Aspect BioSystems | Tamer Mohamed, CEO

(Transcription)

Tamer Mohammed  0:04  

Hello everyone, my name is Tamar Mohammed, CEO of Aspect Biosystems. Our company is based in Vancouver, Canada, and we're focused on applying our 3d printing technology to create bio printed cell based therapeutics. So our goal at aspect is to combine our platform printing technology that leverages micro fluidics with fit for purpose, biomaterials and therapeutic cells to create living implantable tissue devices. So these are devices that replace organ functions that have been lost due to disease. Our goal isn't necessarily to create entire organs that look exactly like organs but create tissue therapeutic devices that replace functions inside of the body. So just as an overview to the company aspect is about 75 people. Right now, we're a venture backed company, we've been quite fortunate to partner with outstanding investors to date we've brought about $50 million of capital we going towards the larger growth round later this year. To accelerate our growth into clinical evaluation of our tissues. Our pipeline is largely focused on metabolic indications focused on pancreatic tissue, and liver tissue, or pancreatic tissue program that will highlight later on, is focused on type one diabetes. And our liver tissue program is targeting a host of acquired and genetic liver disorders. We've been also quite fortunate to partner with some of the biggest names in our industry around different applications of our technology, working with groups like Glasgow, SmithKline, Merck, JSR, and others on different applications ranging from muscular skeletal indications, as well as others in immuno oncology. But today, I'll focus mostly on our LEAD program or pancreatic tissue for type one diabetes that is currently under FDA interaction and large animal studies. But first, just to give you a quick overview over the platform technology that we developed, starting at UBC and then spun out into aspects in 2017. So we're the first and only company to leverage micro fluidics for 3d printing. And this allows us to bring in multiple different materials and cells, process those in real time and print these really complex multi material structures that are surgically implanted into the body and are functional. And the goal is to replace or restore these functions inside of the body. So to give you a demonstration of this, you could see this video where we're able to bring in multiple different cell loaded biomaterials, we've labeled them different colors. And these liquid based biomaterials are quickly fused into a solid through a crosslinking process. So you can see a crosslinker here that is brought in, that will actually surrounds our cell loaded biomaterial and turns it in the liquid from a liquid into a solid instantly. And so we take that cell loaded fiber and then pattern it in 3d, according to our software to create these rationally designed tissue structures that are made up of the cells. And so our LEAD program, AB 739, is focused on pancreatic tissue for type one diabetes. Again, this is a program that will you're interacting with, with the agency. And we're really encouraged by the data that we're seeing in animals. And our goal is to advance that two, first in human trials for what we think would be a category defining therapeutic with their bio printed cell therapies. I mentioned liver is another big area of focus for us. And we're focused on applying that liver tissue for a host of acquired and genetic diseases. And we also have several programs at the discovery stage. So here you can see close up views of our bio printed tissues. Remember that each of these tissues are made up of individual fiber strands that we pattern in 3d. And so on the left hand side, you can see a close up of one of these individual fiber strands in the core region are islet cells that sense glucose and release insulin and surrounding that core cellular material, we have an immune protective barrier that protects those cells from the immune system. And if we go to the image, the next image to the right of that, we can see that these tissues are implanted into the into the peritoneal cavity. Initially in mice were able to retrieve these tissues. And you could see that most of the cells are alive as indicated by the green staining that you could see here. And then on the last image on the right, you could see that these tissues are highly functional through the DISA zone staining that indicates that these tissues are producing insulin. And then to demonstrate that these tissues are truly curing diabetes. Initially in mice, we use the gold standard streptozotocin model where we injected these mice with streptozotocin. You could see a sharp rise in blood glucose levels because the animal isn't able to normalize blood glucose anymore. And then several days later, we implant our bio printed pancreatic tissues, and we're able to bring the blood glucose down to normal levels for the duration of the study which was about 90 days. If You go to the graph on the right of that, you can see that we have positive c peptide levels a biomarker of insulin demonstrating that our