Video Transcription
Jordi Martorell 00:02
The aortic dissection is a dramatic disease in which the aortic wall tears. As you can see, it happens now in the aortic wall, separating into two different channels called the true and false lumen. This is obviously quite a dangerous disease, with its incidence rising globally. Around the globe, right now, we estimate that we can address more than 150,000 cases per year. This is obviously a very high mortality disease, with up to 90% depending on where this dissection happens. It's distributed between type A, that's the ascending aorta, and type B, the descending aorta. In Europe, age, smoking, hypertension, and small genetic diseases are the key risk factors for that. Despite the severity, current treatments represent severe limitations, and we believe they must be replaced. We have open repair, which is a definitive approach, and we basically crack open the chest. We reduce the temperature to 22 degrees, and we replace the aorta. This is obviously extremely invasive, carries a 30% mortality rate, and the recovery is very, very slow. We have endovascular repair since the 1990s to cover that. But the reality is that this treatment, which is minimally invasive, actually returns blood flow, but because of the complex geometry of the stents, it can only be used to treat the descending aorta and has a number of reintervention rates because of the mechanical and biological mismatch with the tissue. Finally, there's medical therapy, which is doing nothing, really, just giving pressure drugs to reduce pressure, and these we call "wait and see" people. Spoiler alert: they die. Surprisingly, against every other cardiovascular trend, 60% remains open repair today, so we have a huge gap that is uncovered. Not only that, 27% is medical therapy, so doing nothing. The current endovascular repair market is just 13%, and that's what the big companies are fighting for. It's obviously a small part of the market. There's still 87% of the market to be covered by the latest innovations. They're still the same stents, and we basically maybe add a branch that multiplies the price by two to three times, and it only covers a little bit, 25% more of the endovascular, so let's say 13% to 15%. The others there, this one is just an adjuvant to open repair. So we do not replace open repair. So there's a huge, huge unmet clinical and commercial need in aortic dissection. That's why we founded Aortyx, to change the paradigm of how aortic disease should be treated. We combined one of the top 10 cardiovascular surgeons, sorry, aortic surgeons in the world, Dr. Tori Mbao, and also a team of engineers and chemists to do that. The concept is simple. This is the size of a neolithic section terrace, that means about one centimeter. This is the size of a stent that's 20 centimeters long. Obviously, we're overkilling that. Finally, that's our patch. We have developed a patch to cover the entry of this dissection. We have not only developed the patch, but also we have created the whole delivery system that includes two catheters to navigate and deploy the 19-oh self-expandable deployer of the patch, and it's adhesive. How it works, and maybe you've seen this video in other places. Typically, what we do is navigate through the femoral artery and all the way to the aorta, orienting towards the tear, deploying the patch. The patch has soluble sutures, so these dissolve once in contact. The glue adheres against the tear, and then we retrieve the whole thing, leaving the patch. The patch also has the same mechanical properties as the artery, so there's no more mechanical mismatch between the device and the artery. I like to show this video because this is now reality, and that's what we see in the lab. We have the dual cerebral catheter that we navigate, that we orient towards the tear, and we implant the patch we've developed. It's the first of its kind, a dual steel catheter that we can actually commercialize on its own for other applications, but it is able to generate free space within the aorta, and then to release the patch. As we can see, we have tested that ex vivo, but also in cadavers. You see how we actually unfold, retrieve the entire device, and also here in a cadaver study, you'll see how everything is radiopaque. We see it under X-ray, and we can see it deploys and attaches. We have been able to do that. Not only that, we've gone to animals, and we have super good results in animals. We've implanted up to three months. You see how the patch is accompanying the natural movement of the artery and is able to just stay in place and really be one with the artery, but also it's able to promote regeneration of tissue around that. This means that we're able to have the tissue grow both on top and across the patch, so we are fully recovered. Those images were from three months ago, but in one month, we have seen now with the latest version of this good regeneration. We have a large market opportunity for aortic dissection because it's a clearly untreated market. For the descending aorta, we have more than $300 million, and for the ascending aorta, there's nothing in the vascular, and it's two-thirds of the cases. So we have a large market opportunity, $700 million, and then other applications within the aorta, other focal lesions. We're talking about another $300 million. More or less 50% of that is in the States, and then the rest is distributed around Europe and Asia. Basically, we're now finalizing a 12 million euro Series A to finalize the design transfer, validation, and manufacturing of the device to go and develop a first in human trial in the descending aorta, and also develop the device for the ascending aorta. Because we need to market, we want to market differently in parallel. As I told you, the steerable catheter has its own path, and we will be developing other sizes for other applications within the tissue. We're at 80% in the Series A right now. We have a lead investor with a term sheet and a pre-money valuation of 9.5 million. We have major corporate investors in the round. We have support from the European Commission, and they'll invest about half the round. With some business angels and local VCs, we've raised 10.5 of this 12 million, and we're now trying to close the last million and a half these days at LSI to close the round. We do all these things because it makes sense. Financially, these are the latest transactions in the aortic space. You'll see the exit values are typically between 200 and 400 million. But as I always say, none of this is disruptive. We are the most disruptive option for aortic disease treatment, and we want to consolidate that. We've been recognized elsewhere, nationally and internationally, with a number of awards and grants. Actually, more than half of the development has been funded by competitive grants in Catalonia, Spain, and Europe. Right now, we need to finalize from the private part of the VC part. With that, I only ask you to live a healthy life to reduce the risk of suffering aortic dissection. So I ask you to think aorta, but also, if you're an investor in the room, to think Aortyx. Thank you.
