Philip Brown Presents SmartWound at LSI Europe '23

Transcription

Philip Brown  0:05  
My name is Philip Brown, I am a director of SmartWound. I've been working with the team from smart wound for about 10 years, the company itself we formed a couple of years ago, out of the University of Bath. So we are a small company, UK basic, a UK private company, from the University of Bath, linked to a hospital in Bristol, we are developing an in vitro diagnostic, which detects wound infection. And the way we're doing this is using a very simple swap. So you basically you swap your wound and you stick your swap into a solution. And the solution will change color over a period of time over a 15 minute period, your solution will basically fluoresce. And the way it does this is in the solution we have created vesicles when you have an infection, or bacteria will begin to produce a particular protein, this protein will damage lipid by layers. So what we've created is a physical negative of a lipid bilayer. In the vehicle we have placed a fluorescent dye which is just Flourescein. Flourescein has some unique properties that at high concentrations, it does not fluoresce. But if you basically split out the vesicles, the the flourescein concentration will decrease because the fluorescein will move into the solution. And you will see that fluorescence as shown in the picture. So the team who were behind this, it's really Toby Jenkins, Professor Toby Jenkins at the University of Bath, he has a great interest in infection and detecting an infection, and also the mechanisms and the causes and the problems it causes. So Toby is sort of the scientists behind the technology. He's been working with a lady called June, who are basically the scientists. This is now being transferred to a commercial team. So Alan Boyce and Donald Decort are to experience people within diagnostics and getting products approved around the world. So we're, we are using them to help us commercialize the technology. So this is what we are developing, our first product will be called SmartWound Resolve, which is basically a visual representation, you basically do your swap, your solution changes color. And it shouldn't be that simple. You know, 15 minutes, you'll see a color change. And if you see a color change, you know you have an infection in your wound. Looking to the future, I think we you know, having some form of reader which measures the color change seems a sensible move. And then I think where we would like to move to is smart one predict, which is basically a wound dressing. So you put your wound dressing over over a wound, and then you'll see a change, you'll see that there's infection but you don't have to remove the dressing, which actually does come in become important when you're looking at your unmet medical need. So the reason Toby started doing this work was because he was working with a group in Briscoe Hospital, where the clinician lady called Dr. Amber young basically said her problem was that she couldn't tell when she has an infection. She's a leading wound burn expert, and she couldn't tell whether patients had a wound and infection or not. The problem of not knowing is you get very complicated wounds, wounds if you have an infection, so you get sepsis, potentially you have delayed healing, and the problem she was facing is that she has children on the wards which have lifelong scarring because of an infection. And if she had caught the infection earlier, the chances would have been the scarring would have been less. So what we are creating is this rapid and accurate diagnostic of infection really to hopefully help clinicians in the prescriptive prescribing of antibiotics and also hopefully to reduce healthcare costs and patient costs. We've also done more of an academic study looking at this technology. In pediatric burns. We published this work, it's on the list there. And it basically showed that the technology was working as we predicted. The two pictures given here are basically to two babies who were burned by cups of tea so be careful. The first baby did not have an infection and has no lifelong scarring at all and you know, is grew up normally. Sadly the second one had some severe infection and how has now got, sadly, severe scarring. So looking at our technology and what we're going to do with it, this is basically a point of care it can be used, we believe in hospital, obviously, but in GP surgeries and certainly in outpatients and allow you to diagnose wound infections cheaply, or cost effectively. Our main competitor is really the clinician at the moment a clinician will look at a wound, and consider whether it's infected or not. You can do swabs and then take them to the lab. But of course, that takes a couple of days to get the results. There's a couple of other products out there called Wound Check and Moleculite. They have very different mechanisms of action to our product. And we believe our product will be sort of a companion to the clinicians to help them in making a diagnosis. And where are we as a company we are basically we are, you know, setting up QMS systems and technical files to get the products approved, we are working very closely with a manufacturing company to develop the product, and to make sure that the product itself is being manufactured to the right quality standards. And now we are in the process of making sure that we can make the volume of solution required. And then, you know, our next stage is to start to doing market authorization. So we're going to look into the UK and India, EU, FDA, obviously, and then other selected markets on market authorization. We're also working with a number of partners. Liposoma is our main partner at the moment. This is a manufacturing company who has taken basically our academic SOP and created that into a quality management process, which you know, covers all of the regulations required. And then we are again beginning to look into packaging and the regulatory side of how do we take our academic product and make it a commercial asset. And again, a number of other companies we're working looking at stability and performance studies. And, where are we now, our status is we are basically we have been funded through grants and through the University of Bath to start with, we're now looking for our first investors to to take the product forward. So I think the significant milestones that we have done is we have tested this product within community with impatience. We have now verified and scaled the solution, which is sort of the main element of the product, beginning to look at the design of how you would package this type of product. And again, we've got now regulatory pathway for this product, quite clear where we're going. And we basically now just need some funding to to take it forward. So again, we are now here looking for some funding, when in the region of one and a half million pounds would take us to first products on the market and allow us to generate income within 2025. If this is of interest to you, please come and find me or speak to Alan or Donald who will answer their emails when they are available. Thank you very much