tissues are indeed functional. And then lastly, if you look at the graph on the right, we looked at the kinetics of response. Ultimately, this tissue is a sensor that senses glucose in the environment and releases insulin, using those cells in our tissues. And so we wanted to demonstrate that we're doing this fast enough to demonstrate efficacy. And so we took diabetic animals, we put our Bioprinted tissues surgically implanted those into those animals. And then we provided the animal with a high glucose concentration and looked at the response over 180 minute period. And we compare the response to healthy animals. And you could see that we have extremely fast response times within 15 to 30 minutes, we can bring these diabetic animals to a normal glycemic level, which is very encouraging for us to see. And our focus is how do we scale this to larger species and ultimately, humans. And so that's really where a platform technology shines, we're able to change the structure of the tissue in software, and then transform that into a real living tissue with high fidelity. So you could see that example here, with a really nice fiber network with really good islet cell distribution within that network, we could see nearly all of the cells are alive, looking at the live dead assay. And you could also see that as we doubled the dosing of cells. In our tissues, we're able to also double the, the function as measured by C peptide or or a biomarker for insulin. So we have multiple levers for us to essentially pull on as we start to scale into into larger species and eventually humans. And so you can see these larger tissues being implanted here in rats, a much larger rodent compared to mice. So we implant that into the omentum. We think that this eventually can be done through a minimally invasive approach. in under an hour, we're working with Dr. James Shapiro, the number one surgeon and pioneer in the diabetes space, the pioneer the Edmonton protocol, to optimize these procedures and, and you can see this data shows that we're able to normalize blood glucose levels in the rats upon implantation of these Bioprinted tissues for right now, six months actually, and counting, this is an ongoing study. And so, taking a step back again, as a reminder, really, what we're doing is we're marrying therapeutic cells, really the engine behind our Bioprinted tissues, with materials that have specific purposes like immune protection, durability, vascularization, with our printing technology to actually create these products that we implant into the body, you can see an example of one of these tissues being handled by one of our in vivo scientists. So you can see that it's handleable. And you could actually manipulate it and ultimately surgically implanted into animals. And then you could see a zoom in of each of these individual strands showing that these tissues are indeed highly functional and implanted into animals. The other big area that we're focused on is liver, liver is an entirely different beast, a much larger tissue mass that requires many, many more cells, probably five to seven times the number of cells. And so the first thing that we wanted to do to do is to show that we had a unique ability to pack a ton of cells in our tissues. And so we showed that we could go from 25 million cells per milliliter to 100 million cells per milliliter, which is extremely dense, extremely dense cell mass. And what we see is, as we call Drupal, the cell density, we actually get a order of magnitude increase in tissue function, which is very encouraging for us to see. And when you look at on the right hand side, as we move from single cells that we print to these 3d spheroids, of hepatocytes that we print, were able to increase the viability so you see almost no red or dead cells, when we move from single cells to spheroids. So that's giving us a lot of reasons to be encouraged that we truly have a unique ability to pack a ton of the cells that we think will be necessary to get an efficacious effect. And so this is early proof of concept showing how these liver tissues are surviving in animals that were able to produce albumin. And when we compare that to levels that have been reported previously, we get an increase and stabilization. Whereas others get a sort of decrease over a seven day period, as you can see on the on the bottom left. And so we think that the environment that we're providing these cells is one that keeps them happy, functional and efficacious. And so we're testing this tissue in different disease models right now. And just last point to mention, we have a broad platform. And so we we recognize we can do everything. And so we'd like to partner as well. And so these are examples of some of the partnerships that we have around the world in different areas, from kidney to vascular to cardiac applications. And then finally, just want to give our team a shout out. It's easy for me to kind of share this exciting work, but they're behind all of the great progress that we're making. So that appreciate the the time listening to our story and We are happy to connect offline to explore what can be done together Thank you very much