Biogate - Building Real-Time Biosecurity Compliance Infrastructure
In the episode, we talk with Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force.
We talk about how they saw fragmented compliance processes were becoming a choke point for biotech companies, how a pre-legal audit layer surfaces potential issues, and how efficient use of legal expertise gives biotech companies the ability to move faster and stay focussed.
Find out more: https://www.biogate.us
Production, Design & Artwork: https://www.hiatus.digital
Other Episodes By Us:
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Description text goes00:00:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hi, welcome to the Future Frontiers podcast from millilux.io.
00:00:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
In the episode, we talk with Eva Risto Parra and Milo Vandal, the founders of BioGate, an LAA-based startup building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US Biosecure Act coming into force.
00:00:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We talked about how they saw slow, fragmented compliance processes becoming a choke point for biotech companies, how a pre-legal audit layer serves as potential issues, and how efficient use of legal expertise gives biotech companies the ability to move faster and stay focused.
00:00:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hey, Evaristo and Milo.
00:00:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
guys, thank you so much for joining us on the Mililux Future Frontiers podcast.
00:00:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How's it going in sunny LA this morning?
00:00:50 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Chris, it's good to hear from you.
00:00:52 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, it's bright and hot over here.
00:00:55 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I don't know how it is over in the UK right now, but I can say that I think summer is starting.
00:01:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Oh, really?
00:01:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it's 10 degrees here in London, which feels like it feels like summer already, because we've obviously had, you know, a long winter this year.
00:01:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I think any time the sun comes out, especially on a bank holiday, it's Easter here.
00:01:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So any time the sun comes out, it feels like summer.
00:01:18 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
No, it must be lovely.
00:01:19 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We are absolutely spoiled here in LA.
00:01:21 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I can't say that.
00:01:22 Speaker 3
Yeah, it gets exhausting sometimes.
00:01:24 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:01:24 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But we've got rain on the radar and I'm honestly hoping for it.
00:01:29 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It's good for a change of pace.
00:01:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was going to say, you must be planning your dev days when it's raining, like us, where we make sure obviously the computer, the desktop stuff is all done on the days it's raining, just so we can maximize on the outdoor time.
00:01:42 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That's exactly right.
00:01:45 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We just sit and we just let the rain fall on us and we just enjoy it.
00:01:48 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah.
00:01:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Great stuff.
00:01:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, guys, yeah, thank you so much again for joining us on the podcast.
00:01:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was going to roll into the questions and let's really unpack your story and see, you know, see kind of like how this has come to be.
00:02:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So,
00:02:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So the first question is kind of what the original insight or threat landscape that led to the creation of BioGate, like what was it that brought you both together to set up and start this mission?
00:02:16 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, so I'm actually a biochemistry researcher at heart and I do protein engineering here at Occidental.
00:02:25 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I remember I was in my lab doing
00:02:30 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
just standard enzymatic reactions.
00:02:34 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I remember looking around and just kind of thinking as like an afterthought, wow, we are unorganized.
00:02:42 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I've actually, that wasn't my first, this isn't my first lab experience.
00:02:47 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I remember the last lab that I was in at UCSD also quite unorganized.
00:02:53 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that that's kind of a rule of thumb for researchers.
00:02:58 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And it's all fun and games.
00:03:00 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
However, I remember reading about this Biosecure Act that was passed in December.
00:03:07 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And on paper, it seems like Congress wants more time taken into the visibility of these biotech supply chains.
00:03:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But when you really look into it, Congress is asking
00:03:28 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
the biotech community as a whole to do something that they are not natively good at.
00:03:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that is having a innate control of the people that they work with and keeping track of that.
00:03:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so I can personally say that if my lab was asked right now to fix all of their documents in order and show the government that they were compliant
00:03:55 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I honestly don't know if we could do it.
00:03:58 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It's a feat that's going to take 12 to 18 months.
00:04:01 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that's where we wanted to begin this process of creating a tool that will hopefully revolutionize how these researchers can get this kind of procurement process done.
00:04:13 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so I called Milo and I asked him, what do you think?
00:04:17 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We've actually gone on a few other ventures together that aren't particularly in this space.
00:04:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so asking him what he thought was definitely opening.
00:04:28 Speaker 3
Yeah, I just wanted to tack on and say that with the passage of this Biosecure Act, I'm an economist by trade and it's gonna move this kind of gray area where there's a lot of these complex shell companies that are in these elaborate foreign webs.
00:04:41 Speaker 3
Those are just gonna become more defined and there's gonna be an industry about hiding your tracks.
00:04:46 Speaker 3
So, you know, we have the classic dilemma of when you do like
00:04:50 Speaker 3
enforce some new kind of restrictions or try to break a market's efficiency by using some sort of forceful mechanism, you're going to just create a new sort of market for averting that.
