"A scientist should be adept at understanding peripheral fields of sciences": we ask tHEMEat Company's Max Tham about his business philosophies

We speak with Max Tham, PhD, the CEO driving innovation in the realm of food science at tHEMEat Company, recently selected as a finalist for the Liveability Challenge 2024. This trailblazer blends scientific expertise with entrepreneurial spirit to revolutionise how we recreate and improve meat flavours and textures using alternative non-animal sources, using heme - a prosthetic iron-containing molecule that is found inside myoglobin. In this interview, we discuss Dr Tham’s unwavering philosophies, the unique challenges and breakthroughs that defined his entrepreneurial journey, and the future of sustainable food innovation.

About tHEMEat Company: We are a food tech startup focusing on solutions for the alternative proteins of the future. Our Veme technology is a novel flavour catalyst that can boost meaty flavours in alternative protein products and replicate the look, cook, smell and taste of real meats.

On the short risky runway for startups 

Like many life science startup founders, you started your graduate journey with a PhD. What was your research topic back then? What was your research topic in your graduate journey?

My final PhD project was in cancer immunology and revolves around the synthesis of platinum-containing drugs with a novel mode of action; instead of simply killing the cancer cells, it converts the cancer cells into a vaccine so that the body can recognize them, and immunise itself against future recurrent cancers.

How did you transition from being a PhD graduate to a CEO of a biotech startup? Was tHEMEats what it started out to be?

I was involved in this entrepreneurship project when I was in my last year of my graduate journey with my research supervisor, Professor Ang Wee Han, initially on an ad hoc basis. A group of us from the lab started out just trying to find a way to make the heme molecule from food discards, but not to the extent of formulating meat flavours. What we started out with was a very far cry from what we do today. Today, we are recreating meat flavours from vegan ingredients using catalytic chemistry.

We didn't have official positions back then, so we were all juggling different roles, just contributing as much as we could. I naturally assumed a leadership position because at one point, the rest of the team left. But we have since rebuilt the team comprising of talented and motivated members. 

Our company is also a research group comprising collaborators from three different schools; chemistry, food science, and chemical biomolecular engineering. This team of diverse expertise has shaped the way we approached technical issues in the company. We have grown to work together to develop technologies, pooled any resources we could get our hands on, and it has been a successful formula for us. 

To say the least, no two days are alike, and making mistakes is part and parcel of the job, and I’m learning something new everyday.

Was being an entrepreneur as gratifying as being a researcher? Was this satisfaction what you were looking for in a startup?

Personally, job satisfaction has a very huge correlation to autonomy; the freedom to do the research that we envision, with the appropriate guidance and a stimulating environment. 

As a researcher, I was blessed with a very approachable PI who would trust me to explore the vast depths of science, yet bring me back when he thinks I’m going off on a tangent. I believe this has had a huge contribution to the success of my PhD, as well as that of the company. 

In the company, we are out here doing a lot of research, business development and outreach, and feeling satisfied at the end of the day seeing the business evolve. This would likely be very difficult to replicate in a commercial or industrial setting, especially if you're working for a bigger entity, say a corporation. So it culminates in a sense of personal pride, passion and responsibility, and I really enjoy the journey. 

As a budding entrepreneur from a technical research background, did you have access to business resources from the university that helped you commercialise your technology?

Initially, we enrolled in the  GRIP MAKE programme at NUS, which is a preparatory course to a longer Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP) that helps scientists develop and commercialise research technologies. However, we didn’t make it far into the programme as we lacked the technological readiness at that point in time. We only had a way to make the molecule, but no commercialisable way to exploit it. So, we had a very painful and sobering experience.

Nonetheless, they teach you the basics of how to set up different functions of a startup. Stuff like, how do you commercialise technology? How do you envision your technology as being purchasable by customers? So that was my first cold water experience realising that not all scientific discoveries are as impactful or useful as it initially seems.

So naturally, we were dropped from the initial stages because the technology simply wasn't ready, and neither was the form of our company. Nevertheless, it was an eye-opening experience. It was very humbling to realize that we were so laden in scientific jargon that we often were  not really thinking about how we can communicate to those outside our fields, and how the research is applicable to the commercial world.

