions, and do it in a flash, no technology exists for doing that, except for what, what TibaRay is developing.

I mean, that's incredible. To even be able to say that, I'm sure, you know, from your perspective in your career, it's so rewarding to feel like you've come this far on one hand.

On the other hand, are there other testing that needs to be done before this gets, this is something that can be deployed on a, you know, on a scalable level?

Yeah, obviously, there is, there's a lot of work to be done. And part of it was done as the initial research collaboration within the Stanford University environment.

So Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Lab, where we actually built the first accelerator prototypes, demonstrating the physical principles that Sammy had discovered, that in fact, there are ways to design accelerators to be far more power efficient.

And therefore, able to produce much more beam with much less power and make compact, high-performance accelerators possible. So that was proof of, you know, kind of a new science, new physics in accelerator development.

And that's the mission of universities and kind of the research environment. And at that point, then we realized now that, you know, within the university research environment, we proved that the science is real.

And how do we make it into something that goes into the real world? And that actually is, in a way, not what universities are equipped to do.

And that's why, and Stanford is a great example of this, why so many companies spin out of universities to kind of take these fundamental discoveries and bring them into the real world.

And we sort of realized, okay. Okay. If we want this to have a real impact, that's the path we're going to have to take.

And that's what led to founding of TibaRay. And then over the last several years, and with the support largely of multiple government grants and contracts in kind of the business sector, as opposed to the academic research sector, that's what funded the development of practical implementation of this new accelerator technology that essentially we are finally just on the verge of testing the actual performance for real.

And so that's been kind of a long road to get to that point, but to be able to do this.

In a device that's not just created for the lab research environment, but something that's designed to be manufacturable, scalable, economical, something that could be a real-world product, and to prove the performance in that sort of platform, that's what startup technology startups, deep tech startups like TibaRay are designed to do.

And, you know, basically we're at the point of just about being able to taste that.

Yeah, it's so exciting to be sitting here with you today to hear about the journey. I know our future shows are going to talk more about the path forward and where the technology is going and also what the opportunities are.

But, you know, I'll get you out of here on this because I feel like this is great context for the company.

Thank Thank you. And the foundational conversation and asset to the company as a whole to share your story. What are you looking forward to next?

Well, so, of course, I think in the immediate next step would be to actually see the results of real high power testing of this new class of accelerator that will be then ready for production.

And the first clinical implementation of that will be as the source of x-rays for our clinical partner, Leo Cancer Care, who's a company that is very innovative and is producing treatment machines that kind of flip the workflow and have patients in the upright position rather than lying down.

And there's A lot of advantages to that, both in terms of patient comfort and workflow efficiency, like throughput in the clinic.

I think those are all important factors that lead to accessibility of radiotherapy, which is still an important problem to solve.

Many patients around the world don't have access to this life-saving treatment. And, you know, it makes the whole efficiency of space and compactness much better because now you're eliminating all that infrastructure that moves a big machine around the patient and rather has a patient sitting kind of like you and I are in our chairs right now, which is actually a very easy way to rotate and get lots of different beam directions into the target.

So, so, so that's, that's the, the first. Our first clinical partnership that we have is working with Leo Cancer Care to bring industry-leading accelerator performance into their novel upright radiotherapy product.

And kind of in parallel, this first generation of our new class of accelerators, which we call Galactica, we'll also be going in to research labs as a way to produce flash treatments for biological research in cancer biology.

And so it's kind of a dual-pronged approach, know, kind of a research unit that goes all the way to flash performance.

And then a clinical deployment that is, it's not flash right out of the gate, but it is a performance that would be...

You leading the industry kind of on every metric.

That is incredible. It is, you know, difficult to pivot and ask follow-up sometimes because it's so interesting to talk about this as a solution to something that's really never been seen before.

So I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing the context on this and, you know, a little bit about the history as well as the path forward.

I know we're going to follow up and dig deeper into some of these things because you also have a campaign out right now on WeFunder to help, you know, raise money for the next stage.

And investors, you know, want to know. I think you have two elements of or two types of investors in the community round that you've started to put together on WeFunder.

And that's, of course. We're, you know, accredited investors that are part of this game for a long time. And then you have the opportunity to actually give folks that have been affected or are affected by cancer an opportunity to participate in the success of a company that's attempting to solve it.

And I think those two pieces coming together are such a unique opportunity for folks. And so I am so thankful that you've been so generous with your time to talk about how that all happens and do it in a way where I think most folks can understand.

And we can pull that out and go deeper and wider into both the technology behind it in a future episode, as well as, you know, some of the reasons why it's so important to you.

So, Bill, I really appreciate you spending the time with us today on this.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we definitely really appreciate it. I it's a partnership, I would say, with these early investors, you know, because, you know, it is early.

They're taking a leap of faith and, you know, also commitment to a mission and a vision to, you know, so it's not I think for these early investors, they're so critical because, you know, it's not just about money.