00:05:03 Speaker 3
And we wanted to position ourselves to be ready for when that happens and try to get ahead of it.
00:05:09 Speaker 3
God forbid something happens where we have another pandemic or when this compliance really comes down to the purpose of why it was enacted.
00:05:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
No, 100%.
00:05:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, I think I totally agree with you.
00:05:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's a case of when, not if the next pandemic happens, because obviously we've in the UK, we had an outbreak of meningitis a few weeks back.
00:05:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And you could see there was a nervousness around the population that was straight back into those COVID times.
00:05:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I think it was a reminder for everyone that it was like, we're only a few years out of the pandemic, but you know, the whole world learned a lesson during that.
00:05:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I was thinking,
00:05:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I can see the exact space where you're where a tool like yours that you're making at BioGate fits in because, and it's something we hear a lot with kind of tech founders in general is that actually they want to be the ones who are doing engineering the solution, the tackling the nitty gritty hard science rather than worrying about the
00:06:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the legal compliance mechanisms that's going or issues that are going on the background, which is usually a compliance team, but obviously then if you've got AI doing this, kind of stepping in there to do this much more.
00:06:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
much quicker and cheaper, with less gaps that you're going to find out, then clearly it's going to allow those founders to stay lean and also focus on solving the problems that they want to solve, which they've spent so long learning about.
00:06:30 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Right, that's a great point.
00:06:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And yeah, it's a great point that you made with the pandemic.
00:06:35 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that's something that we think about a lot is how the COVID pandemic really showed the world what happens when
00:06:44 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
you let things like this slip away.
00:06:47 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
we can survive just fine how we are.
00:06:50 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
The world survives.
00:06:52 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
The issue arises when things like the COVID pandemic or, you know, I think that the Biosecure Act specifically is worried about relationship, US relations with China.
00:07:06 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And the issue becomes when we have a, when we,
00:07:12 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
when our conflicts escalate with China and they strangle us on some reagent that we need to produce a medical device, what are we going to do?
00:07:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We, it works now, but we need the preparation to be ready for a moment like that.
00:07:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that starts with a boring business visibility.
00:07:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:07:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
no, 100%.
00:07:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean,
00:07:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's definitely not boring because at the moment because you just have to look into the rare earths mineral, rare earths metals dilemma at the moment.
00:07:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, you can see how, you know, China's got a stranglehold on, you know, that across the, you know, across Africa and perhaps South America.
00:07:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And you can see how that will be massively disruptive if we have to, you know, scale up.
00:07:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
defence procurement or resilience options or things like that.
00:08:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I think what you guys have, what you guys, the problem you guys are solving is a real crunchy problem which, which will need solving in the future.
00:08:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's something which the pandemics will happen again.
00:08:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And like you say, if we didn't have access to those reagents again, then you're just leaving a massive vulnerability
00:08:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
for future generations to solve, and it's the economic impact of pandemics and some of these conflicts, actually, which have the bigger disproportionate effect of impacting livelihoods and systems and, people's day-to-day things that has knock-on effects for many more generations afterwards.
00:08:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That's exactly right.
00:08:42 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah.
00:08:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
No, but I think it's great what you guys are doing.
00:08:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
As soon as you got in touch, I was like, this is
00:08:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
This is definitely a conversation I want to.
00:08:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I want to have some I'm furiously.
00:08:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm glad you find it interesting for the show notes.
00:08:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, so from a defence and resilience perspective, what critical vulnerability in healthcare or biotech systems are you addressing at the moment that you think others have overlooked?
00:09:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Totally.
00:09:10 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
So when this act was passed, we talked a little bit about how
00:09:17 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
there will be this 12 to 18 month scramble that we are currently in.
00:09:21 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And the reason why it's more of a scramble than I think companies are currently expecting is because there is a level of interesting vagueness, I would say, to the Biosecure Act that is quite alarming.
00:09:43 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And
00:09:44 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
What it creates is a six degrees of separation kind of, I would say, issue that these companies haven't seen before, where not only do you have to do an audit of your own supply chain, let's say you have 20 vendors, however, the act explicitly states that you're going to have to look at their vendors as well.
00:10:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so if each vendor has,
00:10:11 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
to 20 of their own people that they work with, that's suddenly a 400 person problem.
00:10:18 Speaker 3
And it just fractals out from there.
00:10:20 Speaker 3
It just gets harder and harder to follow.
00:10:22 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah.
00:10:22 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that is an issue that we are actively trying to hunt down is how do we create a web of intelligence where we can accurately map out a ownership tree or a
00:10:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
a second or third degree of vendor awareness so that the companies that we work with aren't going to have issues when the auditor comes in 2028.
00:10:54 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
What we're doing now to solve this issue, it's also interesting building software for preparedness when the list that we're all so worried about hasn't even released yet.
