The Healthy Enterprise

In this episode, Marc Koska shares his journey as a social entrepreneur and healthcare innovator. He discusses creating the K1 auto-disabled syringe, which has saved millions of lives by preventing the spread of blood-borne diseases, and his transition to Apiject to advance healthcare delivery with new injection technologies. Marc also reflects on lessons from biomimicry and product design, the challenges of global health in developing countries, and the importance of firsthand experience, social awareness, and data-driven decision-making in driving meaningful innovation.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Marc Koska and His Innovations
05:03 The Birth of the K1 Auto-Disabled Syringe
12:09 Impact of the K1 Syringe on Global Health
17:50 Transition to Apiject and New Innovations
25:03 Future of Healthcare and Injection Devices
26:59 Empowerment Through Creation
29:20 The Birth of Biomimicry
32:12 Social Impact and Empowerment
35:24 Innovations in Design and Technology
39:35 The Journey of Social Entrepreneurship
45:55 Advice for Aspiring Innovators

Guest Information:
  • Guest's Name: Marc Koska
  • Guest's Title/Position: Co-founder and Head of Production Design
  • Guest's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-koska-5761181a/
  • Company / Affiliation: ApiJect https://apiject.com/
  • Guest's Bio: The inventor of the Apiject Platform and its first BFS injection device is Marc Koska, a highly honored “social entrepreneur.” The Prefilled Apiject Injector is designed for simplicity: Just prior to injection, a fill-finished Blow-Fill-Seal container and intramuscular needle hub are push-twisted together by a healthcare professional. Leading Apiject R&D, Marc and his team design drug delivery system prototypes that can reliably serve both advanced and developing markets. Through feedback from patients and healthcare providers, Marc has a deep understanding of customers and in building healthcare partnerships. This feedback is the foundation of Apiject’s Platform to ensure our single-use prefilled injector and future devices meet the needs of all. The Apiject Platform of drug delivery devices is designed to optimize manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation, using advanced technology, deliver cost efficiencies and accelerating time to market, and most importantly, save lives.

Takeaways:
  • Marc Koska invented the K1 auto-disabled syringe to prevent disease spread.
  • The K1 syringe has saved approximately 12 million lives.
  • Syringe reuse was a major transmission route for HIV.
  • Marc's journey involved extensive research and learning about syringes.
  • The K1 syringe design was a significant innovation in healthcare.
  • Marc's work has had a profound impact on global health education.
  • Apiject aims to provide safer and more accessible injection devices.
  • The new injection devices are designed for self-administration.
  • Environmental concerns are addressed with new syringe designs.
  • Marc's career reflects a commitment to solving large-scale health problems. Empowerment comes from creating impactful solutions.
  • Biomimicry is a study of nature's designs and interactions.
  • Social entrepreneurship requires understanding the core truth of problems.
  • Technology, like AI and 3D printing, enhances design processes.
  • Traveling and seeing problems firsthand is crucial for entrepreneurs.
  • Data and understanding all viewpoints are essential for success.
  • Innovative design must consider social implications.
  • Creating a supportive team culture is vital for success.
  • Challenging the status quo is necessary for meaningful change.
  • Success in social entrepreneurship requires a combination of passion and practicality.

Creators and Guests

Host
Heath Fletcher
With over 30 years in creative marketing and visual storytelling, I’ve built a career on turning ideas into impact. From brand transformation to media production, podcast development, and outreach strategies, I craft compelling narratives that don’t just capture attention—they accelerate growth and drive measurable results.
Guest
Marc Koska
The inventor of the ApiJect Platform and its first BFS injection device is Marc Koska, a highly honored “social entrepreneur.” The Prefilled ApiJect Injector is designed for simplicity: Just prior to injection, a fill-finished Blow-Fill-Seal container and intramuscular needle hub are push-twisted together by a healthcare professional. Leading ApiJect R&D, Marc and his team design drug delivery system prototypes that can reliably serve both advanced and developing markets. Through feedback from patients and healthcare providers, Marc has a deep understanding of customers and in building healthcare partnerships. This feedback is the foundation of ApiJect’s Platform to ensure our single-use prefilled injector and future devices meet the needs of all. The ApiJect Platform of drug delivery devices is designed to optimize manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation, using advanced technology, deliver cost efficiencies and accelerating time to market, and most importantly, save lives.
Producer
Meghna Deshraj
Meghna Deshraj is the CEO and Founder of Bullzeye Media Marketing, where she partners with eCommerce brands, healthcare institutions, and small businesses to scale profitably without outside funding. Under her leadership, Bullzeye has driven over $580M in annual growth and more than $1B in collective direct revenue for its clients. With a background spanning corporate strategy, IT, finance, and process optimization, Meghna brings a unique blend of data-driven marketing expertise and operational leadership. A Certified Six Sigma Black Belt with deep experience in program management and business transformation, she has successfully led global teams, large-scale integrations, and organizational change initiatives. Her superpower lies in marketing strategy and consulting, fueled by a passion for helping businesses grow through innovation, efficiency, and strong client relationships.

