Hemdeep (00:09)
Welcome to Big Ideas in Microscale, the podcast where we explore groundbreaking research happening at the microscale where micro innovations makes a big impact. We're excited to showcase the incredible work being done by our users from around the world who are pushing the boundaries of microfluidics, lab on the chip, organ on the chip, and beyond. Through these conversations, we hope to learn from their experiences, uncover their insight, and bring their big ideas to wider audience. So whether in a lab, on the go, or just curious about the future of microtechnology, join us as we dive into big ideas at Microscale.

Hemdeep (01:01)
Welcome to Big Ideas at Microscale. I am Hemdeep Patel, your host. Unfortunately, today we don't have my co-host Robin. She's in the process of setting up her new life in Alberta, but I'm sure she'll be jumping on during our next episode. I'm actually very keen about this next topic and this next group of people because we've conversed with the researchers at schools, at universities. We've done some conversations with those that are in the microfluidic field in terms of 3D printing. This is the first opportunity I get to talk to with a team based out of a pharmaceutical. We're talking to Ann Tong and Drew Wollman and John Shanley from AbbVie and they are part of the group that's called Sparks. Welcome you guys. How are you?

John (01:51)
Good, thank you.

Anne (01:52)
Thank you for having us.

Hemdeep (01:54)
Before we begin, why don't we jump in and I guess I can have you ⁓ introduce yourself. Why don't we start with Andrew, I think you're the leader of this group here, so why don't you take the lead and charge us through.

Drew (02:06)
My name is Drew. I have a PhD in mechanical engineering and I have been at AbbVie for five years. I am a member of a multidisciplinary group in AbbVie that is internal curiosity-driven research group that services our clients in drug discovery in AbbVie at the early stages of drug discovery.

Hemdeep (02:29)
And how about you?

Anne (02:31)
Yes, my name is Anne Tong and I have a PhD in chemical engineering. I have been working at AbbVie for two years and I'm having an amazing time with Drew, John and every member in the group.

Hemdeep (02:44)
Amazing, John...

John (02:46)
I'm John Shanley. I have a master's in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois. I've been in the group here for about five years, kind of switching around between traditional mechanical engineering, more towards robotics and software lately, and of course, 3D printing.

Hemdeep (03:01)
Great. So I think Drew touched on this briefly and I think that would be possibly the best place to dive in. And it's this group that you're part of called SPARKS. I did a bit of dive into SPARKS and the mission statement, it is very interesting. If you ⁓ sort of give us what the acronym SPARKS stands for and what the focus of that group is, Drew.

Drew (03:24)
No. John can do that.

John (03:27)
specialized research in chaotic systems. That's Sparks. It came from our leader, Jeff Pan, who was told by his manager years ago that we needed a creative name for our group and whatever it was going to be called, it had to have the word chaos somewhere involved. Organized chaos is kind of one way to look at it. We make robotic systems, automation systems, software, hardware, processes, all of the above and kind of beyond that for drug discovery research, know, things that give other scientists, biologists, chemists here within the company a competitive advantage.

Hemdeep (04:05)
So if I was to put it out to the three of you, when you first joined Sparks or you were brought into Sparks, what part of that group network really inspired or at least what was the connecting point that you found very valuable to you?

Drew (04:20)
So I think for me, when Jeff first reached out to me to hire me, he described an environment in which you will always have something new to work on. You will never be bored. Every project is new. Every challenge is great. There's lots of room for improvement wherever we look. And I think that Jeff's knowledge and excitement of the industry really got me excited about the group. That's why I joined.

Hemdeep (04:52)
Yeah. How about you, Anne?