00:11:07 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
So the office of management and budget
00:11:10 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
is releasing this list of their biotech companies of concern in December of 2026.
00:11:18 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so what they've basically done is they've said, okay, you guys have nine months to worry about this.
00:11:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We're not gonna tell you who to worry about.
00:11:25 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And then when we do tell you who to worry about, you're gonna have six months to get your affairs in order before we start knocking on the door.
00:11:34 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And it seems like you wouldn't like you'd expect the government to be a little more forthcoming with this kind of information.
00:11:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But I do think that what they're doing is kind of.
00:11:45 Speaker 3
A intentional vagueness to leave layers of more enforcement.
00:11:50 Speaker 3
You know, if I think to a certain degree, the current administration wants that vagueness so they could tack on, you know, new foreign enemies if certain tensions start rising.
00:12:03 Speaker 3
So I think we're seeing that now, but as we get more clarity, there's just going to be more and more of a need, especially at the smaller cap firms without compliance teams, without the kind of funding to go pay a top 100 law firm to audit their entire vendor list.
00:12:18 Speaker 3
And that's the space that we've just been living in for the past few months.
00:12:21 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Right.
00:12:22 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so when we're trying to predict the companies that our clients should be wary of, what we've been doing is using
00:12:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
federal watch list that we believe will serve as an impetus for this list, specifically the Department of Defense 1260H list, I think is the most, I would say meaty.
00:12:45 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It has the most biotech companies and we use it, we reference it constantly when we're doing our case studies on different companies to make sure that our software is working the way that we would like it to.
00:13:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Real quick, if you want to hear when new episodes and articles are released, be sure to sign up to our newsletter at the Mililux website or find a link in the shirts below.
00:13:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But now, back to the episode.
00:13:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Just going to jump on the back of your point then is if you can imagine, like 6 months sounds like a long time, but in reality, if you're running a lean startup scale up, that's not a long time at all, is it?
00:13:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And like you say, if you have to then
00:13:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
commission a law firm to do this investigation of, 400 companies, again, will take a substantial amount of time, but also is it obviously for some who are very dependent on the supply chain, it could be 6, 8, 9, 1000 companies, for example, that you're trying to dive in and look underneath the bonnet of
00:13:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
of where they're registered, who's got commercial interests, who are the stakeholders involved, and it's just a an excise in kind of like trying to shine a light on really opaque places that you know that can I think a lot of companies will you know probably be nervous when this when this does come out because it you know if it comes comes out December 26 or if it gets delayed or if it gets sprung early depending on you know the appetite of the administration and it's.
00:14:15 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I do think that, I do think that these companies are, they have in mind that this act may be delayed.
00:14:24 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that is something that I've heard when I'm speaking to some people is, and that is an interesting perspective to have when it's your company's funding on the line is, oh no, yeah, I'm going to call the government's bluff on this one.
00:14:39 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that if I were running a biotech company, I would not have that kind of mindset in mind.
00:14:46 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
What I would also think about is how the House Secure Committee on the CCP, this is the group that actually pushed this act into law.
00:14:54 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
They've been fighting for the Biosecure Act for two years and they failed the first time that they tried to pass it.
00:15:02 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And they're a bipartisan committee.
00:15:05 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
There are signals in that
00:15:09 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
timeline that hint that this is something that's here to stay.
00:15:14 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It's not a one-off law that will just be erased in 2028 when a new administration rolls around.
00:15:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It's something that we will see probably progress and probably get more complex and more involved for these companies of concern.
00:15:36 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And
00:15:37 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
that goes beyond just these biotechs.
00:15:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I was seeing that if you're a defense contractor and you are using health data and the company that creates the device that measures the health data is a company of concern, there's your funding gone.
00:16:02 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And it's, I think that
00:16:06 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We are starting small so that we can do it right, but the scope is going to be wide.
00:16:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's going to be huge.
00:16:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:16:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I just wanted to jump on another point you raised just now as well.
00:16:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I'm an ex-Marine, Royal Marines officer.
00:16:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We used to have this saying in the Marines that hope is not a strategy.
00:16:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So essentially what you're saying there about kind of companies hoping that the bill will be delayed, you know, it just seems like an exercise of utility because, like you say, this
00:16:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
This bill will happen.
00:16:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's been pushed for two years and then it's not going to disappear just as quickly as it came.
00:16:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It will be once it's in, it's very hard to get these things back out again unless you can prove there's a real need.
00:16:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, they're strangling say innovation or there's real cost to it.
00:16:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But this is a law, an act for resilience.
00:16:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, you know, once it's in, it would take a gargantuan change to get it back out again.
00:16:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, I totally agree with that.
00:17:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Right.
00:17:02 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That's a great point.
00:17:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:17:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:17:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, I mean, it does get me on to my next question.
00:17:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So how do your core products or your systems strengthen operational resilience and what makes them, I guess, more robust and more mission ready than existing solutions at the moment?
