Joe Christensen

Why we'd like to get started with Kitchen.

We've had a lot of encouragement. My supervisor and head of department think there could be real business opportunities here, with companies like Lundbeck, Novo Nordisk or elsewhere, and they have a lot of connections. So we'd like to get started as early as possible and see if there's something promising. No harm, no foul.

See every film Read the plan

Start with these two

Everything on this page plays right here, with sound when you press play.

One question, a minute or less

Made for phones and feeds. The first three are from this week, an experiment in how simple a film can get and still be right.

Lessons that stop and ask

Narrated lectures that pause and ask students to think before each answer.

The website for our lab

I've also been building our lab's website: the research, the methods, the films and the teaching in one place. Press the picture to look around right here.

How it works

A film that explains how a drug works usually takes an animation agency, months and a large budget, and it's hard to check or update afterwards.

I direct coding agents to build every scene in code from primary sources: protein structures, brain atlases and trial data. Researchers check the science. A film takes days, and a correction takes hours.

The same skill works on software. SwiftX is a series of open-source rewrites of standard bioinformatics tools. SwiftLD writes byte-identical output to vcftools and is 826-fold faster on an AVX-512 CPU.

What sits behind the words on screen, from the GLP-1 film

Half is gone in about 2 minutes.Knudsen & Lau, Front Endocrinol 2019: 1.5 minutes after IV dosing in humans, rounded for the film.
Half gone in about a week.FDA Wegovy label, section 12.3: half-life of about 1 week.
The real receptor, the real drug.Cryo-EM structure PDB 7KI0, Zhang et al., Cell Rep 2021. The scissors and paper boat are drawn for clarity.
Results vary. Side effects are common.The film says so on screen, and says how it acts in the brain is still being mapped.

Who has asked for them

This didn't start as a business idea. I began making these in my own time, and people started asking for their own.

  • The head of the research unit asked for clips to promote an international online psychopharmacology course.
  • An AU lecturer asked for two more drug films for a lecture and offered students' feedback as a pilot.
  • The lab's principal investigator uses the films in teaching.
  • A researcher in the unit offered support letters from pharmacology professors abroad, and help with language versions.

The plan so far

Working name Cinapse. We've applied for AU Launch, with a film focus. The feedback has been very positive and we don't have any upfront costs, so we'd like to get started as early as possible. Film is the most obvious opportunity, but I'm keeping my options open since the skill set is broad.

Who pays
Life-science companies, for mechanism-of-action and disease films for doctors, staff and patients. Teaching comes first as the proof: course organisers with budgets, such as summer schools and continuing education.
How it makes money
Studio first, product later: commissioned films and course packages, then update licences and a self-serve tool that turns slide decks into lessons.
The next six months
A short mechanism-of-action film and an interactive course module, tested before and after with students in two AU courses and reviewed by a medical-communication consultant and an external researcher. Interviews with 12 to 15 pharma medical-education staff and course organisers.
Year one
A first company pilot, two paid course packages and six to eight films.
Team
Me as founder. Anne M. Landau, Associate Professor at the Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit, is scientific advisor.

Who should I talk to?

I'm a master's student in molecular biology, doing my project at the Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit, and part of Kitchen through Founders' Entry. My expertise has been AI and molecular biology: research and databases, and recently a lot of films and website work. Would there be a good time for a chat? Or is there someone you'd recommend?

Email me

Joe Christensen, MSc student in molecular biology, Aarhus University. Project at the Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit.