Video Transcription
Yaron David 00:02
Hello, everyone. My name is Yaron David, and I'm the CEO of LifeCord. LifeCord developed a minimal, invasive approach for an open heart surgery cord repair treatment to bring a transcatheter alternative to low-risk patients. So as we know, microaggregation is separating the two main groups. One of them is functional, the other one is degenerative. The most common finding in degenerative is elongation of the cords, or even rupture of those cords. It affects 2% of the population, and out of the degenerative, out of the mitral world, 45% is degenerative. But unfortunately, there is no really good way to fix those cords, and right now, the only option to fix those cords is open heart surgery. Right now, in the US market, we're talking about around 200,000 newly diagnosed DMR patients, adults each year. And out of that, around 14% are in a high-risk category, meaning those patients right now cannot really undergo any open heart surgery and cannot really be treated for cord repair. But we know from previous work that many minimal invasive options are really good and show lower morbidity and mortality. So this is why I want to present LifeCord. So LifeCord is a transseptal approach. We're going to go through the septum and go down into the left ventricle. We're going to clip on the leaflet, and then we're going to go down with our anchor and attach it to the ventricle wall. After that, we're going to actually optimize the length between the clip and the anchor in order to optimize the regurgitation. And the last thing that we need to do is actually cut the remains of the wire and go out, and there you have it. This is LifeCord. So we have some really cool features here, and I think the most important one is that we're able to reposition our clip. By repositioning, if we need to move the clip to actually get a better or optimized regurgitation, we can do that. The reason that we can actually move the clip is not only because it's small, but also because we are actually not puncturing the leaflet. So by moving it, we're not harming the tissue at all. With adding those two parts together, we're actually keeping the anatomical structure intact. And because this device is very, very small, we are also giving an option for future intervention if we need that.
Yaron David 03:44
So we already did extensive testing. We conducted fatigue testing and GLP acute and chronic studies that showed tremendous results in animals, and we're looking forward to moving forward to our first-in-human trials in 2025. We're going to do our first-in-human trial and EFS in 2026. We have already established two DRG codes, and the average of them is around $40,000. When we look at the market size, of course, the market size is big, but the idea is actually to go from those high-risk patients, get the efficacy, and then move to the moderate and even to the low-risk patients and be the first line of treatment for those patients without needing to go for open heart surgery. Our product is highly protected. We have 21 patent families. We're connected from the proximal to the distal end, and we feel very confident about the technology. We have a very experienced team, including Tomer, who runs the R&D, and his team, along with a multinational team of physicians that actually validate the technology and help us improve it. To summarize, we're actually addressing a major unmet need. The unmet need is to eliminate the need for surgery, to eliminate the need to do open heart surgery. We're going to start with those high-risk patients, and we're going to move to the low-risk patients because we feel that this technology can actually do that and still provide an option for future intervention. We did an amazing de-risking of the technology, and right now, we're raising a round of $9 million; out of that, already $5 million is secured. So if you want to join us, please do. Thank you very much.
