4.4.23-Health-Vivtex

MAUREEN DEEHAN: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Maureen Deehan, the CEO of Vivtex, where we are, as Katrina said, refashioning the way we take medicine. We are an MIT spinout company from Professor Bob Langer's lab, in which my chief scientific officer, Thomas von Erlach, developed the technology I'll now describe.

So we focus on drugs that require needle injection. And these actually make up approximately 40% of the total drug market. And with new biologics becoming available, this is expanding. However, a disadvantage is that there is reduced patient well-being and treatment outcome with this route of administration. And the cost of hospitalization has a burden on the health care system.

So our solution is simple-- it's the ability to take these drugs and transform them into a simple pill. Patients prefer to take medicine by mouth. This also expands the therapeutic use because some of these drugs can be used at an earlier line in therapy. And also, it offers the patent protection. So this slide describes the Vivtex technology, which is a data-driven solution.

We start off with our GI-ORIS platform, which I'll tell you more about in the next slide. We use AI algorithms. And we have a rapid prototyping and animal testing capability. And what we can do is do a high throughput screening with a turnaround time of two weeks, which large pharma organizations take three months to perform.

So our GI-ORIS system is composed of, first of all, we take the GI tract from pigs because this is closest, anatomically, to humans. We then have a device whereby we can take the GI tissue and use it in a microplate format so that we can do high throughput screening. And we have IP for a range of formulations of different excipients that we can combine together and generate the data.

So our proof of concept molecule is an orally bioavailable vancomycin. We have created a simple pill that shows 100-fold increase in bioavailability. And you can see in the graph here, on the y-axis, it's the oral bioavailability in beagle dogs. And on the x, the range of formulations. And what you can see, first of all, the non-formulated, in orange, you can see no oral bioavailability.

The benchmark is a positive control. And I told you, we have these two-week screening campaigns. And that represents the different generations. So you can see that we can actually go from 0% up to 20% bioavailability, which is actually quite compelling. So vancomycin is our main program. We're at the preclinical stage. And we will be available-- so we will be ready to enter the clinic in Q1 2024.

However, we also have an oral insulin program. And we also have an oral antisense oligonucleotide for immunological diseases. We also have collaborations with external partners. And to date, we have two pharma partnerships and one biotech for oral peptide for metabolic diseases. So why I'm here today is to look for further partnerships to fully exploit our platform.

And also, we have the ability to work in a whole range of different types of molecules, including antibody fragments, recombinant proteins, small molecular drugs, and also oligonucleotides. So why partner with us? In addition to having a very robust platform with very strong IP, we also have an experienced management team, who have different exits with different companies. And also two of our board are world-leading experts in oral delivery.

So please feel free to join me in the exhibit hall when you're having lunch. And all it leaves me to say is, thank you for your attention, and bon appetit.