Adam Torres and Asif Ahmed Listen to FII PRIORITY coverage.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Listen to FII PRIORITY coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres and Asif Ahmed, Founder and Executive Chairman at Mirzyme Therapeutics, explore stopping major pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and FII PRIORITY.
About Asif Ahmed
Professor Ahmed is a research-minded visionary communicator and possesses entrepreneurial energy and the ability to identify opportunities for growth. He helps to shape the future direction of organisations with his ability to empower others and encourage them to make meaningful contributions to the organisation and wider society.
About Mirzyme Therapeutics
Founded in Birmingham in 2016 and located at Innovation Birmingham Campus, MirZyme Therapeutics is on a global mission to make preeclampsia history. Our value proposition is to save lives, reduce healthcare costs and promote healthy longevity by preventing molecular damage before it starts in utero.
The company is the U.K.’s leading Femtech in Biotech and is developing end-to-end solutions for problems in pregnancy. The founder and CEO is Professor Asif Ahmed, who also founded Aston Medical School. He is a world-renowned entrepreneurial scientist who discovered two pathways to prevent the life-threatening disease preeclampsia.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have Asif Ahmed on the line, and he is founder and executive Chairman over at Mirzyme Therapeutics.
Ahmed, welcome to the show. Thank you Adam for the kind invitation. Looking forward to having a conversation. All right, Asif. So I’ll first off, this is part of our FII series that we’ve been doing. I know I recently went to the event in Miami. It’s my first time attending an FII event.
I know you’ve been to many others, including I believe in Riyadh. I just wanna start off by saying like, how did you originally get introduced to the organization? And how did you get introduced? Yeah. Well, well, I have a. Long term relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Mm-hmm. And when the Crown Prince was before Crown Prince. Mm-hmm. And when he was just a prince, I was very impressed by what he had done. So at the age of 26, he created a thing called MIS foundation. Yeah. And that is about social mobility in medicine social mobility in for the Saudi. Mm-hmm. And I was doing at my age, social mobility in medicine.
So, mm-hmm. I just thought when a 26-year-old person can do that, what was I doing when I was 26? That, and he was not in line to the throne or anything. Mm-hmm. Nor was his father at the time. Mm-hmm. So that showed a visionary leader way before his time. Hmm. And so as you’ve been part of and participating in FII, so you have this relationship, of course.
what do you feel makes this different than maybe some of the other organizations or conferences? And not to talk bad about anybody else, but what’s makes this one so special? Yeah. Well I think this is not just like a conference. Yeah, right. it’s where great and the good meet to do something good for the humanity.
Mm-hmm. And it’s a place where I found that you can meet people from different walks of life, mm-hmm. Who are all doing things to using innovation to improve things for. Not just their nation. Mm-hmm. Or their sector, but for the whole of humanity. And that’s what is attracting to me about FII.
It’s a very visionary. I’ve noticed that, and as I get further and further, ’cause obviously there’s the I guess I could say the fanfare, whatever it is, of going in person. You have that energy, you have those things. And now, but I have the privilege of, doing all of these interviews with key stakeholders that either attend or support the conference.
And I mean, I’ll do for this particular series, you know, 50 plus interviews. So I’ve really gotten to have like really in depth conversations with many and. It’s different. It’s like a community, like people are pointing in the same direction, they’re talking the same language. And to get people talking the same language that are many times in different parts of the world.
I mean I might be doing an interview in Brazil where they held one. I would be doing one for in the US I could be going one Middle East like all the, in the same day virtually. Right? And everybody’s talking the same language. I feel that’s special. Yeah. And it’s expanding, right? Because as you say, it’s now gone from Hong Kong, Miami, Brazil in Europe.
It used to be Davos in the desert. That was its nickname. It happened in Ritz Carlton in Riyadh. Yeah. And at the beginning, you think but the people who had the leadership, who had the vision to do it had a long-term plan. Mm-hmm. And I think that’s what makes it. Unique. It’s not just, let’s have a conference.
Yeah. At pr. Yeah. Let’s let’s switch it up a bit here. Asif, I wanna talk a little bit about Zyme Therapeutics with the time we have here. So maybe start off by telling us a little bit more about the company, and I see you’re a founder, so maybe how you got started. Yeah, so just so you know there are 38 medical schools in the uk.
I’m founder of one, so there are 38 deans of medical school. There’s only one living founder. Mm-hmm. So that, , but when I, that was happened, ZA came out of that because, as you say, although I one of the world’s re research Excellent. People based on, I was a professor at Stanford two 20 years ago and all that stuff.
But the point was when I did the medical school, it required me to learn business. When I did that, I realized that my research would stay in universities and never really see the light of day unless I put it into a corporate structure. Mm-hmm. And that was how me, I started. And then when I finished.
Medical school during lockdown, I left to focus on Zyme. Mm. What is the name? Zyme, like I feel like there’s something behind that. Stands for mere comes from micro RNA, which we discovered, which inhibits the A culprit protein. And Zyme is also the enzyme that upregulates, that microRNA. So we fuse the two together, the Mere and the Zyme.
