Going from Alzheimer's to Pandemics: Bringing FLOSS to Bio Testing by Tom Cirrito, PhD | Devcon SEA

[Music] I'm sure after those last two talks we're all thinking about locking ourselves in a closet to keep ourselves safe uh hopefully by the time I'm done uh you'll agree that there's some hope and that won't be necessary so my name is Tom Sero I'm the CEO and co-founder of varo VAR is a biotechnology company focused on preventing the transmission of infectious diseases we founded varo in early 2020 with the recognition of two facts first the rate and spread of infectious diseases of epidemics and pandemics has been steadily increasing for over 20 years despite that during the same time frame there haven't been any significant Innovations in preventing the spread of diseases so why am I at Devcon varo shares balik's vision for diac and for decentralized pandemic preparedness we believe in empowering individuals around the world by giving them access to technologies that allow them to protect themselves and their communities VAR has built a platform to detect the presence of pathogens in aerosols in real time with exquisite sensitivity using easy to use and affordable devices actually let me stay here for a second so aerosols are the tiny droplets they're about a micrometer in size that we release when we breathe these tiny droplets hang in the air they can stay in the air for days so when an infected person is in an indoor environment like a room like this for example they release these aerosols and they contain the bacteria or the viruses that they're sick with and those just hang out in the air and wait for someone else to breathe them in this is how the majority of infectious diseases certainly respiratory diseases are transmitted until now there really hasn't been a way to detect the presence of pathogens and aerosols and that's what the varo platform is designed to do so the basis of our biosensor platform is the micro imuno electrode we call it the mie the m is essentially a modified semiconductor what we do is we take an electrode and we attach an antibody like molecule it's what we call a nano body and that's what binds to the virus or the pathogen that we're looking for to that electrode this is a technology that was originally developed by neuroscientists at Washington University in St Louis named John Sero and Carla yudi and the name is not a coincidence John Sero is my brother uh he's a professor of Neurology uh at Washington University and he originally developed the M technology to study brain chemistry and Alzheimer's disease he would implant the amuno electrodes into the brains of mice in order to study the proteins that cause Alzheimers in 2020 John realized that the same electrode technology that he puts down into the brain of a mouse he can stick up into the air to detect Co he pulled in another collaborator from Washington University an engineer and aerosol scientist named Rajan Shakari and these are our scientific founders and we've worked very closely with this team over the last four years to develop this platform to where it is today so I'm going to show a brief video of our scientific Founders talking about how we're leveraging the M platform to develop two devices that are designed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases those two devices are the breath-based diagnostic and the air biodetector so can we play the video this is going to be a game Cher you are not just looking at the current strains what is prevalent right now we are also getting ready for what could be in the future whether it's something we know or it's an emerging pathogen we can go to it very quickly within a span of weeks pull out a new nanab body put it on electrode and have it ready to go us another tool to work with in order to really get on top or ahead of something like Co so we won't be kind of slow like we were in the past we're using this in two devices then the breathalizer and the air quality monitor you wake up in the morning you have resp illness you go to the pharmacy to get a test the technician behind the counter doesn't have to be trained um they'll take this they'll pull off the cap that activates the device breathe into it um a single breath is enough to get a reading here then hand is back to the technician who turns the knob they then take this plug it into a permanent device and then within 60 seconds from when you blew into it you get a result of whether you're positive or negative the a quality monitor will determine when pathogens are present they also tell you when the pathogens are are gone so you you can know you can re-enter a room so you keep business businesses open you keep people safe and healthy um and you can still go about your daily lives if you can identify that initial route of where the infected virus is being spread from you can control the further spread of that virus by deploying this device we also want to ensure that the inequity which is prevalent in the word is in many ways [Music] addressed great so I want to take a minute and talk about these two devices that we're developing first is our breath-based diagnostic what Carla called the breathalyzer the breath based diagnostic is capable of detecting multiple pathogens from a single breath in 60 seconds with sensitivity that is comparable to PCR it is a true point of care device oh sorry um so you can imagine IM going to a pharmacy you get your diagnosis you can get your medication before you leave you can get a diagnosis with whatever the known pathogen is you can get your medication you can get a faster diagnosis you can do all of this at a lower cost than current methods like swabs or PCR we recently completed a clinical trial with this diagnostic device device and I don't need to go through all the details of this I don't have time to do that today although I'll be here afterwards if anybody wants to talk about this further but the clinical trial was a great success it showed that we have Exquisite sensitivity and specificity and patients reported that