This EXOZ investor presentation by by Chris Marlett, CEO of MDB Capital and Chairman of the Board at eXoZymes, is based on a brand new pitch deck.
Video transcript
All right. So when we started to think about the company, we got lots of grants to do lots of different things over the years. We were doing a number of things that got us to where we're at. The good news is that we had a lot of grants to go after natural molecules, things that had promise that people hadn't figured out how to manufacture or scale, or it couldn't be unlocked through extraction and purification from nature.
And the great news about nature's molecules is that they've not only been tested anecdotally in humans for eons, they've also been characterized and tried to be developed through pharma and other means, more rational means, based on that anecdotal evidence that humans had.
So we have lots of information about these molecules. We understand a lot, how a lot of them behave, but haven't been able to access them in many cases. Until now. Through traditional medicinal chemistry or synthetic biology.
And so until now, many of them were inaccessible. So we are now proving that we can actually make these and scale them, which is, you know, a first, which was sort of the dream of synthetic biology, but was never really delivered upon.
And we're demonstrating that we can manufacture them at scale. So many of these people. So many of these people are using Symbio and making them in gram quantities. And we're now demonstrating that we can deliver them in ton quantities.
And the big benefit of what we're doing is it's super pure. The purity of how we do our synthetic biology approach enables real purity, which is a big factor, not only in making them viable, but also cost.
And what's even more exciting is that we can, once we can make pure compounds, we can actually engineer them and make better versions of them and more potent, more bioavailable and patentable analogs.
So taking the enzymes that have made these things in nature, engineering them to run an industrial scale to increase purity yields and bioavailability, et cetera. So engineered cells was the dream created billions of dollars of market value and, and, and, and a lot of broken dreams on wall street.
And which is something that, you know, it doesn't go missed upon most people that have looked at the SynBio spaces. It's been a boulevard of broken dreams and the molecular workhorse being the cell was great.
And it was, uh, it was a great concept, but once you get inside the cell, those enzymes were the ones doing the hard work and the cell kind of kept the reaction going until it didn't. And then you had to clean up, clean up those molecules after, after the process.
And that just didn't work. So the dream of our, our team that started this over a decade ago said, well, what if we could take these enzymes out of the cell, use them and run them outside the cell? And in fact, they were able to demonstrate that subject of lots of, you know, peer reviewed publications and, demonstrated it, at lab scale.
but then they went farther and they said, well, geez, if we evolve these enzymes and make them better, then we can really change economics and, and change the possibility that you could probably, it's virtually impossible to do inside the cell at scale and make it all come together.
So you'd have years of R and D to engineer a new cell to make it work where we can now show feasibility and then evolve these enzymes, within weeks or months to, to something that, looks like it's industrial scale, could be scaled industrially.
And that's, in fact, what we've done and we're getting greater than 99% purity and, and we're going to be able to get the tonnage that we're, that, that, that we're going to need to, to make these, into a big market.
So if you had that capability, what would you do, what would be your first molecule? And, you know, focus has been a big part of what we need to do because we need to scale manufacturing. And so, we had a lot of thought to what, where do we, where do we go to, to really scale our, uh, business.
And, and we focused on NCT and not only one, did we quickly show that we could, that we can make it, but we saw that this could be one of the biggest molecules of all time. And, and we see NCT as sort of a master metabolic switch that activates this pathway that, that really ramps up, mitochondrial metabolization of fats and, and energy in your body.
And really could address the root of how, how the body stores, you know, and burns stored fat. And, there's a whole host of, you know, early clinical data that's super exciting. And, um, and we think that this will follow a playbook that could be not only a huge nutraceutical, but also a large pharmaceutical product.
And so what's been shown in the literature is this measure measurable metabolic result where you can, you know, basically the liver in the middle is many of us that are overweight have livers that are infiltrating.
With fat and pancreases that drives the whole metabolic dysfunction that we have today. And it's the, the scourge of American medicine and, and, you know, now global, you know, cost of healthcare. And this really is the foundational thing that's driving 80% of healthcare costs globally is literally what you're looking at right here.
And what you can see is the mouse fed the, the diet that, that gives you the fatty liver, and NCT looks much like the, the mouse that was fed, you know, effectively the starvation diet. And so this is, this is something that we believe will, you know, if translates to humans, um, we'll have, you know, massive scale and impact globally.
And so it's one molecule and multiple billion dollar markets. And so when you look at this, this is really the root of, as I said, obesity, type two diabetes, fatty liver, aging, inflammation, and combined addressable markets in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
If we can, if this, if this is, works out like we hope. And so right now we're the only ones that we know of that can make, NCT, um, at high purity and scale and others have tried, they've tried to do it inside the cell without much success.
And, they've tried to do it with medicinal chemistry without a ton of success. and, and we're now demonstrating we can do it, but most importantly, as we'll, as we'll get into, you know, we can also modify and make better versions of it.
And, and so we've, we've transferred the technology to a third party CMO. There's been videos produced. You can see them talking about how elegant our system was and how it translated to, to, to them being able to scale it up, from lab scale to now commercial scale.
And so, our, our strategy is pretty straightforward. We're, we're going to scale manufacturing and we're out talking to contract manufacturers today, and we've got bids from a number of them and, and start to, uh, engage in discussions with the nutraceutical makers that are looking to find the next big thing.
The great news is, is that there's been early GRAS certification of NCT, albeit, you know, very small quantity in very small doses. We, we're going to be, going through some of those studies to, because it is a natural substance, get GRAS certification and enter the market very soon.
the other super exciting thing is we've already started to engineer and make analogs that are more potent, more bioavailable. and, we've already had discussions with, a couple of pharmaceutical companies that are obviously trying to figure out how to improve, on GLP ones or combine them with GLP ones.
As there are now, we believe 30 different GLP-1s in clinical trials today, all of them trying to figure out how to set themselves apart from the rest of the world. And, we think that we're in a class by ourselves.
There's, there's really no other, there's really nothing like NCT that, that we see on the horizon. And, and the mitochondrial space is being discussed a lot. And we think that we have kind of the, one of the best, molecules there for them.
Obviously, nutraceuticals is a huge market driven, you know, very few of these are driven by actual clinical data. A lot of them are long-term anecdotal data or length, long-term longitudinal data that shows their benefit, but it's a, it's an immense market that continues to grow as we all know.
So, so we're effectively 12 to 16 months from OTC launch. We're, looking to, you know, start making the molecule at scale or at greater scale by the end of this year and starting to make sure that we make the plans to get this on the store shelves, uh, in 2027.
So, pure NCT was the first, and we think one of, potentially one of the biggest ones. and, but, you know, this is not all, this is not, uh, you know, our toolkit, this works, this toolkit works for basically a whole host of natural substances that have yet to be able to be scaled.
So cannabinoids are next. Actually, ironically, it was the first thing we started to make. We started to make cannabinoids. We got grants to make it, and we demonstrated that we could get yields. Lots of people, you know, there was a lot of hope that the other SynBio, you know, companies tried to do to make cannabinoids because of the fact that these cannabinoids, bind so well with, the cannabinoid receptors that are virtually on every cell in the body.
And that's, and that's, what's really driven the excitement level in cannabinoids is that we've had this, anecdotal use of, uh, people smoking pot and, and getting hungry or helping with nausea or pain or, and yes.
And also, getting them high as well. But the reality was, is that that that's what drove the fact that there was a miracle inside those cannabinoids, and that, which drove a company like GW Pharma to prove that something like CBD could work.
And they went over a very, very long and arduous path to get that drug approved. And the data was so good in a, in a segment of, of epileptic, children that nothing else worked, but the FDA effectively had to approve their drug.
And, but the, the fact that there were approximately 400 compounds in that CBD molecule and you had to grow the plants and purify it, there was so much cost and rigor that, that the FDA hates to see. And basically being able to make something GMP, that they were, they, they basically, uh, had to, execute a Herculean effort to make this actually happen and get it through the FDA.
And then now it's a billion dollar a year drug and was, was sold to Jazz Pharmaceuticals, for seven and a half billion dollars. So, you know, cheers to them that they pioneered this work, but we, we believe, working with folks like them, we could, really bring cannabinoids, to a much broader market and could be one of the biggest platforms of all times.
So we effectively have a single platform powering two platforms. And, and so, you know, each aids in validating the model together and platform scalability is, is, demonstrated. And so there's a number of things we're working on to, to, that are value creating events over, over the very near horizon, which is, you know, really, making the manufacturing, scale manufacturing apparent through, delivering with a contract manufacturer.
And also partnering with these large nutritional supplement makers that are looking for novel new molecules that they can build their business on. We're also engaging with pharma partnering. And we think some of these new to nature NCT analogs are going to have a huge amount of interest with pharma.
And, and, and we're going to be going down the same path with cannabinoids. And we're looking to work with the best people in the cannabinoid space to, to effectively bring the promise of cannabinoids to, both nutritional supplements and pharma.
So we, we, we've been capital efficient by design while we work at moving this company forward. We, MDB originally, you know, seeded the company with about $6 million. We took it public as well and raised $15 million.
And we've had about 17 million in grant funding. And really what's great is that we're very, very focused. we were, you know, I think what, what's the big transition for us over the years, because it's been quite some time since we seed funded, it's been about six years was really, what do we make and how do we make it? And I think that focusing on these things that we can, scale into manufacturing, the contract manufacturers makes us very capital efficient.
And so we are, you know, we're looking to raise somewhere between 10 to $15 million on this financing, depending on pricing. The, NCT scale up is really kind of the big variable where we can, you know, the first, first large batch that we would make is somewhere between two to $4 million, depending on how big a batch and who we partner with and et cetera.
And so that gets us into ton quantities and gets us rolling into that marketplace. So, we're making those decisions dynamically right now, as we get the bids back from the contract manufacturers. So why exozymes? Why now? Well, we're focused in this area that is, that is really the biggest market in the world.
A lot of it is around metabolic health and obviously anti-aging, et cetera. These molecules have shown and demonstrated great activity in this area. And I think we're going to have a really blockbuster drug pipeline and nutraceutical pipeline that'll be very apparent and hitting the shelves next year.
And I think that the world is effectively going to wake up to the fact that Cell Free is going to actually deliver on the dream of SynBio that, people have spent billions to deliver and not get there.
So, address the offering. We're going to raise between $10 to $15 million. The other interesting aspect of the offering is that it, it, qualifies for section 1202 under QSPS. And so as most of our offerings do at MDB and which has all the benefits that, that you should, talk to your, your tax people about if you're, if you're not aware of them today.
I've got a few appendix slides that, you know, things that we didn't cover in the, in the, in the slide presentation that I think are pretty important, sidelights, but, but, but important, none the same.
so, you know, we, at MDB, we pride ourselves in creating value with intellectual property and we've, we've taken a leadership position and that's how we've created sort of a 30% unicorn rate for all of our companies is that we stand up the leaders in a new technology category.
And we're, we're, we're very serious about it. And what we're doing, with eXoZymes is, is very deliberate, um, from day one, which is, you know, we, we have the ability to, you know, with these methods that, that are, that we've developed that nobody else has developed to date to patent those methods, um, for, for, you know, for natural compounds.
Some of these natural compounds, you can't get a composition of matter patent because they're natural compounds and, but the methods are, are quite unique. obviously on the analogs, we can get composition of matter and, and, where, you know, we, we kind of see it as a bit of a land grab right now because a lot of these things where we can make the pure substance and then modify them, we're going to be able to get really valuable IP, because we can make, we can actually make them.
Um, and obviously we can also, around these engineered enzymes, which we're, we're making novel ones and, and get composition of those as well. But also, there's a big, you know, debate, you know, how much do you keep trade secret there and how much do you patent? But we have, great, a great strategy to make sure that we really will own, own this space, pretty broadly.
The other thing that I think, you know, you should look up is, you know, we've been, we've been covered in a number of publications and, scientific publications and sort of news publications. And obviously our grant funding, I think that this really validates the fact that, that we are the leader in the space, but I also think you're going to see, you know, we have a number of other big grants that are pending right now.
And I'm hopeful that we'll be able to announce some soon that, um, really will supercharge our effort and obviously really helps to make us capital efficient. And then of course our third party validation that we've scaled this.
but I, I wanted to sort of give you, when you start to get your mind around, what we're doing and how big it could be. Um, statins are a really good. And now analogous situation. I was, you know, involved in thinking about cholesterol many years, you know, over 25, 30 years ago.
And, you know, it was really amazing. There was a company called NuSkin that was selling about $400 million a year thing called, a thing called red rice yeast. And red rice yeast was this, was this fungus that was, uh, called mevistatin.
And, uh, it was originally discovered in Chinese medicine. And, NuSkin could actually give you a cholesterol test before and after, and you could see the difference. And so it really drove huge sales.
And then that didn't, stop the pharmaceutical companies from making analogs. And so the first one was Mevicor. And then, you know, what followed was Zocor, Libitor, Provocal, Crestor, and created, hundreds of billions of dollars of sales from a natural substance.
The discovery of a natural substance. And so it was quite amazing to think that we think that NCT could be something similar to this, where we could own the manufacturer of the core molecule as a nutritional supplement.
And, and then leverage it into the analogs that could be very large drugs. My, you know, I think what's super interesting is red rice yeast eventually got taken off the market because people took too much of it.
And anybody that knows that if you take too much in statins, it hurts your liver. So, so we think that, um, NCT is quite safe and, um, there'll be a little variation of how the whole statin thing played out in our mind.
But this kind of gives you the upside is if we can, if we can develop it rationally, manage the IP, this could be quite a, you know, quite a significant molecule. And then right behind her are others.
lots of people are talking about AI today, but I can tell you, we have a, we have a dashboard that operates, that knows everything about our processes and systems. And we're evolving these enzymes very fast and that's collapsing the timeline.
And so, you know, we're not going to be the only ones that have AI. So it's super important. Like that's what we say. It's a land grab. AI is an absolute game changer. Our methods, you know, are probably not a whole lot different than others, but we're first.
And we have all that intellectual capital of a decade of work of learning how to do self-free. And, but anybody that would come in and see our, our, our, how we are rationally developing the next big, the next big molecules, we'll see that, this is, it's, it's a crazy new time.
And it's going to have a unbelievable impact on, on pharmaceutical development and certainly what we're doing. and, and so we've, we really were the ones crazy enough to say, Hey, listen, everybody said a decade ago, yeah, this makes complete sense, but where are you going to get the enzymes? And, and we, it took a decade to figure it out and to start to figure out where to, where to direct it.
But we, we think we're the leader and we want to remain the leader in the space. And so, if you want to invest in self-free symbiote or biomanufacturing, we believe we're the, we're the ones to look at.
And, and then it doesn't stop there. It's like, the infomercial, you know, and there's more, but we, it is about focus, but. We've also demonstrated the ability to make terpenes and flavonoids. And so all you have to do is put into chat GPT, you know, the promise and within those compounds as well to see, how big this could be.
And, and when we think about our, you know, our KPIs internally and, and how we're going to deliver shareholder value, this is the, you know, the four partnership tracks that are really important. Which is one making those long-term relationships with the contract manufacturers that we can work to scale, scale up with.
So we can scale efficiently and scale with many molecules. also the supplement makers who can reach those consumers. We don't want to go out and sell, you know, a lot of other symbiote companies try to go out and sell on their own and what have you.
We think that's a fool's game. We think we need to go out and, partner with the folks that can bring broad scale to our, our novel, our novel compounds quickly. We also need to work with clinical teams to, to validate our analogs and, and develop them in a, in a, in a very, efficient manner, which then leads to more and more relationships with pharma companies to leverage, clinical trials and getting these into the marketplace.
That's about it.
eXoZymes' safe harbor
This video presentation includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements, which are based on certain assumptions and describe the company’s future plans, strategies and expectations, can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terms such as “believe,” “expect,” “may,” “will,” “should,” “would,” “could,” “seek,” “intend,” “plan,” “goal,” “project,” “estimate,” “anticipate,” “strategy,” “future,” “likely” or other comparable terms, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. All statements other than statements of historical facts included in this video presentation regarding the company’s strategies, prospects, financial condition, operations, costs, plans and objectives are forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described in the “Risk Factors” section of eXoZymes’ quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, annual reports on Form 10-K, and other documents filed by eXoZymes from time to time by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings identify and address important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and eXoZymes assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. eXoZymes does not give any assurance that it will achieve its expectations.