Lucas Arzola
Chemical Engineering
Davis
UC Davis graduate student Lucas Arzola’s hometown, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, is famous for two things: pork rinds and traffic. In fact, Puerto Rico’s second-largest city is sometimes called "El Pueblo del Chicharrón" — Pork Rind Town.
The chicharrones are still tasty, but these days Arzola’s hometown, like much of urban Puerto Rico, is cited as a great place to grow up in if you want to be a biotechnology pioneer. Eli Lilly moved to the island in the 1950s, and today more than 100 pharmaceutical companies run manufacturing facilities in Puerto Rico.
Before entering the UC Davis Ph.D. program in chemical engineering, Arzola majored in industrial biotechnology at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. In the past year, at the tender age of 24, he’s suddenly found himself interviewed for newspapers and television for his research into the use of tobacco plants to make vaccines.
With breakthroughs in recombinant DNA technology, tobacco plants provide a medium for growing vaccines quickly — far more quickly than current methods. According to Arzola, faster manufacturing can head off vaccine shortages like the one that caused a crisis during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009.
"Thousands of lives and millions of dollars were lost because current technologies were not able to provide vaccines fast enough," said Arzola. “Instead of taking months to produce a vaccine, this platform can produce them in a matter of weeks.”
Although Arzola graduates this spring, he’s planning to stick around the UC Davis campus, where he and professor Karen McDonald are founding a startup biotechnology company, Inserogen. It will be housed at the Engineering Translational Technology Center, a business startup incubator.
At UC Davis, where cutting-edge agricultural research meets Northern California’s humming technology, Arzola found a medium for combining science and entrepreneurship. If his success at winning business competitions is any indication, Arzola’s entrepreneurial skills are growing almost as quickly as his vaccines.
Question:
How did you come up with the idea of using tobacco plants to grow vaccines?
Answer:
Tobacco plants are very well-researched and well-understood. We knew how to manipulate the plant to do what we want.
Question:
TV stories suggested that you chose tobacco to get attention because tobacco is usually considered 'bad,' yet your team has proven it can be used for good.
Answer:
I’m not sure how that got in there. Tobacco works better than other plants to produce the proteins we want. This idea has been around for a number of years, actually, but advances have made this more feasible.
Question:
People are responding to the idea of finding a new use for a crop that the U.S. continues to subsidize despite the known health effects. You're creating a benign market for a plant most view as malignant.
Answer:
Right. And we’re not diverting from the food supply. That’s an issue with using corn as fuel for cars as bioethanol; people worry that this is making corn less available and affordable as a food crop.
Question:
You won the Big Bang! Business Plan competition at UC Davis. How did you convince business folks that growing vaccines in tobacco would be profitable?
Answer:
For one thing, since you’re using the plants themselves as a factory for the vaccines, there’s less infrastructure. This method of producing vaccines is more cost effective. This can develop new markets for diseases that are underserved by current technologies. And it can be used to make vaccines for developing countries.
Question:
Does it offer possibilities for new vaccines to fight diseases like malaria?
Answer:
Our platform could be used very effectively for a malaria vaccine, although there are technical challenges that scientists need to overcome before a vaccine can be developed. What we have is a production platform that’s faster and more cost effective. During the H1N1 crisis in 2009, a lot of people needed therapeutics in a short amount of time. If we had this kind of manufacturing platform, we could have produced the vaccine much more quickly.
Question:
How quickly?
Answer:
We can produce a vaccine in a week, but that’s in the lab. I would say large-scale production takes a few weeks. Usually it takes months to produce a vaccine.
Question:
You've been on a fellowship called CREATE (Collaborative Research and Education in Agricultural Technologies and Engineering) that's fairly unique, and you've received numerous grants for your work. How has that affected your research?
Answer:
The CREATE program is amazing. It’s funded by the National Science Foundation and brings together scientists from different disciplines, providing training in business, intellectual property and global issues related to plants, specifically using plants to help improve the quality of life for people. I came to Davis because in Puerto Rico I had studied the use of living organisms in biotechnology, and I wanted to do more with that.
Question:
At a certain point, you began to focus on the business aspect. When was that?
Answer:
After getting first prize in the Big Bang! competition in 2010, we were awarded two grants: one from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) and the other from the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Program. We got great feedback from business people and I was able to learn the business side. We got two grants from the National Science Foundation and then I was really fortunate to go to Stanford for a three-month entrepreneurship course in the fall of 2011.
Question:
What's the next step?
Answer:
Getting my Ph.D. At the same time, I’m trying to get more grant funding so I can work on the startup company full-time.
Question:
Are you looking for angel investors?
Answer:
Before trying to get private investment, we’re trying to attract government funding.
Question:
Do you think you could have moved so quickly if you hadn't been in California?
Answer:
At UC Davis, they have all this great expertise in agriculture, health and engineering. Having that ecosystem in place gave them the opportunity to establish the CREATE program. At the same time, entrepreneurship is very big in this area, so that’s been enormously helpful. We’ve participated in as many business plan competitions as possible. There are a lot of them in this area. In addition to the ones I mentioned, at UC Berkeley, we won the elevator pitch award.
Question:
Move over, Larry Ellison. Let us know when you've got your yacht.
Answer:
Right. (laughs) Most startups fail, you have to remember. For me, money isn’t the motivation. I’m passionate about the technology. I really like the whole concept of using the tools that nature gives you to help improve the quality of life for people.
Question:
So, why do they call your hometown of Bayamon 'Pork Rind Town?'
Answer:
It’s “chicharrón,” the skin of the pork. They toast it and they sell it. It’s the best there. The best in Puerto Rico.
Question:
Did you happen to know that pork rinds, despite their reputation, are quite healthy? They've got no carbohydrates, and tons of protein. Much healthier than potato chips.
Answer:
I actually did not know that! You have made me crave some chicharrones right now.