Video Transcription
Frederik Ceyssens 00:00
Fred, good morning everyone. I'm Fred and CEO of ReVision Implants, one of the only companies in the world that's basically daring enough to try to tackle this blindness. Blindness is a hugely underestimated medical condition. About 18 million people in the world are blind and, of course, totally excluded from most aspects of social and economic life. Also, if you would just ask people the condition they would surely not want to get, it would be either cancer or blindness. So we are in the right session here now. Of course, for a long time, people have been wondering, are visual prostheses feasible? It's something you have already seen in science fiction for quite a while. Somebody gets blind, gets some kind of implant, gets a visor, and can regain useful vision. There is a scientific basis for this. We all know it. If you stimulate electrically the nervous system, that leads to some kind of sensory functionality; you will regain some sensation. This is also shown for the visual system. You can do it in the eyes. You can do it in the optic nerve. You can also do it in the primary visual cortex of the brain. However, to upscale the useful levels, some more developments are needed. That's why current solutions are still lacking. So basically, people can only get gains, guide talk some more advanced things, like reading software, but there's no general way to restore the feeling of real vision. Nevertheless, early visual prostheses were already developed. One of the most famous companies is called Second Sight, but they were not a commercial breakthrough. Why? I'll just show you the next slide. The performance was really lacking. So companies so far have been building things which restore image quality, or equivalent to a few hundred pixels. If you just would downsample an image to a few hundred pixels, you would immediately see that this does not contain enough information to convey useful vision. On the other hand, if you would downsample an image to a few thousand pixels, it is also not that much in the time of megapixel images. Of course, you would recognize shapes. You would recognize that people are standing; you would be able to read with some magnification, even regular size letters. So this is what you should aim at. The market potential for something like this can be estimated in a few ways. Of course, you've asked blind people if they would want to go through a surgical procedure that includes brain surgery to regain vision. Not so much of a surprise, 90% said yes. The sales price would be about 100k in the US, and the EU population combined would be about 650k. That means, of course, a huge, totally addressable market. Of course, this is only a maximum. We can also compare with the cochlear implant markets. Cochlear implants do neurostimulation for restoring hearing to completely deaf individuals. They're a huge success at this point already because they can be based on more simple technology. It's a $2 billion per year market. Now it's still growing at 10%. The market leader is worth 10 billion, so this is basically what we want to become, in, say, a decade, the market leader for visual prostheses with a similar market size. Now, of course, the question is, how can you achieve this? Because people have failed in the past. First of all, we're not going to implant in the eye because the sensitive part of the eye is much, much smaller. We are going directly through the visual cortex of the brain, and it has been shown in people that if you stimulate in the primary visual cortex of the brain, and if you would be able to implant something like 10,000 electrodes, you would actually get 10,000 pixels. They made a little bit lower. I already showed you, a few thousand would be enough for the minimum viable product. Next to that, we will also create so-called virtual electrodes. So basically, instead of just one stimulation pattern, we send the current that goes out of every electrode in different directions. And we have proven, already using transgenic mice, that these can actually be used to excite different regions of the brain. So one electrode can basically create four or five virtual electrodes, thereby potentially increasing the resolution. Now, the type of electrodes is also quite crucial. You really want to have super flexible electrodes that move with the brain. Just because you implant so much, you want absolutely minimum scar tissue formation. And finally, you need to insert them. So then you need an insertion mechanism. You can't just insert them by themselves. This won't work because it's too flexible, and you will also insert them in the entire visual cortex, not just a superficial part, like some people aim at, because the superficial point is only like 5% of the visual cortex. The rest is buried a few centimeters below the skin and indeed, below the surface. And indeed, our implants are suitable for this. So in general, the system would look like this, a bit like every attempt on the visible see so far, with the difference of the brain, like a brain implant that is based on these ultra-high resolution, flexible electrodes. We are an early-stage startup, and I'm happy to announce that for all the crucial parts, we have working prototypes. We have also, I'll show them now. So we have an optimized wafer-scale fabrication process. We are really focused on lifetime engineering. So we have proven a lifetime of the electrodes under realistic conditions of over 10 years, which is the FDA minimum. We have also shown insulation lifetime over 10 years, and we have also proven that you can insert these electrodes at the required density in rhesus monkeys. Speaking of them, we've done preclinical tests on trained rhesus monkeys. So basically, they learn to point their eyes towards what they see. Then they see the screen. They get a brain implant. I'm happy to know that afterwards, the monkeys are not blind. They can still see, even though they have hundreds and hundreds of electrodes in a tiny part of the visual cortex. They can find food in a dark room and basically can repeat the same experiments when seeing no real dots on the screen, but virtual dots that they can only see by brain stimulation. Of course, we're doing this over and over again, so we have statistically significant evidence that this is actually working. Unlike our main competitor, the company called Neuralink, everybody asserts, we have actually proven stability. We have been doing this for several years. The electrodes nicely stay in place. We've also proven very nice biocompatibility. So the picture on the left is actually a current state-of-the-art Deep Brain Stimulation implant, which yields a scar of a few square millimeters. The lesions that our electrodes leave after several years can be typically 100 times smaller. And this is, of course, what you need because we also want to implant 100 times more electrodes. So basically, the safety profile would be similar to the existing state of the art. This is just an illustration. Well, it's actually based on real measurements of the calcium imaging experiments that you do. Based on statistical analysis of this, we can actually prove that you can excite different patterns coming from the current coming from one electrode. In terms of electronic development, we're not that far in the sense that all the experiments I've shown so far, we don't get external electronics, but we do have working prototypes of integrated circuits to steer everything, external electronics, also various power and data transfer, and the first version of the stimulation algorithm. We have raised about 2.4 million so far, mostly non-dilutive funding. At this point, we're looking for funding for the very first in-human test, which would be basically based on the monkey experiments with the external electronics that are already qualified. So the step towards the first in-human is the smallest it can be. And this is really what you need because this is the particularity of the sensory prosthesis. You really need feedback from a human being to be able to optimize the stimulation algorithm and to have a final proof of concept. At the very least, you would need 3 million. If you could raise more, we could also develop the whole system in parallel. So in terms of competition, there are some companies a bit closer to the market past human tests, but they have a very limited number of electrodes, so I don't think there will be a breakthrough. The main competitor is Neuralink, of course, but we have long-term data, and we actually have proven that our electrodes stay in the brain. We have a really nice team. There are seven people working in the company full-time. There are also people working through academic collaboration. In total, it's about 10 FTEs. We have collaboration with neurosurgeons, several relevant professors, and now also somebody who has already done first human experiences of limited size, like towards the race in humans. And he would then, of course, also execute our first in-human trial. Also, there are people from McKinsey and also serial entrepreneurs. There are lots of partners, of course, that have contributed, and they have allowed us to do this on basically a shoestring budget. And just to repeat my final call, we're raising about, at a minimum, 3 million, ideally, for which we can actually amplify thanks to the local government funding, with a factor of two, which would be more than enough for the first in-human to build the entire system and prepare it for further clinical testing. We would need another 12. Thank you for listening, and if there's any questions, I'll be around to answer them.
