Summary

Faizzan Ahmad, Co-Founder and CEO of Cure8bio, sits down with Neil to discuss its growing portfolio of regenerative medicines in development, its hub-and-spoke business model designed to leverage resources and reduce risk, and its push toward curative therapies.

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Transcript

00:36
Neil Littman (Host)
I am extremely excited to welcome Faizzan to the show today. He is the founder and CEO of Cure8Bio bio, which is a novel regenerative medicine company. Faizzan received his PhD in regenerative medicine in cardiovascular pharmacology from the university of Oxford. After receiving his PhD, Faizzan joined h. C. Wainwright as an equity research analyst where he covered a bunch of companies in the biotech and medtech sectors. For the past three years, he served as the director of investments at cambrian biopharma, which is a biotech VC holding company that has been investing in the regenerative medicine and longevity space. And Danny, given my experience at the California institute for regenerative medicine, I am particularly excited about what Faizzan and Cure8Bio bio is building. In fact, when I was at cerm, I was spearheading a program that was attempting to do something very similar. And our goal at cerm, and this was back in, I think, the 2012 time frame, was to build the premier regenerative medicine company by inlicensing a portfolio of cerm funded assets into a company that would then go on to develop and commercialize those technologies. 

01:49
Neil Littman (Host)
And so the entire premise was around creating a large portfolio with multiple shots on goal, which is exactly, based on my understanding, what Cure8Bio is doing. So this is an area near and dear to my heart. So I'm really excited to talk to Faizzan, obviously, about the science and the promise of regenerative medicine and some of the assets, but also around the business model because I think that is truly fascinating as well. 

02:14
Danny Levine (Producer)
There have been a number of companies that have sought to take this sort of portfolio approach of a business model. What's the case for doing this? 

02:25
Neil Littman (Host)
Yeah, I think there's a powerful argument this is not novel. This has been done multiple times in the past to varying degrees of success. One of the more well known case studies these days is bridge bio, who has done this sort of, I guess what is often called the hub and spoke model in the field of rare diseases. This is a lot of work that was pioneered by Andrew Lowe, who's a co founder of bridge bio, and they're a publicly traded company with a multi billion dollar market cap. So that's a great case study for what Cure8Bio and Faizzan are building. There are other companies like fortress bio and atai, I believe, in the mental health space. And Nimbus, of course, is one of the actually the early pioneers using this model. And they've had some great success around spinning out subsidiaries, developing single assets that have then been acquired for multi billion dollars. 

03:20
Neil Littman (Host)
So this is a tried and true model. It's interesting because it does, I think, attract a different set of investors to the parent company or the hub versus the spokes. So while you may be able to access larger pools of capital. You may also be going after slightly non traditional VCs or pools of capital to finance at least the hub version versus the spokes. So, yeah, Danny, to your point, this has been done, it has been successful, it has not been done in the regenerative medicine space, which of course encompasses a whole bunch of different modalities and different therapeutic areas and indications. So I'm really interested to get Faizzan's view about how he thinks about regenerative medicine in general and how that fits into what they're building at Cure8Bio bio. 

04:08
Danny Levine (Producer)
Well, if you're all set, let's do it. 

04:10
Neil Littman (Host)
Danny, thanks for joining us. I am incredibly excited to welcome you to the show today. 

04:19
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely, Neil, my pleasure. 

04:22
Neil Littman (Host)
So, we are going to talk about cure eight bio, your pursuit of regenerative medicine and curative therapies and the potential to radically rethink treatments of disease by focusing on potential cures. This is an area near and dear to my heart, given my prior experience at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Before we get into all this, though, I thought it would be good to start with Cure8Bio's business model, which is taking a portfolio approach and is often termed a hub and spoke model. This model is not necessarily unique to Cure8Bio and has been done by other companies, including BridgeBio, Nimbus, Fortress, Biotech, just to name a few, but has never been done specifically in the regenerative medicine space. So, Faizzan, my first question to you is why did you decide to choose this model and why the focus on regenerative medicine?

