Yongsun Lee Presents S-Alpha Therapeutics at LSI USA '23

Transcription

Yongsun Lee  0:05  

Hello everybody, my name is Youngsun Lee, and I'm the Chief Strategy Officer of S-Alpha Therapeutics, as well as the head of the US office. I'm very thrilled to be here today to introduce our company and the product in our pipeline, or digital therapeutics for children with myopia. All of you here probably know a child who is nearsighted, which is also called myopia. Myopia is a very common eye disease, where you have a blurred distant vision. So when a child has myopia, it can really cause struggles in the children at their school because they have difficulty reading the boards from in the classroom. And also it can affect the children's performance in sports as well. Unfortunately, if a child develops myopia, there is a possibility that it will get worse as they grow. But there are studies showing that if there is an early intervention, there is a chance that you can reduce the severity of the myopia in the later ages. So what cause causes myopia? Myopia is a result of the image being focused in front of the retina. And that is due to the increase of the length of the eyeball, which we measure from the front of the eye to the end of the eye, and which is called axial length. The reason that this increase of axial length happens is that in the lenses are surrounded by a muscle called the ciliary muscle. And this muscle flexes and reflexes when you are focusing, looking for or looking close. So for example, if a child is outside and playing outdoors and looking at things moving around, your eyes will, the ciliary muscle will flex and contract and help them see things like close and look around. But if you the children stay indoors, doing more near work, like reading books and doing work close to their eyes, the ciliary muscles become tense and less flexible. If that happens, when the eyes start to grow, that Fillory tense muscle restricts the growth of the eyeball in causing the eyeball to grow longer than it should. Like for example, if you have a balloon, and if you pinch one corner, then the balloon will grow to the other side. So the only way to help this is to find a way to loosen the ciliary muscle. But so far there is no known way to or help with this symptoms. The currently the prevailing of myopia in United States report in 2014 was about 40% of the people age from 12 to 4054. Had myopia. This trend is expected to grow in the opposite direction, and by year 2050. About more than half of the US population in this age group will have myopia. But what is more shocking and surprising is that in Asian countries, such as Singapore, South Korea or Japan, over 90% of the children, school aged children are becoming myopia. And we don't really know what's the reason. But one of the things that we can think about this that the needle work staying indoors too much, and studying and not having enough light can cause the high incidence of this myopia and this result can be a warning signal for US because eventually this trend will be the trend for us myopic population as well. As the current treatment options are very limited. There eyedrops called atropine that can use in a low concentration can slow the progression of myopia. But still, the mechanism of action is unknown. Experimental step spectacles are developed, but their clinical significance is still unclear. FDA has approved bifocal contact lenses called bisight and also an ortho K, which is a hard contact lens that you wear at night that can reshape your cornea. But those contact lenses like other contact lenses have a high risk of infection. And it's very difficult to use in younger children, causing a low may or low compliance of using this contact lenses. So knowing that there's no safe and effective treatment for pediatric myopia, and really, there's no treatment that addresses the underlying defect. Our team Let's get together and founded our company S-Alpha Therapeutics. So our company started with a CEO who has a global pharmaceutical company experience, and also Dr. Jung Jin Kim. He's an ophthalmologist who develops and provides strategy for our product development. And our team has now grown to 40 people, and over half of our employees are software engineers that help develop our applications. As for today, we have raised 20 million US dollars through seed from seed to Series B funding rounds. I will also establish the US office in San Francisco, where we are overlooking and conduct the exploratory clinical study in us. So this is the solution. So what we are developing is called my site am I setting noon. It is a software as a medical device that has a feature like a video game, so that the kids can play with it and have a higher compliance by providing reward systems. This is the mechanism of action is tried to modulate the factors that are involved in the myopia progression. And it also has eye tracking. And then we can check the compliance in real time. So the physician can see how the kids are using this applications. So what does the game actually do? So the game is to intended to provide a simulated environment that looks like outdoors, that you can actually do it indoors. And the technology for our mindset T has been issued in United States, and the theoretical background of our technology has been published in a peer reviewed journal. To test that our technology really works. We conducted a proof of concept clinical study in South Korea. As you know, there is over 80% of prevalence in South Korea with myopia. So we enrolled total six, six patients, and 30 of the patients were asked to use our MySATY app. At the end of the treatment, we measure the length of the actual length, and also check the doctors to see if there's any increase or decrease of their eyes or vision. From the result, what did we see, we saw a very promising effect of MySATY for inhibiting the elongation of the axial length. From our treatment group, we saw about 38% inhibition of the axial length, which also correlated with the lesser drop of the doctors. And this MySATY didn't show any adverse events showing that is very safe for children to use. And the children really enjoyed using our application more than 70% of the total six months treatment period. So our future plan is that once we complete our Korea studies that we will run a bigger clinical trial to get a Korea's regulatory approval. And we are also conducting the exploratory study in US which will have the final data by early next year. We're planning to launch our product in Korea and US market in 2025. And for that reason, we are really looking to collaborate with global partners who are interested in either licensing out or becoming our financial investors or even strategic investors. So the vision of our company is that every child in the world should have a chance to not be nearsighted. So with this goal in mind, we are striving to help manage myopia one child at a time and thank you for your attention.