Dimitrios Angelis, Sparta Biomedical - Biomimetic Knee Cartilage Implant | LSI USA '24

Dimitrios Angelis  0:04  
We're looking to attack knee osteoarthritis. It's a massive problem in the US. And it's something that has a large unmet need in the gap where the osteochondral defect exists. And I'll get more into that, where the Bullseye is where the defect exists. And so we're where the need exists. So when you have a full knee or partial knee replacement to the far right, you have nothing right before that. And people generally go from pain medicine, pain management, to some hyaluronic acid injections and braces. And there's nothing until you get to a knee replacement. And that's a big issue. People don't want a knee replacement, as Caitlyn Jenner, you know, said, representative of most people in the world. So what we have is something that goes after the defect within the knee. So this is our solution, it is called ormy. It has received breakthrough device designation from the FDA. It mimics native cartilage, which is very hard to do. It's not metal, it's not plastic. It's basically a bacterial cellulose combination with a hydrogel. And there's a lot of proprietary work that's gone into that we've licensed it from Duke University. And the way we'd like this to work is effectively much like a cavity in your mouth, you have to the far left, a to the far right, excuse me the cavity, it's painful, you need to get it fixed, you can't eat as well, you go to the dentist, it's resolved that day, you're back to eating. Similarly, to the far left, now, we would want to go in to the femoral, the femur bone, which I happen to just have prepare the osteochondral defect within the cartilage, which you see there in the second slide. And then at the bottom, it would be performed in under 10 minutes by an orthopedic surgeon, a press fit, which would go in like that, and it would meet the surrounding cartilage. And it would allow this soft, non abrasive interface with the articulating surface on the opposite side. The goal is to get you painless, and back to walking the next day, something that is completely unmet. And we think is going to change the world. Because nobody wants a knee replacement. knee replacements are hit or miss. And if this is caught soon enough, we can fix just the defect and not the entire knee. We've finished mechanical testing, we've greatly exceeded the FDA requirements by several 100% As you can see in the graph, while at the same time producing 28 times less wear than your native cartilage, which is a little irreverent to say we're as good and sometimes better than your native cartilage. But that's kind of where we are. And we're very lucky to be there. To the far right is 12 months cheap data which we had done at Colorado State University, a great team of surgeons there. And you see it was a great outcome after 12 months. So we're looking to be in a place where you have cartilage properties on day one on the on the y axis across immediate weight bearing and pain reduction on day one on the x axis. So we're in the upper right box, and there's nobody else there with us. That's a big deal. We you know, to get to create something that is human like that is native to your body, especially cartilage, it's a very hard thing to do. So it's taken us a while to get there. But we are, you know touching wood thinking we are in a good spot where we can mimic your native cartilage. We've got a great team of doctors led throughout the country. team doctor for the Chicago Bulls, LA Lakers. A colonel from the military, Stanford team doctor, other doctors that are physicians for the Olympic team and so on all behind this that are very excited to get this get this forward. We've got 17 issued patents patents that are some pending worldwide six families. We've also trademarked our logos, our manufacturing process, our our actual way to make the hydrogel and enter tracted with the bacterial cellulose is a trade secret. We think it's going to be a massive market that we're looking to get into. We'll consider hiring a direct sales force looking at Partners. Speaking to some of the big folks that are in this space, some of our accomplishments just in the past year, we're really in a good place. We were selected into med tech innovator accelerator program. Recently, we have been awarded outstanding excellence out of the cohort for medtech, innovator, med tech, innovator and amazingly respected body that we were lucky enough to be part of. We're going to do our first inhuman next month, we're going to start in Bogota, and Bara Kia in Colombia, we're probably going to add a site in the Dominican Republic. And we're going to get that data Garner that and look for our Series A, we've already raised and been oversubscribed and seed rounds. But we're looking to do a series a probably sometime next year. This is the team very narrow, focused group of folks. We're not top heavy, we don't burn a lot of capital. We're we outsource quite a bit, mostly consultants. Some board members, of course, who were MDS and accomplished innovators and scientists, fairly well known. And then we hired Ben Wiley, who's our CTO from Duke University, who was the inventor. We want this to be more than just a one and done, we want this to be more than just a solution for the knee, we want the the device which we've named ormy, which is ancient Greek for endurance, and strength, and the longevity to be something that works in every joint throughout the body. Wherever cartilage interacts with cartilage, we would like to be there. So we're starting with the hardest, which is the knee. And if we can do that, the rest of these will be easy. We'll go to the great toe, the elbow, the thumb, even the jaw has cartilage, which was which was news to me. So, again, platform technology, which we've already prototyped and all of these other indications, and we're looking to grow this and expand and provide a solution that will change the world help people get moving, reduce osteoarthritis, reduce pain, and we look forward to hearing from you. If there's if you'd like to stay with us. You can scan the QR code. We're at Sparta bio.com smarter. biomedical.com That's my information. And stay tuned. We look forward to talking to folks and doing a series day after are pivotal or I should say our first inhuman. Thank you