What is The Healthy Enterprise?

Join host Heath Fletcher on The Healthy Enterprise as he explores how healthcare leaders and innovators are transforming the industry from the inside out. Whether you’re a provider, tech entrepreneur, marketing strategist, or industry executive, these conversations deliver actionable strategies, innovative solutions, and human-centered insights to help you grow, lead, and make a lasting impact.

Created and produced by Bullzeye Growth Partners — let’s make something great together.

Heath Fletcher (00:13)
Hey, welcome to The Healthy Enterprise. And thank you for coming back. If you're a returning listener, if it's your first time, welcome. I hope you enjoy this episode. I'm going to be talking with Marc Koska. He invented the revolutionary K1 auto-disabled syringe, which prevented the spread of blood borne diseases and saved about 12 million lives. He went on to other nonprofit organizations and was eventually awarded the officer of order of the British empire for his contribution to global healthcare.

Today he is the co-founder and head of product design for Apiject. So this is gonna be a good episode. Let's meet Marc.

Marc, thank you so much for taking the time today to join me on this episode. I'm really curious to learn more about Apiject and your journey through social entrepreneurship. So here's the spotlight for you. Introduce yourself and explain a little bit what you've been doing over the last little while.

Marc Koska. (01:14)
Okay, thanks. Well, pleasure to join you and ⁓ pleased to spend the next three quarters of an hour with you and ⁓ talk through some of the stories and learnings and obviously open to any questions that you may have. Good, good. Well, essentially, I became very interested in trying to solve problems and ⁓ long story short, I was

Heath Fletcher (01:29)
Absolutely, I probably will.

Marc Koska. (01:43)
exposed to the media onslaught of HIV back in the early 80s. HIV was identified in 1981. It was much misunderstood. was much maligned. was misappropriated in lots of different ways as the media would. And it was quite a confusing time. I suppose in a way I was kind of shocked having grown up well fed.

and had clothes on my back in thinking, hang on a minute, no one told me that viruses could go around the world and be spread by contact between human beings. just didn't seem, that wasn't part of the game. No one told me that was gonna happen. And so when I sort of started understanding and saw the blame game coming out about it was either,

hemophiliacs or it was gay people who were spreading this. I found that incredibly disturbing and uncomfortable. I started researching and while I was researching I was trying to read everything I could. There was no internet back then, this is 1983, 84. So you had to get everything from newspapers or the media or the odd book that was published.

And there was one quote in a newspaper which said one day syringes, the reuse of syringes would be a major transmission route for HIV. And I just thought this was an extraordinary thing to read. Number one, was sort of, hang on a minute, no one told me that the human race would be susceptible to viruses. And secondly, well, who's using syringes? This must be healthcare workers. So how come healthcare workers are doing more harm than good?

That just didn't, you know, compute to my... Didn't make sense. This is crazy. I mean, obviously I knew that atrocities happened all the time, but on a general basis of healthcare, this just seemed ridiculous. And sadly, after doing lots of research, I found out, and this was research in the library, I found out that, you know, it was... ⁓

It was actually true and there were recorded cases of diseases being spread. 1930, there was a huge outbreak of malaria in the British army because in getting quinine injections, they used the same injection on 500 different soldiers and they all contracted malaria. know, sort of penny starts to drop that this prediction about syringes was, wow, what do they know that, you know, no one else was recognizing?

And it took quite a while to find enough evidence. And sadly, there was a lot of evidence that syringes were regularly reused. And when you look at the numbers, it's sort of, one syringe is used on average three times, I think is the current number. And back then it was a little bit worse. it starts to make sense. Well, if every syringe is used three or four times,

What can we do about this? Is this an education problem? Is this a money problem? Is this a design problem? And it's kind of a combination of all three.

Heath Fletcher (05:12)
Yeah, I was gonna say it's probably all of the above, right?

Marc Koska. (05:15)
Yeah, and probably 20 other factors. And there was ⁓ a big point towards, we need a syringe that a bit like a safety belt in the car, stops someone crashing the syringe several times into humans. so, was there a way of ⁓ making it auto-disable became the term that was used. I learned all I could. I didn't know anything about syringes.

and as you referenced earlier, my hair was a lot longer back then. I started researching and found out that there was a lot to learn. The syringe, a humble product, most ubiquitous to use product, but a very humble product, actually was much more complicated than it looked. So I started learning about where plastic was refined from and how it was refined and whether there was a chance of making it biodegradable.

Funny enough, early on, you would show someone a prototype of a syringe that you could only use once and therefore would be safe. And their retort would be, is it biodegradable? Because even back in the 80s, there was an awareness that plastics were particularly friendly. And so in learning where plastics come from to where the machinery is made, how do they make the machinery that makes syringes?

how are actually syringes made when the machinery is installed? What regulations do they fall under? What's the economics? Who makes good syringes? Who makes bad? Who makes expensive? Who makes less expensive? And how are they distributed? And how are they used? And how are they recycled? So I went on a three-year quest of trying to learn every part of the story.

