Jeff Amacker Presents TibaRay at LSI Europe '23

Transcription

Jeff Amacker  0:05  
I'm delighted to be able to talk to you about a breakthrough that we have, that's going to make a dramatic difference in radiation oncology, and then help millions of cancer patients. So first, let's start with some numbers. Why not out of two and one out of three, significance of those numbers, one out of two men, and one out of three women will get cancer in their lifetimes. I mean, we're medtech conference, we all know. But when you see the numbers, it's still just stunning, the breadth of the problem. The sixth thing people don't really realize is that 60% of those patients get radiation therapy. Radiation therapy is a mainstay of taking care of cancer patients. There's a huge market $7 billion a year growing at 6% per year, likely to continue to grow at 6% per year, we most likely will end up getting acquired as an exit, but we're not running the business that way, we're running it as though we go the hard way. So there's a problem. Problem is that radiation therapy is too slow. You go in to get your radiotherapy treatment, it takes a few minutes, while that treatment is happening, your tumor moves around. We treat large volumes of healthy tissue to make sure that we hit the tumor. And so we're doing extra collateral damage to the patient radiotherapy naturally does collateral damage, and that the damage we do in treating cancer patients is what limits us from being able to cure them. And that's true of all modalities of treatment of cancer. And it's inefficient, going in for many, many treatments and having the slow treatments, not very many patients are treated on each machine. So what are we going to do about that we're gonna treat cancer in a fraction of a second, curing cancer in a flash. By doing that, see the cancer treat it, we don't have to treat extra volumes of healthy tissue, we get to treat just the tumor with small margins around it. It also takes advantage of better radiobiology. So if you treat same dose to the tumor, you'll do the same damage to the tumor if you treat it very quickly, but you do much less damage to the normal tissue, again, saving the healthy tissue so that we can do more damage to the cancer. That's really what we're all about. It also turns out that it's more efficient, faster treatment is more efficient, it's much more efficient, we'll be able to treat twice as many patients on our machine as is currently treated. So how do we do this? You know, how come somebody hasn't done this before because it's hard. It required a breakthrough in linear accelerator technology out of the SLAC National Accelerator lab in California to even make this possible. We then take 16 of these accelerators that had given us 30 times more beam current out of each accelerator, put them in a ring around the patient and focus all the energy from all those accelerators on the tumor all at once. And boom in a fraction of a second you treated the tumor. So here's an example. This is a 25 grade lung cancer treatment. It's it's being treated on a Varian TrueBeam. Doing gated rapid arc, this is top of the line radiotherapy today's state of state of the art. The accelerator is that running. Yes, the accelerator is underneath the patient radiation is coming up through the patient's back. This large gantry will rotate around the patient. You can see the gantry moving it rotates around the patient and the rates to spread the radiation out and bring it in from all the all sides of the patient. This treatment will go on for another three minutes. In contrast, there's the temporary treatment. We're done. No time for your tumor to move around, get to take advantage of the better radiobiology it's a more efficient treatment. This is going to make a big difference in cancer care. So I'm honored to be part of an unbelievable team across the middle here are the five founders. Two of them are out of the SLAC National Accelerator lab. We don't just have licensed the technology we have the people and three of them are from Stanford Healthcare, out of radiation oncology, they're all thought leaders in their respective fields. They brought me in two and a half years ago because I spent 28 years at Varian Medical Systems. I was the leader of the worldwide engineering team there in the late 90s. Got an MBA, switched over to the business side grew their treatment planning business up from scratch to a quarter of a billion dollar a year. market leading behemoth. Arun Ganguly, she also brings a mix of academic and commercial experience out of Varian and Verrix. The engineering team reports to her she's handling the day to day thing activities back at the plant while I'm out here talking to you guys. A great CFO, lots and lots of startup experience very helpful to keep us on track, great team of advisors. IP, we have 15 issued patents exclusive license from Stanford for those. It includes things as broad as treating a cancer patient with more than one accelerator at the same time as patented. And we have the worldwide exclusive license for that. And we also have number of temporary patents that we are continuing to issue and go through and file as we're continuing the development work. In terms of competition, we have a two by two looking at treatment speed with the current slow treatments on the left hand side and very, very, very fast treatments on the right hand side. And then cost effectiveness on the vertical axis, there will be some proton vendors who are working on trying to do very, very fast radiotherapy, they see the benefit, it's the excitement in the field of doing flash radiotherapy is palpable, all the labs are working on it, proton vendors are going to get there, they're going to be able to do this. But proton machines don't solve the problem. They're just ridiculously expensive. So we're gonna be the only ones who come to market with a machine that can treat very fast radiotherapy, anywhere in the body with exquisite dose distributions is super important. We spent decades coming up with great dose distributions, we can't throw those away with great dose distributions. We're doing this in a way that fits into an existing radiotherapy facility with it takes less power than a current treatment machine takes in order to deliver the treatment. So it's easy to adopt fits into the existing radiotherapy workflow. And very importantly, with current reimbursement, this is an attractive purchase for hospitals. So we don't need new codes in order to make this thing and attract a machine. Ahead of us is a four year development. We've proven the core technology, we have built these accelerators that can put this this radiation out, we have running now. We have to now we'll go build the machines and make that happen. Four years from now, we're gonna go to the FDA first on a 510K, then we'll come to the UK and Europe after that. That's going to be a straightforward path for us. Fortunately, we will be able to do a site agnostic 510K, that's been validated as our approach for regulatory. Last year in London, I was asking for a convertible note for $5 million. That's closed, we got six. So I'm very happy with that. We're now looking for 30 million to build two prototypes of the actual beam shaping and beam generation in order to demonstrate that we can go do that. So funding history, you know, we had a seed our first seed round was in 2021, we've had over $11 million of SBIR funding. And that's in the US non dilutive government funding from the Department of Energy and and from the NIH, National Institutes of Health. And then we had our convertible note round, and we have some revenue actually, we these very efficient accelerators are useful in other markets. Now we're being very, very careful to make sure we stay focused on going and getting our machine out because we want to go cure cancer patients, but we are able to sell some of these into existing radiotherapy equipment and make some revenue along the way. So why Tibaray? So for me personally, this was a drop everything go do it. How often do you have an opportunity in your lifetime, to work on something that's going to make this much of a contribution. These don't come along very often. So this is drop everything go do it. We are going to treat cancer patients in a fraction of a second. We're going to get better outcomes as a result of doing that. It's a more efficient machine. Everyone makes money in the food chain. And we will make money along the way. So I hope that you'll decide to come join us on our journey. I have a booth here. So come visit me if you have more questions or want to talk some more about it. Thank you.