Episode 7: Natural Medicines from the Ocean | with Bill Fenical
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About Episode 7
Natural Medicines From The Ocean and Their Potential For The Treatment of COVID-19 | Professor Bill Fenical
In this episode of The Discover | Dr. Dan Proactive Health, Dr. Dan is joined by Bill Fenical to discuss the untapped medicinal opportunities that lie in the ocean. Bill has his Ph.D. in organic synthetic chemistry and has been involved with several institutions and research projects throughout his career. He is currently the professor of oceanography and pharmaceutical science and the founding director of SIO Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the University of California San Diego. As a recognized and successful author on the subject, the insights he shares in this episode are sure to enlighten the mind of the medicinal opportunities in the ocean. Listen to the full podcast below.
The History of Natural Medicines
The use of natural elements for medicinal purposes has been in practice for thousands of years. This was the peak of medicinal technology 2,000-3,000 years ago. While modern medicinal technologies didn’t exist, plants and other natural elements did and so individuals would experiment with them to help treat diseases. This process occurred most frequently in Asia. He notes, “Society there tasted, experimented with plants and a variety of different extracts making teas and they found that in many cases that these provided improved results in a variety of diseases.” Natural medicines were used to treat diseases thousands of years ago but they are also the core of many essential medicines today. The 1800s and 1900s were a pinnacle time for this because natural elements such as the opium poppy led to the invention of morphine and Andrew Fleming discovering penicillin. Natural elements truly are the core for some of our most important medicines and have helped create a medicinal foundation for new technologies to build upon.
Why the Ocean is an Effective Resource in Creating New Medicines
Discovering plants and molecules with medicinal properties has always been at the heart of medicine. However, this industry has started to feel that this traditional resource for new medicines is limited. There has already been a lot of discovery on all of the land covering the earth. This is where the ocean comes in. Bill is very passionate about this untapped resource and states, “The ocean is our greatest biological resource. It covers 70% of the earth, 90% of the crust of the earth. It is both shallow and deep and contains massive biodiversities, organisms, both macroscopic and microscopic that we know very little about in terms of their potential to produce new natural medicines.” Because of its vastness and the biodiversity that is there, Bill notes that taking the time to discover natural resources in the ocean could be the key to developing medicines that the world needs. UC San Diego has started a program to help discover the medicinal properties of the molecules that can be found in the ocean.
The Ocean is Helping with COVID-19 Therapy
As the world approaches the year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of buzz about the new vaccine. Vaccines are essential in helping to prevent another pandemic in the future, but discovering more effective treatments also needs to be a priority. Bill notes the following about what his program is doing to help with COVID-19 treatment. “And so we need things to treat a COVID-19 infection, not just prevent it. … So we’ve decided that our resources, which are thousands and thousands of compounds that we can isolate from marine sources need to be examined carefully in the context of providing antiviral COVID-19 therapy.” The work that Bill and his team has done has helped produce cancer drugs and they are excited about the COVID-19 therapy opportunities that the ocean can supply. Both Bill and Dr. Dan note that when it comes to the COVID vaccine, this vaccine is pulling elements from vaccines for similar viruses to help make it as effective as possible. They are hopeful about the vaccine and are excited about the therapy options that can come from natural elements and molecules that are being discovered in the ocean.
To learn more about Bill Fenical’s work discovering medicinal elements in the ocean, check out the Discover | Dr. Dan Proactive Health podcast episode below, and be sure to subscribe for new episodes each Tuesday.
Transcription
Dr. Dan Gubler: (00:09)
Welcome to Discover with Dr. Dan | The Proactive Health Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about natural medicines from the ocean and their potential for the treatment of COVID-19. On the show we are delighted to have professor Bill Fenical from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego, and one of the founding scientists in the field of discovering natural medicines. Welcome to the show, Bill.
