Interview: Exploring Gamified Flavour Frontiers with Kyle Palmer the Inventor of TaStation
In Issue 6 of Lab Horizons digital edition we caught up with the co-founder of Opertech Bio the inventor of TaStation which has made waves for incorporating gamification into their groundbreaking taste testing system.
Let’s start at the beginning—how did you first get into testing tasty things?
In the earlier part of my career, I worked in the field of behavioural pharmacology, in which experimental approaches for studying psychoactive drugs have been well developed. In the drug discrimination design, animals are trained using operant conditioning to distinguish between stimuli produced by psychoactive drugs acting on different receptor systems. The animal’s ability to discriminate between different drugs is demonstrated by pressing levers associated through operant conditioning with specific psychoactive drugs, which serve as “training stimulus cues.” For example, an animal trained to respond on an “amphetamine-associated lever” will press that lever if it is administered any drug with similar stimulus properties, such as methylphenidate, whereas unrelated drugs will result in presses of a different lever.
The same behavioural principles underlying those drug discrimination experiments could be applied to taste, which can also be regarded as receptor-mediated behaviour. By combining technology from pharmaceutical high-throughput screening with operant conditioning, I invented an apparatus—called the microtiter operant gustometer, or MOG—that trained rats through operant conditioning to lick solutions distributed in a typical pharmaceutical 96-well plate, then press a lever to indicate the taste of the sample. The lever press also operated a dispenser that delivered a food pellet reward for the rat’s performance on each trial. The rats could tell us, by virtue of their lever presses, what each of the 96 samples tasted like in under 45 minutes. We then used the MOG data to prioritise which among the hundreds of possible screening hits would be most likely to succeed in human taste tests.
How did you come to meet your co-founder, Scott Horvitz?
Scott and I met in 2004 at Linguagen, later called Redpoint Bio, a small biotech company founded on the discoveries of Robert Margolskee (and others around the same time), specifically the genes that encoded tastant receptors and their signalling proteins. The goal of Redpoint Bio was to apply the pharmaceutical industry drug discovery process to the identification of novel compounds that controlled tastant signalling.
Scott was the CFO, and I became director of R&D. In that role, I was in charge of high-throughput screening and pharmacology. Just as the pharmaceutical industry identifies drug targets, Redpoint Bio tested large libraries of compounds for their capacity to stimulate cells engineered to express taste signalling proteins. Tens of thousands of compounds were screened in a short period with this approach, and many potentially taste-active compounds were quickly identified. The next step was to gather the “hits” from the high-throughput screen—those compounds that activated the artificial taste cells—and scale them up to amounts ultimately required for human taste tests. However, scaling up, along with toxicity testing before human exposure, is a costly process. Missing from our operation was a strategy and experimental method for efficiently prioritising those with the greatest chances for success in human tests among the hundreds of screening hits.
How did you come to found Opertech Bio?
As is common with small biotech companies, Redpoint Bio eventually ran its course. At the time of its closing, Scott and I found investors to help us acquire the MOG from Redpoint Bio and use it to establish the technology platform for a new company, Opertech Bio. Scott, our CEO, manages all the financial and business operations, and I am the CSO, handling the science and technological development.
Our business at Opertech began in 2011 with companies that had early-stage flavour-modifying compounds and wanted the rats to test them before scaling up to human tests, similar to our experience using the MOG at Redpoint Bio. It is important to emphasise that the underlying principles and methodology of the MOG technology are universal to all species. We recognised that if we could translate the MOG to human taste testing, we could create a whole new business model. With a little more investment in Opertech, we developed the TāStation, the first rapid-throughput taste testing system for human subjects. Now, the TāStation is the basis for all our business.
We’ve covered the TāStation before in Lab Horizons, but can you tell us a little more about it?
The TāStation is based on a similar technological and behavioural approach used for the MOG, but the samples are randomly drawn from the 96-well plate by an electronic pipette. The sample volume for most applications is only 0.2 ml, just sufficient to deliver the taste stimulus without desensitising the tongue. The subject then uses the pipette to apply the sample to their tongue and records their response on a touch-sensitive laptop display. The complete test of 96 samples takes about 30 minutes.
We are now in our third iteration of the TāStation technology. TāStation 3.0 is 20% faster than our earlier version, has enhanced software capabilities to expand options for experimental design, can accommodate a larger pipette for sample volumes up to 1.5 ml, and has a pump-driven wash cycle for cleansing the pipette tip between each trial. We’ve also added an option for a built-in plate warmer to keep samples above room temperature throughout a test session.
What inspired the decision to include gamification elements in TāStation?
You can read Kyle’s answer to this question and the rest of his interview in Lab Horizons Issue 6. Read it for free now.
