5.10.23-Ecosystem-Stratagen-Bio

SPEAKER: Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Like all these other companies, we were born out of MIT. So I did my PhD here in the Department of Material Science, did a postdoc at the Koch Institute, and then co-founded the company with my academic advisor Professor Michael Cima. So at Stratagen Bio, we are focused on enabling MRI-guided precision cancer care.

So Stratagen Bio started operating out of an incubator space in Boston in fall of 2021. Since then, our team has been growing. We brought Max on as an R&D engineer, Steve heading our software engineering efforts, and Carol on our regulatory and clinical side. We also have a wonderful group of advisors and collaborators.

Joe Frassica is a professor here at MIT and also the former chief medical officer of Philips, Hernan Jara, an expert in quantitative MRI, Paul Nguyen, radiation oncologist out of Dana-Farber, and, most recently, Gunnar Schaefer who just left Flywheel where he was formerly the Chief Technology Officer. We have a great group at Dana-Farber and Brigham Women's where we've been collaborating dating back to my days as a grad student and postdoc here at MIT. Our collaborating hospitals have also grown to include Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

So we have a platform technology that is applicable across a wide range of indications. We're starting in cancer. We're starting in cancer because half of all tumors are oxygen depleted. These oxygen depleted tumors are more resistant to radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy. And it leads to poor outcomes for patients. If you know in advance that the tumor has low oxygen, there are steps we can take to try to combat this. One of them is boosting the radiation dose.

On the flip side, patients that have very well oxygenated tumors can actually get the same therapeutic outcomes in some cases with far reduced doses of radiation. This is work being done by our collaborators at MSK in New York. And they're actually using another oxygen-sensing method right now to cut radiation dose in half for patients with well-oxygenated tumors.

So we're focused on, with our first product, being able to tell clinicians how much oxygen is in tissue. You might ask, why is that needed? So historically, a lot of this data that I've been talking about was collected with needle-based probes. They were great because they gave you the type of data you needed, but they were not good because they were invasive and bulky and lacked spatial context.

The last 20 years or so has been focused on methods to collect oxygen information using imaging platforms, the most popular being PET CT. This is what that group in New York is using. Unfortunately, it's an indirect measurement. It's costly, It requires workflow deviations. Just isn't cutting it. And that's where Stratagen Bio comes in.

Our OxyTrack platform is a seed-based sensor. It's made of medical-grade silicon. They're placed in the body using existing methodologies, and then we read them out using existing MRI scans. The technology is protected by one issued and four pending patents out of MIT.

So you might ask, OK, seed-based sensor that goes in the body, measured with MRI, how is this going to work from a workflow perspective? In the case of radiation therapy, we're already placing a lot in the tumor-- marker seeds and spacers. We're then doing MRI scans. We're using information to plan treatment, and then we're delivering radiation therapy.

So when we say now we're going to introduce Stratagen's technology to the workflow, we can use those same steps for insertion to put our seeds in. We can use those same MRI scans to collect our data. And then we use the data we're collecting in the existing treatment planning process. So today, instead of patients receiving too much dose if they have a well-oxygenated tumor or not enough doses they have a poorly oxygenated tumor, we can fix that.

So what we're building is a platform. We have our seed sensors. We have our software to process our data. The very interesting thing about the software is it's not just useful for processing oxygen data. It can be used to process any form of quantitative MRI data, which is the emerging modality of MRI measurements. We're also building an oxygen data engine that can be used as a repository for all of our data. Those past methodologies I mentioned, everything's collected in a very fractured format. It makes it almost impossible to do scaled studies that truly change how patient care is delivered.

A strategy we're interested in talking with folks across a wide range of companies-- MRI manufacturers, radiation oncology companies, pharma and biotech companies, really anyone where oxygen impacts how patient care is delivered, how decisions are made. We're interested in talking to you. We have a table in the room next door. And I look forward to having a chat if you think this could be interesting for anything you're working on. Thank you very much.