Capricor Therapeutics, Inc. (CAPR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings, and welcome to the Key Opinion Leader call, Why Exosomes Are Uniquely Suited for Vaccine Development, hosted by Capricor Therapeutics. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host. A.J. Bergmann, Chief Financial Officer for Capricor Therapeutics. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and thank you for joining our call. Before we start, I would like to state that we will be making certain forward-looking statements during today's presentation. These statements may include statements regarding, among other things, the efficacy, safety and intended utilization of our product candidates, our future research and development plans, including our anticipated conduct, timing of preclinical and clinical studies, our plans to present or report additional data, our plans regarding regulatory filings, potential regulatory developments involving our product candidates and our positive uses of existing cash and investment resources. These forward-looking statements are based on current information, assumptions and expectations that are subject to change, involve a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. These and other risks are described in our periodic filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our quarterly and annual reports. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. We disclaim any obligation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Linda Marbán, CEO.

Good morning. I am Linda Marbán, the Chief Executive Officer of Capricor Therapeutics. I want to thank you for joining us today during these unprecedented times to discuss exosomes as a platform for vaccine development with Dr. Stephen Gould of Johns Hopkins University. I hope you have been following our recent announcements in regards to our exosome program and are as excited as we are with the direction of this important program. Now first, let me begin with some good news. Yesterday, we strengthened our balance sheet by raising approximately $5 million. This capital raise is important and strategic because it gives us runway, likely through 2021, to support our programs and continue to build out our plans for exosomes as a therapeutic platform. Now as we have reported and been talking about frequently, we will have data coming in during the second quarter from our HOPE-2 clinical trial, which is investigating CAP-1002, our cell therapy product candidate for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While we anxiously await the data from that trial, we are carefully planning the regulatory strategy we will pursue to hopefully bring that therapeutic to those with advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. At the same time and behind the scenes, we have been strategically building our exosome program. For some of you, the concept that Capricor is developing a vaccine program based on exosomes may seem like a shift in strategy. But actually, for us, it is really just a tactical change. It is the culmination of several years of work that began with the discovery of the exosomes made by ourselves, the CDCs, cardiosphere-derived cells, identifying the exosomes as the mechanism of action of the cells and ultimately deciding that we wanted to harness the power of the exosome as nature's delivery vehicle. Now we realized that we had the opportunity to not just isolate exosomes from cells, but that the cells could be custom-engineered to be deliver payloads of choice, which potentially may allow for many interesting opportunities for the treatment of disease. So whether our goal is to immunize a patient against a dreaded disease or fix a genetic mutation, we believe that exosome-based technologies may offer the opportunity to do so. Now I did just say engineer the cells. What I meant is that we will engineer the cells to produce exosomes that will ultimately carry payloads of choice. A pivotal part of our plan was to bring the best and the brightest to enable Capricor to deliver on this strategy. For a long time, Dr. Stephen Gould has been working on exosomes and fostering their development as therapeutics. He is the founder of the ASEMV, the American Society of Extracellular and Microvesicles (sic) [ American Society for Exosomes and Microvesicles ] and it was through this affiliation that I first made his acquaintance. I was immediately struck by Dr. Gould's ability to think through the details of taking a scientific discovery to a product. So as you know, one of Capricor's core missions is to bring therapies from bench to bedside. We have a lot of experience in working with academics, and we are now planning to follow the same strategy in our affiliation with Dr. Gould and his laboratory. Now let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Stephen Gould. Dr. Stephen J. Gould is the Professor of Biological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, director of the Johns Hopkins University Graduate Program in Biological Chemistry, and as I mentioned a few moments ago, a co-founder of the American Society for Exosomes and Microvesicles. Dr. Gould's research interest lie at the intersection of cell biology and human disease especially as they relate to exosomes. Dr. Gould's work was the first to reveal the mechanistic link between exosome biogenesis and virus budding, the first to identify mechanisms of exosome engineering and first, together with his collaborator, Dr. Florin Selaru, to show that engineered RNA-loaded exosomes are an effective treatment for primary liver cancers. Dr. Gould has published more than 100 research articles, numerous invited reviews and several book chapters. He has served on dozens of NIH and other grant review panels, reviewed scores of research articles, organized numerous scientific conference and is the recipient of numerous public and private research grants. Dr. Gould earned his doctorate at the University of California San Diego after receiving his Bachelor's Degree from the University of California in Santa Barbara. Now I'm going to turn the microphone over to Dr. Gould, and I'm going to ask you to share today your current thinking on exosomes as a platform for vaccine development for all those who have called in this morning. Thank you. Dr. Gould.