00:17:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, is the existing solution people just doing the background checks?
00:17:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's precisely that right now.
00:17:31 Speaker 3
And we haven't had people have to fully deal with being compliant to receive their NIH funding.
00:17:37 Speaker 3
But when they will in six months, we're going to see an influx in law firms bolstering their compliance teams.
00:17:45 Speaker 3
We're going to see a bigger concentration in larger firms and these smaller developing biotechs getting squeezed out.
00:17:54 Speaker 3
And we want to really bolster those smaller firms and make sure that they can still compete with the big guys because that's once again how we stay competitive in this kind of global landscape.
00:18:04 Speaker 3
We don't want to choke out innovation and concentrate it in these pre-existing big firms.
00:18:09 Speaker 3
And that's where we see ourselves kind of bolstering R&D.
00:18:13 Speaker 3
When we make it cheaper and easier to build and innovate, that's when we can really return innovation back to our soil and
00:18:21 Speaker 3
and keep that competition going.
00:18:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, exactly.
00:18:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:18:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it's a conversation around like customer stickiness as well, isn't it?
00:18:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So if you could offer a solution that is leaner, more affordable, works better than having a really ineffective, slow, costly solution that's in the moment, then I think the market's always going to swing to the way that is the more affordable, better outcomes,
00:18:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Because quicker outcomes as well lead to faster decisions.
00:18:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So if you've got clients there who, for instance, say, you know, you're looking under the hood, so to speak, and they find one of their suppliers is on the register, then they're like, this is a problem.
00:19:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We have to solve it now.
00:19:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We're like, we, you know, we can't, we can't put this rock back down and pretend like we didn't see it because, you know, it's a problem.
00:19:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating stuff.
00:19:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I can already see just where this will apply to many other sectors, not just obviously like biotech, there's obviously insurance market has got a, I think here in the UK it's got like a know your customer act, which is basically you have to know who the end user is and who your suppliers are for all these things.
00:19:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So you can see how it maps across to many other different industries.
00:19:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
more than, as well as just biotech.
00:19:47 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Right.
00:19:47 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
at the end of the core scale, the product that we want to build is not solely for the biotech industry.
00:19:59 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
we are using this act as kind of an excuse to build something new that we think that the rest of the world would find extremely useful.
00:20:10 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
There are sectors that already have
00:20:13 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
a centralized form of regulation management.
00:20:17 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that the biotech sector is definitely behind in that if you look at the global regulation market.
00:20:26 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
However, this could easily be translated to the defense sector, could easily be translated to any sector in which it's important to know who you're buying from.
00:20:42 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
is someone that would benefit from the framework that we are designing.
00:20:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I mean, in my mind, it's very much a defense dual use resilience, you know, security technology.
00:20:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, yeah, you can see where it's going to move in the future.
00:20:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, it does come on to my next question.
00:21:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So,
00:21:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Obviously, you've translated innovation to deployable capability, which is a huge challenge in defence.
00:21:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Having been in the sector for 20, 25 years now, I can, you know, I've seen it from many different angles.
00:21:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I can safely say it's, you know, you're attacking a challenge that the sector does struggle with at times.
00:21:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, how did you bridge the gap between the R&D and then the, you know, the real world?
00:21:28 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, how did you, when you had this idea,
00:21:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Did you take, did you go into different markets and say, okay, so if we make this solution, who would want it?
00:21:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Or was it obvious from the start?
00:21:37 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That's a great question.
00:21:38 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah.
00:21:38 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
So we are designing BioGate under a blanket notion that we believe, which is that the United States needs a more reinforced
00:21:54 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
biosecurity platform for, especially in the regulation space.
00:21:59 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
The Biosecurity Act was simply a signal that told us, this is something that is going to need to be created within the next couple of years for the innovation of the United States to maintain or grow.
00:22:13 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
With the idea of building and
00:22:18 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
how do two college students build a platform that will operate on classified vendor data?
00:22:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That is certainly something that we've been navigating.
00:22:34 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that the way that we've best decided to go about that has been using
00:22:44 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
public 10Ks from publicly traded companies, which is definitely a harder feat than what I think BioGate is designed for, but it kind of shows that we are capable for something that we won't even experience in our day-to-day using this tool.
00:23:03 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
In a perfect world, these clients have
00:23:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
various forms of vendor data, but it's all very simple, invoices or emails and receipts and PDFs and CSVs.
00:23:18 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
All these different formats are, BioGate is optimized to ingest.
00:23:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
A 200 page 10K that has thousands of words and hidden various companies that aren't even vendors is 10 times as difficult for the tool to process.
00:23:37 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But I think that will make the tool 10 times as efficient when we eventually kind of cut back.
00:23:44 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We're basically training it on something that it shouldn't even be able to do.
