Jonathan Balfour, Panaxium - Precision Bioelectronic Devices | LSI Europe '22

Transcription

Jonathan Balfour  0:06  

All right, well, I want to thank everybody here for sticking around on a late on a Friday afternoon, really excited to be able to share with you, first of its kind, cortical stimulation therapy that panaxium is developing that directly drives ions into the brain to modulate activity. And this allows us to help solve the disability problem following stroke that affects so many people each year, we're raising $8 million dollars to complete preclinical primate studies, doing stroke recovery. And we've already got part of that round funded, and we're looking for investors who are committed to solving this big unmet challenge. Now, stroke is an enormous problem, it's gonna affect every single one of us in this room, either directly or through family or friend. Right now, there's some incredible treatments, which mean that you're going to survive that stroke in all likelihood, but from there, things get kind of grim. There really is no treatment from that point on, and it means you're going to face a lifetime of disability. This could mean losing the function of your hand and the incredible impact that's going to have on your quality of life, it can change your personality, it can leave you bedridden. All of these contribute to stroke being one of the number one causes a disability in the world today. And with strokes happening at a younger and younger age. This means the burden on the individuals, their families, society, that hole is just astronomical and growing every day. Now, thankfully, there is a real solution at hand here. To help you recover following a stroke, Panaxium developed a neural stimulation therapy, that helps redirect neuro recovery in your brain following that injury. Now is taps into a mechanism that already exists where your brain naturally tries to rewire itself around an injured tissue. But unfortunately, left to its own. It's a really messy process that doesn't result in good enough outcomes for patients. But if you stimulate on the cortex in combination with rehab, you can help direct that recovery mechanism and reinforce it, so that you get vastly superior outcomes for the patients. And Panaxium has the only therapy developed right now that combines a personalized treatment approach with precision cortical stimulation that is required to deliver the recovery you need. Now, this is an oversimplification, but we can all recognize our nervous systems not comprised of wires electrons flowing through them. But today, we still try and solve all of our brain neurological issues by plugging wires in connecting to electronics, often causing electrochemical byproducts that harm the very parts of the brain that you're trying to heal. And Panaxium is changing this, we have created a proprietary device built on ion conducting polymers that really reflect the electrochemical or rather the ion Tronic nature of the brain. And in doing so, we can stimulate in a much more effective and safe way than ever before, to help you recover in a very effective fashion. Now, decades of neuroscience research has shown us that, you know, having a really good really precise neurostimulator is important, but all that precision goes to waste if you don't know where to stimulate. So you need a personalized treatment patient assessment tool that will allow you to figure out where in the brain you need to, to drive recovery. Up until now that hasn't existed. And so we have a patented patient assessment tool that combines a proprietary combination of MRI processes them using AI to create this personalized, functional network map that highlights the injury reach injured regions in your brain. And what that does is it empowers the clinician to really understand what's happened, predict your recovery prospects and help select whether you're a good candidate for our interventional therapy. And then from there, they can create a personalized treatment plan to target the uniqueness of your particular brain in your injury. That's where this implantable cortical stimulation that Panaxium develop comes into play. Now we've designed this to be ultra conformal to the surface of the brain so you can access the important regions that you need to remap function to. And then by building it using these iron conducting polymers, we drive ions out in a way that delivers charge in a much more effective way than it's ever been able to be done before. at a level of precision that we can get this thing down to the neuron level, that's overkill for this kind of an application. But what it allows us to do is to very precisely and selectively stimulate the parts of the region of the brain, say the motor cortex that your treatment plan calls for, to maximize your recovery. Now, if you zoom in on our device, this is a patented ion Tronic platform that has more than just an incredible stimulator, we can record directly from the cortex to monitor biomarkers. And we even have the capacity to load these up with small molecules to deliver therapy at the same site as another means of driving recovery. Now, this is Stroke, stroke solutions are a big challenge. And it's taken a lot of work and a lot of investment thus far. But we are knocking on the door, we're just around the corner from getting this into humans. And as I said, we have some final stages of primate studies to confirm and demonstrate the recovery that we know is is going to happen here. Before we can move into our Series A and start doing clinical studies. Now, as we touched on the Start strokes an enormous problem, and even a marginal treatment is going to have a lot of value for patients if it can meaningfully improve their life. But we're not looking for a marginal improvement here. We're looking to transform the lives of these patient and give them their function back. And yes, it's going to take a few years to do the right clinical studies and drive adoption in this. But for the investors out there, there are a lot of examples of transformational therapies like that, that get have their value recognized well before mass adoption. And through early conversations with strategics. They recognize that this falls into that category. Now, like all the companies here, we've got a rockstar team, it's taken some real pioneers across a variety of fields here to develop this technology to where it is. And we've got a really strong team that's committed to taking this thing through to patients. Now I'm really happy to be part of what I see is a really interesting neuro technology revolution. I mean, there's smarter people than me that have said that, you know, med tech and neurological conditions, the convergence there is one of the last great frontiers in medicine. And I'm really happy to see how much investment there has been made into this space over the last few years because there's a lot of problems to solve here. And it's going to take a lot of technologies and a lot of solutions. But the important thing here is each solution needs to be very tailored to the patient's requirements at the end. And Panaxium has the only solution that's been tailored to solve both the personalized assessment and treatment planning and the precision cortical stimulation for a stroke patient. And so we're really excited to bring this stroke therapy to the millions of people who suffer Lifetime's of disability following a stroke to market. But after that, there's millions more people this plot cortical stimulation platform can help. And we've got collaborators who are just begging us to start looking at schizophrenia, depression, other neurodegenerative diseases but for us at this moment strokes a big enough challenge and we're looking to find the right investors to help us fill out our round and take this thing to market. And if you catch me afterwards, I'll be quite happy to talk to you and a commercial partnernship that we just formed with a strategic in the space, which should be annouced publicly shortly. Thank you very much.