Cell Viability Testing with Cyto-Clear Photopolymer Resin

Robin: Last week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Veronika Magdanz and Noah Franco from the University of Waterloo. They shared their journey into the world of microrobotics, and gave us a look at their groundbreaking research, from non-surgical gallstone treatments to sperm-based robots and 3D-bioprinted organ models. If you missed that conversation, go back and give it a listen.

Hemdeep: This week, we’re back with Veronika and Noah to explore the challenges of balancing academia and industry, the value of failure, and how that all fed into the validation process for Cyto-Clear photopolymer resin, our newest 3D material here at CADWorks 3D, formulated for broad-spectrum cell viability and biocompatibility. A conversation about curiosity, persistence, and the real-world process behind breakthrough ideas.

When you’re learning a brand new topic, or even creating one out of nothing, there’s this level of expectation of success, but also an overwhelming expectation that none of it’s going to work. How do you guys manage that? In our case, you invest months, years, into a topic, and it can all be for nothing. How do you manage that?

Veronika: For me, the strategy has always been to never focus on just one thing. I usually have two, three, four, maybe ten different things going on, and you know most of them probably won’t work out the way you hope. But then you live off the little successes, the one project that does work out, and it’s so exciting. When you try something in the lab that’s never been tried before, and it works, that’s amazing; I think we live off those moments.

On the other hand, we do draw experience across projects; despite having so many different ones, we have a common theme, especially across the microrobot research, where it’s all about making therapies more targeted and more actively delivered. That’s true for gallstone treatment, but also blood clot removal, kidney stone removal, even antibiotic delivery. Conventional treatment, or cancer treatment too, often means drugs going into your whole body, since you take them by IV or orally, affecting the whole body. The idea is to make these therapies much more targeted and successful, and get rid of the side effects. That’s one of the common themes for the microrobots.

The other important thing for us is going into completely new fields; that’s the exciting part. We’re not competing with twenty other groups around the world doing the same thing; Noah’s probably the only person working on exactly what he’s working on. That also makes it a bit easier to be successful, since whatever you get out is a result, something worth sharing.

Hemdeep: Considering you’re at the starting phase of your life in academia, how do you manage expectations, and this level of expected failure?

Noah: It’s definitely scary, especially when you come up with something you’re really passionate about, and that’s the thing you want to see work. You have to balance that against the fact that it’s very entrepreneurial; when you build a company and it succeeds, that’s the best thing ever, but they almost always fail. I try to balance my expectations with the fact that it’s okay if things don’t work, but at the very minimum, we can build a framework for future researchers to build on. At the very minimum, I want to introduce something new and unique that can benefit the field. It’s definitely scary, but it’s the little steps you have to use as milestones to keep yourself going.

Hemdeep: What characteristics, would you say, let you do that? In business, you evaluate risk in a particular way; you’re either risk-averse or you’re okay with it. What are the traits in academia that make a successful researcher, versus someone who might just want to keep doing the exact same thing day in, day out?

Noah: You definitely need a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset to want to go and pursue something new. That’s important if you’re pursuing your own project, but you don’t have to; plenty of people just do their master’s or PhD and go into industry work. But having a project, and an entrepreneurial mindset, lets you take it further, to the point where it’s more than just a degree; it’s something you can call your own, something that could have real impact.

Veronika: I think it’s also curiosity, which you really have to embrace and live out. That’s where I usually see students succeed too: when they’re really curious, they own the topic, and just go at it, super proactive. Go to the lab, try things out. Don’t sit and read for three weeks, thinking about everything that could go wrong; just go try it and learn on your own. That’s where I see a lot of success come from, and failures too, of course, but failures are never the fault of a person. It’s a failed experiment; it has nothing to do with me or Noah failing personally. It’s just a result we should take seriously and learn from. I think it’s important to distance yourself from the results a bit, in the sense that this isn’t your self-worth you’re dealing with.

One other thing, maybe a bit different from what Hemdeep mentioned: when you do your risk analysis, we have the privilege, and I really see it as a privilege, of knowing I’ll still have my job tomorrow if my experiment fails today. Whereas in a company, that’s not a given; if you’re not selling, if things aren’t going well, that really affects your company and your people. For me and Noah, this is a privilege, being able to work off research funds, to have that freedom and curiosity, and follow it. I think it’s really an honor, and that’s how I see research.

Noah: Good you brought that up. On the flip side, Hemdeep, what’s your take on failure within the industry side of research?

Hemdeep: Industry, the number of failures I’ve had, epic failures; we’re talking setbacks of four or five years. That kind of failure, we’ve done it. My brother and I have co-founded things together, and looking back now, in our 50s, we can map out where our shortcomings were: we were navel-gazing, we weren’t really strategizing for epic failure, and we had a lot of attributes that were genuinely wrong that we had to modify.

Over the last five or six years, we’ve gotten a lot better at understanding what we have, what we don’t have, where our gaps are. One thing I tell our team, well, it used to be every day, now it’s more like once a week or once a month, is that we sit down and talk about our blind spots. It’s a moment of reflecting: yes, we may be doing X, Y, and Z well, but there’s a spot we just don’t see, where mistakes are compounding on each other, and by the time you find it, it may be too late. Can we identify that early? That’s one of the big things we work on.

In terms of risk, though, we’re very poor at evaluating it; we tend to run head first into things. Even during our interaction over the last two years, I’m sure the two of you, and even before that, Lydia, probably scratched your heads, wondering what we were doing and why we were doing it that way. It’s almost part of our fabric. I do think it’s a fault, but we haven’t killed ourselves. We’ve nearly burnt down my mom’s house. We nearly burnt down our old office in the city; when I say almost burnt it down, I mean there was an actual fire, involving alcohol.