To make zyme. And then my Saudi partner says to me, do you know that in ancient Arabic it means cluster of stars? Yeah. Which I can’t speak Arabic, so, but I, I took it and that’s how the logo came about. That’s amazing. So one of the aims in the focus is stopping major pregnancy complications like preeclampsia.
maybe tell me a little bit more about that. I. Yeah, sure. Preeclampsia is a, so if you go to a doctor and ask them, what is preeclampsia? They’ll tell you it’s high blood pressure in pregnancy protein in the urine, and undersized baby. Mm-hmm. But these are symptoms, right? If you ask an oncologist, what is breast cancer?
They won’t tell you. It’s a lump in the breast. They’ll tell you the genes that are involved. And so the root cause of the preeclampsia is what my lab discovered. Hmm. So there is a protein, as I said to you, this culprit protein called sfl. It goes up in pregnancy, but it goes up a lot more in preeclampsia.
Hmm. The question is, why does it go up a lot more? And so we discovered the protective enzyme because one in 12 women will get preeclampsia, which is quite a lot if you think about it. Wow. Yeah. Right, right. And that’s worldwide. Right. So that affects, that’s worldwide Saudi, that’s the us It doesn’t matter.
Yeah. And it doesn’t matter whether you are rich or you are poor. You are famous, you’re not famous. You are George Bush senior. His wife had preeclampsia. Mm. Just two days ago we heard Meghan Markle the Duchess of Sussex prince Harry’s wife had preeclampsia during pregnancy. So it affects everybody.
And if you are Afro-Caribbean or as we call it, or Black American mm-hmm. You are four times likely to die from it. Oh wow. Yeah. So it is a pretty nasty thing. And the question was if one in 12 women get it, what do 11 have that don’t get it? And that’s what we discovered. The protective enzymes that prevent it from happening.
And then those get defected and Zyme has discovered how to predict who’s going to get it. For sure. How to prevent it without therapeutic. So think of a journey in a car. Halfway through the journey, the car crashes. You don’t know why, because the brakes have failed. And we are putting diagnostics to predict when the brakes are gonna fail.
Mm-hmm. And then we put new brake pads on. That’s our therapeutics, so that the journey continues. Yeah. So I’m trying to wrap my head around this ’cause it’s a big problem. It’s affecting a lot of, a lot of pregnancies, a lot of people. Like how does solving this like, affect the world? Like , what are some of the kind of potential effects of this?
I. Well there there are three things. One, we’ll save millions of lives. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Like I’m trying to wrap my head around that. That’s millions of lives we’re talking about millions of lives. Yeah. Well, every minute you and I are talking, a mother or a baby is dying from preeclampsia.
Mm-hmm. Around the world. Mm-hmm. And that shouldn’t happen in the 21st century. Mm-hmm. So we have. my colleague who’s with me, who’s that independent chairman of scientific Advisory Board Professor Steven Smith. He was the my professor when I was in Cambridge. Hmm. And he said to me, we’ve got the cure and we have to make it happen.
So stop being the Dean of Medical School and start focusing on Meza. So that’s Wow. So that’s what we are doing now. And the only rate limiting factor now for us is funding because with Donald Trump being in post now, I’m hearing on the grapevines that regulatory hurdles will be accelerated. So we’ve got an accelerated pathway already here in from, in the UK called iap, which means that UK regulators.
Consider our drug to be of, that much value that they want to the path to market authorization. Hmm. So where, where are you at then right now? With the, with, so uk like, talk about the rollout, talk about like where the company’s at, like present day. Yeah, so we, we’ve just got UK regulatory approval for our diagnostic.
Wow. Digital diagnostic. It’s the first world’s first. Rule in test, which means that we can predict who’s going to get it. Mm. One test halfway through pregnancy, and that’s been approved. So it is not like I’m making it up. Of course in research, right? and the therapeutic. Already we had some funding from Innovate uk, which allowed us to develop formulation.
So we have a, now an world’s only orally active drug ready almost for going into clinical trials. And we need funds to do that. Wow. For these series A fundraising. That’s what we are doing now, and that will take 12 to 18 months to complete that. Mm. And so looking at I wanna, like a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners, a lot of executives that watch this show.
Let’s dream for a moment and in five years, where do you hope to be with this? In five years time, we would have made preeclampsia history in, at least in the uk mm-hmm. And possibly in some other countries like the Kingdom and, maybe in the United States, but obviously we want to do it around the world.
But of course, of course time, we will have both the drug and the diagnostic fully operational. Amazing. What a great story. One that I’m happy to bring to my audience. Asif, if somebody wants to follow up and learn more or to connect with you and your team, how do they do that? They can go to the Meza website, which is meza.com, or they can connect with me on LinkedIn uh, if Ahmed Meza.
should find me. and just for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links to the website and all that other good stuff in the show notes, so you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again. Hit that subscribe or follow button. And Asif, thanks again for coming on the show. It was a pleasure, Adam. Thank you for having me.
