Abhishek Ramkumar, Abram Scientific - Precision Blood Coagulation Management | LSI USA '24

Abhishek Ramkumar  0:00  
Good morning everyone. I'm Abhishek    Ramkumar CEO and founder of Abram Scientific. Today I'd like to speak to you about blood clotting or coagulation, and a rapid point of care diagnostic platform called Quaker for precision coagulation management. Blood, and one of its most fascinating functions is that of damage control. And by that I mean forming blood clots in order to protect the body against harm because of cuts and injuries. It does this by maintaining a simple chemical balance between its different components such as plasma, red blood cells, and platelets, when this balance is perturbed, essentially all of these components act in concert turning blood from a fluid to a gel like state, which we call a clot. And once the job is done, blood ends up dissolving or lysing itself, essentially self regulating itself. This is why health care providers need access to rapid diagnostics that can monitor all aspects of this blood component activity and be able to understand how this balance was stepped in order to counteract against it and save lives. With this balance in mind, I'm going to highlight two scenarios that happen very frequently, where healthcare providers are making life and death decisions in the dark because of insufficient or delayed diagnostics. The first application here is that of ER visits, there are about 140 million ER visits that occur on an annual basis in the US alone, and there's only about a 10th of blood volume left to basically transfuse them if they need it. This shortage has been fueled by COVID and is we've never recovered from it. In order to grapple with the shortage healthcare providers instead of transfusing patients that whole blood ends up transfusing with platelets plasma as well as red blood cells to components if you may, and essentially able to save lives using one person's blood donation and save multiple lives. But the alarming statistic here is about 58% of all blood transfusions are estimated to be inappropriate or unnecessary. This is because there's a lack of rapid point of care diagnostics that can monitor all aspects of this balance and be able to have personalized transfusion, as well as therapies that can be delivered accordingly. The second scenario over here is that of anticoagulants. One of the most alarming statistics here is that about a third of all ER visits are actually anticoagulant or blood thinner related, and making them the number one cause for adverse events due to drugs. Historically, Warfarin was the mainstay in anticoagulation, where it was being prescribed for the most part where you could test for it as well as reverse it using inexpensive agents. But now over the past decade, there are two new classes of anticoagulants called direct oral anticoagulants or dou x, which are essentially taking up greater than 50% of the prescriptions. And the problem with these drugs is that you cannot test for it rapidly to tell the difference between one drug versus the other. And this causes a lot of headache because healthcare providers end up spending upwards of $100,000 to find the right reversal agents to give to the patient because they're operating in the dark. And what's worse is that about 20% of the patients that get the reversal agents which are very expensive, they don't actually need them. The obvious solution here is to actually have a rapid point of care test that can measure all aspects of blood clotting such as clotting time, clot, stiffness, platelet activity, and so on and so forth. The current systems called thrombo elastography or TD systems are are large, expensive, vibration sensitive and take about 40 to 60 minutes for a complete result, which is just way too long to make transfusion decisions. Our solution to this problem is the Quacker platform, which is implemented in a truly point of care format, with a low cost disposable card similar to that of a glucose test strip that interfaces with a wireless meter. One of the most important aspects of our particular technology is that it can deliver the complete results in five to 10 minutes compared to 40 to 60 minutes in the current systems. And it does this by actually monitoring the mechanical transformation of blood from a fluid to a gel, monitoring the viscoelastic curve and parameters coming out of our system to characterize the blood. And here's a sample of the measurement that comes out of our system where on the top of the slide, you see the viscoelastic curve and power meters generated in under 10 minutes compared to the current systems out there, which take about 60 minutes to generate the same parameters. And in our case, we can actually generate 10s of additional parameters beyond the ones that the current systems generate, in terms of our meter is designed to be truly portable, so that it's wireless battery operated and enhances ease of use Use and if you look at it, it kind of looks like a point of sale reader similar that you see in restaurants and clinics, because it's designed to be intuitive for us. The other aspect of our technology is that of the disposable card. And our disposable card essentially houses our innovative resonant beam technology, which allows for measuring the viscoelastic properties of blood as it transforms from a fluid to a clot. But the