Patrick Anquetil, Portal Instruments - Needle-Free Biologics Delivery | LSI USA '24

Patrick Anquetil  0:01  
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Today we'd like to talk to you about a an unmet need. That basic is actually not very well known. patients suffering from chronic diseases actually have a terrible time staying on therapy, and also adhering to treatment as well. Those data here are from a McKinsey Report. And as you can see, the numbers are less than than stellar. Basically, in the best of case, about half patients do the right thing. And after one year, on average pharma companies actually lose two thirds of their patients. It's quite insane. And we asked I said, Well wait Wait is that we believe that one of the reason is linked to the to the delivery technique. Most of those drugs are used for chronic use, actually biologics, so injectable medicines, medicines for which you need either an eland syringe or an auto injector. And as you can imagine, this creates a lot of anxiety, disposing of needle, it's actually very difficult. In fact, you have to go in my town in Brookline, you have to go to the police station to return the needles. And of course, you know, we're humans, we forget things. And, and oftentimes, we just get confused as well. There's another reason actually, why this is starting to become an issue. As we've seen the success of all the weight loss drugs, we go V Manjaro, ozempic, those typically use a an auto injector. So it's a, it's a, it's a needle and syringe with a spring was doing the activation, it's pretty much like an epi pen, as you can see in that in that picture. Those have a huge burden for the environment, when I need to get to get disposed of. And in fact, he, as you consider the New York Times actually reported on that a couple of weeks ago, so we're coming in with a breakthrough in drug delivery. It's not only reusable, its 21st century, so it's connected. And it's also needle free. And just just to give you a sense of burden brought a device here, you get to see the what the size is. And then there is a Disposable single use component that's actually this big just looks like a syringe. But for if you open it up, there's actually no needle. So to cut to the chase, why are we here, we're here, because we first of all, at an inflection point, we're raising $35 million. And the company is actually at a great stage, we've actually spent a lot of time de risking the technology, we have a few partnerships actually in place with pharma. And we have an extraordinary team that's focused on execution. And we get us there. So let's dive a little bit deeper tell you about the solution that we have. So our core belief is that in the 21st century, not only do you need to focus on the delivery experience, but also on the digital side of things actually, as well. And that combination, we believe, will help actually keep patients longer on the drug, make sure that they reach the outcomes they desire, and also reduce cost done down the road. So how does the the technology works, so it's, it's actually an older concept in which that you use a very fine jet of drug. And that jet actually is fast enough and thin enough, in fact, thinner than a needle, that it will pay us actually gently the skin. And the innovation that we have, which comes from MIT is that we're able to control that jet during the very split second injection duration, we also have a, the ability to basically not only control a jet in time, but also in space, actually, as well, as you can see from from the graph here, it's a very thin jet, much, much smaller than an instrument engine, a crude way to look at injections. This is just for illustration purposes. This is a slab of, of porcelain tissue. If if those no circles were labeled, it will be very difficult to know which one is which. So we're able to mimic any injection, be it a subcutaneous injection, in intradermal injection or an intramuscular injection as well. We also believe that connectivity is very important. With connectivity, we're able not only to capture when an injection has happened, we're also able to to actually get the entire care team on the same page. In addition, we believe that the pharma companies with whom we partner may be very interested to know not only how the drugs are getting used, but also when those drugs are getting used actually, as well. The company has an extensive patent portfolio. And in fact, you know, we keep on inventing and and no IP is of course thing for us. And how do we differentiate against competitors on the two axes that we like to actually use to do that? The first one is Can those devices administer biologics? Yes No and other reusable again. Reusability is important because you don't want to find, you know, very complex devices, very expensive devices in the waste stream, and so on. So, the on the bottom right corner, you see the traditional auto injectors, those are main competitors. You know, for those MPEG, all those weight loss drugs, these are typically the drugs device that I use for those drugs. There is actually a needle free device that exists as you can see in the top left corner, the pharma device, but unfortunately, because of volume restriction, it's not able to inject more than half a milliliter for biologics, you actually much more than that, there is a product that we like a lot. It's the Amgen auto touch. It's a reusable auto injector, but it's needle based, actually, as well. So we're extremely differentiated in this market. And we believe that, you know, in a few years time, the standard of care for any administration of biologics will be with without device. A patient's love of device. When you get injected, we've done about three clinical studies. Typically the sensation that you feel is about heart a sensation of need and syringe. In addition, when we ask patients well, would you actually prefer to take a biologics with this technology? About 80% said yes, not only do I prefer it, but also I believe that this could help me do the right things too long on a drug as well. Our target market is the very large biologics market, it's about half a trillion dollar market, if you can believe that. And we're targeting basically all the major players there from Regeneron to smaller biotech companies that are still in development. How do we structure deals, typically, this is a licensing model. We like to call it a traditional biotech license, where basically you you set up, typically an exclusive deal with upfront payments, and then you set up a Development Development Program with milestone payments, r&d dollars, and then you get once it's all said and done, and you want to market you get also access to quality as well. So why do we, why do we believe we have a core value prop for pharma companies as well, it's basically market expansion strategy. If you can keep patients longer on the drug, and you can actually increase increase the market actually as well in that you get not only the needle phobic folks, but also perhaps patients who have difficulty using current devices, you can imagine that the market basically would grow and so from a visual standpoint, this will look something like this. So, we can take any biologics font size and in piecemeal sort of, you know, increase it through basically, great arguments are going to persistence and also by market expansion as well. Apart week strategy is quite advanced. In fact, this is actually an older slide here that I see we have five partners in feasability. Actually, right now, for major pharmaceutical companies don't two biologics company we ready with with GMP manufacturing. We have both the production of the device this device is made actually in house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then the disposable the container is made by a very reputable primary container manufacturer gara Shimer, I like to call them the Becton Dickinson of Europe, they've been a partner for actually quite quite some time. On the device side, we have also plans to expand into into US companies like flex, and so on. Once we go beyond a large volume, currently, we can make about 1000 devices per year, once we get to the 10,000 100,000, a different company would be needed. We've got a great team. And as mentioned, we're raising $35 million. What we do is it sort of it would be for clinical studies, sort of it would be of course cooperation. And a third of that will be to to basically set up manufacturing and expand as I just just described. Finally, I will just leave you with this. We think it's an exciting area to invest in two key deals actually have been done recently enable medicines with about $200 million at a very attractive valuation a couple of years ago. HelloSign is kind of the sort of the more interesting and sort of big company in this space as well. And more recently lindera also raised $100 million in a drug delivery space. So again, a great unmet need Duris platform and a great team to execute. And second very much for your attention.