And at the end of that three years, I woke up one morning and it was absolutely clear to me that there was a very small opportunity for a design that could make a tangible difference. And the opportunity was in a mold, the plastic injection mold that are used to make the syringes, they were all constructed in the same way. There's around 600 factories making syringes in the world.

They all have many molds making these, so there are several thousand of these. So you couldn't expect the whole industry to throw out their molds and start again, because they're incredibly high cost and they last a long time. So what was the conversion opportunity? And there was a very small construction line in every single mold in exactly the same place. So I took the opportunity of opening up the mold, taking off two millimeters of metal.

and putting in my two millimeters of metal, which had a shape which allowed a mechanical valve to be introduced into the product. And that meant that you could use it normally once and then you couldn't use it again. It would lock and break. This syringe was named K1 after my surname and one for one use. after many, many years, 17 years after reading that newspaper article, sold the first one.

UNICEF and since then we've gone on to sell around 23, 24 billion of them around the world mainly for immunisation and pretty much all of them in the developing world across about a hundred countries and of course you know that that syringe has had a big effect in lots of different ways not just physically but also in education and social terms it's had a huge effect and it's still being made today.

even though the patents have expired and there's no more royalty benefit from it.

Heath Fletcher (09:07)
And are all, so all these other organizations that are creating syringes, these manufacturers, are they, have they adopted that design now?

Marc Koska. (09:15)
No, the only forced market is immunization and pretty much every syringian immunization either uses MyDesign, which is probably the biggest selling design, either use MyDesign or two or three others that are well known and well established and do a very good job. ⁓ So there were three or four competitors in the end who sort of shared the market. ⁓

were looking for microscopic advantages to sort of take more of a market share over someone else. And a lot of that was pricing because syringes have a funny quality. Everyone knows the price of a syringe, but no one knows the price of a scalpel or a catheter, for example. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone in the industry.

Heath Fletcher (10:07)
Yeah

Marc Koska. (10:07)
And they're all when you say this is 3.6 cents. really I can buy them for 3.4 and it's like, okay, we'll buy them, you know, because an added advantage of auto disable or a single use is obviously good for the patient. But not necessarily that good for the manufacturer. And the reason is kind of complex but ⁓ understandable once you understand.

Syringes are made as a loss leader generally. know, people do make money. Manufacturers do make money out of syringes, but what they are foremost is a brand carrier. So the, if the syringe is accepted and, nurse, didn't feel any pain. The nurse feels, wow, what brand is that? that's, you know, the Pepsi brand of syringe and other brands are available, but that's the Pepsi. Great. I'm going to buy everything Pepsi.

because I don't get blamed for a...

Heath Fletcher (11:07)
They make my job easier, they make me look good as a nurse. That makes sense.

Marc Koska. (11:12)
And

so a lot of profit is loaded onto those other, a lot of profit margin is loaded onto those other products and not onto the syringe. So your syringe is your traditional loss leader, if you like, in the market. Anyway, by the end of the patent life, 2017, you know, we'd sold many billion. We knew that in those cases, every single injection was safe and clean and had never been used before.

And secondly, we knew that healthcare workers preferred that because they couldn't be blamed or, know, historically, ⁓ you know, criticized, my uncle got an abscess, that must have been you type thing. And then thirdly, we had a reasonable effect on the public awareness of safe syringes against unsafe syringes, you know, ⁓ doctor, I'd prefer that one. Well, it's more expensive. Fine, I'll have it because...

they knew it was safe for them or their family members or their children. ⁓ those three things were very, very, you know, big achievements for us. And of course, we're incredibly proud of ⁓ doing that.

Heath Fletcher (12:22)
⁓ I you are. What a journey.

Marc Koska. (12:25)
Yeah. And then when the patents expired, we got to the end of that period and you know, on reflection, what am I going to do now was obviously a big question for me. And I was thinking about those three elements of, know, everyone was safe that we gave, but doesn't mean to say one tomorrow is going to be safe. If it can, if it's a reusable, most disposable syringes are reusable.

And so, you know, it sort of really weighed on me. I wonder if we can tackle the other issues that are in the marketplace. And I had seen them all, of course, traveling to over 90 countries for work over that period of time, you get to see lots of things that your product isn't necessarily helping more or ⁓ providing a benefit towards. examples.

you could have a lot of drugs available in a clinic, but no syringes. So if you tied the two together, then you knew that you would have 330 doses of drug with 330 injection devices. So therefore there's no reason to reuse anything. One of the prime reasons for reusing it is because, as I mentioned, they're a commodity and they're not really valued in the same way that a drug is valued.

drug has much more profit associated with it, so therefore the drugs are well supplied, but the syringes aren't necessarily well supplied along with them. So I sort of thought, well I wonder if I could do Act 2, and if Act 2 would be able to provide, first of all, safety, second of all, availability, would we be able to allow drugs to be more available to people who want it?

or were prescribed them and knew that that was the right thing to do. So I'll give you an example. There's oxytocin. Oxytocin is a drug given during childbirth. If the mother is losing too much blood, you can give oxytocin as postpartum hemorrhage. So ⁓ after the baby's been born, the placenta detaches. If too much blood is lost, you can lose the mother.