beauty of this technology is that it is implemented using the same materials and processes that are used to make glucose test strips, making it a truly scalable platform with low cost of goods. In terms of clinical data view, have done hundreds of tests using our platform to verify and validate that our system is clinically capable to perform the entire gamut of coagulation tests, which in this case is six plus tests. And in addition, we've also filed patent protection and secured 15 patents which are granted worldwide and about six patent applications and trademark applications currently in process. In terms of our market, we plan to target the $9 billion coagulation diagnostics market, which spans the entire gamut of coagulation tests. We plan to start with the T G market, which is about 3 billion in size worldwide, and then get into the anticoagulant market, which is in a sum total of close to 9 billion or sorry, 6 billion on worldwide. In terms of our go to market strategy, we plan to target the TG market, which is currently plagued by a CapEx model where you have a $50,000 instrument that is sold to hospital which has expensive disposables at about $100 A piece. The issue that this creates is that the hospitals don't have any margin to make any money from the purchase reimbursement, which is about $86, that's less than the disposable price. We plan to disrupt this market using our cracker system with the meter price below the cap x limit at $5,000 and have the disposables priced below the reimbursement amount. So in which way the hospitals get access to a rapid, portable high accuracy system, but can also turn a profit per test using the reimbursement dollars. Further, we envision a world where we have multiple meters, not just one like the current system, but multiple meters in every hospital, and have them be able to test more and more of using our system. And when you have a razor razor blade model such as ours, with our disposables, which are have low cost of goods, we can see margins close to 70 to 80%, essentially allowing for expanded use of it and increasing the market and growing it exponentially. In terms of our competition aprons Quacker system outperforms the competition's in a variety of respects ranging from the platform capability to five to 10 minutes for the result time, as well as the low cost of goods. from a timeline perspective, we've been very efficient. From a capital point of view, we've raised $7.5 million, 5 million of it comes from support from NSF and DOD grants, which we're very grateful for. And we've also raised a two and a half million dollar seed round that we closed last year. And with this, we've taken the technology from a from scratch to all the way to a production scale prototype that we're applying to start clinical studies and in the next quarter. In addition, we've also gotten clearance from the FDA to basically proceed with the 510 K strategy, and we plan to submit that and expect clearance towards the end of next year. We are currently raising a $10 million Series A round, and we are engaged with investors strategics as well as government contracts. And the idea here is that it would support us to finish the clinical studies, get our regulatory clearances, scale our manufacturing for our meters and our disposables, and be able to initiate sales through a strategic with multiple products in our portfolio. We estimate that our financial projections estimate about sales about greater than two and 50 million in five years within which timeframe we expect to become profitable. In terms of going back one slide in terms of the stars that you see over here their milestones triggering value inflection points, I'll give you a little bit more color in this particular space where you have m&a is listed over here over the past 10 plus years. where really the upshot here is that large medical device manufacturers such as Abbott, end up spending upwards of $200 million in acquiring companies that are one trick pony is where you have a single test that the technology can perform given coworkers platform capability to perform the entire set of coagulation tests, while ensuring that we have 70 to 80% margins. We believe Abram can create value that's multiple times higher than the comps in the market.

I'll take a quick minute to talk about our team. Very proud of our team. I've had the privilege to work alongside these amazing individuals who have decades have experience in diagnostics, specifically in point of care diagnostics. And one in particular, I'd like to highlight as Max McInerney, who is our heading our product development who has been in the coagulation diagnostics business for about 40 years. And they lovingly call her the mother of Quagga check and Roche, because she was one of the people who are engaged in developing that technology all the way to creating $3 billion annually for Roche. Richard wired as well as our VP of engineering has scaled up diagnostic district manufacturing at j&j and has been able to move forward with that. We're also privileged to be working alongside key opinion leaders and collaborators at our clinical hospital sites that are working to ensure that we design and test our system to meet the market needs. That's us here at Abram Scientific. If you have any questions or would like to discuss further, I'd be happy to engage with you off stage. Thank you