6.15.23-STEX-CA-C2Sense

SPEAKER: Good morning. My name is Robert Deans. I'm CTO of C2Sense. C2Sense is a sensing company that spun out of Tim Swager's lab in the chemistry department at MIT. We're primarily focused on the field of diagnostics.

And if you look at the field the diagnostics, it really hasn't changed in decades, to be perfectly honest. You've got a very slow turnaround times and you've got essentially workflows that are very, very cumbersome. If you look at near patient testing, there's really two camps. There's two scenarios. You've got your minute clinics, you've got your doctor's offices, your urgent care centers where there's incumbent devices, which are expensive, closed loops. So they only read to their assays. But the biggest problem is they're designed around the health care professional mindset. This is a big issue, obviously. It's very complicated.

If you look at near patient testing, you've got existing companies. You've got your Labcorps. You've got your [? Quests of the world. ?] And then you've got up and comers like Everly Well. These solve some of the problems being convenient, but the problem is they're still very expensive and the turnaround times haven't really been impacted by these solutions. We believe that the availability of an at home digitally collected, digitally connected solution that can analyze any lateral flow assay or any rapid test is going to really be a game changer.

So think about it. If you need to intervene in the critical first 48 hours when you've got the flu, you want to diagnose you've got the flu. You want to intervene while the drugs still work. This scenario isn't going to work for you. If you want to figure out if your kids have a bacterial versus a viral infection so you can get antibiotics, this is what we're here to solve.

About two years ago, we came up with our technology, which is essentially embedded into every one of your phones. You just don't really know about it right now. Essentially the way these imaging chips collect their data is using the rolling shutter mechanism typically. If you think about that, it means that every roll of photodiodes is sequentially exposed as it collects its image.

That means every raw pixels in that image is a unique slice of time. And we take advantage of that. So we use this rolling shutter mechanism. You couple it with pulsed light sources, materials that have the proper optical properties, and then software to analyze the results. You can do some quite exquisite sensing modalities, including time resolved spectroscopy.

So this is just some examples to kind of show you some of the things we can do with the technology, particularly here for sensing. On the left panel, what we have is we have a superposition where we've deposited a blue fast emitting dye and a red slow emitting dye to a surface. Now, all we're doing is we're taking a regular CMOS imaging chip in iPhone 11 and we're interrogating it with a pulsed light source. When the LED is on, you see a superposition of the two missions. Not very useful. It's very difficult, very cluttered data there.

As soon as the LED turns off, the blue faster method decays the background almost immediately. But the red slow method keeps going. So we analyzed that dark band and we can use our algorithm to positively identify the material based on its lifetime. So beyond solids, we have in the middle panel we have, we can [? essentially ?] barcode liquids. You think of it that way, where what you see visually when you hit it with blacklight versus what the camera sees with this pulsed UV is completely different, as you can see from the candy cane picture in the top right.

The video that's looping around is another manifestation of this. It gives you a better visualization of what is possible with this technology. We have a large vial with a green fast emitter into which we place the small vial of a red slow emitter and then we're sweeping past. When the LED on band sweeps past, you see only that green emission, none of the red. But as soon as the dark band goes by, you see that red emission really pop in a dark background.

And that's what we can use for both sensing, diagnostics, and also for anti-counterfeiting capabilities, as shown in the right where we've essentially put these materials into-- just printed them into codes. And we can make covert codes that look completely different under ambient light, under UV light, and under pulsed UV.

For diagnostics, if this advances. There we go. For diagnostics, we've created the system we call Halo, which is a low cost reader that you can deploy at the home and essentially read any lateral flow assay. Well, it's called metric fluorescence or time gated.

Sponsored by the Army, we've taken this Halo system and fluorescent amino acid, particularly in this case around COVID detection, through a third party testing where we've shown quite exquisite sensitivity and essentially best in class price versus performance. In follow on testing with the incumbent system for health care professional for your minute clinics of the world, we showed similar performance, which is quite remarkable since that device retails for about $1,800 to $2,000. Ours is $60 or $70 instrument.

Beyond COVID, we've shown similar performance improvements with other acids for other analytes, whether it's other viruses, whether it's biomarkers, whether it's toxins, cadmium, lead, you name it. Really the world's your oyster here. And we're currently working with a number of diagnostic companies to deploy our solution, including evaluation agreements with two of the three biggest diagnostic companies.

In addition, recently, we won a RADx [? Tech 3 ?] award to commercialize a COVID/flu A/B at home test using our Halo system. And that's in combination with a company called Princeton BioMeditech in New Jersey.

Finally, I'd like to finish off by thanking you for your attention and asking you to reach out if anything here has peaked your interest and you're interested in either licensing our technology and/or co-developing products. Thank you.