In a nutshell, what led to the creation of Coeptis and how does the company fare in the larger biotech market nowadays?
While having a career in the financial industry, I often had the chance to work with biotech companies and I always felt compelled to find out more about this field. The definitive push towards entering this space was the news that a family member got diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2005. The idea to fund Coeptis emerged at a dining room table when I got together with my two co-founders. From this meeting, we planned the bases of the company. Initially, we were a niche generic pharma company. But as the generic industry was falling off valuation, we pivoted towards cell therapies for oncology. Fast forward to now: one of the principal diseases that we are working on through our GEAR (Gene-Edited Antibody Resistant) platform is multiple myeloma. We got into the space of cell therapies out of fascination with the science that makes them possible. Since these are the next frontier in medicine, if they can be conquered, the face of the industry will be changed forever.
At the moment, we are in the pre-clinical phase, and we are moving towards the clinic sometime early next year while trying to file INDs in the U.S. Besides multiple myeloma, the plan is to target HER2 ovarian cancer through our SNAP-CAR technology platform. In addition to these, we are hoping to get breakthrough status from the FDA for the diagnostics platform. Hopefully, we will be allowed to use the current blood samples in order to get this tool out to the public as fast as possible. Our main mission is to alleviate the devastating effects of cancer or even possibly cure them, in some fashion, as we dream to develop a company where our shareholders reap benefits as well as moral satisfaction.
Which programs in your pipeline are making you look toward the future with confidence?
Momentarily, we have two technologies that are being co-developed with a team of leading researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. GEAR is a therapeutic that works in conjunction with monoclonal antibodies and it acts like a guided missile therapy that finds the cancer cell, attaches to it, and kills it. Since the same targets exist naturally on effector cells in our immune system, we had to find ways to allow these cells to keep all their functionality.
Furthermore, we created a diagnostics tool that shows if a monoclonal antibody therapy will be effective prior to use. Having a predictive result is highly important in the space of oncology: it makes life with this disease a bit more bearable for the patients.
As we expand to other areas, this tool could bring a lot of value to all immunotherapies - where having a predictive result could translate into more accurate treatment schemes.
SNAP-CAR is an advanced new version of CAR T therapy that we licensed from the University of Pittsburgh. This new approach allows us to circumvent key shortcomings previously associated with this therapy. Consequently, we were able to deliver the payload in a way that avoids the cytokine effect; we had effective results in solid tumors not only in blood cancers; and we managed to attack the cancer cell on different antigen points to negate its ability to mutate.
What is your take on the financial environment right now and how are you navigating the circumstances?
Merging with BullHorn Holdings, which is a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company), allowed us to uplist to NASDAQ. This move will help us attract a much broader audience of investors - which will lead to raising the capital that is needed to push the science forward. As you know, the markets have been incredibly tough for biotech recently. When we went public on NASDAQ, we were the only SPAC merger during the month of October that did not need to do negative financing to get listed.
Our stock price indeed suffered. This has to do with the generality of the market but also with the negative results in the wider cell therapy field by other firms. However, this downward push is creating a lot of opportunities to inexpensively expand a portfolio as there is an immense amount of good science left on the market. So, the opportunity that we have created is playing out very well and should allow us to, maybe, step into some of the failures and step out with successes.
What do you most look forward to in the following two to three years?
We hope to be able to further our science to the point where the data that we show will allow us to strike major collaborative deals with big pharma companies. All our technologies are platform based, so the future is extremely open and, to be honest, equally bright. We do not exclude the idea to be acquired by another company, but this could happen only under one absolute condition: the work continues to advance science, the work continues to innovate new cell therapies, and the work continues to extend patients' lives.