It's about making the world a better place and solving problems that, you know, really we will all face. I think everyone pretty much is touched in one way or another, you know, either directly or through relationships and so on by cancer.

And it is really the epidemic of our age. And to be able to talk about treating and even curing cancer, I think is...

and... Right. You know, that's just, you know, I mean, how can you do more than that, right? And having partners, you know, contribute and partner with us and to build this, that's what it takes.

know, doing deep tech is a hard job. And, you know, we need partners like that to move us forward.

That's awesome. And you're so right. You need to, you know, it takes a village to build something like this for sure.

In your case, maybe even more. So it's a very noble cause and worthwhile for sure. So if folks want to learn more about the opportunity to invest, they can do so on the page, wefunder.com slash TibaRay, and learn more about the technology, the total addressable market, and the opportunity that it presents for folks to, you know, see success.

So, so Bill, thank you so much for, for. Taking the time today.

really appreciate it. Thank you.

On behalf of my guest today, Dr. Bill Loo, the co-founder, chief medical advisor, and member of the board of directors for TibaRay.

Thanks for watching. Until next time. There you go. That was great, man.

Thank you. Yeah. It's good. I appreciate it. Yeah.

I thought that was a really good... So with these first couple of episodes, lay the groundwork for what we're trying to solve.

And man, I think there are so many angles that we could follow on there that allow us to go a little bit deeper and wider and pull back the curtains, if you will, for investors.

So I thought that was a great start.

Great. Great. Thanks.

Anything from you? Any questions, thoughts, ideas?

ACTION ITEM: Share 'In a Flash' podcast name w/ team; send feedback to Justin - WATCH

Any questions, comments? Yeah, so I'm just curious, you know, in terms of the overall plan, right, who will this, who will this reach?

Sure. So first, we've got to come up with a name. We had 10, we sent Lisa, I don't know, 10 or so names.

So if you have thoughts, ideas, I'm sure she'll.

Yeah, yeah. I think Lisa sent that around. You know, one that I thought, you know, was good. I kind of like the in a flash.

Yeah.

Because it kind of builds on our mantra and also, you know, kind of plays on this idea of the podcast being kind of like short bursts of, you know, info and things like that, right?

So. Yeah, I like that too. Yeah. Cool. So I mentioned earlier that the goal is to create a repository of information so I don't have to keep coming back to you or our team doesn't have to keep coming back to you for ways in which to talk about it.

It gives us a chance to do better and be more efficient with your time to create social posts, WeFunder posts, articles, refresh the WeFunder page, add content to the website.

These will live on the TibaRay website, but we'll also have a channel on Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and wherever else you get your podcasts.

So we take care of all that. So we try to put together a small library of three or four episodes before we go live so that we can, somebody wants to listen to them all at once, they can.

And then we get into a cadence of about one every two weeks. And then those are, you know, so the goal isn't to be number one on iTunes.

The goal is to be a platform to be able to communicate directly to investors and potential customers, as well as.

And so that builds the community so that we can get more folks involved. And then when we start layering in ads, it gives us a chance for people to have more content to digest.

Yeah, mean, one thing, I mean, we have attempted, you know, to post things on, you LinkedIn and X and so on.

It only has so much traction. I mean, I think we have, what, like a few hundred followers on LinkedIn or something like that.

So it's not exactly like a viral campaign, right? Right. And not that it has to be. I think it's more important that it actually, you know, gets traction with the people who can actually invest and support it and so on.

So what strategies are there to kind of get that reach?

So in addition to the viral element of it and organic posting, we... We've already started to recommend that we layer in some ads, especially retargeting, so that people that are already coming to the WeFunder page or the TibaRay page in general are getting an opportunity to kind of be followed around so that they come back.

And then we'll get to a spot where we'll do lead gen, so introducing it to new people, thinking about those pages on Meta, Facebook, LinkedIn, that are focused on finding a cure or being supportive of family, friends that are potentially going through something like that.

So that's the strategy with RegCF. Unfortunately, it's not super, super quick. It looks as though, you know, coming into it in the middle, you guys had some pretty good early success and, of course, stalled, it seems.

And what we're trying to do is sort of pick. That momentum back up and recreate it. It also, the bugger is that we didn't have some of the foundational assets in place, you know, from the beginning, like a pixel, which allows us to create a lookalike audience, which, you know, we didn't have a CRM.

So we weren't following up with investors or people that started checkout immediately. So those are all things that we've started to implement right away.

So we actually just completed some of those first foundational pieces on Monday and Tuesday. And then, yeah, so that's what we're working through right now, is making sure that the blocks that should have been in place before you went live are there, so that anything that we do going forward can be tracked, can be seen, and can be built upon.

All right. Sounds good. Cool.

Well, hey, great to meet you. I will catch up with you again soon, I'm sure. I like the in a flash.

Well, I'll... I'll service that with the team and see what they say, too. Great. Okay. Thanks.

All right. Good to meet you.

Yep. Bye.

Bye.