one litre of blood lost and know the mother is in severe danger. But with oxytocin you can stop that bleeding and it's 10 or 20 cents this injection. But the reason it's not given and we lose 200,000 women or so every year at that critical point, probably the most beautiful point in their life, is because there's no healthcare provider to deliver it, to deliver that one injection. So for the sake of

that fact of not enough healthcare workers, the challenge was, I wonder if we could provide a product that would actually do the job for you. So there's a condition where if you want to give a self-injection or a familial given injection, so what if mum's at the birth attendant? Because most births are unattended. But if the mum is the birth attendant and she's been briefed and she's got a birthing kit, she would know that if...

blood had reached a certain level of loss that she would reach for the purple syringe and jab it in the mother's thigh and you could save that person's life with no side effects and it would be almost an instant result. So the way you can do that is by having a self-administered registered product and that basically comes down to it's got to be pre-measured. A bit like a bee sting injection.

you know, for a kid or peanut allergy or any of those. Yeah. And so those can be administered by non-trained people. And so could we make ⁓ oxytocin one of those? And the way to do that is to make a pre-filled device. And that's, that was the thought that was dominating. What else could we help with by making a better injection system? The other thing is environmentally glass for glass vials is a horror show.

it's incredibly energy intensive. You have to heat it up multiple times to a thousand degrees to shape it into the shape that you need for the vial and the neck and the straight tube, et cetera, and then cool it down and then heat it up again. And that heating process is incredible waste of energy, or it's incredible use of energy, I should say. So even though glass is cheap, it's incredibly expensive environmentally. And would there be

Heath Fletcher (17:14)
Yeah,

Marc Koska. (17:20)
It's you know, you have to treat it very delicately in transport. Of course, they're not. you they break. If one breaks in a box, you normally discard the whole box, etc. Because shards of glass and, you know, and glass has done an amazing job over the last 150 years. Glass has, you know, probably saved humanity more times than any of us will. But it was time for a change, in my opinion, and looking around, I came across this technology that we all know.

which is the technology used for eye drops. When you get a medical kit and you get those little plastic tubes, you twist off the top and can give yourself a couple of eye drops. And that is made by an amazing process called Blow, Fill, Seal or BFS. And when I investigated this, it seemed like the ideal way of moving drugs or vaccines around the world. what an investigation by going to the founding company

which is called Romelag in Germany, I found out that actually many people have tried over last 30 years or so of trying to fix a needle to this product to make it into an injection device. And there were several patents and several attempts, but no one had really cracked the code. And so my deal, if you like, with Romelag was, look, you're the best in the world in making these little vials. I'm pretty good at needles. I know what I'm doing.

I wonder if we can work together and we can make something which is suitable and fit for purpose and meets all the other criteria of lower cost, easier to manufacture, better return on investment so that it's commercially viable and socially viable and ⁓ humanitarianly much more improved over the scene that we've got. So for example, here's one of our latest prototypes. This is the BFS at the top here.

It's a flexible container. You can see I'm squishing it. This is a needle hub. This is the cap. So you would remove this in the normal way. There's the needle. Put that back on just in case. And all you do to activate, you twist the product. That activates it. You remove the cap and then just push like you do with a syringe, two fingers and a thumb. You push down on the top and that gives the injection.

Heath Fletcher (19:45)
Have a

Marc Koska. (19:46)
Back to our oxytocin example, can imagine, you know, grandpa or mom being a couple of demos with a dummy in an orange would easily be confident enough to save their granddaughter or daughter's life. of course, many people inject themselves around the world every day. Diabetics, people who've got deep vein thrombosis, etc.

Heath Fletcher (20:14)
It's not the kind of thing you have to actually hit the vein either, right? It's anywhere.

Marc Koska. (20:18)
No, and in fact the majority of injections are outside the vein. They're either in the muscle or in the subcutaneous layer. So, and that's our target area for those sort of much bigger generic type injections. And so that's what we're going for. know, to just...

Heath Fletcher (20:34)
so

small, I was surprised at how small it is, but it's just a dose, so it doesn't need to be much bigger than that, really. It's just so simple.

Marc Koska. (20:43)
Yeah, there it is.

we've got a lot, you know, all the labeling that's required is on there. And it's very, it's three seconds to activate and you're often and you can't use it again. It's of course, it's auto disabled. So it meets all the international standards, etc. And I could, you know, I could keep going on is lower price, it's better for the environment. Even though it's plastic, it's actually

Heath Fletcher (21:07)
Yeah

Marc Koska. (21:10)
made with far less energy. It's well under half the ⁓ environmental cost of a glass bottle and a syringe.

Heath Fletcher (21:20)
⁓ So who fills it with the medication? Is it done separately so the syringe is made somewhere else and the base with the actual medication is in it and then they come together and then that's in their package. How does that work?

