Full Press Release Details
Amro Albanna (00:04):
Very good. Let's get started. Thank you for joining. This is, again,
our Aditxt weekly update. This is our way of sharing updates with our stakeholders and current stakeholders.
And with that, I'm going to go ahead and ask Shahrokh to just do a
quick intro as our chief innovation Officer. So Shahrokh, why don't you go ahead and please get us started?
Dr. Shahrokh Shabahang (00:26):
Good morning, and thank you for joining this call. As my name denotes,
I'm Chief Innovation Officer, and my role in Aditxt is to really identify innovations that are out there and see how they might fit with
our various subsidiaries.
I have a very good team of people who work with me, including an innovation
group in Mountain View that works on our own technologies and also a strong team that works on the IP side to evaluate what technologies
are out there and what we might be going after to strengthen the position of our subsidiaries.
Amro Albanna (01:14):
Wonderful. Thank you, Shahrokh. And we'll touch on the role that Shahrokh
and his team played as far as bringing the Adductomics platform into Pearsanta, and I will always go back and highlight the business model
of Aditxt and put it in context as far as what Pearsanta is, what Aditxt is, and how we work with our various subsidiaries.
So that said, Chris, you've been here with me before. You've joined
me before. You talked about Pearsanta, I believe, a couple of weeks ago. It was very well-received. Obviously, there is lots going on
with Pearsanta as far as innovations, commercializations, IPO. But as we discussed, you just newcomers, they never heard from me before,
so why don't you go ahead and get yourself introduced?
Chris Mitton (01:59):
Sure, sure. Thanks, Amro. Really glad to be here again. It's certainly
an exciting time for Pearsanta, and there absolutely is a lot going on for Pearsanta and the whole Aditxt ecosystem. Thrilled to be at
Previously, I was with MDNA Life Sciences for about eight years, developing
a novel liquid biopsy platform that focuses on the mitochondrial DNA and disease-specific biomarkers in the mitochondrial DNA for the
early detection of disease. That platform was acquired by Pearsanta earlier in 2024, and we are currently developing various tests and
developing a pipeline out of our Richmond CLIA/CAP certified lab for global launch, for tests for endometriosis, prostate cancer, lung
cancer, ovarian cancer, and the list goes on. That's really only the beginning of this true platform to enable early detection and deliver
actionable information to patients and clinicians for intervention earlier when treatments can be more effective.
So again, always thrilled to be here and to talk about what we're doing.
Excited about today. We're going to be digging into a new technology we just acquired, and thanks to Shahrokh for identifying this. He
was one of the first to identify this technology and bring it to the Aditxt family. And Shahrokh's vision and scientific instincts were
really key in helping us discover this, and we believe that his platform is truly a promising platform for furthering our mission in early
detection and prevention, so certainly excited to talk more about that today.
Amro Albanna (03:40):
Wonderful. Thanks, Chris. And Roger, thanks for joining us. Like I
mentioned, you're the star of the show today.
We did announce the acquisition of the Adductomics platform, and we
positioned it, as you know, as far as potentially, and the opportunity where we can get to the point where we can potentially prevent
cancer by understanding the leading causes towards cancer, and we truly appreciate you joining us. So Roger, why don't I turn it over
to you for an intro?
Dr. Roger Giese (04:11):
Yeah. Thanks, Amro. It's a real pleasure to join this group, and we'll
be a group within Pearsanta. And the idea is primary prevention of cancer. If you detect cancer early, getting a cure is much more likely.
That's very important. But in primary prevention, you prevent cancer before it even gets started. You sort of go upstream in the process,
and nothing beats primary prevention for cancer. You catch it at a risk stage.
And we do that by assessing DNA, so we have that shared in common with
Chris, and this is assessing for exposure to carcinogens. And as you may have heard, cancer has been increasing for ages under 50, and
it's not clear exactly why that's going on with all of the prevention programs and everything. That's really frustrating the cancer community,
and so we have an important technology to really sort that out and to potentially have a big impact on the field.