Anne (04:54)
Yes, for me, it's like when I talk to Jeff, he inspires me about the opportunity to grow in the group. And when I come to the group for the interview, I experienced that each of the team member, the group member, they have different background. And when we talk about it, I feel I can learn a lot from them. It's like I am specialized in microfabrication for microfluidic device. And in the group we have Dave Chang-Yan, he also specialized on that and he has more experience than me. So I feel I can learn from them and on top of that I can learn from Drew, John. I feel it's a non-ending journey for me to learn and grow and be in the field of pharmaceutical, which is the field that I really want to work with and be helpful and devoting my specialties for the field.

Hemdeep (05:47)
And you, John, how did you sort of be inspired? It's starting to sound like your first connection with this team. There was a connecting point between what you've experienced before and what you're currently experiencing right now. And it was a continuity of your, I guess, a mindset that you had.

John (06:04)
Yes, the continuity and the common factor I think that you're hearing here is curiosity driven research. Nobody here, I think would really be too satisfied in iterating on what's already been done as much as they would be exploring what's to come. For me, that was the idea that kind of sold me on the group. That notion that, hey, yeah, you could just, you know, optimize this a little bit more and a little bit more. But if we look at this from an interdisciplinary perspective and we say, hey, You've got an electrical guy over here, mechanical guy over there, a software person about, and now we're going to throw this weird problem at you that none of you really understand more than like 10, 15 % of What can you come up with? Where does that take you? It was the freedom to kind of imagine where you could go and how you could integrate and learn along the way. That's what got me excited.

Hemdeep (06:55)
If you take the name, I guess the word sparks, you said that the word chaos had to be in there. So how does that even work? When you look at biological innovations, like how are you supposed to find chaos in systems that are fairly not rigid, but the prescribed systems that have a well-known functionality? then you try to, know, where does the chaos start in this case?

Drew (07:19)
Drug discovery is complicated and there's lots of work that needs to be done and there's no clear path on how to do it. There are rules of thumb, there are things that have worked in the past, but there's plenty of room and there's more room to innovate there than almost anywhere. And I think the chaos comes in as in we have a bench scientist that has a problem or would like to do something faster and better. There's lots of different ways that that could happen. And so we are encouraged to pursue multiple solutions in parallel to help solve that problem. And that, from an outside perspective, if you're in a traditional engineering company, that looks like chaos.

Hemdeep (08:10)
And so would it be correct to say that within your system you have a series of verticals, multiple projects going at the same time, all of them attacked in parallel? I can envision that being chaotic if someone was to see it from the outside.

Drew (08:24)
And all of our solutions from one project can feed into other projects. So the things that John is learning about 3D printing and his project, I use in my project, because John shares that information. And then that goes to Anne. And then Anne has a problem. And she knows that, or we talk about it, and turns out 3D printing is that solution for her problem. Let's explore that. And then she'll get a little bit farther along, and then she can enhance her microfabrication skills with the 3D printing.

Hemdeep (08:58)
So I'm glad that you touched on skills. Can you draw it out as to exactly the skillset that you bring to the team? And then what have been the learnings that you've had over the last, in your case, Anne, two years, and Drew and John, the last five years? Like what is the additional skillset that you've built on previous to you attending or it being brought on board in this team setting?

Anne (09:21)
Before I joined AbbVie, I'm specialized in microfabrication of microfluidics device using photolithography. So most of the time I use the mask and I use the photoresist so that I expose the light through the mask and cross-link the patterns and transfer the pattern on the mask to my substrate. And that's the only way that I have been using to create microfluidics channel, tiny microfluidics channels in my device. And after joining AbbVie, I started to learn how to do 3D designing, modeling, and then also picking up 3D printing, how to apply 3D printing to make microfluidic device for my daily use. The advantages of 3D printing is it's fast turnaround time. So for example, regular microfabrication technique that I use, it takes me a week to finish and each iteration it takes another week and another week. So for 3D printing, I can just quickly draw up a 3D model, put it in the printer and print it, and then the next day I have something to investigate and make change. I also learned from other team members to become a little bit of mechanical engineer, a little bit of how to put the wire together without execute myself. So, and I've learned so many things. I learned ⁓ to become better at optics, designing the microscopy from another team member. And I have learned a lot from all other team members in the group, every day, every day. ⁓

Hemdeep (11:00)
Yeah. How about you, John?