So, things fell apart for a while because some left. At that point in time, it also  happened to be in the heat of COVID crunch and the market was not favourable for a “Jack of all trades, but a master of none” startup, and it was a very painful experience.

Did you feel stranded back then? If so, what spurred you to keep moving forward when the situation was getting dire? Were there cheerleaders in your journey towards becoming an entrepreneur?

Yes, it was stifling, but I was blessed enough to have my boss find another source of funding for me, and I also just started working on this food project in my spare time. The more steps I took; the iterations I made, the knowledge I gained of the plant-based meat industry, and the food security problem in Singapore (and around the world), the more inspired I was to make this a reality. 

In a way, this has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. My wife also has been very, very supportive. She said, “You know, even if this doesn't turn out well, opportunities like these don’t come by easily. Just go and chase it”, and I’m grateful for that support.

How did having academic support aid you in your journey in building tHEMEat Company?

Research-wise, this wasn’t a solo effort. Our success has also been the result of having very talented students. In our company, we make it an equitable relationship; students put in the hours with the research, and we transfer valuable research ideologies and technical expertise to them. Some of my students even made several breakthroughs and these were crucial in shaping the company you see today. While we have some ways to go, we are in a much better funded position than we were a few years ago.

Interestingly, we do not select the students that come in, they come to us solely by  recommendations from the PIs. On this note, academic yardsticks are poor indicators for research output. We try not to look at GPAs, or for students with impeccable scores. At the end of the day, we really want people who are motivated and interested in the research. 

So, apart from leveraging on talented students, how did you and your company adapt and grow on this entrepreneurial journey?

When we first started the company, it was tough because we were operating in a vacuum of market awareness. We had a promising food-based technology, but it took us another year or two before we fully developed our technology with a good market fit, as well as our strategy to sell it.

At that time, it was proposed that heme, a prosthetic iron-containing molecule inside muscle cell proteins, is responsible for the ‘meaty’ taste of meat. It is now a well-known fact, but back then, there was little evidence to support that. Any scientific literature that we found either in patents or in papers were preliminary. I was skeptical this would work, but we still worked on creating heme, replicating and improving the technology through slow iterations. 

One day, my student serendipitously managed to recreate a beef flavour. We started reverse engineering the process, then recreating more flavours like salmon and pork, which grew our confidence in the core technology. None of these would have been possible when we joined GRIP in 2020. So technological readiness and maturity is paramount for one to survive, a milestone we only achieved after 3-4 years of painstaking development.

On being an interdisciplinary technopreneur

It appears that many aspiring scientists-turned-technopreneurs find difficulty in finding a market fit for their products/research innovation. How does being interdisciplinary help in being a more effective entrepreneur?

Agreed, just because you have a solution doesn't mean that it's always commercially appreciated. So communication with market consumers has always been a vital part of technological development, which brings about my next point.

As scientists, we have to trim down on big vocabulary words to bridge the gaps of scientific communication with the consumers. This research ideology also informs the way that we do research in tHEMEat Company, as we try to bridge technological gaps across different scientific disciplines. One glaring example would be the apparent barriers of communication – chemists can make the drugs, but the mechanism of action won’t be known until the biologists and pharmacists test them. This is something I try to advocate in the name of scientific progress, for interdisciplinarity, for the biologists to be able to do chemistry, and vice versa. There shouldn't be any barriers because at the end of the day we are still using the same toolset. Specialists from different fields meeting halfway at an interdisciplinary junction helps to accelerate the pace at which one field hands over knowledge and materials down the pipelines.

Do you find that your pursuit of interdisciplinary solutions can conflict with the need for specialisation as you scale up? This assumes that it would be more efficient for each expert to handle each aspect of the production process in economies of scale. 

While this remains true for scales of industrial efficiency, in an academic or startup setting, a scientist should be adept at understanding and manipulating materials in peripheral fields of sciences. You shouldn't aim to be solely an expert at one field, for at the end of the day you may produce potentially groundbreaking molecules that unfortunately get discarded because nobody knows how to use them. That would be a huge pity and would potentially override any efficiency that one claims to achieve with specialisation. Developing a broad understanding of peripheral fields also allows us to develop a keen sense of innovation when it comes to manipulating a particular technology - be it for academic research or commercialisation. At the very least, developing a subspecialty helps to keep one resistant from being made redundant due to disruptive technologies.

