10.10.23-Showcase-Seoul-Cellino

WILLIE T. REAVES, JR: [SPEAKING KOREAN] I'm the Chief of Staff at Cellino where we are working to make a healthier world, using personalized human cells. Cellino is a cell therapy technology platform company based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which we heard a good bit about earlier. And we are based at the Engine, MIT's accelerator.

Imagine for a moment that we could not only treat, but also cure chronic degenerative diseases like Parkinson's, diabetes, and heart disease, using a patient's own cells safely and effectively. That's the future that we are creating at Cellino. So as you see on your left, cell therapies are leading to cures in their early days.

However, they're inaccessible to most patients due to the high cost of cell manufacturing. And Cellino's goal is to really revolutionize this manufacturing process, bringing additional automation and removing many manual steps. There are several challenges with this process of culturing cells. And Cellino uses a special type of cell called IPSCs, or Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.

And you can start with a mature sample like a blood sample or a skin sample, change that into IPSCs, and then program those IPSCs to become whatever cell type is needed to treat a whole variety of diseases. Now there are several key challenges with the IPSC generation process today. As you see here, there are many manual steps.

First, the scientist is individually culturing cell colonies and running imaging analysis by eye. All of this process is very expensive, because it does not scale and requires an entire clean room for just one patient. And ultimately that limits the scalability of this entire process. And there's variability from scientist to scientist, which makes it difficult to reproduce.

Now this tree shows the incredible potential of IPSCs to be used to treat a whole variety of chronic degenerative diseases, by being turned into many different cell types. However, all of these leaves and branches that you see here, they're all dependent on being able to reliably generate the IPSCs first, because they are the trunk of the tree. There are clinical trials in progress for several of these disease areas. And Cellino is in discussions with potential partners, working on diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and age-related macular degeneration.

Now here on your left, we see one of Cellino's automated work cells, which is generating patient specific IPSCs today. And it's doing all of this in a very automatic fashion. In the center here, you see a little bit more about Cellino's process. We use machine learning algorithms that are image-guided to predict which cell colonies are best to select. And then the laser, as you see here, zaps the cells that are not wanted, leaving only the highest quality ones.

All of this happens in a closed container to reduce the manual manipulation risk that we saw in the earlier videos from moving cells around with a pipette. Now here on the right side is the closed GMP system that we are currently designing. And the goal here is that each of these purple cassettes is an individual patient sample. And what that means is that it would allow us to process thousands of patient samples at once, as opposed to today's standard of needing an entire clean room for each patient.

Our goal is to create GMP compatible versions of these that can be geographically distributed from Korea to the United States to elsewhere, all around the world, where patients need it most. Now we're thrilled to have an active collaboration with Dr. Kapil Bharti of the National Institutes of Health, and more specifically the National Eye Institute. Dr. Bharti's lab is running comparability studies on IPSCs generated using Cellino's automated platform versus IPSCs created the manual and artisanal way that we've been seeing.

Now this is an important time to point out that there are several key advantages to IPSCs and specifically this personalized approach. So in cell therapy broadly there are two approaches. One is personalized or autologous, where a patient's own cells are used to treat them. And the alternative is off-the-shelf or allogeneic, where one patient's cells are used to treat multiple patients.

Now at Cellino, we are focused on the personalized approach. And there are several reasons for that. One is that it is ultimately safest for patients, because there's an extremely low risk of your immune system rejecting the cells, because they are your own cells. Hence our tagline of your cells, your cure.

Another reason is that the personalized approach allows the greatest effectiveness for people of all backgrounds, because it does not require a donor match, which can often be hard to find even among family members. So as you can see, there's a lot of value with this autologous or personalized approach. And our goal at Cellino is really to bring scalable biomanufacturing to the production of personalized cell therapies.

And many other companies have sought to improve on one piece or another piece of the IPSC generation process. But Cellino's combination of machine learning, laser physics, and stem cell biology is unique and will bring scalability for the first time to this field with curative potential. Now, why are we interested in Korea? Several reasons, other than the fact that I used to live in Daegu, not so far away.

One is that the South Korean government has put a tremendous focus in recent years on personalized regenerative medicine. There is the National Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Institute here in Korea, and even not far away in Incheon there is the Songdo Bio Cluster, among other Bio Clusters that the country has established and is working toward establishing. And as we can see here, Korea has one of the world's most rapidly aging populations.

And so IPSC-based therapies that can treat chronic diseases, especially for elderly patients, make the country an excellent candidate for these therapies to treat patients. At Cellino we're looking forward to our automated platform bringing scalability for the first time and really enabling the personalized cell therapy market to take off. We are interested in partnerships across industry and academia for a variety of cell types and a number of different disease areas.

That's part of the magic of IPSCs is you're not limited to any one disease area. I would be delighted to continue discussions with anyone out in the hall after the presentations have finished. We are thrilled to be here at LG Science Park and I hope to engage with many of you after the presentations. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]