Marc Koska. (21:39)
As

I alluded to, Rommelag has been around 60 years and they are the market leader. there are a lot of manufacturers, 200 or 300 around the world, medication or saline in these type of containers. So our target audience are people who use Rommelag equipment now. There's a new generation that's just come out which is very farmer biased. It's very much

bias towards the regulatory framework that the pharmaceutical industry runs under. We've made ⁓ some changes to the way we would have ⁓ finished the product, which is that we have this word, fill and finish. So we fill the vial and then we finish it with labels, et cetera. And so the whole fill and finish process we've looked at very intensely and I would say it's a

very much an AI based system now. We've changed it quite dramatically over the last 18 months to bring it up to speed. And of course it's highly flexible for the future, much lower cost than was being used over the last 30 years anyway. And so, you know, we're sort of getting ready for the next generation. So our target audience are people who like Rommelag, the target audience, definitely people in...

lower regulatory pathways than let's say the US. This is certainly for introduction because not because they have any, in fact the highest stringency is one of the regulators that we're dealing with now because we feel that if we jump that hurdle that we've jumped all of the, you know, we've jumped the majority of them in the world, which of course is, you know, we're tackling the most difficult first. And the, but a lot of the companies that we're looking at,

India, South American countries, other Asian countries. Because one, that's where the need is. That's where the real need is for lower cost and independency. Because they don't want to rely ⁓ on the big boys to send them equipment like glass vials, et cetera. So this is a very low cost alternative that can be done. And so that's where the need sits at the moment.

know, I said before, glass and syringes are doing a great job in the West. know, none of us really suffered in the latest COVID vaccinations, for example, for lack of syringes that we had enough to get through. ⁓ But in the developing world, that wasn't so. And so we ended up with vaccinations falling off because we didn't want people gathering. ⁓ Number one, we didn't want people gathering in groups because of the spread of COVID airborne.

or any airborne virus in the future. And secondly, they were very reliant on getting, for example, crimps or stoppers that are used in the vials from ⁓ developed world countries. And those just weren't taking place because that volume was being absorbed by those countries. And so there was a lot of ⁓ exposure to these weaknesses of supply chain. And so what we've got is a complete supply chain in a box, essentially.

and we ship in a container, in 20 and 40 foot containers, a pre-assembled unit which is plugged in and run on reasonable amount of energy. It's about five kilowatts and it's an incredible system.

Heath Fletcher (25:22)
Wow. Wow. This is a great story. I mean, thanks for sharing all that. mean, you took us down. I mean, it was probably fast tracked a little bit. You took us down the road in ⁓ about 20 minutes. But ⁓ what I'd like to do is go back to when the first idea came up. What were you doing? you in this industry already or where were you ⁓ in your professional world? Were you looking for something?

you kind of got obsessed with syringes and you heard about it through the media. What took you down that road back then?

Marc Koska. (26:00)
So when I was very young, I became very interested in a career in problems, I guess. that was the best way to describe it. for the first, all my, I needed one that tickled me. I one that was going to be interesting and kind of a large scale one. I suppose I was arrogant enough to think, yeah, I want a bigger problem. Sure enough, got one.

Heath Fletcher (26:12)
There's no shortage of

Marc Koska. (26:30)
I was actually living in the Caribbean at the time when I read about HIV for the first time and then the media was on an American territory. the media was very Americanized and full on for this HIV pandemic. Whereas we had nothing really in the UK where I had just left. ⁓ I hadn't gone to university because that's my...

linked to my fascination for biomimicry, which I'll explain. But in reading this story about HIV, ⁓ I kind of had reached a very interesting point in my life because a year or so before I'd started making models of murder scenes. I was on a pretty turbulent island at the time, St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, and I was sailing on

you know, every weekend, I was there for the beach. And I was offered a job to make a model of an unfortunate murder scene. And of course I said, yes, I can easily make models of this to represent the scene in court and show the jury. It turned out, obviously I'd never made a model before in my life, but I, you know, took the opportunity.

And we made this model and it was incredibly empowering to me because making with my own hands something which had such a ⁓ huge effect on the jury and the case was immensely empowering. I ended up, or the case ended up being settled out of court for one of the largest out of court settlements in American legal history at the time.

And it was actually only the second time a model had been used. I think the first one was dramatized in the film, The Accused with Jodie Foster, the Boston bar room rape. And that was a few weeks before this happened. one of the lawyers on St. Croix thought that he would try and get a model made and asked me. Anyway, I was very fortunate to be able to do it. then I made this whole series of models. And while I was...

looking after myself on the Caribbean. It was brilliant to actually understand that I could do things. I could take things from an idea or a real scene, do something with my hands and translate that into something that was worth tens of millions of dollars, even though the model wasn't. But it was a fascinating turning point and really was empowering. And then reading about the problem, it all started to, know, of HIV.

it all started, right, this is what I'm gonna study. And in fact, the moment I read that sentence, I knew that was what I was gonna do for the rest of my life. And so it was a massive turning point. And then back to university or the choice of not going to university came from the fact that I didn't really wanna go and study any of the subjects that were on offer. And of course, that's an amazingly ignorant and arrogant thing to think.