00:23:49 Speaker 3
We're training it on the Pfizers of the world.
00:23:51 Speaker 3
So then when we do deploy with these smaller cap firms, it's already stress tested.
00:23:57 Speaker 3
Right.
00:23:59 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that's something that we're thinking about a lot when we're building this tool is what is the cost for our business of a false negative?
00:24:07 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And the cost is existential.
00:24:10 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We are trying to become a credible source of intelligence for law firms and companies to make their decisions on how are they going to operate their business in the next couple of years.
00:24:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And
00:24:24 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
we want to ensure that the data that we're providing them is not only verifiable, but also comprehensive.
00:24:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We don't want to analyze 10 pages of invoices and leave out a vendor, right?
00:24:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
So that is, that troubleshooting has been really interesting, especially as someone who is certainly navigating software engineering has been, it's been interesting to kind of
00:24:54 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
work around various bugs and errors when I'm looking over these reports.
00:25:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So we're always interested to hear from organizations that want to contribute their thoughts to our articles.
00:25:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If this is you, send it to the e-mail newsletter to stay up to date on what we're working on.
00:25:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's a link in the show notes.
00:25:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Otherwise, back to the episode.
00:25:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating stuff.
00:25:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean,
00:25:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Obviously, you guys use this as well.
00:25:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, defence, defence resilience, dual use.
00:25:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It can take you decades to build up a reputation, a brand, and literally minutes to lose it, you know, as you see.
00:25:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I think that's when I say I think there's genuine interest in something like this, which can, you know, maybe they use it in a suite of systems, maybe they use it in a, you know, a multi-layered approach where they have
00:25:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
They have this, they have, maybe a small, lean legal team, for example, and they use it as part of the Swiss cheese metaphor for risk management.
00:25:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But you can see, you can see, you can see companies that supply, healthcare, resilience, defence, defence related products will be very keen, very keen to have something where they can protect their reputation because it's that keeps them
00:26:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
employing people and getting contracts and so on and so forth.
00:26:18 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
So there is a similar company that we, similar company in the space, not biosecure exactly, but compliance adjacent.
00:26:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I won't name them, but they have recently been very popular in the news for a huge compliance scandal.
00:26:43 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I actually just read that the top San Francisco accelerator that backed them in the 1st place just cut ties with them this morning.
00:26:54 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah.
00:26:55 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And it is interesting to watch as we're building a tool to watch others in the space fall.
00:27:07 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And
00:27:10 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It kind of highlights exactly why it's important to take this process slowly.
00:27:16 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We want to stay as lean as possible, but I think that a lot of founders, especially in tech, deep tech, and biotech, want to just grow, grow, grow, make as much as you can, show as much as you can.
00:27:30 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
However, our product is
00:27:38 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
could be crucial for a company.
00:27:40 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And we don't want to ship something that is half-baked and then have to suffer the repercussions a few months later.
00:27:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Tasty, yeah.
00:27:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's good to, I don't have any doubt, but it's good to hear people take, you know, you guys taking that long-term approach because it's, like I said before, is you've seen companies who can lose reputation overnight and that's the be-all end-all.
00:28:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Brilliant sir.
00:28:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And you guys are saying, I've got to say as well, like it's inspiring because you guys are, young as well.
00:28:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So it's good to see, lofty ambition, real technical product, and obviously, an obvious demand for that because, you can't evade the law when it comes to running a company and a business.
00:28:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah, you guys are tackling such a fascinating problem.
00:28:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, just getting on to supply chain intelligence is becoming central to the next generation of biotech resilience.
00:28:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, that's something we've already spoken about.
00:28:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you guys approach like visibility, control and security across the biotech supply chain?
00:28:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And please don't say it's sensitive if obviously.
00:28:52 Speaker 3
Yeah, well, you know, supply chains are fundamentally opaque.
00:28:55 Speaker 3
That's kind of a key point, especially when we're at such a global level.
00:29:00 Speaker 3
And we want to have this kind of multi-directional approach to supply chains where when we do find that, oh, this specific precursor in this space is being supplied by this one company and they've now switched and people who receive NIH funding are now vulnerable for dealing with them.
00:29:20 Speaker 3
We can kind of work, one, to find that firm, a new supplier, but also to then reverse and grow that web
00:29:28 Speaker 3
horizontally out to find other biotechs that are dealing with them to just find enforcement even more speedy than just say working straight from the firm, the biotech firm.
00:29:42 Speaker 3
And that's kind of how we want to approach this fundamental opacity in supply chains.
00:29:48 Speaker 3
We want to grow it and define it to then be able to enforce it because you can't enforce something you can't observe.
00:29:55 Speaker 3
And
00:29:56 Speaker 3
This is a very tricky, we're observing relationships more than we're observing companies.
