Brian Hess, RevBio - Studio Interview | LSI USA '24

Brian Hess  0:00  
My name is Brian. Hess. I'm the CEO and founder of Rev bio. We're developing a regenerative biomaterial, a super glue for bones. I've been working at a large company, Stryker, for a handful of years as an engineer, and I've been working with trauma surgeons looking at ways to help treat their patient. And they all said, If we only had a bungalow, and so that was really inspirational. And I had some great mentors, and we got opportunities to get funding and work on a dedicated program to come up with this underwater adhesive, regenerative biomaterial. And we did. We got inspired by mother nature. We actually looked at like how underwater sea creatures secreted their own bone glue. Think of mussels and oysters and how they attach themselves underwater to boat hulls. We thought that was a great inspiration, analogous to maybe what we want to do. We want to have a glue that is able to be deployed underwater, form robust bonds and then heal over time. So rather than take a complicated approach with proteins, we said there's got to be like a reverse engineer where we can find simple materials. So we found synthetic ways to manufacture our materials comprising calcium, which is our bone. So we were inspired by mother nature, but we actually found synthetic approaches because we knew for this to be commercially viable, we need to be able to produce it at scale and at cost, to compete with existing solutions, as well as to kind of address some of the healthcare needs of overall cost reduction in the place. So buyer. Bio inspired approach is the pathway that we took, and here we are today with a really exciting biomaterial that we think is going to transform bone repair. It's an adhesive. It has load bearing strength, but it's also regenerative. But specifically, we have indications that we've targeted in the dental region, Dental Implant stabilization, cranial cranial flap fixation, broken bones in your arms and legs, but also your spine. These are all indications that have huge opportunities to innovate the current standard of care. Like I said, right now, a big problem across the board is getting good fixation between implants to bone or bone to bone. Imagine a surgeon having a surgical adhesive and how that would revolutionize how they actually treat their patients, how they approach their surgical procedures. This is a material that will be revolutionary for them. In the US alone, there's over 15 million surgical procedures per year to treat bone related defects or injuries. In dental there's over four or 5 million dental implants price per year. In cranial flap fixation, we're talking about a half million procedures where brain surgeries are conducted and they have to replace the bone flap at the end of these procedures. In trauma, you're looking at 78 million bone fractures per year. So if you add it all up, it's actually a very large market size, addressable with our bone adhesive. We're in the clinical stage. We're treating patients. We're studying our biomaterial. We're answering key questions that the regulatory authorities want to know about. But also we want to generate clinical evidence for the surgeons that are going to use our product in the future, maybe later this year, and then into next year, we'll expand into clinical indications, looking at clinical studies for treating broken bones in the arms, legs, as well as the spine. Now that we have FDA approval to start clinical studies for dental implant stabilization and cranial flap fixation, now we're enrolling patients for dental implants. We've been able to use our material in a handful of patients and see great success, and so now we're going to track those patients and enroll more patients in 2024 for cranial flap fixation. We're starting to recruit now, and by the end of the year, we hope to have full enrollment in our study and see early results. That'll be a value inflection point for our company. Once we're done with our clinical studies, a big goal for us is to commercialize, obviously. So we're looking at working with surgeons and potential distribution partners incumbents in the field. These are the large companies that are already selling many great products to surgeons, and this would be a product that would maybe fit into the bag of a sales rep. And so we are looking at forming relationships to develop the sales channel for when we get the regulatory approval. We're looking to launch our products in roughly three to four to five years, as each one of the indications that we developing is FDA approved, not only in the US, but also overseas as such, in Europe, we're absolutely looking to raise our first institutional round of investment. To date, we've raised over 25 million in equity funding, compounded with 20 million in non dilutive grants, we won nearly seven and a half million dollars last year alone in a. Full of different indications that allowed us to fuel all of the projects that we have been working on and keep up great progress, but we need to now fuel our clinical studies, and so we're targeting to raise $15 million from institutional funds that's a key goal for us this year, is to try to identify the right investors for us and obviously work with them to show a compelling reason why they should invest in rev bio. That's a key goal for us. Later this year, I.