⁓ but to me, none of it was going to be directly useful, you know, going to university for, ⁓ a couple of three years to study something just seemed like all my peers were treating it like another three years off another three years of not working. It wasn't that I was desperate to work. was that I was desperate for a mission and university didn't seem like a mission apart from

I would have wanted to study what is now called biomimicry. so biomimicry with Janine Banius and Dana Baumaster was codified into the most beautiful subject, which is understanding the way that ⁓ evolution has selected not only benefits to ⁓ mutations for animals or plants or...

any living organism to survive in the environment that it finds itself in, but how to live with each other. And so there are three structures really in my view of biomimicry. One, there's copying something. So you can look at a whale's tail fin and think, wow, I wonder if we could turn that into a more efficient rudder for a boat. And you copy something about the leading edge of the tail fin. And of course that's viable.

And then the other one is the process. So you might look at photosynthesis and think, we could copy that mechanism in a solar panel and make the solar panel more efficient because nature through billions and billions of experiments and mutations and accidents has come up with a better way to photosynthesize. So maybe that would do something for us. could copy that. But the one...

that I really am fascinated with and always have been but just never been able to put a structure around it is how do organisms live? If you like here's organism A but how does it live with and survive off the organism below it and the organism above it? Something's eating it, it's eating something. And how did those billions of experiments and mutations and accidents happen that allowed that whole structure to do? So if we're looking at

And believe you me, I know how, I am much more humble than I'm gonna sound, but to look at something like this and think, well, what does this do socially? What does this do if you could distribute injectable contraception to young women who don't wanna start a family because the cultural norm is that maybe you fall pregnant when you're 15.

But what if you could empower women in a way that isn't criticized through religious bias or gender bias or ⁓ familial bias. Like grandpa says, no granddaughter of mine will ever take chemicals made in the West ⁓ to interfere with nature. You're not doing that. And of course, no one knows their situation and it's probably to them out of their choice.

empower a young lady to be able to say, I want to not have a baby for three years. I want to finish my education. I want to study law. I want to do that. And of course, one of the choices is that she could, ⁓ she can either not have sex or not be forced to have sex, but also maybe she could take a contraception so that even if that goes against her, that she can stay at school and she can, you know.

look up, she can control her own destiny to some degree. ⁓ so, you know, that interaction of a product suddenly has a layer of social benefit or disturbance or interference. And then there's one below, we're using plastics, are plastics in this case, worth using? Or are they killing too many dolphins that actually we've caused a bad imbalance?

rather than a good imbalance or a good balance. So I'm really fascinated and actually the team that I'm lucky enough to have assembled, a multidisciplinary, not only in each role but also in the cross-disciplinary way we work, in that we take a lot of care about coming up with these are some of the samples behind me that we've made over the years but to look at

lots of different features, not maybe necessarily a whole product, but features and how that feature relates to manufacturing cost. And this is what we're trying to differentiate is that what I'm trying to differentiate is that we're not just designing a product and putting it out in the market. What we're trying to understand is that the effect all the way through from the top to the bottom, and we're just this tiny little piece in the middle calling

calling the shots, hopefully, because we are attractive to the people who pay. So instead of putting out a load of shit that doesn't actually do any good outside of the people that benefit the people that pay, we're actually having an effect that's much wider. And so that's my understanding of my own version of biomimicry. And I've been lucky enough to...

to work with some of the founders on field courses and it's just been amazing, literally some of the most amazing weeks I've ever spent with these people who can not give you the answer but they can explain what you're seeing so that you can create your own answer. It's sort of like my core belief I suppose.

Heath Fletcher (35:46)
Wow, that's very interesting. So bio-memcrease is an actual study now in universities.

Marc Koska. (35:51)
Yeah, but back then you couldn't study it wasn't codified. wasn't it wasn't a study now It's only taught at one university in the world at Arizona State. Is that right in its true form? Of course, there is bioengineering and there's sure, you know, there are people who go Oh a whale's tail. I will copy the you know, the the surface Roughness to you know mimic that and that will make a faster surfboard or something

Quite right, you're taking advantage of something which through billions of years has evolved and there's nothing there that's wrong. But the true sense of the word for me is understanding these layers of interaction and that's only taught at Arizona State. And unfortunately it's post-grad and because I didn't go to university, I'm not eligible unfortunately.

Heath Fletcher (36:44)
I the theory, the theory and the philosophy is certainly something that can be studied and are there books on it out there that are being written or has it? Yeah. That's very interesting. I, it's, ⁓ it's certainly something when you were explaining it about how, you know, it doesn't, it's not a far stretch to understand that we can, we can and have probably duplicated or replicated.

Marc Koska. (36:53)
Yeah, there are. There are quite a few.

Heath Fletcher (37:10)
a lot of things that nature has taught us and the more we learn and the more we understand about the laws of nature and how they work together, you know, I think it has an impact on us because we are one of those organisms. So why wouldn't we be able to understand how we align with everything else on this as well? Yeah.

