Patrick Calhoun Presents Nanocrine at LSI USA '23

Transcription

Patrick Calhoun  0:05  

Hi, I'm Patrick Calhoun, I am representing Nanocrine. This presentation is going to be a little bit different than some of the presentations you sat through today. One thing, which is probably obvious is a little bit more cell based. Something that's probably not as obvious is the fact that this is not an improvement on a previous technology. This technology has never existed before this technology was born out of the Navy. So getting right into it. This is just to show you that cells are not static. And most of you may know that cells are dynamic, they're constantly moving, they're moving into wounds, when you implant a medical device, the cells actually sense that, and to in order to better understand what cells are sensing and how they're behaving. That is, the goal of our company is to provide that technology for a better understanding of cell behavior in real time. So medical research, there is a broad unmet need for better technology, I think everyone here would agree with that, or else we wouldn't be here. And the next leap and cell imaging technology will allow for the monitoring of cell secretion in real time, this is not currently possible. So moving from left to right on these images, what you can see is light microscopy that you can see then a fluorescence microscopy, super resolution microscopy. But importantly, in all of these, you can only see what is inside the cells, you can't see what's going on outside the cells. And so you may think, well, there's nothing outside the cells. But that's not true, we've just never been able to image it until now. And so that's where our platform comes in nanocraft EC res imaging. And what this platform allows you to do is it allows for the quantitation of extracellular secreted proteins in a way that again, just has never been able to be done before. This is happening at 1/1000 of a second as far as time resolution goes. The implications here, which I'll get into more in a moment, stretch from biopharma to bio production to med device. So if we look at the image on the left cells communicate in this dark space, it's a form of intercellular communication, they're communicating with each other, they're communicating with themselves. Again, we think that there's nothing there based off this image, but it's because we couldn't, we had no way of imaging it before. The video in the middle is a cell that is secreting a therapeutic MC protein that is actually being bound by gold sensors on arrays. And these light up on a microscope. So importantly, this technology does not require any new expensive equipment, it works with microscopes that are already in labs today. So what you get out of this is a protein quantification, which is shown here at the bottom right. And then you can use that quantification to generate a heat map, which tells you where those proteins are in real time, while these cells are secreting them. So importantly, I need to introduce a cell monitoring suite, because our goal is for to empower scientists to better understand cell behavior. And so we do that through the EC res imaging platform that I showed you, you can see a picture of it in the top left, it's just a one inch, circular, clear piece of glass with these arrays on it. And then we also have surface chemistry bio chips, that I'm not gonna spend too much time on this today. But what they allow you to do is better understand cell behavior by challenging the cells in specific ways. Both of these technologies are pretty reliant on semiconductor fab techniques, which make them unique amongst themselves. And then we also have a proprietary software. We call it nano mammal software for microscopy analysis with machine learning. So this is a self supervised machine learning software that makes this kind of data manageable. One of the reasons that a lot of people don't do live cell microscopy is because the datasets are so unwieldly and large. So for the surface chemistry biochips. We actually launched those earlier this year. Those are early revenue generating products, and they share methods for development and manufacturing with the Easy Res imaging platform. And so because they have shared development, shared methods for development, manufacturing, that's de risked some of the Easy Res work. And the Nano mammal software is designed to work well with both. Again, the surface chemistry, bio chips, beta marketing, early revenue generating, the software has early access available. There's a version 1.0 available. It's undergoing alpha and beta validation studies. And then the Easy Res imaging platform. The prototype is complete we can make this in a lab and we can use it to make these measurements that have never been able to be taken before. It's just not an off the shelf product yet. And so why should we care? Well, we're at a med device conference. So it would behoove me to loop it back into medical device. Sometimes implants fail, sometimes medical devices fail. Short story is that the key inventor for this technology, he spent some time at Walter Reed and saw veterans coming back from overseas. And you could have two veterans out receive very similar treatments, but have very different outcomes. And so his background was in spintronics and condensed matter physics. And he wanted to know why that was. And so it's really what gave birth to this whole cell monitoring platform. We know very little about viral reactivation. Immunotherapy is very hot topic right now, you know, what kind of signals our cells getting that allow them to be successfully reprogrammed by our production. So if you're in bio production, you want to know which cells are producing the optimal antibodies at the optimal concentrations, this platform can answer that question. If you want to know better about exosomes and extracellular vesicles to deliver drugs, this platform is capable of capturing and quantifying that it's important for developmental biology. And it's also important and other things such as cancer biology. And so what I'm showing here on the right is a patient glioblastoma. So this is taken from a human patient. And you can see in the top panel, that's a traditional surface, this is what you can buy on the market today. It's plastic, it's glass, it might be coated with something it might not be. If you look on our surface, you can physically see the cells undergoing metastasis. And if anyone's curious more about what I'm talking about, I can talk about it more after the talk. But yeah, so moving on. So accomplishments to date for the Easy Res imaging, we have a collaborative research and development agreement with the Navy, at the Naval Research Lab in DC. We have issued patents, we have peer reviewed publications. And again, we can make this prototype in a lab. And we can actually use it. For the surface chemistry bio chips, again, just more holistic view of the company. These are early revenue generating products. And then for the software we have software development is ongoing. But there is alpha and beta validation studies currently in process. So market and competition, I could list all the companies but the bottom line is they all have the same problem. You can go to any of these major life science companies and say I would like something that provides spatial and temporal space and time resolution of proteins as they're secreted from cells. And I'd like to be able to see them on my microscope. And they're all going to tell you the same thing that technology doesn't exist, and it didn't until now. And so I have a couple examples up here that you can see, our target markets are biopharma CROs and Cancer Research Centers. But of course, we'll market to everybody. And then some numbers for the sell analysis market estimated at 17.7 Billion with about a 10 CAGR. We have a pretty impressive leadership team. So one of our co founders, Steve Turner started several life science companies throughout his career, very successful. Alias Hooni is our advisor, one of our advisors. He's the former director of NIH. Some of the physicists from the Naval Research Lab are shown kind of in this bottom corner here, with the primary inventor being Mark Rafael, the one I shared about the story where he went to Walter Reed and really switched over from physics to biology. So this all started with a quest of better understanding why some wounds heal better than others. But thankfully, we have a top notch family of collaborators that are very active, Virginia Tech, Johns Hopkins, Ohio State UMD. And we work on everything from cancer, cardiology, which is my background. We also work on mesenchymal stem cell differentiation, neurodegeneration and animals and super resolution through thin film gold. So with that, I will end my presentation, but if you'd like to talk more, I'm free after thanks