2024 MIT Health Science Forum: Lightning Talk - Vivtex

MAUREEN DEEHAN: So at Vivtex, what we do is we take drugs that normally cannot be absorbed by the GI tract and get into the systemic circulation. And we take these drugs-- they normally have to be given by IV-- and we transform them into a tablet, into a simple pill. And when the slides are up, I can jump to the main part and show you that, how can we do this?

Well, first of all, the reason why we do it is that, currently, over 40% of the drugs on the market are large molecules. And Maria's presentation touched on this earlier. And so basically, the size limits them getting across the GI tract. So with the market expanding in these areas, it's very, very important to give patients the choice to be able to take the medicine orally, and that's our vision at Vivtex.

So we work with different biotech and pharma companies who have new drugs that cannot get across the GI tract. So we work with biotech and pharma companies who have drugs that cannot get across the GI tract to make them into oral pills. So the challenge, as I said, is that it's a large number of drugs, and our vision is to give patients the choice.

And the benefit for the patients, also touched by Maria earlier, is that you avoid needle pain, safety issues. There is a higher patient adherence. But also the ability to take a tablet at home really has a positive impact on the health care system. And also there are advantages for pharma.

There's a larger patient population, a market that they can tap into. It also expands the IP protection for that molecule, and often it gives competitive advantage for a particular pharma company in a particular therapeutic area. So the Vivtex Engine is depicted in this slide, and there are three main components.

So if you focus on the top left hand corner, we have high throughput GI assay system, physiologically relevant, called the GI-ORIS, and we have multiple Nature publications that show validation. And what we essentially do is we can test the ability of thousands of compounds per day, their ability to get across the GI tract. So we use pig GI tract, and we also have access to human GI tract tissue.

Moving to the right hand side, we've now got over 130,000 data points. And so what we can do, then, is interrogate the data, use AI models and in-house expertise, to look at a particular compound and predict what type of chemicals that we can add as a combination and a formulation to help that compound get across the GI tract. And then down at the bottom, what we also have is we have our own IP on a range of different formulations that we've identified.

And it's the combination of all three that enables-- if you look at the orange box, we're primarily working on peptides. We can also work on oligonucleotides and smaller proteins. But this system enables us to take something that has to be given to a patient, a needle, to make it orally bioavailable. So why can we do this and other people can't?

Because we have the GI-ORIS platform, the high throughput system, we can test thousands of compounds a day. Normally, other companies have to do that in vivo studies, and that can take years to test this number of compounds. Again, we-- I've said we've got the rapidly growing database, which is an advantage. Other companies don't have that or organizations. And also we've got our own drug delivery IP that we can use, and other people are limited to what's out there in the public domain.

So now I want to just share quickly a couple of case studies of data that we've produced using our platform. So here I've got four different molecules, and we're looking at the oral bioavailability of liquid formulations in a rat PK model. The y-axis is the oral bioavailability, and the x is the different compounds with different formulations. So on the left hand side, if we look at the-- vancomycin is an antibiotic, and normally it has got a really low oral bioavailability.

We use a benchmark formulation that everyone can use out there, and it's called sodium caprate. And what you can see here is that with that benchmark formulation, you get very low oral bioavailability of vancomycin. With our formulation identified, we can produce a 15-fold increase. One of our partner compounds for a cyclic peptide, looking at the second graph, you can see that we actually increased from benchmark with our formulation. We've got a four-fold increase.

For the second partner compound, we've actually had a 40-fold increase. And then I included the semaglutide data here because I'm sure everyone in the room knows about GLP-1 agonist, is reading all the information out there at the moment. And what we managed to do is, taking Novo Nordisk semaglutide, if we add a benchmark formulation, the C10, versus what we have in-house with our Vivtex formulation, we've got a 10-fold increase in oral bioavailability.

So I'm sure that the data that I'm showing to you just now has convinced you that our Vivtex Engine does work. And so the ask today is we have some partnerships already established. We've already got seven partnerships. And the partnerships can be either a formulation partnership, whereby a partner comes to us and says, I've got this really interesting compound. It shows efficacy, but it has to be given as an IV at the moment.

Can you work with us to give us an oral? And today, this year, in 2024, we've got multiple partnerships. Only some of them are in the public domain. We announced earlier this year that we had a partnership with Astellas for such a program. And last week a press release out that we're working with Equillium, a company on the West Coast, developing immune related disease molecules.

And then the second type of technology-- sorry, partnership we look for is a strategic technology partnership. So what we can do is, if a company has a particular type of molecule, so, for example, last week, again, a press release out about Orbis medicines, who are funded by Novo Seeds, they have cyclic peptides. And they want to work with us so that we can help them develop orally bioavailable. And AI Proteins is another company in this area, a Boston-based company, who have many proteins which are surrogate antibodies.

So we're also working with them. So I'm interested if anyone in the room has got any potential projects, whether it's formulation or strategic technology, I'd be happy to speak to you. And why should you partner with us? Because we have a very experienced team, spearheaded by myself, a solid board of directors, and global experts as scientific advisors.

So again, apologies for the technical difficulty, and hopefully you understand what we're doing. And if anyone wants to speak to me at lunch break or reach out to me after, I'd be happy to discuss with you.

[APPLAUSE]