04.10-11.24-HST-Startups-Epicore-Biosystems

JAMES RYAN: All right. Thank you, everyone. So Epicore Biosystems, I am not the founder. And also, unfortunately, I did not go to MIT. I tried. I applied, but for some reason MIT didn't want me. I had to go up the river a little way for my undergrad. But here is our cofounder, Rooz Ghaffari. He not only got into MIT as an undergrad, but he stayed at MIT for his master's and his PhD. So our founding team is very MIT heavy. And as you can see, he's also been awarded many awards from industry and also academia.

So what do we do? We look at sweat. Why do we look at sweat? Two reasons. First, sweat contains a lot of very interesting biomarkers. Also, it's, with our technology, very easy to sample sweat, much easier than it is to sample blood.

There is a lot of evidence available that shows for most biomarkers that you can detect in blood. They're also there in sweat, just at some lower concentrations. However, our technology allows us to accurately measure these biomarkers even from small amounts of sweat. This gives you an idea of the relative concentrations of certain biomarkers in blood and in sweat.

So what have we decided to do with this core technology? We've created three products, three product lines. One of them is under exclusive license to Gatorade. You might have seen it online or in Dick's Sporting Goods, places like that. It's the Gx sweat patch, and it allows athletes to track their fluid loss, to track their chloride concentration, and ensure that they're properly hydrated for optimum athletic performance.

On the left-hand side, you can see we have a continuous hydration monitor, which is primarily aimed at the industrial safety market to keep workers who are working under hot conditions, doing strenuous work, keep them from suffering heat injuries.

For today's audience, I imagine, the more interesting of our products is the one you can see in the middle, which samples sweat noninvasively and then allows you to take that sample and do a variety of benchmark assays, sorry, benchtop assays to determine the concentration of the biomarkers that you're particularly interested in.

We offer the patch for you to use in your own labs, but also we can conduct the analysis as well. So if you tell us what biomarkers you're interested in, and you collect the sweat with the patch, you can send it to us, and we'll do the analytics. And you can see here the device that we use to extract the sweat from the patch after it's been collected on the body.

So we have, obviously, a very strong scientific background. All of our cofounders come from academia. We believe very strongly in peer-reviewed evidence. So you can see that we have published-- this is just one example-- a lot of validation studies for the efficacy of the patch.

In addition to peer-reviewed publications, we also have received many patents, close to a hundred patents, both applied and approved around the world. And we have existing university research partners that we do sweat biomarker research together with.

One real-world application that came out recently, we worked with Lurie Children's Hospital to develop a patch that detects and diagnoses cystic fibrosis in children. So it's a real-world-- sweat, I mentioned, it contains biomarkers. What can you do with those biomarkers? A lot of things. One thing is diagnose cystic fibrosis in children completely noninvasively, very easy. It's not disruptive to the child at all.

So we would love to partner with both pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as consumer products, skincare products, cosmetics companies. I think the primary utilization could be just R&D. I mean, you need to sample biomarkers. You don't want to draw blood. We can work together, help you sample biomarkers just through sweat noninvasively.

However, we'd also love to work with a company or university lab to develop diagnostics similar to our cystic fibrosis diagnostic that use sweat biomarkers to diagnose medical conditions such as you can see here. We know that Alzheimer's and certain cancers are detectable through biomarkers that are present in the sebum and the sweat. So we're next door. You'll recognize me quite easily. I'm the guy with the mask. Please come and talk to me. Thanks.

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