It's interesting. The idea is old, but the technology to accomplish
it has never emerged in spite of much effort, and we finally figured out a way to set up that assay.
Amro Albanna (05:35):
Wonderful, Roger, and welcome to the family. We truly appreciate you.
And joining us, we are obviously a small company, but you've seen the vision, you've seen Pearsanta, you met with the team, you've been
working with the team now for, I don't know, almost a year really until we got to this point, so welcome, and this is pretty exciting.
Before we kind of get into the conversation some more, I see a lot
of Shahrokhs on the screen, so maybe I think this is probably meant for guests to join. It's not an issue, but if you can switch back
to guests, that would be great, so that way our screens look a little bigger, and that Shahrokh did that intentionally so we can see his
name all over. All right.
So before we dig in more, it's really important, especially for our
guests to understand the relationship between Aditxt and Pearsanta and our business model overall. So Aditxt is a platform where we identify
companies and potential assets or innovations that are well-positioned to capture an opportunity where we can address some of the most
pressing health challenges: autoimmunity, cancer, neurological disorders, infectious diseases, women's health, so on and so forth.
And our business model is to acquire a company, bring it in-house,
support it for growth, position it for global growth, and from there, we look at a launch or a launching event as an IPO, an acquisition,
partnering with a bigger partner. That's really our business model.
And with Pearsanta as a subsidiary, the focus is on early disease detection,
leading with cancer detection, and that's what Pearsanta is. It is our subsidiary, and it started by acquiring an asset few years ago,
and we continued building the company. And you see where Pearsanta is at today, and now Chris is at the helm leading Pearsanta moving
So to summarize the vision and mission of Pearsanta, early disease
detection is key. That is an obvious statement. And cancer, I would always say that the best treatment for cancer is not to get it in
the first place, and the second-best treatment for cancer is to catch it early. Chris, is that a fair statement, and is that how you're
moving forward with Pearsanta? And what are you doing right now to make that statement a reality for all stakeholders?
Chris Mitton (08:09):
That's absolutely a fair statement, Amro. 100% correct. At Pearsanta,
our mission is to shift the diagnostic timeline forward to detect disease earlier when treatments and interventions can be more effective.
This latest acquisition fits squarely into that strategy for us. It
fully complements the Mitomic platform, which focuses on the mitochondrial DNA, and this new technology from Roger really adds another
layer of insight at the molecular level. Together, this gives us a powerful multidimensional view of disease at its earliest stages and
the earliest signals of disease.
So we're already working on incorporating this platform into our development
roadmap. We're mapping that out, starting with, as you mentioned, the high-impact use cases in cancer. That is our focus. That's where
we think we can have the most impact sooner.
The academic validation is strong for this technology, and our next
step is to translate that into clinically actionable tools, working hand-in-hand with Roger, Shahrokh, the Aditxt team, and the Pearsanta
team to accelerate the development, validation, and commercialization of these new tests to lead not only early detection, but as we indicated,
the ability to intervene even earlier and enable prevention.
Amro Albanna (09:36):
Great. So just to make sure that at least our audience understands
it, we're starting with the mitochondrial platform for early detection, and that is on path for commercialization second half of this
year, starting with prostate cancer. That's the case.
Adductomics, it's certainly not commercial-ready, but the potential
for the platform after development, validation, we can't obviously guarantee the results, but the goal here is to really begin to look
at Adductomics and adducts on the DNA side where we could potentially begin to see leading causes for cancer or where someone is moving
towards developing cancer. Is that, Chris? And then we can take it from there. Chris, does that frame the product roadmap accurately?
Chris Mitton (10:33):
That's correct. Our lead products are in cancer using the mitochondrial
DNA biomarkers. First test in cancer will be the prostate cancer test. Longer-term, we are developing this Adductomics technology, working
hand in hand with Roger. He can certainly do it more justice, but this science detects harmful chemical modifications to the DNA caused