Mary McGovern, Adtec Healthcare - Cold Plasma Antibacterial Technology | LSI Europe '24

Mary McGovern 00:02
Hi, nice to meet you. I'm here to introduce Adtec Healthcare and our cold plasma for anti-infective. We are a UK medical device company. We have MDD and MDR; I just got a lovely email just now, which will come very shortly. We are a spin-out from an industrial plasma company. So plasma, cold plasma, as you can see in the corner there, is an energized gas. It's the fourth state of matter, and what it does is it kills bacteria; it breaks a hole, a micropore, in the bacterial cell wall. So it's a physical mode of action, and its main benefit is for antimicrobial resistance. Cold plasma will be effective against the superbugs. So we're raising 6 million, and we already have a partner, our business partner, from Southeast Asia, and we're going to give them the license rights to that area where they will look at Taiwan and Vietnam. We will use this to generate revenue. Because, as you can imagine, with disruptive innovation like cold plasma, there are no codes, there are no insurance codes, and there's no predicate device in the States. So we have a lot to do in order to generate and grow the business. We also have focused very strongly on clinical trials. We were the first in the world to use clinical trials with cold plasma. We have 80 peer-reviewed clinical publications.

So why cold plasma? It's for treating infection. Every year, 100,000 amputations in the US are from diabetic foot ulcers. 85% of them are due to infection. This means that the current standard of care is not working. There are many reasons for this, and one of them may be antimicrobial resistance, and also biofilm, which is 1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics. There was an article in The Times a few weeks ago where the wounded in Ukraine had to get their legs amputated because the antibiotics just didn't work. This was after over five or six courses of different antibiotics, and they didn't work. So they've contacted us since and said, "Can you come to Ukraine and we'll try?" We don't have regulatory approval there yet. So by managing the infection, it allows the wound to heal.

We have two main areas; one of them, your particular niche, is in treating infected driveline LVADs, which are electric pumps for heart failure. That driveline gets bacteria around it, and it's very hard to treat with antibiotics because how is an antibiotic going to get to the driveline? So what we do is the plasma is a gas, so it travels along the driveline, treats the infection, and therefore the infection is managed, and the patient can go on to transplant. Sometimes, people are living long-term with LVADs. A single infection costs $19,000, so it's quite a serious problem. We will have a publication coming out this month where we had two hospitals in Vienna and Newcastle treating children. Now these are very hard cases, like a three-year-old with heart failure, but with the Steroplaser product, her infection was managed, and she went on to transplant. This is very satisfying.

Similarly, for a driveline, a catheter, or any entry into the body that gets infected, which is hard to treat with the standard of care, plasma will do it. Another big area, of course, is diabetic foot ulcers. I think you may all know people who have diabetic foot ulcers, and if the infection is not managed, it can lead to amputation very quickly. This shows some of our examples of infected diabetic foot ulcers treated at Kettering Hospital, which went on to manage the infection. I was in Taiwan last week, and we were with our partners, and I was chatting with the family of a 104-year-old lady who had a diabetic foot ulcer that was going for amputation, and thankfully, it didn't. Her granddaughter was saying, "Oh, thank you so much." It's not us; it's just the technology, but these stories help us, and it's very satisfying for us.

We have health economics data showing that you don't need to use antibiotics. I come from a microbiology background; if it kills the bacteria, why use something else? Keep the antibiotics for chemotherapy, for surgery, for systemic use. We can also treat deep sternum infections. We've shown our efficacy against biofilm. We don't disrupt the biofilm; what we do is kill the bacteria within the biofilm. As you all know, antimicrobial resistance is significant. Remember when there was no COVID vaccine? How scary it was? This is what happens with antibiotics. If they're used against the infection and they're not working, the infection will be uncontrolled. An infection is now the second leading cause of death for cancer patients.

So our main market is, of course, infections. The infected wound care market is huge. In surgical sites, we need to kill the superbugs. We need to kill the bacteria. So it's a sadly growing market, and this is due to AMR. Our journey, this is our Sterelas device, and our key technology, where our strength lies, is in the microwave plasma that we use. It creates a bigger device, but this device has efficacy against bacteria at a very low temperature, so there are no side effects in all our time of use, but we've managed to achieve strong clinical efficacy, which is our strength.

The business model involves selling the bigger device or the smaller device, which will handle smaller infections, and the console, as well as the single-use device. What was interesting in Taiwan when I visited is that they have a shared payment scheme, so the patients and the hospitals share the payment, which is quite interesting and couldn't happen in Europe, but it will help us to increase our sales while we're processing to get a code sorted in Europe.

Regarding the competitive landscape, there are many cold plasma devices, some of which have advantages we don't have. We cannot be used in the home; we're very much for clinic use. But our main strength is our clinical efficacy. Without a doubt, we can kill the bacteria and manage the infection. Our regulatory and launch strategy includes the UK and Europe, our MDD, and now MDR. We're using our MDR certificate to get our distributors in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to obtain regulatory approval. SG Biomedical are our partners in Taiwan, and they have a great plan to cover all of Southeast Asia. We're going to use the funds we're seeking, the 6 million, to get FDA approval and to grow our business in Europe.

So our three main areas: there's me, the technical guy, and the business development guy. We work really hard. We've been in the cold plasma field for years now. We work really hard to make it work. I also learned from the beginning that if you don't know something, get help. So we have regulatory advisors, marketing advisors, plasma advisors—everything. You know you need help, but you don't lose sleep over it if you can't figure it out yourself.

This is setting a new standard of care, and this is our funding plan where we will go. We already have income, we already have commercial traction, and we'll use the funding to increase our presence in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America. So why this problem? Obviously, the infection; the current standard of care does not always work. There are amputations because infections are not being treated effectively. AMR is increasing, and it is spreading rapidly. It is the silent pandemic.

Why the solution? It works. We have shown, over 10 years with clinical trials, that this really, really works. Why Adtec Healthcare? We're ready. We've worked hard. We know how to do regulatory approval. We know how to do business development, and we can do this. Thank you very much. Applause.