00:30:00 Speaker 3
And that's what we're really excited about, is kind of bringing clarity to people who need it and hopefully fostering growth in our own country.
00:30:09 Speaker 3
I mean, there's a nobility that we feel every day when we're building and we're working, that we're empowering founders to build faster and to build more.
00:30:18 Speaker 3
And I mean, that's kind of this theme that we've seen over the last five years with this return to
00:30:23 Speaker 3
American innovation and the whole, I mean, I think the whole fundamental beliefs behind why Biosecure got passed was that we have to return innovation to our own soil and try to stay at the forefront of the bleeding edge of technology.
00:30:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I completely agree.
00:30:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's a conversation we're seeing across the UK and Europe at the moment in the same space of making sure that we're all kind of like fortified from
00:30:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
from these risks, which actually I think more people are becoming aware of and more companies now are becoming aware of things like data sovereignty, supply chain risk as well.
00:31:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah, it's great to see.
00:31:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, so with the Biosecure Act driving towards domestic biotech supply chains, how do you see this impacting national resilience and where does BioGate fit in within that shift?
00:31:17 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, absolutely.
00:31:19 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
So we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier.
00:31:23 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We talked about how the pandemic showed just how fragile the pharmaceutical supply chain can really be.
00:31:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that really is something that I think the Biosecure Act, I think the background behind the Biosecure Act that is a concern of Congress right now is how can we maintain the stability and the resilience of the US
00:31:48 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
supply chain when we're trying to become this innovative powerhouse.
00:31:53 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I think that it's interesting to look into the reasons behind why this act was passed.
00:32:02 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
What are the signals that we've seen in the last couple of years that have led the United States to make this decision?
00:32:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And one of them I can say from a kind of
00:32:12 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
industry perspective is that we lost clean tech as Americans.
00:32:18 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And in the early 2010s, this was something that every founder was pushing, just like how we're doing AI now.
00:32:26 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Every founder wanted to make the next solar cell.
00:32:28 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Every founder wanted to make a completely solar powered airplane.
00:32:35 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It was all kinds of ideas and dreams.
00:32:37 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And then it all crashed.
00:32:39 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that was
00:32:42 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
a opportunity for China to step in.
00:32:44 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And now we see in 2026 where China has full control over solar cell production and innovation in that space, and we can't even get our foot in the water anymore.
00:32:56 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And so I think that is a leading motivation for Congress to define these restrictions against
00:33:10 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Chinese suppliers is that we want innovation in America and we want to stay in America.
00:33:15 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And another problem that we have that's more of a consumer side is the control of genomic data from Wuxi and BGI.
00:33:26 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
There's been several, I mean, we were actually just speaking to a PhD candidate at USC who was talking about how during her molecular biology research
00:33:37 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
she sent a sequence in for, or a gene in for sequencing, and the company just took it.
00:33:46 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
They just, I mean, they gave it back to her, but they're like, yeah, we're just going to take this data.
00:33:49 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I mean, yeah, what are we going to do?
00:33:51 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We can't do anything about that.
00:33:53 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
They just have the freedom to do that.
00:33:56 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that is that kind of level of data sovereignty that they have in
00:34:03 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
and not just in China, but in other adversarial countries, is something that the United States is worried about.
00:34:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And of course, I think that was just a simple, just your PhD research, which is a big deal in itself, but this could also be our own genomic data that we are giving to a country that we definitely don't want to have access to.
00:34:24 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that BioGate will give these companies more of an ability and an excuse to
00:34:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
cut these ties as quick as possible and to cut off this bleeding that we have of this data being allowed to be accessed by companies that don't have the American interests in mind.
00:34:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:34:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Just that example alone, you know, of a country just stealing like genomic data.
00:34:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it blows your mind, you know, as I guess as a lay person, as an outsider,
00:35:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, it sounds like unfathomable to think how that would work.
00:35:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Right, and we appreciate you actually interviewing us, Chris, because it is interesting to have an outside perspective because oftentimes the only people that we are speaking to are Americans because this is kind of the space in which we want to innovate in.
00:35:22 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But it's good to know that there are, that this is a global issue and it is something that other countries need to have in mind because
00:35:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
It also is kind of depending on, I know that there are several companies in India and Denmark who are looking at this Biosecure Act as an opportunity to enter into the biotech space and to start supplying to these companies as a alternative means, which I think is great.
00:35:51 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I think that this act isn't just isolationism, but it can also be
00:35:56 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
a form of expanding the network into other countries that might not have had the opportunity to do so.
00:36:02 Speaker 3
A tool for deepening our ties.
00:36:03 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Exactly.
00:36:04 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, totally.
00:36:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Just to jump in for a moment, if you're based in London, we'll soon be running a series of informal free events to bring the community together, which we're calling the Defence Sessions.
00:36:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Expect founder stories, investor insights, government agencies adding their thoughts to the relaxed settings of our Central London presentation room, dates to follow later this year.