Bill Fenical : (00:38)
Well, thank you again.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (00:40)
We are sure delighted to have you, and let me tell our listeners a little bit about you. Bill Fenical received his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry, and then joined the Scripps Institution of Oceanography UC San Diego in 1973. Bill is currently the distinguished professor of oceanography and pharmaceutical science and the founding director of SIO Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. Bill’s research interests have been focused on the field of marine natural products chemistry. For the past 25 plus years, his interests have been to develop marine microbial resources for the utilization of marine microorganisms as a source for new drug discovery. His efforts have resulted in the advancement of two drugs currently in late phase three human trials for the treatment of glioblastoma brain and non-small cell lung cancers, which is nasty cancers. He has developed several potent new antibiotics and has a current research effort to discover marine microbial drugs for the control of COVID-19. Bill has coauthored more than 490 papers in this field and has served on the advisory boards of eight major journals. Bill has received numerous awards among them the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California, Riverside. The Paul Scheuer Award in Marine Natural Products chemistry. The Silver Metal Award from the International Society of Chemical Ecology, the National Cancer Institute’s Merit Award, the American Chemical Society Ernest Guenther Award for the study of natural products and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Pharmacognosy. In 2008, Bill was elected as a fellow of the American Association of Science and in 2015, he was honored as Scientist of the Year by the San Diego Regional American Chemical Society. More recently, Bill was nominated as a member of the Sigma Xi Honor Society. So Bill again, we’re so delighted to have you here on the show and look forward to hearing the amazing information you’re going to give us today.
Bill Fenical : (02:42)
Thank you very much, Dan, for your generous introduction.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (02:45)
So Bill to get started, can you please give us some background on natural medicines and their history?
Bill Fenical : (02:51)
Sure. So of course, natural medicines date back at least 2000, maybe 3000 years. In Asia by trial and error. Society there tasted, experimented with plants and a variety of different extracts making teas and they found that in many cases that these provided improved results in a variety of diseases. And just to point out that one of our current malaria drugs called Artemisinin, was discovered in that process a thousand years ago.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (03:34)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (03:36)
But when you think about more modern times, you go back to the late 1800s when morphine was discovered as the main component of the opium poppy. The compound was purified, it was brought into the clinical trials, it was brought in for the control of pain and by 1900 morphine was the standard of pain control. And basically this discovery and how this evolved provided the foundation for the pharmaceutical industry as it evolved in the early 1900s.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (04:18)
That’s amazing, amazing background on natural medicines.
Bill Fenical: (04:21)
Yeah, there’s a little bit more. And I think what happened in another milestone was in 1939 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. And the antibiotic penicillin resulted in saving more than 5 million lives during World War II and it ushered in to the pharmaceutical industry, clear advice, clear understanding that organisms in the soil, microbes as well as plants of all sorts, produce molecules for human use. And this makes good sense because these are adaptive chemical compounds that are used to control predators, that are used to control microbial encroachment and so on. And fortuitously, we’ve learned how to use these molecules to our advantage over the last couple of centuries and currently almost every one of our antibiotics is a natural compound or produced based on a natural compound, like synthetic mimics of penicillin, ampicillin and so on. And in cancer, the major drugs Taxol, for example, treating breast cancer, come from the American yew tree and so we’ve relied over decades and decades on natural sources for the production of drugs.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (06:03)
Wonderful. Yeah. I was reading a paper where they said that 50% of all anti-cancer drugs and 30% of all pharmaceutical drugs are derived from natural products and plants.
Bill Fenical : (06:15)
Absolutely, absolutely. So this is a guaranteed resource, but some things have happened and that is that the pharmaceutical industry has changed in their direction. Unfortunately they’re no longer looking for antibiotics and at this point in time, we need them desperately. They’ve decided that they can create in a computer, for example, create drugs that will be effective. And in many cases they are very effective at doing that, but natural products remain as a viable, unbelievably useful resource for drug discovery.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (07:04)
Awesome. So you are an expert in the field and you founded the field of studying natural medicines from the ocean. So please tell us a little bit about why look for natural medicines in the ocean and a little bit about your story of how you got into this area of study?