Consequently, that’s the mentality I approached my PhD project with - it was one continuous experiment. We produced and characterised the molecules to understand how the difference in the molecule structure contributed to different phenotypes, in some sense, its structure-drug activity relationship.

Likewise, I brought this mantra along to tHEMEat Company. We wanted to have a very strong chemistry foundation, yet develop the food science aspect of it as well – all towards crafting a good flavour that can be sustainably and affordably sourced from food waste. We relied on the strong principles of tests developed by the food science community, especially in the strong development of sensory tests and flavour crafting. So there lies the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge, a simple suggestion from one field could actually be the long-sought solution to another.

So as a startup founder, how would you describe the local biotech startup scene? What are some things you appreciate, or wish could be done better?

I can only objectively speak for the local food technology space. Different startups are going around and sharing collaborative opportunities ideas, being generally very forthcoming. Unexpectedly, the smaller startups tend to be more generous with their advice as well, which was great for this ecosystem. So we have also picked up trying to help out other startups as well, and this does have a very positive reciprocal effect. 

One of the problems with the biotech community is that people are too protective of their technology. This is understandably so, as tech developments and brand-building are costly, investment-wise, and therefore the logic of patents and trademarks - and why proprietary medicine is so expensive. 

Counterintuitively, tech and profit-wise, if you want to go further, go together - and there lies the need for startups to band together (pool resources) and collaborate more often. There's so many wonderful discoveries - CRISPR-Cas9, genetic code expansion and unnatural amino acids, CAR-T cells, all great inventions with limited use cases thus far. I would think that the point of R&D is to turn these wonderful discoveries into realizable products and solutions.

On mitigating entrepreneurial risk and coaching the next generation of risk-takers

So what are your thoughts about the riskiness of an entrepreneurial endeavour? How did you end up mitigating this risk?

For one, I think this startup is still risky - we are heavily reliant on fundings. I believe a founder has to be very aware of the technological readiness of the startup relative to competitors, as well as having a keen sense of the current and predicted market future. The founder has to walk the ground, and capitalise on any opportunities that he/she comes across. And all these has to be done while in the face of rejections (that thankfully pushed us in the right direction), on top of the lack of clarity at certain junctures - research has certainly prepped us well for that. For us, despite these uncertainties, thankfully there were breakthroughs in our flavour development efforts, especially the recreation of a beef flavour just from vegan ingredients. This spurred us on to return to consumers and stakeholders to seek their sentiments.

We are actively pushing towards commercialisation to independently fund ourselves at the earliest possible stage. So it becomes important to discuss market pain points, allowing both the consumers and stakeholders to understand how useful this technology is. And discuss the possible gaps where these technologies can be commercially applied to as soon as possible.

Besides profit margins and financial sustainability, I feel that it is our rightful scientific duty to exercise due diligence and risk mitigation, as we are funded by taxpayers. In particular, it would be a duty to the rigours of scientific research and commercial justification, as it should provide some tangible returns, or in-kind to the public, even if it is not much. 

Do you think there is a culture for supporting like-minded graduate students towards venture creation in Singapore? Could we develop an Asian Silicon Valley? 

There is definitely a stark difference in culture and ecosystem in the United States versus Singapore, where you do see more startups popping up, all because there is a resource-rich environment (i.e. Silicon Valley). The venture capitalists and investors in the US have a much larger financial appetite to fund riskier ventures. I can understand that the culture here is meeker, so there is less room for budding entrepreneurs, let alone for growth and expansion. Even so, the harsh reality is that success is not guaranteed even for Silicon Valley founders that have raised unicorn-status amounts of venture capital., so we shouldn’t be too discouraged just by the difference in resources.

That being said, I feel that we are making progress towards supporting the next generation of risk takers, with regards to funding. We now have more opportunities to seek funding from local venture capitalists and angel investors, although not an easy task. Nevertheless, these sources of funding have provided a liability-free pool of resources for founders to develop technologies without the stress of loan repayments, more frighteningly so with prevailing interest rates - albeit at the expense of equity.  

These days, we have a network of VCs that actively look out for startups that they are comfortable with working alongside, despite the lack of technological readiness. I think it’s a shift in perspective to focus on the people rather than the commercialisable products, for with a great team, most ideas can be realised with ease. 

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