Richard Yazbeck, NED Medical - Oncology Embolization Therapies | LSI USA '24

Richard Yazbeck  0:03  
Thanks everybody. First time at LSI, it's great to be here, and I appreciate all of you letting me tell you what it is that we're doing at Ned medical. So Ned medical is a company based out of the Boston area. It was founded by myself and Andrew Thorson. Andrew is a practicing interventional radiologist and a successful physician, physician entrepreneur. He has started and exited to other companies in the past. I myself have been in the industry for over 20 years. This is my fourth startup, and I've worked on or launched over two dozen medical devices with roles in engineering, R and D, regulatory, quality, all sorts of different roles over the years. So the initial problem that we're trying to solve is liver cancer. Liver cancer is a huge problem in the United States and all across the world. You can see this heat map showing where all the hot spots are, and the statistics around it are quite dire, including, not only predictive deaths between now and 2040 but also the economic burden of this disease across the globe. It's a huge issue, both from a life perspective and the economics perspective as well. So today, liver cancer, liver tumors are treated using predominantly embolization therapy, and these are typically unresectable tumors, and 80% of liver cases, liver cancer cases are unresectable, so it's a large part of the patient population. The traditional embolization therapies that are used is blend embolization, radio embolization and chemoembolization. These are microscopic spheres. They're delivered through the vasculature, targeting the tumor, and just like the name describes, they're either looking to cut off blood flow to the tumor to try to get the tumor to die and shrink, or it's delivering localized chemotherapeutics, or it's delivering localized radiomobilization, the solutions that are out there today, these solutions are have been around for decades, 30 to 40 years, some of them, and they've continued to be monotherapies. They haven't progressed and evolved with the best practices in oncology today. And today, cancer patients are treated with combination therapies because clinical data has demonstrated that that's what works. That's what moves the needles, and moves the needle in terms of patient outcomes. And one of the big things that a lot of the existing therapies run into is tumor hypoxia. These tumor microenvironments are very complex, including a large percentage of these cells that are hypoxic cells and simply don't respond to radiation. So you either get a patient that has a recurrence of tumor, or you have to carpet bomb their liver, for lack of better words, in order to try to overcome the tumor hypoxia, and then you end up with significant side effects that are sometimes debilitating and lifelong. So our mission is to transform radio embolization from a palliative to a curative intent treatment, and the way we plan on doing so is actually something that's been around for decades, and in concept, it's easy to do, but to solve it from an engineering perspective is really, really hard, and we've been able to solve that, and what we've done is developed our product combo sphere to encompass the three paradigms within the mobilization therapy. So it acts as a blend embolic, it acts as a chemo embolic, and it also acts as a radio embolic, so it is delivering a combination of all three locally at the tumor site with with reduced side effects because of the localized accumulation of therapeutics and also localized radiation delivery. Okay? And for the first time, we're showing the world what our particle looks like. No one's ever seen this. You guys are the first people to ever see this, and it really looks like a Gobstopper, if you remember the candy when we were kids. It's basically a core that is radiating emissions, radiating emitting radiation. It is made with a new, proprietary material that's never been done in this space before, but it is a material with a long history of biocompatibility. It is also constructed in a very unique way. You look at it, it's not smooth. There's some really cool stuff going on the inside that I just can't tell you about at this meeting, but it allows us to do something that no one else can do, which is deliver a high dose of radiation on par with therosphere, but to do so at a fluid mechanics, or a a flow mechanics, similar to red blood cells. So when you deliver this and it comes out of the catheter, it doesn't just sort of sink, it doesn't just sort of come out of the catheter and fall on the vasculature and go to all sorts of places where it's not supposed to. It flows to the blood and it gets to the tumor, and you end up with better tumor targeting that you don't have. And other products are out there today. The outside shell, the polymeric shell, is there to uptake medication and deliver medication locally if the physician still chooses to do the market is huge. We were selected by the medtech practice of Deloitte to do a month long evaluation. Situation of the opportunity, the reimbursement and also the market access strategy. We were really fortunate to have them support us on this journey and and the data that you see today are and our market strategy came out of that effort with them. So it's a huge opportunity in the US, and even more so across the globe, with additional opportunities within other types of cancers. We envision a multi prong commercial approach. Because of the uniqueness of our product design, it allows us to effectively develop a product within the three verticals, within three verticals in this market space, and to do so while leveraging the data we collect from each of those verticals. So you basically get three you get three things for one. And we're pretty excited about that opportunity to deliver three different products and in different market verticals. Okay, the economics are quite strong. The reimbursement today for a single dose is about $18,000 it's a C code, it's a device code. It costs us less than $1,000 to make our product. So the re the the margins are quite generous for this specific device. In addition, it's an outpatient procedure. And so what ends up happening is a lot of physicians are moving away from chemo and bollocks, from bland embolics to radium bollocks, because it has better patient outcomes, has better economics, and it's also an outpatient procedure. And so we're really seeing a huge shift in that direction. Nowadays. There have been multi billion dollar acquisitions we have. There's another startup in the space, ABK they're doing an amazing job innovating as well, and and they've received really strong investments, both from Varian and Medtronic as well as some really good quality VCs. We have a fantastic Medical Advisory Board. I call them the 1927 Yankees of an eventual radiologist. And it kills me to say it, because I'm a Red Sox fan, but they're all wonderful people, innovative. I approached them about two years ago with just an idea on a piece of paper, and I said, this is what I want to do. I have $0 raised. And they were all over it. They were so excited about it. It was truly this event that validated the whole concept for me, and I knew that we were onto something really valuable in the space. So we are looking to raise. We're actually doing two different fundraising at the same time. The first is, we're looking to close our seed round, and we're almost there. And so we're looking to connect with investors here at LSI that are interested in C stage financing, but we're also starting to launch our outreach for our a round. We're looking to close a $12 million a round around q1 of next year. So thank you. Applause.