Noah: 3D printer.

Hemdeep: There was a material my brother was working on developing, and he said, “This thing has got amazing properties,” and, you know how we have to use IPA to clean our models. We were at a large workbench right beside a wall, and there was a very thin layer of IPA on the bench that we hadn’t noticed. My brother wanted to take a model and light it, just to show it off, not realizing a drop of IPA had landed on the bench. We didn’t notice anything until a blue flame shot straight up the wall, and we were just like, no.

Robin: Was that at your mother’s house, or the office?

Hemdeep: No, this was at the office. At my mother’s house, we burnt her kitchen. I was thirteen, my brother was nine; we burnt her kitchen while she was away at work. I kid you not, we burnt the ceiling, the stove hood, and then, like a typical thirteen- and nine-year-old, we invited all our friends over with paint and brushes and repainted my mom’s ceiling.

Robin: Can stress cause gallstones? Because I think we might know where hers came from.

Hemdeep: It was the best thing. My mom came home that afternoon; we did it all in one afternoon. We burnt the kitchen around noon, and by three o’clock we had the place painted. It was summer, and my mom’s coming home to a house full of paint fumes; we’d opened all the windows, had fans going. She walks up and says, “What happened? Why are all the doors open?” We say, “Don’t worry about it, mom, we were just airing the place out.” She says, “Why?” We say, “Oh, we decided to paint this area.” She says, “Why would you do that?” It didn’t even dawn on her that her sons would have pulled something like this. She goes upstairs to her bedroom and notices soot had fallen on her bed, that’s how much we’d lit the place up. She came down and just had it; she chased us down. It was epic. And that’s the start of a great relationship, right? That’s how you find your co-founder. That’s the story of my life.

Veronika: You’ve been in this business a while now; how many years have you been working with your brother?

Hemdeep: Oh my god, I think forever and a day. I joined my dad’s business at 23; my brother joined at 27. So we’re now closing in on thirty years together.

Veronika: Amazing. Did you ever have a moment where you nearly folded it, said, “That’s it, we’re done”?

Hemdeep: I don’t know about that. I think we were just wired to always ask, “Okay, what do we do now?” We’ve had major inflection points; the one in 2009, when my dad passed away, was a really big one; it’s when we reorganized ourselves, and that’s also when we took up 3D printing, self-taught ourselves CAD design. It was a big reset for us. When we looked at it, we thought, “Okay, what do we do now?” I don’t recall a single moment where either of us said, “Maybe we need to part ways.” We’ve had plenty of moments where we didn’t agree on strategy, but we really started designing our roles around each other: my brother is our CTO, he manages the technology side, the photopolymer manufacturing and formulation, all of that is his. I handle the business side; I understand what’s happening on the technology side reasonably well, but that’s not what wakes me up in the morning. What wakes me up is trying to distill complicated processes or technologies into a format that can be understood, and get people excited, by a wide range of people.

When I connected with your team two years ago, it was purely on that, “Oh wow, this might be interesting.” We’d done something similar before, a collaboration with U of T in 2018, and one with the Majid team from UTS Sydney around 2018 to 2019. We really enjoyed those collaborations. It’s funny, when our collaboration with you happened, I’d approached a couple of teams before that, and they sort of looked at us like, “What do you guys even do?” We explained what we wanted to do, but there wasn’t a keen curiosity or interest. We figured, okay, maybe it’s not the right time yet. Then you guys came along, and it turned into a really good opportunity, and a good relationship that we’ve built over the last couple of years.

Robin: How did that actually happen? How did you find out about CADWorks 3D? Were you searching for something specific?

Veronika: I started as assistant professor here at Waterloo in fall 2022, a big change for me, coming from Barcelona and my postdoc at IBEC. I had to start building my network in North America, and one of the big funding opportunities in Canada is collaboration with industry, through programs like Mitacs. I was looking to build a network with companies also interested in doing research together, and there was a Mitacs call supporting collaborations in biotech, between academic research and industry.

So I was looking for local companies, but I really didn’t know the area at all. I was talking to my colleague in Barcelona, and she said, “I think we just bought a printer from a company that’s really close by.” I said, “Really, what’s their name?” It was Creative CADWorks, and she passed me the contact. I emailed Hemdeep, and he wrote back right away, said sure, let’s talk. I was really surprised by that level of interest, since it’s not a given; industry often runs differently, with different interests. But when we were brainstorming, there were a few topics right away where we could see common interest. So we started our first Mitacs collaboration, and now we’re on to our second, which is expanding. It’s been really great.

Robin: When the collaboration first started, how far along was Cyto-Clear in development?

Hemdeep: It was on the shelf at that point; it had been sitting there for about three years. We had it running, and were happy with it, but there were some real shortfalls, and we wanted to get it validated. There were a lot of steps still left to do, and honestly it wasn’t really on our radar at all; there was a sense of, “we should get to it eventually.”

But when that email came in, it’s strange; Veronika mentioned it started with a conversation she’d already had in Barcelona, but I’d also gotten an email from a student in the UK who said, “I’m going to be at Waterloo, would I be able to intern with you through the Waterloo industry program?” That’s where our connection happened. At that point, it dawned on us: what about that clear material we’d been kicking around for three years? Could that be something we bring to the table, push through, and get validated, really understand what we had on hand? That was the starting point for us. We were really excited when that email came in, since up until then, as I said, we’d had a couple of conversations with teams across Canada without much reciprocal curiosity. So it felt like, okay, maybe we’d have to wait longer for the right partnership.