Kytopen

PAULO GARCIA: I am Paulo Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Kytopen. Really what we're doing is we're facilitating the delivery of genetic material into cells in a non-viral manner. That means we're not using viruses to introduce the genetic material into cells. And this has applications in biotechnology and also in facilitating cures for diseases, in which the engineered cells are the actual living medicines.

Delivery of genetic material into cells can be done either via viruses or viral delivery or via physical forces, and that is non-viral delivery. And viral delivery can be slow, it can be very expensive, and it does require some significant capital infrastructure in order to manipulate the cells with the viruses.

Because of those drawbacks, there's been significant interest in developing non-viral delivery alternatives, that involve physical forces in order to introduce genetic material into the cells. Some are leveraging electrical energy, some are leveraging mechanical energy, others are physically injecting the genetic material with physical devices, and there's even chemical delivery technologies.

All of those solutions may have potential benefits and drawbacks in order to introduce the genetic material into the cells. And the solution that we have to deliver actually capitalizes on the benefits of all of them. We're looking for either therapeutic partners, or collaborators, or academic pioneers that potentially have access to genetic material that can help accelerate the potential treatment of these diseases, by leveraging our delivery methodologies.

We have been pretty active in engaging with potential collaborators in industry and are very pleased with the influx of interest, because of the challenges that are abundant in terms of the delivery of genetic material, particularly in hard to transfect cells.

We currently have an active paid optimization engagement, in which we have received cells and payload from our partner and we are optimizing the conditions for manufacturing of their own cell therapies. But really the long-term goal is to translate those initial paid engagements into long-term clinical manufacturing partnerships, in which we can accelerate their time to clinic and reduce the cost of manufacturing of these very promising therapies.

So we're looking forward to having a device that can be placed in these partners facilities and help accelerate their developmental efforts. We believe that the biggest breakthrough that we can achieve is to engineer CAR T cells in a completely non-viral manner that leverages the flowfect technology.

These will be able to impact directly patients' lives, by reducing the time that it takes to manufacture these cell therapies and also reducing the cost associated with these in a curative single dose therapies that have so much impact but that are currently very expensive for the patients.

One of the applications in CAR T cells involves using DNA as the genetic payload in combination with others. And a challenge that the industry has as a whole is the fact that DNA can be toxic to cells. So if we have access to some therapeutically relevant DNA and at some time in our hands, we would start by investigating the toxicity issue of these payload and see if with our platform we can generate some impactful results without having to use a lot of the DNA.

So tackling that toxicity would be the first step. Once we tackle that toxicity issue if we had more time, and then we would look at engineering CAR T cells in a completely non-viral manner. And CAR T cells again, are tackling liquid cancer, these are the leukemias and lymphomas of the world.

But liquid cancers are only 20% of all of the cancers that exist. So that's where we will go if we had additional time and resources. At the end of the day where we really want to be if we want to tackle that additional 80% of cancer, which are the solid tumors.

There are applications and cell therapies that are emerging that leverage all their cell types, such as natural killer cells, for example, that have the potential to treat solid tumors, and that is the direction that we will be pursuing over the next 12 months.

So the goal would be to reduce DNA toxicity, go after that liquid cancers, there are 20% of cancer, and then go after the solid tumors, which is the remaining 80%. Solid tumors actually have a soft part of my heart, because for my PhD I was developing a minimally invasive therapy to kill solid tumors in the brain and we achieved some pretty exciting results.

So we are excited to continue developing our platform and eventually test the efficacy of a completely non-viral workflow, in order to see if we can provide the same or better experience for the patient with these non-viral engineered therapies.

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