John (11:02)
I those answers a lot and I forgot the original question.

Hemdeep (11:06)
The original question was, in terms of the skill set you had before you joined this team, how have you found that joining this team has broadened your capabilities in everything that you try to do?

John (11:20)
back to why I came here, that was the thing that really kind of got me interested. So before here, I spent a couple of years as a mechanical engineers designing for a consulting firm of sorts. And I'd carry a few projects at a time and I would do just the mechanical design and prototyping and hand it off. And that was that. When I was contacted here, the position was primarily a software position. My experience with software was programming Arduinos and Raspberry Pies to do what I needed to do in grad school, not professional software development. I'm not a programmer. And so I told them this in the interview process. And I was like, you guys realize you're trying to hire a programmer who doesn't know programming. And that didn't seem to faze anyone. So I thought that was strange. I'm interested. Yeah, they hired me to be a programmer of all things. And now I get to do both. So I learned C sharp. I didn't know C sharp before I started here and I can now efficiently and effectively program robotic systems in that language and navigate additional interfaces beyond there while maintaining the mechanical design work that I had kind of started with and what really got me interested in engineering in the first place. So as far as new skills go, I'd consider that a pretty good one to pick up.

Hemdeep (12:41)
That sounds fantastic. So you're saying that before you joined the team, you had no software skills at all.

John (12:48)
⁓ I mean if you count undergrad MATLAB then I had that. If you count looking at stack overflow for Raspberry Pi how to do blink and LED type stuff, I had that. Beyond that, nothing.

Hemdeep (13:03)
Nothing. Drew, before you even answer this question, I you know, I looked at your Google Scholar and the stuff that you were working on. just sat there, what on earth? So this one that really jumped out, puddle jumping, spontaneous ejection of large liquid droplets from hydrophobic surfaces during drop power tests. I looked at that. was like, and, and he is in pharmaceutical. I, I need to know exactly what drew you to this.

Drew (13:32)
So my background is large length scale capillary fluidics, so managing propellant for orbiting spacecraft. When there's no gravity, fluid behaves much like it does on Earth, but at a much smaller scale. So of course I'm a microfluidist, and so in my job interview, I had to confess that I've never made a microchannel in my life. And they're like, yep, you're perfect. So the common thread in our group is that no one is really an expert in what they're working on. I have built a career out of fighting bubbles, and that is a handy skill to have, whether it's in spacecraft or in diagnostic equipment on our

Hemdeep (14:18)
in terms of the skills that you had leading up to this. How have you found, or at least broadly speaking, the new skills that you've developed while you've been on this team?

Drew (14:29)
there's plenty of new skills. So microfluidics is a new skill, but also like program management. There's some software development that I've had to try and wrap my mind around. electrical components and electrical selection. That's been my latest ⁓ opportunity for improvement. So I'm familiarizing myself with all of the problems with electronics communicating with one another from various sources. There is never a moment where I'm not learning in the Sparks group. And I think that that's true for everyone. Yes.

Hemdeep (15:10)
Amazing. Would you be able to give me an example of a project that sort of brought all of this together in terms of in one cohesive? I know that we're going to be touching on some of the projects that you're working on right now, but have there been projects that have gone commercialized or at least has sort of found its way to a point at some point it may have failed and may have succeeded, but there was a collaborative effort and how many people would be ⁓ collaborating on a specific project that that

Drew (15:38)
There might have been one project that was commercialized that came out of the Sparks group, but by and large, almost nothing is commercialized. We build sophisticated prototypes for our scientists. ⁓ Everything is ⁓ unfinished and can always be improved, but we get it to the scientists as quickly as possible to make it as useful as possible in the amount of time that we think is reasonable. And then they start working on it. And then as scientists start using the instrument, they give us feedback and start giving us feature requests. And we're able to like turn those around. Every project is collaborative. Even if there's only one Sparks group member working on a project, they are working very closely with scientists, biologists, chemists, and external groups. I have been working with Anne very closely on our project now. I also help other people with their projects. So if John is working on his project and he needs help, we help each other. So it's collaborative in the group, but also across the group within AbbVie. I guess, John, do you have something to add about how collaboration works? You work with, I guess, Marco. You were working with Marco, so that's the next turn.

