10.5.23-Showcase-Tokyo-Cellino

WILLIE T. REAVES, JR.: Hello, everyone. My name is Willie Reaves and I'm chief of staff at Cellino, where our vision is to enable healthier lives worldwide with personalized human cells. Cellino is a cell therapy technology platform company based in Kendall Square, an area we've been hearing much about, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

To set the stage, imagine a future where chronic degenerative diseases like heart disease and diabetes and Parkinson's could be not only treated, but cured in a safe and effective way for patients. That is the future that we are building at Cellino.

As you can see here, cell therapies are leading to cures in their early days. However, they are largely inaccessible to the vast majority of people due to the high cost of artisanal manufacturing. Cellino's goal is to significantly increase access to personalized cell therapies by dramatically improving upon the manufacturing process.

Cellino's technology uses induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, or iPSCs, which can be derived from a mature tissue sample like a blood or skin sample. And then those iPSCs can be programmed into a whole host of different cell types to treat a wide variety of diseases. Dr. Shinya Yamanaka from Kyoto University really paved the path for this with the 2012 Nobel Prize for discovering that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from mature cells.

Now what you can see here are a lot of manual things. And this is describing several of the key challenges with iPSC generation today. First, it's super manual. A scientist is individually evaluating cell colonies by hand, doing image analysis by eye.

Two, it's very expensive because these manual techniques simply don't scale. And three, there's high variability because this artisanal process does not track well from scientists to scientist, which results in lower cell yields than we'd be able to achieve with a more automated process.

Now here, this-- I'm going to walk around just a little bit. This is my favorite part. This is the tree that shows so many different disease areas that can be positively affected by iPSC-based therapies. But one of the important things to note here is for all of these disease areas, they all depend on being able to reliably generate iPSCs first. That is the trunk of the tree.

Now there are two main approaches in cell therapy, autologous, or personalized, where of the patient is their own donor. And allogeneic, or off-the-shelf, where one patient's cells go to many patients. At Cellino, we're particularly focused on the autologous approach for a couple of reasons.

One of those is that it does not require immunosuppression. And that carries a lifetime cost for patients and doesn't work for everyone, especially the elderly. Two is autologous is effective for people of all backgrounds because it doesn't require a donor match, which can be hard to find even among family members. And three is it's safest for patients. There's a very, very low risk of immune system rejection because the cells are derived from your own cells.

Now here on the left, you can see one of the automated systems that Cellino currently has running in our facilities in Cambridge. This automated system is generating iPSCs right now as we speak. Now Cellino's platform automates many of those manual processes that we just saw in the other videos by using machine learning algorithms to predict which cell colonies are the best to keep.

And then the laser, as you see here, comes in, zaps the undesirable cells, leaving the healthiest ones in place that are likely to turn correctly into the best cell type. And this all happens in a single container, reducing the risk of contamination from manual processes.

Now here on the right, is a future system that we're currently designing. And the goal here is really to be able to tremendously scale up access to cell therapies. Each one of these purple boxes is an individual patient sample. So it allows us to deploy the technology in a high-grade clean room and process thousands of patient samples in parallel, as opposed to the standard from today, where you need an individual clean room for every single patient.

So other companies have sought to improve upon bits and pieces of this process, automation here and there. But Cellino's combination of stem cell biology, laser physics, and machine learning is unique and will bring scale to a potentially curative industry.

Now we're very excited to have an active collaboration with Dr. Kapil Bharti of the National Eye Institute, which is a division of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bharti is using-- leading the first United States autologous iPSC clinical trial to generate retinal pigment epithelial cells for the treatment of age-related macular degeneration, a form of vision loss.

Dr. Bharti's lab is running comparability studies on iPSCs generated using Cellino's automated platform versus iPSCs created the manual and artisanal way. And the big goal here is for Dr. Bharti to be able to use Cellino's platform for the later stages of his clinical trial. We're also in discussions with leading autologous iPSC cell therapy developers working on a variety of cell types in a couple of disease areas, including, but not limited to, heart disease, diabetes, and Parkinson's.

Now thinking about Japan, the government of Japan for a number of years has really put a strong flag in the sand on leading and being a leader in the regenerative medicine space. The PDMA has put in place a strong regulatory environment for cell therapies and regenerative medicine, which is one of the many reasons that Japan is such an excellent market for autologous iPSC-based cell therapies.

Additionally, Japan has one of the world's most rapidly aging populations. And so many of these chronic diseases that are affecting patients are particularly debilitating for elderly populations. So what we see here is that Cellino would be really interested in developing biomanufacturing locations here in Japan and elsewhere.

Cellino's biomanufacturing system will dramatically accelerate the development of potentially curative cell therapies that will really change the way that we think about health forever. And we want to combat the chronic diseases affecting hundreds of millions of patients globally. We're targeting industry and academic collaborations and would be happy to discuss with any biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, or others, manufacturers, that are interested in the personalized regenerative medicine space.

We hope to engage with everyone here. And I'm very much looking forward to speaking with you afterwards in the exhibit space. We'd love to further discuss Cellino's platform. Again, I'm Willie Reaves with Cellino, where we are working to bring your cells, your cure, and make it a reality for patients. Thank you.