00:36:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, for sure.
00:36:28 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm not aware of what the UK or the EU, where they are at the moment, but a lot of things, we take a lot of lead from the US in terms of laws and approaches and stuff.
00:36:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So you've definitely given me some homework to go back and actually look into how the UK and the EU is oriented towards this because, like I said before, it's a definite risk that you can see
00:36:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
whenever the next pandemic or health related issue comes out is that it's not the time then to be looking into supply chains.
00:37:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's here and now when you're when you're not a war, so to speak.
00:37:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Totally.
00:37:07 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah, it does get me on to my second from last question.
00:37:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, obviously, trust and reliability are critical, like we mentioned before.
00:37:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you ensure your solution meets the standard requirement for defence government or mission critical use?
00:37:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it's I can't even begin to fathom how complex it must have been, you know, coming from outside the sector, let alone two young guys, two young chaps, you know, coming at it from a
00:37:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
a very different angle, which is good.
00:37:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I've got to say, actually, Defense needs people from outside of Defense to come up with these new ideas and actually challenge group think and notions of what is possible.
00:37:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah, please.
00:37:43 Speaker 3
No, certainly.
00:37:44 Speaker 3
And I think a key part of our Edge is Risto's background in biotech is the fact that he knows what people want and like what founders that don't have compliance teams actually need.
00:37:56 Speaker 3
The ability to have a continuously running
00:38:01 Speaker 3
monitor of your supply chain and just to be generated audit reports, especially when you're trying to grow, when you're changing what your day-to-day operations are on a weekly or monthly basis was a really powerful tool that got us so excited about exploring this sector.
00:38:17 Speaker 3
And when we can give these people faster data
00:38:23 Speaker 3
where they don't necessarily have to spend a massive portion of their funding from the zero to fully complete audit through a big law firm.
00:38:33 Speaker 3
When we can get them 95% of the way, it changes their entire perspective on how they run their lab and it changes their entire perspective on innovation.
00:38:41 Speaker 3
And that's what really gets us excited is being able to, essentially we saw this first as
00:38:49 Speaker 3
a legal tool.
00:38:50 Speaker 3
And then we realized, oh wow, we're actually building the next kind of defense tool, that this is a key aspect of national security.
00:38:58 Speaker 3
And that was a powerful thing to almost arrive to that, independently, oh wow, we are building this incredible tool.
00:39:06 Speaker 3
And I think that's what gets us most excited in the morning for thinking of setting the new standard because
00:39:13 Speaker 3
the audit people that we've worked with in the past, there's a bogged downness, there's like a bureaucracy that they're just, that is super tiring and it's not what these biotech founders want.
00:39:26 Speaker 3
And we're so happy to disrupt in that space.
00:39:29 Speaker 3
It's move fast and break things, but also build them up right after you break them very quickly.
00:39:36 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, it's a great point.
00:39:38 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I think that
00:39:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
when we were deciding how we wanted to, who we wanted to have access to this tool, it was important at first to think, okay, well, we're going to be giving these companies an ability to become biosecure compliant as quickly as possible.
00:39:58 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But then it started thinking, well, we are young founders in a space that we weren't traditionally familiar with.
00:40:06 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I think that it was
00:40:09 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
an important decision to make to decide to realize that instead of deciding to cut out a law firm, which we think is incredibly important for the growth of any company, instead it's important to just work with these law firms.
00:40:25 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We are not attorneys, right?
00:40:28 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And we have this tool that, of course, maybe in a perfect world,
00:40:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
could provide a company with the ability to be aware of their supply chains at a fraction of the cost and the speed of a traditional method.
00:40:45 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
However, instead what we realize is that we are providing a legal counsel with the ability to give their clients
00:40:56 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
better counsel faster.
00:40:58 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We're giving them the ability to work with their clients more often.
00:41:03 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that I think is important to know is that the best that we can do with what we're given is to provide this data in a organized fashion as quickly as possible and then not have any advice over it.
00:41:22 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We don't want to overstep our boundaries in this space
00:41:26 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
just yet, we'll say.
00:41:28 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
But yeah.
00:41:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And positioning is a tool as well for attorneys rather than direct competition, obviously not trying to replace the attorney.
00:41:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's something which can speed up comprehension of risk, determination of likelihood and impact, because they can look under that rock a lot quicker, make an assessment from that, and then companies can move faster, they can innovate faster, they can do things
00:41:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That's exactly right.
00:41:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Are we compliant or are we going to get a knock on the door from, you know, from NIH?
00:42:03 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That's exactly right.
00:42:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, you can see that where it fits in.
00:42:07 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I'll throw in a really difficult question to end on because I realise you guys got a lot of work ahead of you today.
00:42:12 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, I did.
00:42:13 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I appreciate it.
