Video Transcription
Bjorn Sprengers 00:02
Good afternoon. Thanks for being here. My name is Bjorn. I'm CEO of Plasmacure. I'm going to talk to you about wound care. Every 30 seconds in the Western world,
Bjorn Sprengers 00:12
someone loses a limb because of a wound that got infected. Every year, that infection ultimately leads to an amputation. 10 to 20% or 10 to 15% of the elderly suffer from chronic wounds. A chronic wound, the definition is a bit inconsistent, but typically, it is a wound that starts and doesn't heal for a prolonged period of time. So for example, for an elderly person who is, let's say, of age and has diabetes, something that may start as a small wound is treated through the normal standard of care. Once or twice a week, that person visits a clinic, or is visited, but the wound just doesn't heal, becomes larger, and has a huge impact on that person's life. We've heard in many rooms today that med tech needs to be about what matters, what influences people's lives. This is what med tech is about. It's not only a huge impact on people's lives, it's also terribly expensive. Two to 4% of healthcare costs go to wounds, and a large proportion of that goes to chronic wounds. This makes up a global market of about 70 billion a year. Now, if you look at the standard of care, the existing practices in wound care have not changed in the last decades. We're talking about super traditional hard debridements, dressings, with big companies making lots of money and having vested interests in this space. But actually, if you look at the clinical data associated with these technologies or TV solutions, there's hardly any compelling clinical evidence. So two to 4% of healthcare costs come with hardly any clinical underpinning. Our company, Plasmacure, brings technology to this space called plasma technology. I'll talk about it in a minute. But we intend to, let's say, bring innovation in a way that works with how the industry currently operates, with how people currently work, rather than revolutionizing every dimension of it. Our solution is proven safe and effective. This is a result of a recently completed RCT that shows that in the Netherlands, the gold standard of care, which is sharp debridement plus dressing twice a week, closes 25% of chronic wounds. Cold Plasma Technology, or our Plasmacure solution, closes 62% of wounds. That's a huge impact, a huge impact on that person's life, but also on the system. If you cut off the long tail of care, not having to go to that patient twice a week, or the patient not having to visit the clinic twice a week, you can save between 40 and 50% of that huge amount of cost in the healthcare system associated with wounds. Perhaps even more importantly, you can save labor associated with it; you can make people more productive, and thereby get rid of some of the long waiting lists that I think you can find across the world in every healthcare system, with more than 50% of productivity improvement from using Plasmacure or using the plasma solution. So what is plasma? Not to be confused with blood plasma. Plasma is also sometimes referred to as a fourth state of matter, and you create it by sending a lot of energy into gas, which ionizes the gas, and it's a perfectly familiar concept, both in the medical space as well as in nature. Lightning is a plasma. The sun, obviously, is a hot plasma. What happens if you send energy into a gas is that the gas basically breaks apart into particles, or what we call reactive species, and if you do that with atmospheric air, you create reactive species that have a proven conducive effect on wound cleaning and wound healing. To go a little bit more in detail, on the left, you see the cleaning bit: cold plasma kills bacteria instantly. You send plasma into a bacteria colony, and it's instantly dead. More than that, it also breaks the biofilm. Proven effects in medical science, it also stimulates the healing process by driving cell proliferation, but also improving microcirculation. And every dermatologist or any wound specialist will know that these are the underlying principles of wound healing. Now, how does it work? Schematically, we put a patch on the wound. We drive a high current, a high voltage to the wound, 6000 volts. It sounds very high, but it’s very low amps, so not super dangerous, not dangerous at all. In fact, under the patch, there are cavities; let's say we ionize the air in the cavities of the patch, we create small lightnings, and we create those reactive species which do their job, not only during the treatment, which is a two-minute treatment, but also, let's say, hours after the treatment. The solution consists of two components. First, you need a unit, a pulsar unit, we call it, to create the plasma. That's the thing on top that drives the current to the wound through a wire, basically. Then you have something on the wound which is closed over the wound, so you capture the plasma, and that's called the Cold Plasma pad. That's basically the consumable in this model. Every treatment with cold plasma pads costs around 125 euros, and you require about 10 to 15 treatments to close a wound. You may recall from the chart I was showing you earlier. We have a strong patent position filed and granted both in the US and in Europe. Now, there are other companies that offer cold plasma, and that's good because it's an up-and-coming technology, and it would be quite scary if we were the only ones advocating this new technology. What is unique about Plasmacure is the fact that we are proven safe and effective with a technology that can be used both in the clinic and at home. That's because quite early on, there were some really smart design choices made by the team. Plasmacure therapy is portable. You just carry it on your back in a backpack. It's very simple to use. There are lots of Philips people in the team, so these are typical Philips design principles: one button, and all the intelligence is hidden in the technology, in the electronics of the solution. But also, the treatment itself is a two-minute treatment only, so it can easily be integrated into the regular care, the standard care, and also the actual physical movements, the practices of applying bio treatments are very consistent with the way a nurse would treat a wound nowadays. So that's why I was mentioning earlier that we will revolutionize wound care with technology, but apply it in a way that is very intuitive to the players in the system. We are from the Netherlands. You can tell by my accent, maybe this is our home market, and we're starting to make commercial traction. That means that we have care institutions that say we want to work with you, but also insurers that say you guys are going to save us a lot of costs. Let's go and partner. More importantly, the government has also given us a grant, and that grant will take us to a reimbursement state, the fastest path in the Netherlands. So that's a great vote of confidence. We're also focused on China. We have a strong partner, the strongest wound care partner in the Chinese market, that believes in our technology and is allocating 3 million euros to take our technology to reimbursement through a so-called Hainan route. We believe we can be reimbursed in China in 2026, and we have some operations pilots going on in other selected markets, like South Africa, the Middle East, and we're getting interest from other markets as well. We're currently raising about 4 million euros. About a million of that is covered by existing shareholders. That money is basically going to the commercial acceleration of the business, a little bit still in future developments, but I would say the technology is mature. We've invested over the years quite substantially behind technology, behind clinical evidence I was showing you earlier. There's more where that came from, and we believe we're ready to, in fact, scale commercially, and we're looking for partners that want to join us on the journey. We've said the US is a very interesting market as well, obviously a large market, but one that we believe the regulatory path will be able to navigate. What we consider to be more complicated is the go-to-market strategy, how we're going to make money, so we're also looking for the right partners to help us navigate that. That's it, and this is a letter from our lawyer. Thank you.