05:15
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. So, more generally, our business model in biotech is really akin to the mining industry, right? We drill multiple holes hoping to strike gold, and the success rate in biotech, especially in phase two clinical trials where we move beyond healthy subjects to demonstrate efficacy in treating pathologies range from 22% to 54%, and that's a heck of a delta. And then the 54% for antibiotics. But if successful, the company's value can increase significantly, often by 15 to 20 times. Right? So the risk reward profile is similar. Playing a game where in Monaco or Vegas, right, playing a game where every third hand wins, you 15 to 20 times. And so if you're right, in one of three, you get 15 to 20 times of what? If you're right in one of three, you get 15 to 20 times that in valuation. Right. And so how long would you be playing if the ODS were with you on that? 

06:30
Neil Littman (Host)
So you're basically looking at the expected value of each program, right? And so you're taking into account all the losses, but the winner is big enough to still have a positive expected value for the overall company and portfolio, which I think is a great approach. So we'll come back to the regenerative medicine question in a minute, but let's talk about and stay focused on the business model so do you plan to establish subsidiaries around a specific asset or a specific indication or therapeutic area? How are you thinking about sort of dropping down each of these individual subsets together? 

07:07
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
We'd be exploiting that opportunity. Right. For instance, in an example of our portfolio company availbio, where at Cure8Biobio, we have a cadre of technologies come together to create a platform for drug discovery. Right. So given that our thesis is to move cellular therapies forward, particularly regenerative medicine therapies, where we have strong conviction on the mechanisms of action and have modeled human development acCure8Bioly as possible, what we would call a drug discovery engine, which is similar to clinical trials in a dish. So we put together all of those technologies into one subsidiary to move forward the drug discovery paradigm, in addition to the separate entities or subsidiaries that are moving individual cell therapy assets forward. Right. 

07:56
Neil Littman (Host)
And Faizzan, are there core capabilities that the parent company has that it will share across all of the various subsidiaries? 

08:07
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah. So let me step back for a second and explain a little bit of the strategy. Right. The Cure8Bio Biostrategy is more about the efficiency of pursuing multiple programs simultaneously versus simply diversification. Right. I think investors can get diversification on their own and don't need to pay me to do it. Right. Instead, the idea is to bring together, from a strategic perspective, programs under a single banner so that you're not duplicating costs on lab space, core equipment, GNA functions. You can and should debate the merits of every program. But incremental programs can have increasing ROI if you're leveraging the same infrastructure. And for example, if you look at some of the publicly trading companies that are available in the market, like Bridge Bio, its first gene therapy program costs them tens of millions to get 1090, whereas subsequent ones were less than 50% of the first. 

09:07
Neil Littman (Host)
So you're really able to leverage those learnings across the portfolio. And so, Faizzan, I guess, going sort of a level deeper in terms of your core focus. So one of the arguments, as you just mentioned, of this type of approach is the ability to reduce risk by building a diverse portfolio of assets and products. This can potentially give you access to larger pools of capital. And while you do have a defined focus at Cure8Bio around regenerative medicine encompasses lots of different modalities and approaches. And so how diverse a pipeline are you looking to develop? And how important is diversity across assets within the overall portfolio? 

09:51
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, I think sort of the fundamental point that you're getting at here is really putting together a diverse pipeline, a diversified pipeline with uncorrelated. And so, you know, obviously you allude to the fact Andrew Lowe's work has influenced our thinking. And as we're getting towards more biomedical innovation and the speed at which that happens, this has made drug development more complex and costly. And so to risk mitigate for that a diverse portfolio helps us spread risk and maximize our chances of success. The way we approach it at Curie bio is really to position us from a therapeutic modality agnostic approach, right? And so where we're really trying to get at is opportunities where we see improvements in the disease or replacement and improvements in the disease cells that consist of a pathology, right? And so then the idea becomes, can we approach it whether we need to do cell replacement? 

11:08
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Do we need biologics, do we need small molecules? Because that can help improve the cell ideology and therefore so on and so forth. 

11:18
Neil Littman (Host)
Faizzan you and I have talked offline quite a bit about Andrew Lowe's work. And so I want to spend a minute there. So for those in our audience who aren't familiar with Andrew Lowe, he's a professor of finance and the director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He pioneered this concept of a cancer mega fund. He's done a lot of sort of portfolio theory around how to build a diversified portfolio of zan, as you mentioned, uncorrelated assets. And so I want to sort of talk about how his work has influenced the model at Cure8Bio Bio. And specifically, is there a critical mass of uncorrelated assets that you feel like you need in the portfolio to make this model work? 

12:01
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, to take a step back, funding for early stage medical innovation has become, particularly in this macro environment, has become more difficult to secure. And at the same time, medical breakthroughs seem to be occurring at ever increasing rates. 

12:19
Neil Littman (Host)
Right? 

12:19
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
And so one explanation for this sort of counterintuitive trend is that increasing scientific knowledge can actually lead to greater economic risk for investors in life sciences. And so while the Human Genome Project high throughput screening, genetic, biomarkers, immunotherapies and gene therapies have made a tremendously positive impact on biomedical research and consequently patient lives, they've also increased the cost and complexity of the drug development process, which causes many investors to shift their assets to more attractive investment opportunities. Right? And so this suggests that new business models and financing strategies need to be utilized to reduce risk and increase attractiveness of biomedical innovation so as to bring new and better therapies to patients faster. And I think that's sort of where Andrew Lowe was getting at when he sort of came up with this thesis for cancer. 

13:18
Neil Littman (Host)
And Faizzan. As we know, Andrew Lowe is a co founder of Bridge Bio. And so his work has influenced the Bridge Bio portfolio theory, which has a specific focus around rare diseases. And we see how well that they have done in the public markets. They recently had some readout of data in a rare disease that was very promising. So what you're doing is, if I can simplify sort of taking that model and applying it to the regenerative medicine space and so why don't we talk a little bit about the regenerative medicine space. Why do you feel like the regenerative medicine space overall is a good place to apply this business model? 

13:57
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Oh, absolutely. Just to sort of answer the question prior as well. So we've worked through a number of risk adjusted valuation models, in particular for regenerative medicine, the capital needs for these sort of complex products. And that sort of critical mass that you were pointing to in the earlier question was we've come together with in terms of eight to ten assets, seem to be the sweet spot. But the reality of drug development, and particularly for regenerative medicine, is not every asset is going to be cut equally and over time, this is going to be an iterative process with the goal being to maximize innovation and progress for patients in need. In terms of regenerative medicine, one of sort of the manufacturing paradigm, right, is something that's highly prohibitive in terms of running individual programs. So everyone has to sort of build out their own manufacturing scheme or paradigm and to push that forward. 

15:03
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
So why not? Can we just efficiently optimize that where we have a singular sort of manufacturing paradigm to be used across everyone in the portfolio for Cure8Biod bio? Right. 

15:17
Neil Littman (Host)
Faizzan, why the specific focus on regenerative medicine? 

15:23
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, two main things here. One, it's personal. I lost my mother when I was 15. She had a brain tumor that caused seizures, which ended up in her heart stopping for a few seconds and lost oxygen to the brain. And then when her heart restarted again, she had complete brain damage. As a 15 year old, I started thinking about, okay, what can I do to sort of help with pushing research forward in this venue where we can actually dramatically affect patient lives? And so I got started at 15, working at many of the pioneering stem cell labs in New York, firstly with David Sassoon at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and then with Lorenz Tudor at Sloan Kettering. It's actually worth interesting and it's worth noting, lorenz is a scientific co founder of a company called Blue Rock Therapeutics, which is putting together which has currently actually shown some really good, interesting data on a phase one two A that they're conducting for Parkinson's disease with a dopamine cell therapy product. 

16:28
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
And so this has sort of segued into taking up my role at the NICEF Labs when it started in 2009, and then the potential to utilize live medicines, which can be remarkable both from a treatment paradigm as well as holding curative potential. And then, number two, the second reason scientists and labs were sort of redefining, what the future of regenerative medicine? Gene therapy, vaccines, and so much more. And it's hard not to be excited about what we'll witness in another decade of incredible human progress. Really. We're building this company based off of or the idea around reengineering cells. 

17:08
Neil Littman (Host)
Right. 

17:08
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
And so can we do that more efficiently and effectively and speed up the process of innovation where we can actually help patients. 

17:18
Neil Littman (Host)
Faizzan thanks for sharing that very personal story. Like so many founders and entrepreneurs that I talk with in this space, there's often a very personal mission and story that acts as a catalyst for you doing what you're doing and trying to solve some of these fundamental problems. And the regenerative medicine field has this potential, as we all know, to not just treat the symptoms, but to treat the underlying cause of disease. And that was certainly our focus at Cerm. And there's lots of examples out there of curative treatments. And I think many folks have heard me talk about the origin story for Bioverge, where we cured kids of severe combined immunodeficiency using a gene therapy. And these kids are now living sort of a normal life. They go to school, right? It's incredible. It sounds like science fiction, but it's not. It's science fact. And I think that is the promise of regenerative medicine. 

18:17
Neil Littman (Host)
And I think that's exactly what you're talking about and describing. And that's what gets me so excited about this field in general. And I want to stay focused on the assets and the portfolio that you're looking to build. And so at a high level, what are some of the qualities that you're looking for in a potential asset? Are you looking at clinical stage preclinical? Some of the characteristics I think would be helpful to describe if there is a set of characteristics that you're looking for a given asset within the overall portfolio. 

18:46
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
So the reality is fundraising is likely state specific, meaning that each of the programs in the portfolio will be at slightly different stages because again, they're sort of uncorrelated risk, right? And so what that would entail is the parent company raising funds and distributing it appropriately for each of the subsidiaries to reach particular milestones or inflection points, though at a broad level, I generally think from an investment philosophy perspective, I really like the idea of syndicating and syndicating early at the subsidiary level directly, right? And so that's obviously going to be part and parcel for the program. And if you look at sort of some of my history, I went in and led an investment into a company called Vita Therapeutics. Vita Therapeutics is a muscle satellite stem cell therapy for limb girdle, musculidstrophy as well as FSHD. And very early on we wanted to make sure within the Series A that one, we led the round significantly, but then we wanted to make sure that we brought in a good cadre of investors to the mix as well. 

20:15
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Because the reality is drug development, particularly in the live medicines scenario or the regenerative medicine scenario, is going to require inordinate amount of cash. Right. And so to be able to do that and seek justification as well as validation early on is going to be important. And so that's going to be part of our investment thesis within the subsidiaries that we're building. 

20:42
Neil Littman (Host)
Yeah. No, I totally agree. And just for clarification, the investment that you mentioned in Vita was when you were at Cambrian biopharma. And so I think you have a great history, which I talked a little bit about in the intro, but you're a Cambrian biopharma. You have equity research experience from H. C. Wainwright right on the finance side of things. And so as you think about building this type of company, I think you bring a lot of unique skills to the table to develop these types of assets within this type of business model. And I want to pivot now, Faizzan and talk a little bit about the assets, because you've already identified four assets within the portfolio, and I'd like to walk through each of those at a high level and have you talk a little bit about what made those technologies compelling, what indications you're pursuing, maybe how the investment came about. 

21:37
Neil Littman (Host)
And so why don't we start with Luxa, which is developing a progenitor cell therapy for the treatment of the Dry version of AMD. Can you talk a little bit about that program and the scientific absolutely. 

21:53
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
I think it might be useful to go take it one step back further just to sort of set the context. And so the idea Cure8Bio BIOS. We're building a company around the idea of reengineering cells, and we'd want to approach it from a lens where we could be agnostic, right. If the cell was still alive and we could fix it in vivo, be able to modify the cell inside the body, and if the cells were too far gone or already dead to be able to grow one or build one, ex vivo and replace what's missing, and so typically people go in one direction or the other track. But it turns out that most of the capabilities we need to build are highly synergistic and utilizable across both platforms, where both areas consist of modifying cells. But the risks are pretty idiosyncratic, which is great from a portfolio construction perspective. 

22:40
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
And particularly, Luxa is one of those programs where the scientific rationale for this approach is that the retinal pigment epithelium layer supports overlying photoreceptor cells converting light into signals sent to the brain. And so atrophy of the RPE layer occurs early in Dry age related macular degeneration, followed by photoreceptor cell dysfunction and loss of central vision. And so Sally Temple and her group at the Neurostemsil Institute figured out that identified that retinal pigmented epithelial stem cells can be a cellular therapy product that can be transplanted to rescue photoreceptor cells. And AMD is sort of the primary cause of blindness as RPE cells die. In AMD, she essentially discovered a novel protocol for isolating adult RPE stem cells, which can be activated in human RPE cells to proliferate and produce billions of progeny per donor. And so these RPE progenitor stem cells are transplanted and support the retina in rescue photoreceptor cells. 

23:56
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
It's actually currently in a phase one to A, where, again, the cellular therapy product is that you isolate RPE progenitor cells from cadaver eyes, expand them in a three to four week time frame, and then transplant them back into a patient. We're already seeing dramatic effects to this nature. 

24:18
Neil Littman (Host)
Insulo is another one. This one is working on creating Schwann cells from a patient's own blood using induced pluripotent stem cells for the treatment of traumatic peripheral neuropathy. Can you talk a little bit about that program and the scientific rationale? Can you talk a little bit about this program and again, describe the scientific rationale? 

24:37
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. And so in a healthy nerve, right, schwann cells maintain tubes of the basal lamina. Regenerating axons interact with Schwann cells to guide their growth. And so nerve regeneration occurs, particularly when Schwann cells increase neuronal survival, they improve axon growth and prevent muscular atrophy. And so during traumatic brain injury, you sever that right. As well as I want to bring in sort of the context of aging as well. When you grow older and you have sort of these insults or pathogenic crises, your Schwann cells aren't able to because they've aged, they aren't able to sort of create that functional myelin. And this work sort of really stems from Gap Sang Lee's group and Ahmed Hoke at Johns Hopkins, where they've actually created the first demonstration of creating functional myelin. So one of the functions of Schwann cells is to produce functional myelin. These are these sheets that insulate the nerve for the axon to propagate over long distances. 

25:49
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
But again, this is in. The Schwann cells are sort of in the context of the peripheral nervous system. And so our first proof of concept would be to show efficacy in nerve regeneration within traumatic brain injury that occurs in the peripheral nervous system. Now, you can imagine what sort of excites me about this technology is. People have been trying to create functional myelin from oligodendrocytes, which is the main cell type that provides functional myelin in the central nervous system for diseases like multiple Scorhosis. There is some evidence that we have that suggests that Schwann cells internally in vivo in the human body, sometimes Schwann cells translocate into the brain to create functional myelin for them. Can we optimize that and transplant or show first proof of concept to transplanting functional myelin that's derived from Schwann cells into the CNS? And that sort of opens up a whole set of other opportunities, potentially just fascinating. 

26:57
Neil Littman (Host)
I love the field of regenerative medicine. I mean, so much of this sounds like science fiction, but it's becoming more and more science fact. Okay, make sure I got that right. 

27:08
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Okay. 

27:10
Neil Littman (Host)
A third Cure8Bio bioinvestment is SCARTEC, which is developing peptide induced de differentiation therapy to reverse fibrosis fuzan. Can you talk a little bit about this program? This one's different. So it's a peptide, not a cell therapy and talk about this idea of de differentiation and what that? 

27:33
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
I mean, in general de differentiation is sort of a paradigm that a lot of our organs use, for instance in the cardiovascular context, right? But this one's a little different. Again, it's a peptide and not a cell therapy. And a key reason for the loss of healthy regeneration is a significant amount of collagen deposition or fibrosis observed in age tissues. Right? And so the idea is to target fibrosis to unlock healthy regeneration. And specifically what the peptide does is it's the activation of receptor integrin alpha five beta one by the growth factor TGF beta one. And it's been shown to play key roles in fibrotic signaling. And so by selectively binding to integrin alpha five beta one scartex peptides stop TGF beta one signaling resulting in reduced collagen deposition and promotes regeneration. And sort of the first proof of concept for this particular peptide would be in pancreatic cancer. 

28:40
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Where there is in the tumors that are generated during pancreatic cancer there's an increased fibrosis that occurs. And can we potentially use this as an adjuvant therapy to chemotherapy where we break down the fibrosis in pancreatic cancer to then go and fight the tumor? 

29:04
Neil Littman (Host)
Right? 

29:04
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
And then the idea is to build this into targeting fibrosis. 

29:10
Neil Littman (Host)
And Faizzan the final program currently in the portfolio you had referenced before Avail, which is leveraging iPSC models, induced pluripone stem cell models for rapid drug discovery or what's I guess traditionally been dubbed clinical trials in a dish type of approach. This has been done quite a lot in the past. It has been adopted to varying degrees across the industry. What is avail doing differently? 

29:37
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. So the idea again for the clinical trials in a dish paradigm is to bringing a drug discovery to market, typically cost one to 2 billion. Again, this whole massive value of death exists for early drug discovery, right? And so the conventional approach has always involved new technology, basic research, early discovery, then preclinical development, then clinical development, then assessing clinical signals and then fulfilling an unmet clinical need. 

30:10
Neil Littman (Host)
Right? 

30:11
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Which is extremely risky and time consuming. Avails approach is really flipping that what I would call the conventional approach is like the A to Z approach. Avail's approach is to flip that from Z to A which is inverting the process, right? And the idea then becomes, okay, can we identify an unmet clinical need? Can we assess a sargate clinical signal using human iPSC lines, right? Is the signal present? And then we start preclinical development, ind filing and then clinical development. So the idea is to derisk the approach with the faster path to ind acceptance with this unique combination of patient information, genomics AI, machine learning and iPSCs, which collectively we've dubbed which you said eloquently clinical trials in a dish. 

30:59
Neil Littman (Host)
And out of curiosity, would the Val technology be useful or leverageable across other assets within your portfolio? Is that one of the ideas or would it really sort of stand alone? 

31:12
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
The idea is for it to stand alone, but obviously where there is potential for leveraging across the portfolio, we do that. One of the first use case examples I see from it, outside of the traditional drug discovery model is, can we identify compounds or molecules or biologics that help sort of speed up or improve the efficiency of deriving a particular cell type that we need to a specific cell type or cell therapy product that we need to make right? And so I envision that sort of being some of the first areas where it could be very useful for the broader portfolio. 

31:54
Neil Littman (Host)
Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. One of the things that we didn't talk about across all these assets, which I think are endlessly fascinating in and of themselves, is sourcing. You sort of mentioned this earlier on, but I want to dig into it a little more. You had referenced you're working with academic clinical investigators to source a lot of these types of programs. Are all of these programs sourced from academics or is that going to be the primary source going forward? Do you envision working with small startup companies? How do you envision sort of sourcing a lot of these programs? 

32:26
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. High level, when you're building a company, I think you want to sort of build in both organic growth and inorganic growth. And what do I mean by that? So what I mean by that is the first set of programs is going to probably likely include to sort of help build value is to look at mature companies and seeing if we can invest in some of those. For instance, in our particular case we have Luxa biotech, which is a clinical stage opportunity focused on age related macrogeneration. And then what I call sort of organic growth would know companies that. 

33:12
Neil Littman (Host)
Are. 

33:13
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Currently sitting in a university, right, or technology sitting in a university where we'd be spinning out and talking to various tech transfer offices in building that company out from scratch. 

33:27
Neil Littman (Host)
And as you go forward, one of the at least theoretical advantages of the approach that you're taking is this ability to make more dispassionate go versus no go decisions because you do have sort of a broad portfolio as opposed to one asset, which is sort of your baby, so to speak. How do you think about or how are you planning to make portfolio level decisions and go no go decisions for individual assets and across the portfolio? 

33:58
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. So when we set out making an investment or building a company from scratch, which is in licensing IP from university, we do that with a particular hypothesis driven experimentation approach. And I think from a financing standpoint as well, we like to spread out our funding in tranches, where each tranche is sort of met with a hypothesis driven question that we need answered. Before we hit the Go button. And obviously some of these things don't within science, some of these things don't pan out the way we see them today versus what we see in six months or twelve months. Right. But generally speaking, milestone, gating, these tranches is the approach to take. 

34:51
Neil Littman (Host)
Right, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And that sort of reminds me of the model that we had at Cerm. And you and I have talked about this a little bit offline, but the approach that you're taking at Cure8Bio reminds me very much of a program that I spearheaded at Cerm, where and this was back in 2012, so almost a decade ago, where were looking to build a premier regenerative medicine company in the state of California. And thesis was almost exactly what you're doing at Cure8Bio, except were going out to inlicense serm funded assets, largely from academia, into this NewCo that were setting up that was going to access CERN funding, it was going to access private sector funding, it would come with programs that had a bunch of CERN funding. And the goal was exactly what you're talking about, where you have multiple shot fun goal, and you would have a much larger pipeline of theoretically uncorrelated assets, which should, in theory, give you a higher probability of successfully developing a asset or series of assets within that structure. 

36:01
Neil Littman (Host)
We never quite got it off the ground, unfortunately, but I spent a lot of time doing that and it was really fascinating. So a lot of what you're doing reminds me of some of the work that we did at Cerm many years ago. And part of that was absolutely this tranche funding that you just described. Faizzan I guess there's sort of a lot of directions we could take this, but I want to be cognizant of your time. Where are you in terms of thinking about the future direction of Cure8Bio. Let's say you're sort of just getting things started. You have four assets that you've already identified and have started investing in and building. Where do you see the company, let's say in the next three to five years? If you had a crystal ball or assuming everything goes according to plan, which of course we know it's biology and never quite does, but sort of in an ideal world, where would you like to see Cure8Bio in the next couple of years? 

36:55
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. Probably at eight to ten assets in development. I'd say one of them, hopefully Luxa, for instance, goes out and is in approved therapy by that time. And another three or four that's going to be in phase one, two A in that sort of range. 

37:16
Neil Littman (Host)
Yeah, makes sense. Wolf Hasan, we could talk probably for another couple of days about some of this stuff. I find it endlessly fascinating, but I do want to be cognizant of your time and say a big thank you for joining us on the show. Today. 

37:28
Faizzan Ahmad (Guest)
Absolutely. It's been a privilege and pleasure and like of the some of the experiences you held at Serm could be very useful for what we're doing and what we're trying to build and so offline. I'd love to chat more about that. 

37:42
Neil Littman (Host)
Yep, of course. 

37:48
Danny Levine (Producer)
Well, Neil, what did you think? 

37:50
Neil Littman (Host)
I thought that was a really great discussion with Faizzan. I mean, you heard us talk quite a bit about the business model, why he feels like it's a good fit for Cure8Bio given their focus on regenerative medicine. You heard us talk quite a bit about applying some of Andrew Lowe's work around this idea of building a portfolio of uncorrelated assets. And it sounds like from Faizzan's description of the assets they already have, they are very different. Right. It's doing everything from cell therapies, treating AMD to a peptide that is pursuing a de differentiation approach to treat fibrosis to another IPS based technology for creating schwann cells from the patient's blood for peripheral neuropathy. Right. So they're very different. And so I don't know if these programs are entirely uncorrelated, but they seem different enough that Faizzan is executing on this idea of building a portfolio of relatively uncorrelated assets to give the company multiple shots on goal to create real lasting value as they build out the portfolio from the four companies or assets they have. 

39:07
Neil Littman (Host)
Now, to, you heard him talk about having a target of eight to ten he felt was the right number. I don't know what the right number is. That seems to make sense, but time will tell. And obviously we'll see how successful any of these individual assets are as they move through clinical trials. 

39:21
Danny Levine (Producer)
One of the challenges of this model is getting access to promising technologies. How important are having those relationships with academic centers to get visibility and access to these programs? 

39:36
Neil Littman (Host)
Well, this is where my CERN background will color my answer. It's absolutely critical and I think that's why what were proposing at CERN many years ago would have been great, is we had that access, we had those relationships. I think for Faizzan and Cure8Bio, absolutely, you need that access to a lot of these academic investigators who are pursuing these technologies, what the Tech transfer office is. But I think you heard Faizzan mention it's not just the academic programs. There's also startup companies and others that are developing some of these technologies. So I think it is sort of a mishmash. But like all this stuff, right, it all comes down to access, it comes down to sourcing these opportunities, it comes down to relationships and winning these opportunities. Right? So, yeah, that is obviously a critical part about what they're building.

40:21
Danny Levine (Producer)
The company is focused on regenerative medicines while there are cost efficiencies in this approach, and it's taking that with certain shared resources and functions. But what's the opportunity to leverage expertise across the model and to have one subsidiary benefit from the expertise in another. 

40:42
Neil Littman (Host)
Well, again, I'm going to sort of rely on my CERN days because that's the lens that I view all this from. But we had a similar approach within CERN where we had a huge portfolio of assets and there was a shared knowledge base within Cerm that was providing oversight to each of our programs that were very different. And we had everything from clinical advisory panels and we had scientific officers who managed these programs. And the base of knowledge that Cerm itself accumulated that could be shared across the assets was literally invaluable. It added so much value to each of the programs well above the funding that we provided to help make these programs successful. If Cure8Bio can even scratch the surface of what CERN was able to do, I think there's a huge opportunity here because there is so much shared knowledge across the regenerative medicine space, from everything from manufacturing is a key part to designing preclinical ind enabling studies. 

41:51
Neil Littman (Host)
I mean, there's just so much that goes into each of these programs. And in the field of cell therapy in particular, is often said the process is the product. So if you can share learnings from a process across different products and you obviously have to tailor them, but that's hugely valuable. So yeah, I think the model could really work well in the regenerative medicine space. 

42:14
Danny Levine (Producer)
This is a model that on paper increases your odds of success, but there are a lot of moving parts to manage. What do you think will be key to Cure8Bio success? 

42:27
Neil Littman (Host)
I think the key is really having a strong central hub and having the infrastructure within the central hub and the personnel to manage the diverse set of assets that they're bringing into the portfolio. I think without a strong central hub, strong central governance across all these portfolios where you can amass that central knowledge base and be able to share that across companies, I don't think it's going to be successful if you can't have that strong central infrastructure. And to me, that's the key to this whole thing. 

43:01
Danny Levine (Producer)
Well, until next time. 

43:03
Neil Littman (Host)
Okay. Thank you, Danny. 

43:07
Neil Littman (Host)
Thanks for listening. The Bioverge podcast is a product of Bioverge Inc. An investment platform that funds visionary entrepreneurs with the aim of transforming healthcare. Bioverge provides access and enables everyone to invest in highly vetted healthcare startups on the cutting edge of innovation, from family offices and registered investment advisors to accredited and nonacccredited individuals. To learn more, go to bioverge.com. This podcast is produced for Bioverge by the Levine Media Group. Music for this podcast is provided courtesy. 

43:46
Neil Littman (Host)
Of the Jonah Levine Collective. 

43:48
Neil Littman (Host)
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