Thanks, Linda, for the kind words. Hello to everybody. I'll just give my introduction here. I am, as Linda said, a professor of Biological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, where I run a research lab and this is my primary affiliation, my primary job. We also are involved in a wide range of exosome-related research activities and organizational activities and I -- as part of my role at Johns Hopkins University, it's incumbent upon me to start every presentation with a listing of all my real and potential conflicts. So I do consulting work beyond my job at Johns Hopkins with a number of companies. I have equity of royalty or license agreements with a number of companies, those that are starred or those in which I actually own some amount of equity. And I'm funded by a mixture of private and public sources, our researches. Now one of the things that brings us all here today is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This is the screenshot from this phenomenal website that Johns Hopkins University runs. This is from a couple of weeks ago. You can just see the numbers there were scary at the time. It was 100,000 in just the last 2 weeks. It's quadrupled across the world, as have the deaths. So in the midst of this pandemic, one of the questions becomes, what are the various approaches that scientists can take to try to fight this disease? And what I'm going to do in the next few slides is to try and concisely describe exosome field and exosome biology to you and a little bit of what we're trying to do to develop exosome-based vaccines in our research group. So for those of you who aren't familiar, exosomes are a subclass of what we refer to as extracellular vesicles. So extracellular vesicles are all secreted vesicles that are made by cells. Exosomes are the smallest subgroup of these. They're very small particles, only about 30 to 150 nanometers in size and diameter. And they show signs of active assembly, and what I mean by that is that if you look at the proteins and lipids and nucleic acids that are in these secreted vesicles, they're all obviously derived from the cell, but a large number of them are highly enriched in the secreted vesicle relative to their concentration in the cell, which suggests an active assembly, active targeting process. They're released by all cells. They're abundant in all biofluids that have been assayed. And they play complex roles in biology: in normal conditions, by allowing cells to communicate with one another in complex and multifactorial ways; and in a wide range of diseases, allowing cancer cells, for example, or damaged tissue to actually alter the gene expression profiles and signaling profiles of the cells in their neighborhood and also cells at a distance. Now what this cartoon shows you are all these vesicles in suspension. If you were to look at the extracellular vesicles, say, in the blood or the cerebrospinal fluid, and you could see it at this resolution, you would see that the fluid is full of these small vesicles. But even this one subclass of vesicles is very heterogeneous in size. The cartoon also shows a number of the very interesting proteins that have been reported on exosomes. I just caution, there probably is no exosome that has all of these proteins on it. But it's just a cartoon to represent some of the very interesting proteins that we find on them. There are growth factors, growth factor receptors, various kinds of signaling molecules, some adhesion molecules, and of course, inside the exosome are RNA molecules that have the ability to drive gene expression changes in recipient cells. The electron micrograph shows what they look like at the ultra-structural level. They're very small. They don't really have any distinguishing feature other than that they are bound by a single membrane. They just kind of look like a ball with some content in size. Now the exosomes that are released by any one cell or found in any biofluid are highly heterogeneous in size, even the small class are. And the size distribution profile for a sample exosome prep is shown in the graph on the bottom, where the blue bars show the relative percentage population in the -- and along the X axis is the size and diameter, and this is fairly typical of what people see. So there is no single uniform size to these vesicles nor is there any single uniform composition, but that's okay because in a given bioreactor system, you can still generate a very uniform batch characteristics of vesicles. Now one of the things that's been extremely helpful to us in understanding exosome biogenesis and exosome engineering was to really follow how a number of individual exosomal proteins are made by the cell and how they make their way into secreted vesicles. And I'll just summarize in this cartoon what we know at this point in time. These small vesicles are made both at exosome membranes and at plasma membrane. Some forms of plasma membrane are really at the cell surface, some forms of plasma membrane are in deep invaginations within the cell. And all 3 of these sources of exosomes contribute to what a cell secretes and releases into the medium. Now to give you a better idea of the size of these particles that we're talking about, there's a cartoon here on Slide 9 where you can see the relative sizes on the top of a potassium ion, an adrenaline molecule, a typical growth factor and the exosome. And what this reveals is that the exosome, as a single unit, is far more complicated than any typical signaling molecule. And in fact, it's comprised of a very large number of different molecules, literally dozens to hundreds of different proteins and different RNAs, each in a single particle. And even though exosomes are much larger than your average signaling molecule and are composed of multiple bioactive molecules, they're still vastly smaller than a cell. And so on the bottom diagram sort of shows the relative size of an exosome, which is that tiny dot and then a microvesicle, which is another type of secreted vesicle, which is much larger in purple there, and then to the right, just the edge of a cell to give you the relative size of a cell. So one of the things I'd like you to take away from this is that exosomes are extremely small but much more complex and larger than