Full Press Release Details
Amro Albanna (00:05):
All right. Welcome everybody. I do see people are starting to join,
so I'm just going to take a few seconds to make sure that everybody gets the beginning of the Aditxt weekly updates. I see some people
joining right now, and with that we probably can get started. Maybe a couple more people here, a couple more seconds. So, hello everybody.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. My name is Amro Albanna. I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Aditxt. We have these weekly updates
for our stakeholders, our team members, our partners and our shareholders to make sure that we keep everybody engaged and updated on the
status of our business. So with that, I wanted to make sure we discuss the data that we announced a few weeks ago for the ADI-100, which
is a product of Adimune. And with that, I wanted to invite Shahrokh, our Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, and Friedrich, who is
the Co-CEO of Adimune to discuss the data. But before we get into it, maybe Shahrokh, why don't you get us started by introducing yourself?
Dr. Shahrokh Shabahang (01:20):
I'll say good day to cover all time zones, and thank you for joining
us. I'm Shahrokh Shabahang, Chief Innovation Officer of Aditxt, and my role is to support all innovations as they pertain to product development
Amro Albanna (01:35):
Wonderful. Thank you, Shahrokh. And Friedrich, you've been with us
before and why don't you just do a quick intro and we'll get started from there.
Dr. Friedrich Kapp (01:45):
Yeah, thank you and good day to all watching and listening. I'm Friedrich
Kapp and I'm responsible at Adimune for the development of ADI-100 and moving it to the clinical development phase and the clinical trials.
And I'm very excited about it and will share with you why.
Amro Albanna (02:06):
Wonderful. So that said, just like the last couple of times folks that
are joining us, please, we do welcome Q&A. You see the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. We truly, truly welcome the questions
and answers and that goes for our team members as well. This is, again, a public forum. Given the various programs that we are working
on, given the fact that we are all operating from different locations, this is a great forum for all of us, whether you're a team member,
partner, or any other type of stakeholders, it is a good forum for you to ask questions. So here it is. I will be monitoring the Q&A
and certainly we welcome your questions and we'll provide some answers. So that way maybe Shahrokh, today we're going to be focusing on
Adimune. It is our first subsidiary.
The focus is on autoimmunity and addressing autoimmunity as one of
the most pressing health challenges. And with that, why don't you just give us an overview of what autoimmunity is. That, of course inclusive
of multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, psoriasis, and the various other types of autoimmunity diseases that we deal with.
Dr. Shahrokh Shabahang (03:20):
Thank you, Amro. And autoimmune diseases really can be summarized in
one statement, and that is that our own immune system, which is really designed to protect us against potentially harmful external stimuli
or forces to start attacking aberrantly our own tissues. And why that happens, there are a lot of different schools of thought, and maybe
it's one, maybe it's a combination of things that lead to that and what the etiology is hard to pinpoint. But the fact remains that something
starts that process and the body starts to recognize our own tissues as foreign as something that could be dangerous and needs to attack.
And some of those components of those tissues are shared. So it may know a particular protein, for instance, which is the target of the
autoimmune attack, can be in one particular tissue like the heart, or it can be in multiple tissues, in which case you might have several
different organs or tissues engaged in that process. But that's in a nutshell what we're looking at with autoimmunity.
Amro Albanna (04:44):
And autoimmunity can develop at any age randomly as far as its initial
Dr. Shahrokh Shabahang (04:52):
It can. And there's, of course, been a lot of work done on the genetic
predispositions to certain types of autoimmune diseases. And we know that there are certain individuals that carry certain genes that
render them more susceptible. But at the end of the day, it's not just your genes that you're born with, it's also the environmental factors
that can have an impact on your system in general that can later on in life lead to autoimmune issues.
Amro Albanna (05:25):
Generally speaking, Shahrokh, what has been the method and approach
to addressing autoimmunity, generally speaking?
Dr. Shahrokh Shabahang (05:31):
Generally speaking, it's really, again simple, it's suppression of
the immune system. So you basically try to down-regulate the whole immune response as a whole in order to not have as much impact or autoimmune
response to what disease indication you're trying to address. And of course the side effect with that is that because the immune system
is being down-regulated, sort of blanketly, then you're leaving the body susceptible to other harmful stimuli and other harmful diseases
like infectious diseases and cancers.
Amro Albanna (06:13):
So the good news is you're slowing the pace of rejection or at least
the pace of attacking our own tissues but obviously the challenge here is you're also opening up our system to be susceptible to other
diseases that our immune system would handle.
Dr. Shahrokh Shabahang (06:29):
Yeah, essentially you're disabling the ability of the immune system
to do what it was designed to do.
Amro Albanna (06:36):
So Friedrich, that's it. And given the mission of Aditxt and our business
model, which I will continue to repeat, where we identify a promising innovation or a promising business, we'll bring it in-house, build
it, we support it for the purpose of positioning it for global commercialization. So Adimune as a company has a platform, ADI and ADI-100
is the first product candidate based on the ADI platform. Why don't you maybe share with us what is fundamentally different than existing
approaches to addressing autoimmunity?
Dr. Friedrich Kapp (07:12):
Yeah, thank you, Amro. I think there must be a much better approach
than to suppress the immune system. And the better approach would be to restore immune tolerance. Because immune tolerance is disrupted
in autoimmune disease. You need to restore it. And when you think about how to do that and how to approach this task, then it's a good
idea to look at how does the body itself maintain tolerance. And the point is that the system, the immune system responds to dying cells.
And the dying cell can either be a danger signal or it can be just normal turnover, just of these many hundreds of millions of cells that
are being turned off-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:08:04]
Dr. Friedrich Kapp (08:03):
Just of these many hundreds of million cells that are being turned
over every day. And in that second case, the immune system says, "Well, let's tolerate." So the immune system can either attack
a dying cell because it's dangerous or it can really down-regulate or keep the immune system down-regulated or regulate and maintain tolerance
that way. So if you take this into account, then you have two observations because the immune system always identifies and detects antigens.
And so there is the dying cell, which we call an apoptotic cell, and there is an antigen. And when that is detected, then you can really
maintain tolerance or use this system, apoptosis and antigen presentation, to restore tolerance. And that's the principle of ADI-100.
So we have, of these two components of our drug, there's one that induces
a small amount of dying cells. And the other component of our drug presents an antigen. It's actually in our case, GAD, G-A-D. It's an
antigen related. We've used an antigen related to the one that, for example, in type one diabetes is the one that causes the disease when
being attacked by the immune system as part of the autoimmune disease that's evolving in type one diabetes. So the dying cell, the antigen
presentation, and then the down regulation of the attacking part with our ADI-100 to restore immune tolerance.
Amro Albanna (10:03):
So Friedrich, basically our immune system, there is a natural mechanism,
a [inaudible 00:10:10] mechanism, which is tolerance, that tolerates our own tissues and cells. It wouldn't make any sense for our immune
system to attack our own cells, right? We want to make sure the immune system obviously addresses external threats, all threats, right?
So our own mechanism of tolerance, somehow the immune system forgets that one of our antigens or tissues or organs, that it's ours and
it will begin to attack it. And what we're trying to do with ADI is to retrain it or to remind it that this is ours, recognize it as our
itself and therefore do not attack it. So we're really trying to replace the suppression with restoring the natural order to remind it
that it's our own tissue. Is that fair enough? Is that correct?
Dr. Friedrich Kapp (11:05):
That's very well and correctly described. And our drug ADI-100 uses
a related antigen to the one that is being attacked. And that is important because if you use the one that's being attacked, it doesn't
make much sense. With the related antigen, we have shown in many experiments that we can really, with this principle of inducing apoptosis