they preferred this method of diagnosis which is of course non-invasive compared to PCR or the swabs that we've all become familiar with our second device is our air biod detector so there's never been a device like this before this is a device that'll sit in a room like this passively sampling the air in that room so if somebody were to enter that room who were sick and infected producing pathogenic aerosols the air biod detector could sense those those pathogens before you could infect most if not all of the people in that room so This truly gives us the ability to interfere in the transmission of disease and prevent it in those environments where people are most susceptible which is in in indoor environments during covid we know that the overwhelming majority of cases of covid were transmitted in indoor environments through aerosols so what does this mean for diac and what is varo mean for DC so both of our devices rely on the M technology but the m is a true platform technology and we believe that there are many applications for this some of which we probably haven't even thought of yet we want to empower people around the world to innovate with this technology and develop new things new ways to do it people that have different backgrounds different ideas different goals than what we have at varo by empowering people by giving them access to this technology we're giving them the ability to protect themselves protect their families and protect their communities so how are we doing this varo has adopted an open-source business model we're making all of our plans designs and data publicly available we've signed a pledge that we will not enforce our patents against third-party innovators in fact we're going to encourage people to adopt this technology we're hiring an open- Source Community manager to put all this information and make it available package it up so that it's easy for people to access and even promote people to come and enter into the open source community and learn about our technology and hopefully motivate them to take up this technology and use it themselves we've embraced the principles of free and open- Source uh hardware and uh this has become sort of the core of what we're doing in Faro this is the core of our business model see infectious diseases don't care about patents right they don't care about borders they don't care about intellectual property rights and we all know this right we all live through the same hellish pandemic for the last four years what we want to do at varo is open up all of this technology you know we recognize that as a small company it's going to take a lot of time for us to be able to access markets like southeast Asia or Africa viruses bacteria don't have those restrictions so by empowering governments and companies and individuals around the world to practice our technology and to innovate around that technology we're giving them the ability to protect protect themselves protect their people and protect their economies it also allows us to ensure that important Technologies like this can get into markets in low and middle income countries that may not normally have access to these types of Technologies and hopefully address the gruesome inequity that we all saw during the pandemic which vitalic actually spoke about during his his opening remarks so typically in the pharmaceutical industry patents are your competitive Advantage right and I've been in this industry for my entire career I've developed drugs and gotten them approved by the FDA I've started about a dozen biotech companies right patents have always been sort of the Bedrock of the biotech Community but patents are a negative right patents basically give you the right to tell someone else they can't do something what we're trying to do at varo is turn that on its head instead of standing behind our patents and preventing Innovation we're going to leverage our patents and promote Innovation we're going to get all of this out into the world our competitive Advantage instead of our patents will be our R&D so we're based in St Louis Missouri uh we're in this great area called the cortex Innovation community and we're building a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to produce mes and our challenge our competitive advantages will be to produce the lowest cost highest quality Mes in the world and then Supply those to our innovators give them the ability to innovate and give them that secret sauce the mes that they can incorporate into their own devices or they can build capacity for their own countries we're doing something else I haven't been uh keeping up with with my slides there we go so we're doing something else with our R&D platform that's important when we think about pandemic P pandemic preparedness as well we're creating a nano body Library so you may remember I said at the beginning of my talk that nanobodies are the proteins that we link to our electrodes to make mes and those are what bind to viruses and bacteria we're creating a library with trillions of different nanobodies that will give us the ability to develop mes very quickly against whatever the next emerging pathogen is whether it's SARS K3 or monkey pox 2 or whatever comes along that threatens to become the next pandemic our platform our R&D capability will allow us to produce new mes against those emerging pathogens within within a matter of weeks and deploy devices so that hopefully the next time this comes around we can get out in front of it we can either bend the curve or maybe prevent the spread by getting those devices for those emerging pathogens out into the world so ataro we're very passionate about preventing the spread of infectious diseases um we're grateful of metallic for his support uh and for his support and supporting a new you know business model for innovation in the biotch industry so I will be here uh I'll be out in in the back I have a few demos that I can show of the uh the breath-based diagnostic device I have some mes that I can show um so feel free