Danguole Altman, Cx Precision Medicine - Blood Test for Neurodegenerative Diseases | LSI USA '25

Danguole Altman  0:03  
Hi, I'm Danguole Altman, CEO of Cx Precision Medicine. So by way of background, I'm a Harvard undergrad. Yale MBA, started my career in McKinsey, and then became head of managed care contracting at Kelsey Siebel clinic. So the first half of my the first two CEO positions I've had have been in payer, provider space, and now the last two have been in life sciences, and I'm excited to tell you about what we're doing. So Cx Precision Medicine is using AI advanced machine learning to really transform how patients with neurodegenerative diseases are diagnosed. All of our technology is based on the work of Dr Sid O'Brien. Sid is the most funded researcher in blood based biomarkers and Alzheimer's and predictive algorithms in the United States. It's been $250 million of funding into the university, and we have an exclusive license to his work. So here's the problem. As we all know, we have an aging population, and both Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases are all linked to aging. Most patients start to seek care of their primary care physician, but a lot of early symptoms really look like a lot of other things that are not dementia, and so they end up getting referred to specialists that run a lot of very expensive tests. There's no one test for Alzheimer's or for Parkinson's, but there aren't enough of those specialists, and it's great that we finally, after many years, have some new drugs for Alzheimer's, but that's also fueling a lot of patients going to those primary care physicians saying, Am I a candidate for these drugs? They work best early, and we have some symptoms. So our answer is an easy to use blood test at the primary care level that can rule out Alzheimer's and related dementias in patients that have possible early symptoms and are really unlikely to have that disease. And what that does is allow patients that need to be referred to be referred, all of those things that are on the blue here, all have early memory loss symptoms, but all of those can be diagnosed and treated at the primary care level. Really, it's only Alzheimer's that needs to be referred up at that at a higher level. So as I mentioned, we have a blood test. We're measuring a huge range of 12 different proteins using a multiplex immunoassay, and then we've got that two 50 million of data has built a very large database, and we've trained algorithms to be able to distinguish between people who have disease and don't have disease. The test gives a binary read out. We are actually the first and only blood test that can rule out Alzheimer's and related dementias at the primary care level. If you're ruled out, it tells the primary care doctor figure out what else is going on and what else is causing these symptoms. If you're ruled in, that's the patient that would benefit from the further work up, both for cognitive testing and also for brain pathology. There are a lot of different companies that are out there with different tests. We are the only ones that fit the existing work flow, fit the reimbursement system, can rule out ADR D and combine both brain pathology and cognitive function. We there's been a lot of work on Alzheimer's blood test, and it's been in the news quite a bit over the past year, and those can be great for finding the right people for the right drugs, but we don't believe that those are appropriate at the primary care level, and the reason is that 25% of patients with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease have no amyloid pathology, and that's especially true for patients that are in diverse populations. The converse is true. 33% of patients, of people that are cognitively normal, that are age 70 and up, have amyloid pathology, and they don't have Alzheimer's disease and will never have Alzheimer's disease, so that would create a lot of false positives. There have been a lot of tools that have been developed to help primary care physicians be able to do better cognitive assessments, but over half of all primary care physicians do no cognitive testing, and the people that do do cognitive testing don't have a lot of confidence in the results of those tests. There's a lot of obstacles at the primary care level. Time is very limited. It's a production shop. There's no resources in terms of exam rooms and extra people, and also the business model for. The Digital test, rely on the physician to bill for the service and then pay the digital company out of theirs. And, you know, it's a low margin business. This is a survey that was done of primary care physicians that was presented last year at the Alzheimer's Association meeting. Hardly any primary care doctors use blood based biomarkers or Alzheimer's now, but 100% of the family practitioners, nurse and virtually all of the gerontologists, has said they do plan to use blood based markers for diagnosing and treating Alzheimer's. We've done a lot of work on the savings for payers, and if you can treat this at the primary care level and not have to refer up the pipeline. You save a lot of money from payers, from really the evaluation, the advanced imaging, the cognitive testing that's down the line. This is not even including the savings from very expensive drugs and the risk that patients who don't need those drugs might get put on those drugs. I think there's really an opportunity here to become a very, very large company. If you take one, we've done the total addressable market, and it's, you know, at least $8 billion in the US. If you look at it another way, if only 1% of patients that are 65 and up, take this test. That's about a half a billion dollars a year of revenue. We can do this because it's built on a very scalable platform. It attractive gross margins at scale. And there's also the opportunity to form partnerships with other companies that are looking at the primary care space that would benefit from a relationship. I've talked mostly about neuro first memory. We have neuro first Parkinson's, which is the next test that's sitting up. We also have some subtype tests and a Lewy Body Dementia test. We've licensed this technology and exclusive basis from the University of North Texas Health Science Center. And the patents cover the composition of these different biomarkers that we're using together, we also have an exclusive license to the to the algorithms that are underlying that the company's raised $7.9 million since 2020 I've built a small and super experienced team, but we've also supplemented that with partnerships with a bunch of firms with really deep domain expertise, and also have been active in various industry groups that are focusing on Alzheimer's. We made a lot of progress in 2024 since I presented here last year, the analytical validations in our contracted large Clea lab are virtually complete. We do have the blood samples ready to run for the clinical validation, and so that will be complete early this year, we spent a lot of time on coding and also on the payer budget impact model to be able to make the case to payers, and have started those conversations, and we've also had a lot of discussions with physicians, with a survey ongoing to really clarify the intended use. Our plan is to launch with a select group of physicians this year with pilots, just so that we make sure everything is working properly and all the processes are in place, and then looking at a much larger launch next year that will allow us to be able to build a case for reimbursement and also work with the FDA in complying, in parallel to the IBD regulations. Parkinson's is really ready and just waiting for funding to advance that as well. So we currently have a small $4 million raise that is open to support the pilots. I've got about a million of that remaining, and so that would help fund the pilots for Neuro first memory, and really do some of those support activities for reimbursement and coverage and all that. And then also get Parkinson's going. I'm also interested in meeting folks that are interested in that next level, because next year will be there a large raise in us going alone. We'll partner with someone else to be able to get broader distribution, or we'll license. So glad to have any of those discussions. Thank you very much.