He’s not particularly striking to look at. Average height and build, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with his company’s logo, his age revealed by the salt-and-pepper stubble on his jaw. A barely noticeable cauliflower ear hints at an ongoing interest in Jiu-Jitsu. Get him talking about biology, however, and Cameron Slayden’s true calling becomes clear: He loves science, and he wants you to as well.
Slayden is a scientific animator and runs Microverse Studios, a firm that produces short films for biotech and pharmaceutical companies that explain how their technologies operate on a cellular and molecular level. He says something strange is going on in biotech, and it’s going to change the human experience fundamentally.
“AI is all the rage. Some say it’s a fad. I say it’s about as much of a fad as the internet was in 1999,” says Slayden, referring to the investment frenzy known as the “dot com bubble” at the turn of the century in which any company building a website on the freshly-born internet could practically write their own check when it came to raising capital.
“Of course there was a major correction when the bubble burst, but out of that rose Amazon and Google. The same is going to happen with AI, including in biotech.”
In his line of work, Slayden and his animators have front-row seats to cutting-edge life-sciences technologies, often while they are still confidential. Three-quarters of their clients over the last two years have relied heavily on AI for their discoveries, and the kinds of things that they’re creating are unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Slayden gets animated when he talks about scientific discovery. “They’re designing proteins from scratch that will do whatever they want. You want a protein that breaks down microplastics? No problem. What about a protein that replaces a mutated protein in your body, but that won’t get broken down by the body’s systems? They can design it, optimize it, spit out a gene for it and manufacture it en masse. The major impediment right now is that they have to select just the one or two products to produce to generate profit in the beginning. But down the line, that will enable everything else.”
In the last few years, there has been an explosion in new biotech companies leveraging AI to make rapid advances in therapeutic discovery. According to Slayden, this is going to result in an increasing number of new therapies hitting the market in the coming years. While that’s potentially great news as more diseases are being addressed with better treatments, there’s a bottleneck in the process: How to stay informed.
A lot of these therapies operate on completely new principles that people, even scientists, aren’t familiar with. Many rely on discovery platforms that have only recently been developed. Society has popular science writers to distill the message for those members of the public that are interested, but there are other groups that need more targeted, detailed, and distilled communications: investors and doctors.
Biotech may have a truly ground-breaking technology that will save lives or change the world, but if its message gets lost in the noise among all the other biotechs pitching for the same pool of investment, it may not get the support it needs to get to market. The key is brand visibility and efficiency of communication.
According to Slayden, the two are closely tied together. While brand visibility is easy to understand, efficient communication has three key features: it grabs the attention, it’s rapidly understood, and it’s memorable. Investors’ time commitment when deciding whether an idea warrants further investigation can be measured in minutes. They could review dozens of pitches in a day before deciding to have a live conversation with just one.
“Our job is to take a scientific message and make it stick in the mind of our viewers, like a song you can’t get out of your head,” says Slayden. “We use every cognitive trick in the book, from story structure to aesthetics and visual cognition to the science of memory.”
Slayden believes that there is so much work coming his way that it’s critical to train the new generation of medical animators to handle it. He’s taken on a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he guest lectures and serves as an advisor to students.
“Scaling up to meet demand is a major pain point for Microverse Studios, because we only hire the absolute top talent available. It’s in our best interest to maximize the talent quality in the industry so that they will be available to us as we need to scale. It’s also valuable for the students, because it better prepares them for a career in scientific animation, and it’s good for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries because it makes sure that there are plenty of people capable of meeting their communications needs.”
To see the kind of work coming out of Microverse Studios and the big things happening in biotech, visit their website.