Bill Fenical : (07:25)
Yeah, sure. Well, what is clear is that you look at the history of the pharmaceutical industry and their interest in natural medicines. What you see is that around 1995, the pharmaceutical industry decided they could no longer discover new drugs, new antibiotics, new cancer drugs from their traditional sources. These traditional sources are largely what they can find on land. And of course, unfortunately they didn’t understand that by far the ocean is our greatest biological resource. It covers 70% of the earth, 90% of the crust of the earth. It is both shallow and deep and contains massive biodiversities, organisms, both macroscopic and microscopic that we know very little about in terms of their potential to produce new natural medicines. So I began thinking about this, as you mentioned, I was trained in synthetic organic chemistry, but I’d also been fascinated with the ocean. And I kept saying to myself, why aren’t people looking at the ocean? It makes perfect sense. The answer was clear, although, and that is that the ocean was foreign. It was not something that pharmaceutical executives felt they could control. It was not an area that was readily explored by the people that comprised the majority of the pharmaceutical industries. And so I realized that the only way to do this was to open the field as an academic. I decided to look for a place that I could begin to explore the ocean. And I grew up of course, in California, so I immediately looked around and said, this place out in San Diego, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, very large, 1,400 people, massive numbers of programs might just be the right place to start. So I came down to San Diego, I had gotten a PhD by that time, I’d gotten a postdoc and I had done some preliminary work, isolating Marine compounds and I came to the director here and I said, “I’d really like to start a program. Will you give me a chance?” And of course he looked at me like, “Well, I mean, this is pretty outlandish, just to come and ask that.” But he said, “Guess what? I’ll give you nine months of salary and see what you can do.” And that was 45 years ago.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (10:39)
Wow.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (10:40)
So we began, we began looking in the ocean. We didn’t know what we were doing. We tried a variety of things. We looked at marine plants, marine animals, we worked all over the world at different points in time. And it became really clear in around 1990 that the ocean was a spectacularly productive environment to isolate new medicines. And so we just kept moving forward and kept doing things and ultimately, I think you mentioned, our two cancer drugs that are doing well in late phase three.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (11:22)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (11:23)
Ultimately we found those and we developed those. And then we turned our attention to a new field. It was based on Alexander Fleming’s discovery in 1939, that microbes produced molecules when they grew, presumably to protect where they live to discourage anything from eating them as competition. So we wondered about microbes in the ocean and we started a program to go out in the ocean, go into shallow waters, beaches, deep waters, and to find out what’s out there and could we grow things? There are many detractors who said, “No, there’s nothing new in the ocean” and furthermore, “You can’t grow anything in the ocean.”
Dr. Dan Gubler: (12:16)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (12:17)
It comes from the ocean. But now we know a lot more and a lot better, and we’re doing that routinely now.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (12:27)
Wow. Fascinating. So related to that, I know you’re doing some amazing research in the area of natural medicines related to COVID-19. Can you let us know about that and what you’re doing?
Bill Fenical : (12:40)
Sure. Well, first a little background, of course we’re all excited about the evolution and development of vaccines worldwide. There’s no less than 20 vaccines being developed in different countries, under different regulations and so on and different technologies. And these are fabulous and they’re typically quite effective and we’re looking forward to having wholesale populations be vaccinated.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (13:15)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (13:17)
However, these vaccines are not 100% effective. Some are as low as 60% effective. And even if they’re 90% or 95% effective, that leaves thousands of people, even when they’re vaccinated to really inherit an infection of COVID-19.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (13:43)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (13:44)
And so we need things to treat a COVID-19 infection, not just prevent it. And I think many people know about the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies that President Trump had a special access to and his friends also. These are wonderful drugs. They are biological drugs, they’re antibodies, proteins, and they work well. The problem is they are thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars each, and there will never be enough being produced to be used as a therapy for an existing COVID-19 infection. So the issue becomes, we need to discover and develop small molecule medicines that are inexpensive and effective. And these kinds of antiviral medicines are out there already for things like HIV, even flu viruses, and so on. And we need to develop those for COVID-19 infections.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (14:58)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (15:00)
So we’ve decided that our resources, which are thousands and thousands of compounds that we can isolate from marine sources need to be examined carefully in the context of providing antiviral COVID-19 therapy. So we developed a program. It’s a small program at this point, but it’s turning out to be pretty good in which we use a biological assay to isolate and discover molecules that are potentially functional.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (15:38)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (15:38)