Marc Koska. (37:33)
It's

really funny, think nature is such ⁓ a trigger word for me because you hear, ⁓ I spent the weekend in nature. What do think you were doing Monday to Friday? were in a man-made box, but that's still nature. It's a weird definition that most people have of what nature is. It isn't green, it isn't nature.

Heath Fletcher (37:45)

Yeah, maybe in the wilderness is a better frame of.

Marc Koska. (38:03)
Yeah, or without, you know, human-made influences or something. But yeah, it's a much maligned word, I feel.

Heath Fletcher (38:11)
Yeah, it's very interesting and it's just in the many podcasts and conversations I've had with people regarding so many different areas in health, that all this conversation about genetics and biotechnology and all these things. mean, the things that are being understood and being ⁓ explained and used in...

trying to make the world a better place, trying to help other people. And that seems to be a real common thread is that the desire is to make things better. And there's a lot of understanding and realization that some things are actually quite broken and have been for a lot of years, many decades. ⁓ And there's a mission ⁓ to fix what's broken and to find new ways of doing things. So pushing the envelope.

pushing and asking, why do we do it this way? Why don't we do it another way? So I find it very interesting that you, such early on, were able to kind of go, yeah, that's certain. I got to find a new way to do that because that's how change actually happens. Isn't it? Is it somebody has to decide, well, I'm going to make something better out of that. And that you were inspired ⁓ at that age to just sort of go out there and tackle this as a lifelong commitment is amazing.

And so that's, you know, that's what took you down this road into social entrepreneurship. And that's kind of, you've kind of done a lot of things in that, in that category, haven't you? You've done a few other things I was reading about you. And in fact, you got a few ⁓ awards for your work as well, haven't you?

Marc Koska. (39:56)
Yeah, got a few awards.

Heath Fletcher (39:59)
Including the British, the officer of the order of the British Empire, is that correct? Yes, tell me a little bit about that.

Marc Koska. (40:05)
That is correct.

⁓ what the award or the day or...

Heath Fletcher (40:11)
Well,

what you got it for and what was the recognition?

Marc Koska. (40:15)
So when we had been acknowledged for saving the first million lives through the K1 syringe, yeah, got a, was, I was actually in Vietnam on a trip and my wife called me and we have a rule, we never called each other. So it's either really good news or really bad news. And she called and said, there's a letter here from number 10 Downing street. Do you want me to open it? And

I went, yeah, it's probably a circular, know, and so she, ⁓ I thought it was, you know, just a political thing. yeah, anyway, so she read out the letter and of course, know, it's incredibly flattering and stuff. But it was good. Yeah, I went to the palace with my wife and two daughters. My son was quite young. He was only two, I think. So it was about 20 years ago and it would have been a...

bit of a stretch for him to go. Incredibly cold day, I remember. And ⁓ yeah, it was a wonderful event. One, you meet gorgeous people who've done fascinating things and they're all interesting to chat to in the warmup. And it's a bit surreal really. You need to be pinched a few times to understand where you are. then you file through and Prince Charles gave me

the ⁓ GON as we refer to it in the UK. And he did this ⁓ funny thing. I don't know if you've seen him on TV. He does this quite a lot. so he said, so tell me how your syringe works. And I went, well, sir, you put it. So apparently we were both doing this at the same time, which my wife was giggling about in the crowd. And yeah, it was good.

And then afterwards we have a nice dinner with loads of...

Heath Fletcher (42:16)
Wow, very exciting. Yeah. Well, it's good to be recognized and yeah, clearly you're super humble about it because you didn't jump right in and go, and by the way, I got this award. So yeah, I had to dig it out of you, but that was, that's very, that's very cool. Congratulations on that. you talked about, before we get close to the end here, you talked earlier that you're working with AI.

So, and obviously your company is very innovative. You use a lot of ⁓ technology, including when we were talking earlier, you were explaining the board behind you is kind of a journey ⁓ through your development process, but you're also using 3D printing ⁓ as part of your development process, right? So kind of give us a little bit about that ⁓ and explain how that came about.

Marc Koska. (43:09)
Well, we use 3D printing because it's the fastest way to visualize something and hold it in your hand. ⁓ CAD is unbelievably incredible, but what you really want is to hold something and ⁓ feel it and see whether it fits your hand or your fingers. So the team here have done an amazing job of

know, replicating ranges of things. So we can, for example, on this product where you push down with your thumb to give the injection, we've made a whole variety of these at different thicknesses, different shapes, because we can start to see what would give us the best effect in the injection. So here's a kid's toy called Pop It. And when you push down it,

inverts and goes the other way. So of course what we've done is designed this so that when you push it and let go it stays inverted because there's a visual clue then to the user that that one shouldn't be touched or it should be disposed of because it's already been used. So there's, you know, we use 3D printing as very much a development tool. The other interesting thing about AI is that we're using it for quality by design. What we're doing is

Instead of having the sort of end inspection process, which is very prevalent in medical products, where you inspect the product at the end of the line for 20 features and you test it and make sure that it's up to standard. There are better ways now being led by AI where you're basically looking at the criteria that the product was made under and say, well, these conditions are all within range.

