4.28.23-Korea-Gensaic

LAVI ERISSON: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking both MIT and KPBMA for the opportunity to travel to Korea, observe the marvel of Korean spa, and finally present Gensaic. My name is Lavi Erisson. I am Gensaic's CEO and co-founder. Gensaic is a programmable genomic medicines company with a mission to treat patients with genetic disease and provide global access to genomic medicines.

Gensaic was founded by three MIT alums and spun out of MIT in 2021. Our scientific co-founder is Angela Belcher, the Chair of Bioengineering at MIT, and Professor Amin Hajitou, professor, head of Targeted Therapeutics at ICL. We're also really privileged to have a deeply experienced board of directors consisting of Dr. Jeremy Levin, who is the CEO of Ovid Therapeutics but previous CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals, as well as head of ventures for Novartis, and Dr. Briggs Morrison, who is a partner at MPM capital and the previous Chief Medical Officer at AstraZeneca.

The challenge that Gensaic is trying to solve is precision delivery of genomic medicine. Precision delivery is the challenge of our era and probably the greatest bottleneck to clinical translation of genomic medicines. Immense investment and innovation had poured into this challenge. And meaningful progress had been made, but true to date, there is no FDA approved IV-delivered genomic medicine that can access any other tissue outside deliver. The clinical and commercial value in solving this challenge and expanding the therapeutic window for genomic medicines in tissues like the brain, the heart, or the bone marrow is enormous, and this is what Gensaic is about.

Gensaic's discovery thesis is that biological networks are too complex to design rationally. Instead our technology relies on the unbiased premise of natural evolution accessing the incredible diversity of our genome, and then, more importantly, letting it compete with the only clinically relevant selection pressure of an in-vivo system biology. To do that, Gensaic is leveraging its FORGE platform, consisting of three pillars.

The first is a protein barcoding technology that links sequence motifs to delivery function. The second is a machine learning-guided design, which harvests and learns from this data, and then finally a massive parallel in-vivo evolution campaign that is run across multiple tissues at the same time. Together we believe the FORGE platform is the most scalable, clinically translatable, and cost efficient delivery platform in development.

With that, let me take you one step deeper into our technology. The FORGE process starts with a DNA encoded capsid that can receive any DNA input and program trillions of different protein variants. Each protein variant or combination of protein variants is displayed on an individual capsid. That very same capsid carries a genetic cassette with both a DNA and RNA barcode, which allows us to connect between the protein barcode and the actual delivery function into cell and subcellular compartments.

In turn, we allow these trillions of barcoded proteins to compete against both in-vitro and in-vivo selection pressure, evolving only the ones that survive and are able to select one tissue over the other. In this process we generate enormous amount of high-content data linking sequence motifs and feature sets with ground truth measurements of both manufacturing efficiency, tissue by distribution, and intracellular trafficking. This high-content data is used to train generative machine learning models that predict sequences that are outside our sample search through space, but still have a delivery function.

In summary, the result is an AI-powered discovery engine that can evolve highly diverse genetic libraries to discover new mechanisms of delivery into tissue and cell nuclei. Connecting FORGE to therapeutics, remember that the product of our program is tissue programmed proteins that can be paired with any biomedicine, genetic or other. And that is really the blue sky strategy of our company.

Currently Gensaic is focused on two genomic medicines asset classes. The first is the FORGE gene delivery, which consists of a proprietary phage-derived particle. This is a non-viral vector that is immune-silent, can carry over 20 KB of DNA, and has no intrinsic tissue tropism. The second is FORGE oligonucleotides, which is targeted nucleic acid therapeutics that can traffic into difficult-to-access tissues and affect aberrant protein translation.

Taking these two asset classes into account, our therapeutic vision is systemic delivery of genomic medicines into tissues that are the CNS, lung, and muscle. All three tissues are extremely difficult to access and offer a high unaddressed clinical need and commercial opportunity. Our therapeutic vision is deeply connected with our business model. In this model, we partnered with biopharma and foundations alongside having and advancing an organic pipeline of our own.

The logic is quite simple. By partnering, we get to diversify our development risk. We get to access therapeutic expertise. And we also get to generate non-dilutive capital to grow our own operation.

In that vein, we've been able to partner, create our first partnership with Ovid Therapeutics in 2022 and received funding from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in early 2023. We've also been very fortunate to receive recognition as an innovative company through multiple competitions. These include awards from Novo Nordisk and BioMarin, with whom we have active dialogues on future collaboration.

Presenting to you here in Seoul, I'm in awe by the level of growth and investment Korea's biotech industry has experienced over the last few years. This is evident both in the commercial growth of exports, as well as, for example, in Korea's commitment to global vaccine access. The confluence of innovative science, sophisticated CDMO, and importantly government commitment, positions Korea biotech industry to become one of the global leaders in cell and gene therapy.

And this brings me to Gensaic. Over the last 12 months or so, we've had initial discussions with companies in Asia, Korea and Japan included, and would love to extend these conversations into real partnerships. If you are looking to target the genomic medicine in your own pipeline, I invite you to reach out to me outside at the booth and would love to talk further. Thank you for the hospitality, your time, and the opportunity to present our vision of programmable genomic medicines. It's been a pleasure.