Now, the assay, I think is pretty simple. Most of us understand by seeing TV, cartoons, caricatures, of the COVID-19 virus, that it’s largely a ball, but there are orange colored appendages that stick out from that virus and these are called spikes. The spike is a protein and it is key to the infectivity of the COVID-19 virus. Spike protein behaves by binding, especially in the lungs, to surface receptors called ACE 2, ACE 2 receptors. Once that spike appendage, that protein binds to the ACE 2 receptor, it is then engulfed and assimilated into the cell and then of course, because it’s a virus, it begins to replicate in the cell and then depart from this cell, and you have an avalanche of viral disease. If you can inhibit the binding of the spike protein to the ACE 2 receptor, you will inhibit the entry of the virus into the cell. It cannot then replicate and you have a fabulous treatment in principle for COVID-19. So we’re testing hundreds, we hope to do thousands of materials. We’ve already found things that have pretty good levels of inhibition of that binding process and we hope to find something we hope to take it to the pharmaceutical industry and have it developed, which of course will take a very long time. But I think we need to recognize that this viral infection is not going away. It is here to stay as is the flu. Everybody gets a flu shot and you would think that over time you might no longer have flu. But that isn’t the case. I mean, we even have measles reoccurring, which is a viral disease as well. So the need for a drug, even if it takes 10 years is very important. And of course the cost is very important as well.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (18:29)
Oh, that’s wonderful. So this, this technology that you’re using for inhibiting viral entry, is there a way that this assay and other compounds could be screened for other antiviral types of drugs and other antiviral molecules?
Bill Fenical : (18:51)
Well, you know, this is, this essay is very specific to the COVID-19 virus. But, it is a similar assay could be developed for virtually any viral infection. It strikes me to talk a little bit about the history of COVID-19-like viruses; viruses called SARS COVI-2. It is not a unique virus. These kinds of SARS viruses have been around for 15 to 20 years. The MERS virus is very closely related. So the development of vaccines for this particular virus, the COVID-19 virus, was not a rapid development. It did not occur in a few months as President Trump said. It occurred over years and years of viral geneticists understanding the composition of these kinds of viruses and thinking about creating vaccines. Now, some of the vaccines we have now are very innovative. The Moderna virus, the Pfizer vaccine are very innovative vaccines because they utilize messenger RNA technology that is extremely useful and this is really, I think the first time where that technology occurred, but none of this would occur in the nine months that we’ve had this without the previous long-term investments in science, in this kind of viral diseases.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (20:54)
Right. Which underscores the need for basic research in all areas of science to combat problems that are happening and might happen in the future.
Bill Fenical : (21:04)
Well, if you listen to people that know what they’re talking about and I’m not that guy, that person, I’m not a physician. I’m not, I don’t work in public health. I do read, and I do understand what I read in this area. But if you listen to Anthony Fauci and others, we had better be prepared for viral infections of unknown types and unknown origins in the future. You saw how fast the COVID-19 disease virus spread. We now hear about a more infectious mutant of COVID-19 virus, and we need to invest heavily, heavily in understanding the origins of these viruses, the kinds of new technologies that we can use to create effective vaccines. And also we need to figure out how to discover drugs that are not only focused on COVID-19 virus, but maybe other related viruses as well. So there’s a wake-up call, I think for us.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (22:28)
Well said. And that leads me to my next question I want to ask you and it’s related into perfect segue. And the question is this, why is there a need for the continued discovery of natural medicines?
Bill Fenical : (22:44)
Well, one of the things that is an interesting statistic is that if you are trying to find a drug for a disease and you take a thousand synthetic molecules that people made and you take a thousand natural products, you will get one out of the synthetic mixtures and you will get hundreds from the natural product.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (23:18)
Wow.
Bill Fenical : (23:19)
Why is that? It’s because over evolutionary time, life in the sea, life in the forest, wherever it may be, evolved to produce materials that improve their survival. So they are pretested, and what we found is that these molecules have targets that we can use. So we don’t know apriori what those targets are. I mean, you just look at a molecule from the orange tree, we don’t know exactly what the target is, but these molecules produced in nature are functional, they have their chemical structures that were improved over evolutionary time, and they give us a much higher level of activity and efficacy than molecules that we dream up using synthetic tools.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (24:27)
So Bill I’ve found it fascinating, this field of chemical ecology, where plants and other organisms will produce natural compounds that they use for defense and warding off predators and who knows what. It underscores the need, what you’re saying for treatments and natural medicines, which leads me to my next question, which is what do you see as the future of natural medicines?