And so we know that we don't have to inspect this. Of course, there are random inspections and this actually improves quality because you're not stopping the product in the process of manufacturing. So AI is becoming more and more prevalent in the opportunities that we have. Of course, it will be standardized in a few years, but at the moment, the opportunities are wide and vast and they're very exciting.

Heath Fletcher (45:25)
So, you know, for people who are kind of in your shoes, know, ⁓ kind of walking that path towards social entrepreneurship or looking into some type of innovation or innovate, inventing something unique, like what you did, you know, is there something that, you know, along your journey where you, you know, whether it was how you dealt with your challenges or how you navigated that, that experience.

Advice, what advice would you give to somebody who kind of walking your path and taking that trip?

Marc Koska. (46:02)
Oh God, there are so many cliche answers to this. course there is. Follow your passion. I wouldn't necessarily say that's the right answer. think it's more about truth. If you can go and see that you can make a difference. So in my case, you know, I've just traveled to my 95th country and not all, you know, most of them were for work. think over 88 were for work.

Heath Fletcher (46:10)
Thanks.

Marc Koska. (46:32)
If you've seen it for real with your own eyes, even if you're just one person who's seen the problem and you've got a solution that you know will work, then the decision is a lot easier for you. But I think there's a lot of people who, I'm not having a go at people who invent toasters, but the world doesn't need more toasters, to be honest. There aren't that many problems.

Heath Fletcher (47:02)
I that exact same.

Marc Koska. (47:03)
But there are a lot of people who want to invent just for the sake of inventing or be a social entrepreneur, just for the sake of being a social entrepreneur. What it comes down to is you've got to have traveled, you've got to have seen it yourself. And then if you've got that core truth understanding of that problem, which took me at least 10 years to really understand what I was doing.

Heath Fletcher (47:14)
Yeah, exactly.

Marc Koska. (47:31)
If you can gain that core understanding, then you probably have the, you know, the fortitude to do it. It's tough because you're changing the status quo. Right. You know, you're basically saying no one should eat bacon. Let's all eat popcorn or whatever you're, you know,

Heath Fletcher (47:52)
Whatever your stand is.

Marc Koska. (47:54)
you're pushing a lot of mass by being any of the inventors, social entrepreneur or a do good or whatever you want to call it. But whatever you're doing, you are pushing a lot of weight and you've got to be prepared to know that it's worth pushing. Not just, I can make a load of money or I can do this or I can make a difference. It's a combination of everything. You know, we all need to make buck and we all need to, you know, feel good about ourselves and we all need to.

bring a team along with us. it's based on understanding and it's based on truth. It's not belief. Belief is, believe my better toaster will sell more than someone else's, but yeah, okay, good luck. That's not what hopefully we do here. What we do is we base stuff off data and we try and understand the data incredibly ⁓

deeply and to a fine point so that that data can then be sensibly presented to people who matter and they're normally the money makers. They're normally the commercialized end of the spectrum. You've got to have them on board because no one else is going to invest $100 million to build a factory. those are the people that you eventually got to make sense to and actually

They're in business to make money. They're not in business to save the world.

Heath Fletcher (49:24)
They want to return on that investment. Yeah.

Marc Koska. (49:27)
Exactly.

And human nature is a gauge change, know, change is bad for survival. So if you want to change something, you've got to be, it's got to be front loaded with a lot of advantages to the people that really matter to get it over the line. And that all takes understanding. That's what I meant earlier by, know, you've got to, you've got to get out there, you've got to travel, you've got to understand all viewpoints.

Heath Fletcher (49:51)
And you've probably infused this into the culture you've created around the people that you're working with. You talked about how great your team is. And so it sounds like you've infused all of these aspects and these philosophies into your team too.

Marc Koska. (50:07)
Well I

hope so, they're listening at the moment, so we'll see what they think when we go down the path.

Heath Fletcher (50:11)
We'll see what they say at the end.

Well, Marc, this has been truly awesome. really it's an inspiring conversation. I'm sure for lot of people, myself included, I really enjoyed your sharing and your openness to ⁓ explain your experience and your journey through your career. It's been an amazing accomplishment. So, yeah, you must be proud. So thank you very much for sharing this time with me today.

Marc Koska. (50:39)
All

right, well, I appreciate it and it was a pleasure talking to you.

Heath Fletcher (50:46)
Okay, well I learned a new phrase today, biomimicry. I just checked that out. Super fascinating. I'm going to check that out a bit more. A takeaways from Marc around social entrepreneurship is that it requires a pushing against the status quo. understanding the core truth of a problem takes time and traveling and seeing problems firsthand is crucial for entrepreneurs. Having belief in a product must be backed by data and understanding all viewpoints.

points is essential for success. what a great conversation today. If you want to learn more about Marc, you can find him on LinkedIn. That's Marc Koska. And you can check out appiJECT at APIJECT.com. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Healthy Enterprise. And I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. ⁓ Please be safe and be healthy and have a great day.