Video Transcription
Ludovic Le Meunier 00:02
I'm Ludovic Le Meunier, actually the CEO of THERYQ. Well, let's start with that. What if we could cure a cancer patient in the blink of an eye? Well, I'm sure everybody here agrees that it would be absolutely fantastic. Well, THERYQ is working on making that possible, and I will show you how. So THERYQ works in the field of radiotherapy. In radiotherapy, we use particles loaded with energy to actually destroy the tumor. So it's a highly used cancer treatment, and it works relatively well, okay, but you still have quite a few limitations. The first one is that you still have a significant amount of tumors that are resistant to the amount of radiation, the amount of energy that we can give to the tumor, so it lowers the efficacy of the treatment and the survival rate for those patients. On top of it, to treat a patient with radiotherapy, you need multiple sessions of several minutes, sometimes up to 35, so it's a very long treatment and very uncomfortable for the patient. And lastly, radiotherapy has many short- to long-term destructive side effects like dermatitis or necrosis, because when you actually destroy the tumor with the particles, you also have an impact on the healthy tissue around it. That's what we call toxicity to healthy tissue. So let's imagine that we could reduce the toxicity to healthy tissue. If we could reduce the side effects, we would have the opportunity to give more radiation, more energy to the tumor, providing more efficient and better-tolerated cancer treatment. Well, at THERYQ, we have the solution, and we call that flash radiotherapy. So flash radiotherapy is a groundbreaking emerging technique that literally has the potential to change the way we are going to cure cancer. With flash radiotherapy, we can treat the patient in one session of a fraction of a second, typically less than 100 milliseconds, and we can do that because our machines are 1,000 times more powerful than the conventional ones. But this part is what I would call the technical part of flash. Let me tell you a few words about the magical part of flash, because when you give this amount of energy so fast to the tumor, you still destroy it, but you're far less toxic to the healthy tissue around it, so you have far fewer side effects. So this opens the door to better treat the cancers that we can treat today with radiotherapy, but you can also potentially treat the cancers that you cannot treat with radiotherapy or even with any other therapeutic alternative. So it's quite a game changer. We've been working on that for more than 10 years, so we can consider ourselves pioneers. You know, we started in the arc. Yeah, 10 years ago, everybody thought we were completely crazy. You know, you cannot give so much radiation to a patient. You're going to kill the patient. You know, that's not the way you do it. Well, fast forward to 2024, we have developed our first machine, which is getting into clinical trials pretty soon, and we are working on the second one. Well, if nobody believed in it 10 years ago, now we work with a lot of other centers, so I won't do any name dropping or anything like that, but when you work with the first cancer center in Europe, Gustave Roussy, and when you work also with the first cancer center in the US, MD Anderson, well, it tells you something about flash. On top of it, we have signed an exclusive contract with CERN in Switzerland, which is a world leader in fundamental research on particle acceleration, so we can use the technology inside our machine to accelerate our particles, which puts us quite ahead of any potential competitors. And then on the right here, I just wanted to mention that we go to quite a few trade shows, you know, several times per year. And the last one, when we were in Glasgow at the ESTRO, which is the biggest European one, we had a sample room with 250 seats. Well, we had to refuse 200 people to get in. So just to remind you that, you know, flash radiotherapy makes quite a buzz. Okay, let's have a look at those impressive clinical results. What you see here is what we call a cat patient. So this cat has nasal carcinoma. So if your cat has nasal carcinoma, there is not much you can do for the poor animal. First, if you try surgery, it's too invasive, so you can't do that. If you do conventional radiotherapy, then it has an impact on the brain. Then your cat loses connectivity ability, and then it stops eating, so it dies. Well, we treated several cats with one session of flash radiotherapy, less than 100 milliseconds. We cured all of them, and they all survived. So I won't go through all the mice, the dogs, the pigs, everything that we did on the technical side; I will jump to the very first patient that we had in 2018. We did that with a prototype machine. It was a compassionate treatment. This patient had cutaneous sarcoma, which was multi-resistant to any treatment at the time. Well again, one session of flash radiotherapy, and the result here, but you can see at the bottom, no scar, nothing. The tumor is gone. So this actually gave us the goal to start developing clinical machines. And what you can see here, the first one that we have developed, it's called Flash Knife, which is capable of treating superficial tumors up to 27 centimeters inside the body. We're getting into clinical trials in four centers. And for the anecdote, it's very funny because, I mean, it made me laugh. But we are installing two more machines, like 20 minutes from here in Nice, one of our centers. So that was our first machine, but now we're also working on the second one, which is called Flash Deep. This machine will be able to treat any solid tumor anywhere in the body. So it's a much higher energy machine. We are developing this machine in collaboration with CERN, the Rosan University Hospital, and Gustave Roussy Hospital in France. We expect to have the first patient in 2027, and what you can see here on the left is the design that we're going to have. But this machine is going to be still compatible with an installation inside the hospital. So in the heart of the hospital, it's not like a big bunker, like a huge building that you have to build. So this, again, is going to change the role of the game. Well, a few words about the clinical application. We're going to start with the clinical trials for head and neck, brain, pancreas, and skin. But the important thing here is that soon after that, we will treat all deep-seated tumors anywhere in the body. It's 90% of the cancer right now. And I wanted to mention glioblastoma because it's the most aggressive brain tumor. It kills 200,000 people per year, and the survival rate is 5% after five years, so it's horrible. Okay? Why am I mentioning glioblastoma? Because with flash radiotherapy, we will be able to give more energy to the tumor without increasing too much the toxicity on healthy tissue or, like, you know, the side effects. So the key opinion leaders we are working with, the physicians, are convinced that they will be able to cure glioblastoma with this machine, which is going to have quite an impact on the patients' lives. Okay, a few words about this quickly. We are not the only ones believing in it anymore because the French government just believed in it too. It just gave us a 30 million grant to actually develop the second machine. So we're quite happy, and it's quite comfortable to start developing nice machines. Well, I'm a little bit more worried about the money. We are looking for private investment of 20 to 35 million for the first tranche. We have quite a, I would say, enthusiastic interest from several investors, including potential leads. And it's worth noticing that we will start generating income this year. Well, with two flash radiotherapy devices, I think THERYQ is starting a real therapeutic revolution. We have Flash Knife for superficial lesions, and we have Flash Deep for the deep-seated tumors. So flash radiotherapy will unlock new treatments for patients, including the ones with no therapeutic alternative today. So that's why, at THERYQ, we are convinced that flash radiotherapy is the future of cancer treatment. So thank you for your attention. If you want to know more about flash or about THERYQ, you know what I look like now, so please come and find me. Thank you very much.