John (17:06)
Marco messaged me about five minutes before we hopped on this call and set up a meeting for later this afternoon. So that's an excellent guess out of seemingly nowhere. Yeah, Marco is a great example. He's a scientist over more towards the production side of things, but he's worked in a number of areas here. He's a chemist by training. And when he's got little needs like, Hey, I need to test out this new process, or we've got a machine coming next year that is going to, for example, work on drying out a wedded powder of some sort. He's like, I'm not going to get this machine until next year, but I need some initial data to basically demonstrate that this is the right path to go on to optimize our targets, to basically get ourselves a head start into doing the research that we ultimately need to do for, I'm not actually sure what he's working on. Can you help me do that? Cause you notice he comes to us for the engineering side of things. And this is an extremely basic SIMS system that he's asking for. He's saying, okay, I've got this wet powder. I need it to be a dry powder and I need to not damage it in the process. Can you help me do that? Sure. Absolutely. That's the low, easy end of the type of project that we would work on. This is the sort of thing that might not be on my radar for more than a week or two at a time. Okay. But one of the cool things here, and trying to tie this back into collaboration somehow, everybody in this group is carrying a couple of projects like that, a couple of projects that might be on the one year, multi-year length scale and all in between.

Hemdeep (18:29)
It sounds like as if these projects, may be various in length. The sole purpose of the project isn't for commercial applications. It's actually pretty much to identify processes or improve processes within the network within AbbVie itself period. And then if it turns into something commercial, fine. If it doesn't, that's great. There's no issue about that because it would have had an immediate application at the scientific level, whether it's a biologist, chemist, or any of them, their needs. That actually is a very interesting way of setting up departments where there is no overarching need to follow the bottom line. That we've got commercial ventures that have to be out the door in one year, five year increments, so on and so forth.

John (19:18)
Yeah, that's one of the nice things here is that we're pretty separated from the commercial aspect of things. We are almost kind of like our own little bubble in a lot of ways, just framing it as a Skunk Works team would be the way to put it, I suppose. There's no cutoff, no deadline or anything like that, that isn't at least partially influenced by our own leadership and decision-making. Nice.

Hemdeep (19:41)
I love that description, John, a true skunk work team operating within AbbVie where you're free to focus on problem solving without the pressure of commercialization. I genuinely believe that it is the organized chaos, collaboration, and curiosity that played a big role in innovation. And that's a wrap for today's episode of Big Ideas at Microscale. A big thank you to Drew Wollman, Anne Tong and John Shanley. for sharing how Sparks is reimagining research with a fresh, open-ended approach. Next week, we'll pick up with the team as they take us into their journey with 3D printing, how it started as a small experiment and grew into a cornerstone of their workflow. We'll also explore the story of the iBeacon, a custom-built microfluidic device that makes it possible to measure protein solutions with just two microliters of material. You can also follow us for more updates and behind the scenes content on LinkedIn, Instagram, Blue Sky and X. We're Cadworks3D across the board. That's spelled C-A-D-W-O-R-K-S. For show notes, paper references and bonus resources on today's topic, visit our website, cadworx3d.com. That's spelled C-A-D-W-O-R-K-S.com. ⁓ and we will see you on the other side. Thanks for tuning in and as always stay curious, keep exploring and never stop asking the big questions that are shaping our world. Whether you're in the lab or on the go or simply curious about the future of science and technology, join us next time on Big Ideas at Microsoft.