00:42:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Always a nice one to end on.
00:42:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So
00:42:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of what emerging biological and health-related risks do you think will most impact national security?
00:42:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I guess how are you guys orientating BioGate to address them?
00:42:28 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Totally.
00:42:30 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
That's a great question.
00:42:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And I love to dream about these kinds of problems.
00:42:36 Speaker 3
I'm curious if we'll have the same answer as what I'm thinking of.
00:42:39 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Well, okay, I'll give my answer first.
00:42:42 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I can say that
00:42:45 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
What we talked about previously about how just decoding the motivations behind the Biosecure Act, why does Congress care about this?
00:42:55 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And what I believe is that it has never been easier for these tools that can enable breakthrough medicines that we're developing in 2026 to also lower the barrier for bioweapons.
00:43:11 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I mean, it's interesting creating content in the defense space and providing kind of my thoughts on the defense space while also trying not to fear monger.
00:43:24 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
I don't want to scare people.
00:43:25 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
However, this is what Congress is worried about.
00:43:29 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Congress is worried that China will have access to Americans' genomic data with this genomic sovereignty.
00:43:36 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And they're going to be able to manufacture these
00:43:41 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
these new diseases and weapons that we couldn't even imagine right now.
00:43:49 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
innovation is currently hockey sticking up into exponential levels of new frontiers.
00:43:58 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And something that I'm worried about is giving, handing an adversarial country the data that could lead to
00:44:09 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
a lot of damage.
00:44:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yes, yeah.
00:44:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And if you look, obviously you look at the economic damage, that financial damage that's COVID caused, you know, you can see it's in some ways it's really easy to comprehend, you know, the cost you put into R&D for bioweapons versus the outcome on your adversary, you know, it's an easy payoff, isn't it?
00:44:30 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Absolutely, absolutely.
00:44:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, what do you think?
00:44:32 Speaker 3
So, yeah, I do agree, and I think the key
00:44:37 Speaker 3
The key to building the next massive bioweapon is going to be tailoring.
00:44:43 Speaker 3
And that's really what we're worried about once again with this data leakage is that it will be targeted at a degree much more significant than like the damage we saw from COVID-19.
00:44:56 Speaker 3
There's going to be ways to isolate sections, both physically and demographically.
00:45:01 Speaker 3
And that's what we're really worried about.
00:45:03 Speaker 3
So it is about
00:45:04 Speaker 3
protecting our own data and keeping it out of the hands of bad actors.
00:45:08 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, the US to the Venn diagram between the US and China, especially with biological innovation is really interesting and unique because we can't even imagine the level of government influence that these Chinese companies have.
00:45:26 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And that really is why we don't want to work with these specific companies is because
00:45:32 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
In the US, when you're working on a product, the government can't do anything about it.
00:45:37 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Unless you're getting money from them and they told you explicitly that you're designing something for them, you have the ability to protect your own work.
00:45:46 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
In China, however, it can be very different.
00:45:51 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
You can have this government intervention that at one point you were just trying to build a company that
00:45:59 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
a 23andMe style genomic library.
00:46:02 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
And then a week later, you've just given the CCP a hard drive that has very, very secure genomic data that it's important that we keep that onshore so that kind of interaction doesn't.
00:46:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Take place.
00:46:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
100%, 100%.
00:46:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I can completely imagine that.
00:46:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
When I left the Marines, I almost went through graduate entry medicine myself.
00:46:31 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So this sort of stuff is a genuine real interest in because I can see it as a new frontier of defence, especially when you think across Europe and the UK, we see a lot of sabotage events happening rather than things which are below the threshold of war.
00:46:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And my prediction is that actually we'll see more that's below the threshold of conflict, like
00:46:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
low-level bioweapons, for example, subsea cable cutting, data, data sovereignty issues, by bad actors, so...
00:47:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think it's a great place to end the end the podcast.
00:47:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realize you guys have got a lot of word ahead of you, but I'm just going to say thank you so much guys for giving up some, almost an hour of your time to talk us through this.
00:47:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's been absolutely fascinating and I wish you the very best of luck with getting this, getting this off the ground.
00:47:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think it's going to be, you know, snapped up when companies understand the true complexity and how much cost.
00:47:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Thank you, Chris.
00:47:31 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
Yeah, I mean, these questions were excellent.
00:47:33 Evaristo Parra and Milo Van Dall, the founders of BioGate, an LA-based start-up building real-time biosecurity compliance infrastructure ahead of the US BIOSECURE Act coming into force
We really, we really enjoyed this conversation.
00:47:35 Speaker 3
Yeah, thank you for the conversation, Chris.
00:47:36 Speaker 3
We really appreciate it.
00:47:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It was really great chatting with Eve Rista and Milo about Biogate.
00:47:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If you want to find out more about them, check out the charts below and we'll see you next time.
