Peter van de Graaf, Choice - Implantable Valves as a Contraceptive | LSI USA '24

Peter van de Graaf  0:03  
I'm the CEO of Choice with Choice, we have a very clear goal, we want to create hormone free fertility, freedom for life. But let's first start with the problem. At the moment, out of 100 pregnancies 40 are unwanted. This is a huge problem in the world of, of these 40 unwanted pregnancies 25 are aborted, and 15 are born. To tell you about the societal effects of that. Estimates are that 75% of inmates in US prisons for serious crime were unwanted children at birth. Current conception is very much myth 20 century technology. And if you look at current conception, for women, it's a kind of choosing the lesser evil, what happens is that there is this massive swing against hormones in especially younger women, recent research in Europe basically showed that the younger generation of women will not use the pill, they're switching to IUDs, then very often, these IUDs are not tolerated, and they have come out in two months. And condoms are universally hated. Sterilization is, of course, sort of a final procedure when you're done with your family planning. We started by thinking about ideal conception, its tenets. And one of the things I already mentioned, it's got to be hormone and chemical free. A second thing is that it's got to be discipline free. Why it says doesn't have to be disciplined, free, because the pill gets forgotten for the same reasons why you don't brush your teeth, you have a flu, you had a great party, there's a death in the family you're traveling. Another thing is passion proof. Passion. Proof means that you're not on the pill, you're not on anything. And you go to this party, and there's this wonderful, gorgeous guy. Yes, some drinks and things happen. That's the large cause for unwanted children. And the other thing, it's got to be long acting, reversible contraception, so that every child is desired. How we're going to do that we're placing implants in fallopian tubes in the utero to will junction valve implants. So basically, you can open or close your fallopian tubes at will. And now what happens it's no longer contraception or contract conception. It's pro conception, you only open them when you want to conceive. We do that with a removal catheter, where we with a delivery catheter, but we also have a removal caster. For any reason this is not tolerated, we can take this implant away. We do that on the endoscope. We've developed a smallest endoscope in the world with a one millimeter diameter. So we can actually look into the fallopian tubes while placing these. How will that work out for a life? Let's assume a woman has these at 18. She chooses to have a baby at 27 opens them up, closes them down again at 29 decides to have a second baby at 32. Again, same procedure and then forgets about it. This is a huge market opportunity. We have at the moment 20 million women in the EU and the US choosing sterilization which is 1.2 billion female sterilization. Why am I talking about sterilization first, that is the first market we're going to address, it's easier to prove that a bottle can be closed than it is to prove that a bottle can be opened and closed and open and close. So our first market will be the sterilization markets coming from there. We can go to the worldwide for a sterilization market. But the real kicker is of course, this becomes conception. And conception is 28 billion worldwide markets. But it's not only about the markets, and we're talking about a planet with an increasing population. We're talking about a planet where still 200 million women don't have access to contraception, but would like to have this access.

So how are we approaching this? We're preclinical, where you see two of our K wells working here. We like I said we have developed this endoscope, and what you're seeing here is the first time you look into the place where every one of us big started its life. This is the inside of a flow peon tube and we do that And the scope so we can really see what we're doing because fallopian tubes are very fragile organs and can easily be pierced. So we realized we needed this endoscope, so you can actually see where you're placing these implants. We've also tested our stents, they're going to be held there by stents by placing them in rabbits 28 Rabbits for 28 days. fallopian tubes have big peristaltic movements. And so these implants have to be resistant against these peristaltic movements. Rabbits have even bigger peristaltic movements than women have, and our STEM spade stayed perfectly in place. We also tested our materials against human fallopian tube organoids. And again, the materials were very well tolerated. But the real accelerator to our design, is the fact that we can work with women undergoing hysterectomy. So we have this unique ability to actually implant our devices while researching them in women, and then have the organ on the table to dissect it and look at it, there are very few organs where you can do this kind of trick without giving the patient we're going to go first in human. In this April, we're going to place our stents with this endoscope in women's bodies, first, just prior to a hysterectomy, then, eventually, three months before hysterectomy to me. So if we can actually see how these implants will grow in.

We have a team we do this with we have two key opinion leaders. We're a Dutch company, these two people, these two John ecologists professors, they are the most experienced people working with all the previous attempts at implants like Adiana and ensure we've got one of the best ice engineers, so integrated circuit engineers in Holland, because eventually, while our first generation will still be switched by a catheter, we go wireless. So once you have these implants in place, you will never have to be there again, and will open and close them wirelessly. And we got your Hizballah bear who is a serial CRO, entrepreneur, and one of our investors, our team is all very leading engineers and clinical specialists. We got the best stem designer in Germany, working for us. But basically, the whole thing revolves around a big network that we have created of high tech companies, universities, research institutes, and the like. And all these people get a glint in their eye when they see what we're working for. Because in the end, our goal is every child desired. So, to put it in a summary, we have the people, we're working with the right network. We have the technology. We've got about five patents now and another seven way and we're seeking two and a half million investment to get us basically to the pivotal trial. See. That's it. Thank you