Bill Fenical : (24:51)
Well, of course, the pharmaceutical industry, at least the major pharmaceutical industries, are no longer working in natural products for reasons. I think I mentioned they really ran out of terrestrial natural medicines, and decided to do something else. But the ocean represents a massive new resource of a massive, massive number in the microbial ocean alone. There’s over a million cells in a milliliter of seawater, 29th of an ounce.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (25:29)
Wow.
Bill Fenical : (25:30)
The bottom sediment in the ocean, no matter where you explore has 1 billion cells per cubic centimeter. And so we know so little about these and what we know up until this point is that you can derive effective medicines and what you need is the financial support, you need to have the facilities. And what is happening and what has happened in the last ten years is that these are activities that are best suited for the universities or research institutes where faculty members do know about the ocean, are capable of working with marine sources and can discover new agents. So this is where the future lies in natural medicine. It lies in academics and worldwide academics continue to explore. We have drugs from the ocean already developed because of these academics. Every single drug that is available today, there’s about 20, was discovered by an academic who decided to push very hard to get it into the hands of people that can develop it. And that process involves first going out and trying to get the money from the venture funding community to start a company where you can do things that cost millions of dollars. And then once you perfect your discovery, you take that discovery and you look for the big pharmaceutical industries that are interested in that area of therapeutics. And once you have that defined, they license that drug, they begin to develop it and of course there are costs involved there, 35 to $40,000 per patient with thousands and thousands of patients required. So our drugs, the one that’s for glioblastoma is currently being developed by Bristol Myers Squibb. But it started out in a little company here in La Jolla, named Marius, and then it went on and on, to those folks who believed in it, who saw the potential and were willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe more than 1.2 billion dollars.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (28:30)
Wow. That’s amazing. My mind is blown by the potential that’s there. So what you’re saying is that the natural medicines from the ocean, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s out there and what’s available for natural medicines to support human health. That’s amazing.
Bill Fenical : (28:50)
Yeah. Well, I think there are many other areas that we should be exploring, but we just don’t have the grant money in order to establish those new programs. And that’s always the challenge in the university environment. We have to support students, post docs, technicians, and in order to do that, we have to get federal money, almost always federal money, NIH, for example. Universities do not provide research support of any significance. In fact, they rely on us getting research support. So, it really needs to be clear and I think it will be clear after COVID that investments at NIH and in particular, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci, that their budget is going to increase massively.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (29:57)
Right. So Bill, you’ve mentioned in our conversation here a couple of times, Dr. Fauci, what are your thoughts about Dr. Fauci and his research and his ability to lead the CDC during this really difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Bill Fenical : (30:13)
Yeah, well, I think Anthony Fauci is very likely to be man of the year by Time Magazine. I mean, he was and remains the voice of reason and knowledge with respect to viral diseases and specifically with respect to COVID-19. He’s a mild-mannered man, very highly experienced over years, beginning 25 years ago with the HIV pathogenic infections and he has brought calmness, reason, and the scientific method into view for the public. I have the highest respect for him and I’m sure he’ll do a wonderful job under the Biden administration.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (31:15)
Yeah. I was reading and looking at the scientific literature and, as you know, one of the qualities of high level scientists and you’re up there as well, is the number of times that their research has been cited. And in looking at that, Anthony Fauci is in the top ten of all researchers in the number of his work cited.
Bill Fenical : (31:38)
Right. Well, I mean, there’s no question that he has access to the purse strings. Let’s go there. Not only is NIAD an institute that provides external funding to people like me, but they have a very massive in house research program that is very productive. And, unlike us, they have the money to do it and they don’t need to write grants and have them refused for petty reasons and whatever happens. So his productivity is enormous. He’s an honest, quality person and scientist.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (32:30)
Awesome. Yeah. It’s great to hear your thoughts from one credentialed scientist about another scientist. So back to COVID-19, what final comments would you give our listeners about treatments for COVID-19 and your thoughts about the future?