typical signaling molecule. And they're very hard to measure with great determination on a single particle basis although we can. And just keep in mind that the exosome is roughly 1/10 the wavelength of the smallest wavelength of light. So these are very small particles. Now what makes exosomes attractive as a therapeutic or a drug delivery vehicle or a vaccine template, and let's try to put this idea across in the slide here, where you can see on the left, the graph of how concentration falls with distance from a point source. And the concentration falls by the inverse cube law, which means from a single point source, and if fusion alone was governing the process, you find the concentration falling dramatically with distance. And this is also true for exosomes in -- as individual entities. But when you look at the exosomes themselves, concentrations of the molecules on the exosomes do not change relative to one another as you go away from the point source. This is not the most elegant demonstration at this point, but what I'm trying to get across here is that when cells want to send multifactorial signals to another cell, doing it on exosome is far more efficient and effective for a variety of reasons, so one of which is that you get enhanced signaling from a single molecule. So rather than the cell interacting with one growth factor, an exosome can actually deliver signals from dozens or hundreds of individual copies of that one molecule. You also can get multidimensional signaling because multiple signaling molecules can be placed on the surface and are placed on the surface. And in fact, exosomes can even deliver biochemical pathways from cell to cell. So they are much different and much more complex and, in some cases, effective signaling platform than your standard single molecule signaling systems that exist in biology. One of the things to keep in mind is exosomes, both in terms of their normal biology and as a drug delivery platform, is that they accumulate wherever there are sites of vascular leakiness. So in our vasculature throughout our body, the permeability limit is around 10 nanometers or so. In the blood-brain barrier, it's even smaller, about 1 nanometers. So anything larger than that really doesn't get out of the circulation and into the tissues. This is quite different though in the liver under normal conditions. Liver has a very high permeability to particles, and so exosomes can come into the liver very easily under normal conditions. The other thing that's significant about this is that a site of infection, wounds, sites of inflammation and tumors have extremely high vascular permeability. So as an injectable for therapeutic purposes, exosomes have the ability to deliver drugs to sites of infection, to wounds, to sites of inflammation and to tumors in cancer patients. Now one of the things that brings us all here today is whether exosomes can be used to make vaccines. And my comments here are trying to keep them relatively brief so that there's time for questions, but we have a couple of different approaches that we're using to try and use exosomes for vaccination purposes. So the first of these, what we refer to as exosome display vaccines, and these are recombinant products with a very clear pipeline. We start with a cell platform that's approved for biologics production. And into that cell line, we introduce the genes that encode, in the case of a viral vaccine, the viral antigens anchored to exosomes, so that when the cell makes exosomes, it's actually generating particles that are loaded with the antigens of interest, which we want the injected subject to raise immune responses. So once we make these cell lines, of course, we just simply have to collect the exosomes from them. And then these exosomes are reloaded with large quantities of the antigens of interest. And they can be purified really quite easily by a highly-scalable filtration chromatography procedure. And the end product of that essentially is the vaccine, and this can be delivered by a standard intramuscular injection and boost protocol. So this is one platform that we're developing for a vaccine and that Capricor is partnering with us to investigate and develop. The other way we're going about using exosomes to make vaccines is to use the high degree of tolerance to exosomes to deliver mRNA vaccines into the body. So this is a very simple concept in which we take exosomes, and we mix them with mRNAs that are designed to be stable and to encode target antigens, which we want the immune system to develop a response. And we use a special exosome mRNA loading reagent, combine them all together to make a formulation that then can be injected and lead to mRNA expression in the host cells, which induces an immune response that provides protection. So again, a very simple approach, and we are working on this with Capricor, and we're working on it in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 infection virus. So we're, right now, in the process of generating the SARS-CoV-2 Display vaccine, and this is essentially designed to put the viral proteins in their native context in the vesicle, which is how they look on a virus. These are then human cell-derived, recombinant production platform, and it's a 4-part antigen design for balanced antigen presentation and immunity. And the important part here is that this is a vaccine that has the viral antigens. It looks like a virus but it's a virus-free platform so there's no infection risk in this type of a vaccine. The second one that we're developing together with Capricor is the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. And what we're doing here is we're combining in-vitro synthesized mRNAs that encode the antigens of interest, exosomes and loading reagents, and then this tripartite design, which was also engineered for balanced antigen presentation and immunity, will be injected for the development of protective immunity to the virus. Again, these are research projects at present. We are well underway on both of them and we look forward to seeing how they work. And with that, I think I'm done with my presentation and I'd like to take any questions if there are any.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Joe Pantginis with H.C. Wainwright.

