Video Transcription
Rob Hill 00:02
So we are a company that was founded in 2017 in Southern California, where we're based. We have around 100 people working on our project. Our company has a little bit of an unusual history. We were a spin-out company of a fusion energy company, which has really moved us forward. We're in oncology therapeutics, so we're focused on treating various cancers with our innovative, targeted radiation therapy solution. And the type of therapy that we do is called boron neutron capture therapy, B, N, C, T. We're in the middle of doing a capital raise right now; I'll walk you through the company, but what we're going to use that capital for is getting clinical trials going in the United States and Europe. We've already started a trial in China where we've treated 36 patients so far with our medical device. So historically, radiation therapy is treated where you treat a region of a patient, a region as identified by imaging scans, and typically that region, those treatments take between 20 and 30 individual treatment sessions every day. Some of you probably have had family members or loved ones who were treated with standard radiation. It's really a grueling activity where you go in every day for your treatment. But something interesting is happening in the field of radiation treatments, where a new era of personalized medicine has begun, where these various targeted drug agents have been grafted with radioisotopes, the most well-known of which is Pluvicto, which is a very successful drug made by Novartis. These drugs are typically used for late-stage cancers, and they're used for systemic therapy, the approach that we're taking, boron neutron capture therapy. You can think of it as a combination of existing standard radiation therapy, where you're treating a region of the patient across the life cycle of cancer, but the cellular targeting that comes from radiopharmaceuticals. So to just walk through a little bit how the procedure works. So you start off getting an infusion of a drug. The drug delivers boron to cancer cells. The drug itself doesn't have any biological effect on the patient, but once the boron is present in the cancer cells, you take the patient to a special radiation room where you deliver low-energy neutron radiation to the region of the tumor. And that results in the neutrons, when they interact with the boron, emitting daughter particles, alpha particle radiation that then can destroy the DNA in the cancer cell using a double-strand DNA break. So my company is developing both the boron drugs to deliver the boron as accurately as possible and in as high a quantity as possible, as well as the treatment machine that generates the radiation therapy, which we call Alpha Beam. So we've got a pipeline of new drugs in this presentation I'll share with you. I'll talk about two of those drugs, but we have several other drugs in the pipeline that we are developing for the Alpha Beam product. It's a particle accelerator. It's a large-scale medical device that gets installed in the hospital. So our lead indication that we're focused on is refractory head and neck cancer. It's a very difficult-to-treat cancer. About half of the patients that have this disease ultimately recur. When they recur, the prognosis is not good for these patients. So the existing drug, and in fact, our small molecule drugs in general, use an amino acid transporter to get the boron into the cells called LAT1. And it turns out, for this type of cancer, cancers that have high LAT1 expression tend to have poor outcomes. So it's a very interesting situation where the transport mechanism that we use to load boron into the cells is, in fact, correlated with patients having negative outcomes. This therapy has been used for several years in Japan and was approved in 2020. And this slide shows some of the clinical results from that study and the post-approval experience in Japan. To just summarize, this data is for squamous cell carcinoma, a very common head and neck cancer, and also one of the most lethal head and neck cancers. If you have access to this form of therapy, BNC, around 60% of the patients are alive in two years, versus if you have access to standard care, 50% or less, depending on the paradigm that's used to treat the patient. So we see a significant survival advantage for this approach. We developed a new drug called BTS, which we've shown in animal experiments. We can deliver twice the amount of boron as the existing drug that we're using in patients, BPA, and we can also deliver that two times more selectively. So this means that we can deliver significantly higher radiation doses to tumor cells while delivering half or less the radiation dose to healthy tissues. So we think this will be a very big deal, and we'll move the field forward. Also, there's a lot of very, very good outcome data for treating cancers of the brain as well, for treating various brain cancers like glioblastoma or high-grade meningioma. We see about an 80% survival advantage in the recurrent setting. There's a lot of interest in this around the world, a lot of publications, a lot of ongoing studies in the United States, Europe, and where we've treated our first patients in Asia. Sometimes you see a challenge in new therapies that the clinicians are excited and the doctors see that it has significant advantages for treatment, but it doesn't make sense economically. The good news with this therapy is it's a significant money maker for hospitals because you treat patients in a single treatment session, so one-and-done therapy; you can treat a large number of patients for one of these systems that are installed. That business model generates a very strong return. And in fact, from one of our partner hospitals in the United States, it shows that you can get a 34% rate of return for the initial investment for installing this machine and the associated facility. It's also very significant in terms of the impact on cancer. While we're starting with head and neck cancer, also, it's been shown to be beneficial in treating various cancers of the brain, and it can treat a large number of cancers over time, leading to a large market opportunity. We have a pretty strong management team, all veterans of the radiation oncology industry or targeted drug development on the pharmaceutical side, who have worked at all the who's who companies in the industry and have strong contacts with different hospitals around the world. So our company is a unique investment opportunity for patients, and the clinical advantages are clear. Can that lead to significant survival advantages and significant clinical quality of life advantages? Also, it's a one-and-done therapy, which is extremely rare in cancer. I mentioned before, radiopharmaceuticals, those are typically given six times, six cycles for chemotherapy. If any of you have had loved ones who have had chemotherapy, it's very damaging to the patient and has to be given over a long period of time. It's very rare to have a therapy that is more effective in treating the tumor while being a one-and-done therapy because it's so well tolerated by patients. For hospitals, it can be a very high-margin service line with a high rate of return, providing them access to patients that otherwise they wouldn't get and wouldn't be able to treat with radiation therapy. So we're in the process of raising capital, a $50 million Series C round. We've raised about $200 million in total capital to date in this company, and we're far along in our journey to bring this to patients around the world. Thank you very much. Applause.