Bill Fenical : (32:47)
Well, I think from what I can tell by reading, we are more than ever before, utilizing techniques, technologies, peripheral drugs and treating COVID 19 effectively. Of course, we understand the death rate. We understand how devastating that is to families and every time someone comes on, including Anthony Fauci, they argue, “Please wear a mask, stay home, don’t interact with the public, don’t even interact with your family.” And this is absolutely high quality advice. However, what you’re looking at are people flooding the airports who apparently don’t care, potentially putting themselves and their family at risk. And it’s a sad scenario to have to look at when you understand how many people are dying every day. And that there will be, given the behavior of people currently, increasing rates of death from COVID-19 over the next three weeks to month.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (34:16)
Right.
Bill Fenical : (34:17)
What do we have to do? Well, we’re doing some good things already. We’re using related drugs, like anti-inflammatory drugs to keep the inflammation down. I mean, inflammation and the immune response to the virus is one of the most serious negative impacts on humans. So we’re doing everything we can and in California, here in Los Angeles County, it’s absolutely frightening what’s going on. They have beds in the hallways of the hospitals, they are now telling ambulance drivers not to come to the hospital with people. And I don’t know what they can do about it, but we have to, have to be able to do something profound to control this virus. Here at UCSD I’ll tell you a quick story. You know, we have lots of students here. We have a resident’s hall, we have lectures and people are living together in these residence halls. We’re delivering lectures, not only virtually, but outside in tents to keep viral transmission down. And one of the innovative things we’re doing is we have vending machines all over the campus with COVID-19 test kits that people just go get, fill it out, send in their sample, and they get their results back in 24 to 48 hours.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (36:00)
Wow. Very cool.
Bill Fenical : (36:02)
Testing is free here for me. I test every Friday, but what’s really innovative on our campus is that we’re testing sewage at individual facilities for the presence of the COVID virus. And when we see levels of virus, those facilities are then quarantined, restricted, the people are all tested to find out the source. And this is a very sensitive assay in thousands of gallons of sewage, we can detect the virus. Wow. So we’re now monitoring the many, many buildings on campus to isolate and keep those kinds of COVID positive folks out of the mainstream of the student body and staff.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (36:57)
Wow. That is brilliant. That’s a perfect example of being proactive to fight back. And one thing that I’ve really noticed in talking with you and the research that you’re doing is there is hope, right? There is a lot of really credentialed, smart scientists that are working to eliminate this virus both short and long term. So that gives me a lot of hope and comfort that smart people like you are doing this.
Speaker 3: (37:23)
Well, I don’t know about smart people like me but certainly smart people are out there, they’re looking at every aspect of how to control this particular virus from the assay we’re doing to a bunch of other assays. The virus, the COVID-19 virus, is a very small piece of RNA. It’s not very large. And we understand it from the beginning to the end. Each bit of that virus has been analyzed. So this gives us the opportunity for at least 30 different drug targets in the virus, in different proteins, different components of that virus. We’re just using the spike protein as our target. But there’s so much else going on. If we can produce the monoclonal antibodies at lower costs and in much higher frequency, wonderful. Because this is a treatment that works when you catch early infectivity, like with Trump and others. So, I’m completely optimistic, but at the same time, we are in such a terrible situation right now that you have to beg people to think about themselves, their loved ones and stay away. And don’t go to the airport. And we understand the psychology where people are suffering about this and I hardly ever leave my house, but this is gonna be required if we’re gonna beat this virus in the next couple of months.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (39:20)
Wow. Profound comments, profound advice. Thank you, Bill. I’m sure our listeners will agree. My mind has been blown by the amazing information you’ve shared here. So it’s, it’s a delight talking with you and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Bill Fenical : (39:37)
Well, thank you Dan. It’s a pleasure to be with you here.
Dr. Dan Gubler: (39:39)
Thank you, Bill. Thank you for listening, my friends and sure hope that you, again, that you found this information helpful and actionable as we move forward. This is Dr. Dan signing off.