[Jacob:] One of the technologies that we're really excited about is a capability called far UVC. Collectively, we think there is a ton of promise with these technologies. If you were to combine them together and put them into the world around us—the built environment where we spend around 90% of our time—we could get to a world where those colds and flus and other things that drag us down, make our lives get cut short in some instances, and can lead to things like COVID-19, are potentially a thing of the past.
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[Jacob:] The type of UV light that we are most excited about is a special type called far UVC. Far UVC came about because, as everyone knows, UV light can damage DNA and do all these harmful things. Scientists went and kind of fought about it and said, "Well, what would it take for that to not be true for humans?"
What they figured out was that given that we're covered in skin, and skin is filled with proteins that make us up, if we pick a wavelength of light that is heavily absorbed by proteins, then when that light comes down on us, it will all be absorbed in our skin and not get down to our DNA and do any damage.
And that wavelength of light is far UVC. Basically, by picking this wavelength, all the things that you've heard about UV being bad in terms of causing harms applies to germs because they're much smaller compared to our skin layer. When it comes down to our skin, it doesn't go through and looks safe for us.
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[Jacob:] Our best guess, though, is that you would want this widely deployed in high-risk environments. Epidemiologists would tell you these are where there are large numbers of people spending a lot of time together and where people are interacting outside of their usual networks, where you can get that spread if you kind of imagine the contagion in your mind.
When you model it out, that's where you get the greatest returns on investment. This probably looks like places like classrooms, gyms, restaurants, conference venues, public transit, houses of worship, lecture halls, movie theaters, long-term care facilities—you name it.
I think places like gyms and restaurants are particularly important. We got great data on this during the pandemic. Whether you're breathing, talking, or exercising really changes your infection risk. Your listeners might appreciate this, but generally the infection risk is proportional to how much you're breathing.
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Jacob: […] For skin and eyes, based on all the currently available data, there's no evidence suggesting that there's any effects that cause significant short-term or long-term harm with this. This has been studied a fair bit.
When it comes to things like skin, we've exposed mice for over a year—basically eight hours a day, every day of the week. We've had researchers expose themselves to levels far beyond daily guidelines. We have models of the skin and the eye that are looking at this. And there's also just a lot of studies with regular people in different environments going about their day, and we don't see any harms there either.
It is probably important to note, though, that we think there probably is more research that should be done. Our goal is to see this widespread. We really want to see something that can put a dent in annual influenza and flu, and something that we're really passionate about is ensuring that we can prevent the next pandemic. So we want to see it widespread.
And when you go that widespread, you are talking about large diversities of people with different skin conditions and different backgrounds. So you really want to make sure that you're covering all of your bases. Our position at our organization is that to gain further confidence in this technology, we'll want to conduct more studies, particularly long-term safety studies.
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[Jacob:] People are buying them and using them. So we think about it much more in terms of the question of "Is it happening fast enough?" We believe absolutely not. There's H5N1 right now, and the base rate for pandemics is like 3% a year. And annual deaths from influenza are a tragedy we shouldn't stand for. So it isn't really happening fast enough.
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[Jacob:] So if we have 30 children in that class, we're talking something in the order of $30 per child per year. Now, it's important to note that far UVC is incredibly nascent in terms of a technology. There's probably tens of thousands of lamps in the world. So if you think about learning curves and reductions, and if we really start to scale this, I don't know exactly where the floor would go for this, but it's very easy to believe that it would drop an order of magnitude.
When we talk to some manufacturers and talk to them about their capacity, they give projections for steep cost decreases. So we could go from something that is $30 per student per year now maybe down to dollars per student per year. And as you noted, this is a bargain.
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Jacob: The vision that we have, which is our best guess for how we get to the world where far UVC is widespread, looks roughly like this: We're already getting the early adopters who are excited and are installing it. We will continue to climb up that value chain where people who get big benefits from it will be compelled to use it.
This could be things like professional athletes or Olympians where the difference between a respiratory infection or not is very easily the difference between medaling and being remembered by history or not, and kind of seeing that happen.
All the while, there is more data being generated on the safety and efficacy side that makes it more compelling. And as you get more adoption and more of that data, the cost-benefit calculus continues to shift, and we continue to see more adoption. Maybe we start to, at some point, get recommendations that it goes into place.
Our hope is that when you get to the point of having the gold standard for evidence of a cluster randomized control trial, where you can definitively show the value of this, you can start to get to the point where maybe insurance starts to incentivize it, and you get ways that it starts to get more widespread.
From the podcast transcript:
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