Thank you, Dr. Gould for all the details here today. I'd like to focus my question on looking forward towards potentially getting these exosomes to markets and looking at the safety and regulatory environment as well as manufacturing. So when you look at the -- especially, for example, the display vaccines, obviously, you'll have your antigens of choice that you want to be part of the payloads. But how do you necessarily control for what else these exosomes are pinching off from the cell that might contain things that you might not want, including potentially, say, negative immunomodulatory compounds?

That's a great question. One of the keys to doing this is to work with the cell line that does not express those proteins. I don't know if you're aware this but exosomes have been implicated in immunosuppression in certain cancer models due to their -- the presence of PD-L1 and some certain other immunosuppressive proteins on the surface. We work with a cell line that does not express those proteins. So that's a key first step and we control for that. In addition, our expression and cell culture conditions, during which we produce our modified exosomes, drive extraordinarily high levels of expression of the proteins that we want to put into the exosome, such high level that they actually compete out many of the other cargoes. So although we are nowhere near close to having completely -- a complete control over exosome content, our production system that we've been inventing here at Johns Hopkins is getting us closer and closer to that goal over time. So it's a concern, and of course, we're always going to have to control for these during batch production, but we think that we've mitigated a lot of those issues in our technology.

That's very helpful. And I guess my follow-on would be, even in your -- one of your initial charts showing that you see various sizes of exosomes that are basically spit out of the cell, so when you look towards approval criteria or rather, say, release criteria of the specifications for FDA approval, what sort of, I guess, bounds could you expect to see? Like do you see that you'd have to have specific sizes that you'd need to isolate through your filtration methods and how you can control for? Or would the FDA require you to have some sort of identification of the payloads and certain concentrations, et cetera?

Yes, this is an evolving aspect of the field right now. What I would say is that our purification strategy already eliminates the vast majority of significant contaminating vesicle sizes. So we're left with a very small subset of vesicles to begin with. And as you point out, they are heterogeneous. However, the degree of heterogeneity in our preps is actually less than what one sees in commercial and clinical lipid nanoparticle preps, which actually display even greater variability in size. So we don't feel that there's a lot to be gained by trying to further subdivide by size. And on top of that, there really is no existing technology to do that. We don't really think it's going to be an important factor, particularly in the case of vaccines, where really you're using these to elicit an immune response. I think that's more of a question that becomes potentially a concern in terms of therapeutics delivery. But again, it would really depend on the kind of therapeutics you're trying to generate. So for example, if one is simply trying to generate a much better version of, say, a trapped type of decoy receptor, it probably wouldn't matter so much. If you are committed to delivering a very specific RNA into the cytoplasm of a very specific subtype of cell, it might be more of an issue. So it's a good question. I don't think that's really going to be a barrier here in the area of vaccine development though.

Very helpful. And then actually, just 1 last question. I don't know if this is proprietary yet for the company or you, with regard to your CoV-2 -- COVID-19 vaccines, either display or mRNA. I don't know if you can describe sort of where these stand right now. Like have you even identified the actual payloads that you want to go into these yet?

Yes. We're well past that point. We are very optimistic. Let's just put it this way. The animal studies are being organized at present.

[Operator Instructions]

So Steve, I have -- this is Linda, obviously. I have a question from the webcast. The COVID-19 space is crowded. I think it is a global effort to try and develop technologies to deal with this scourge that is affecting all of humanity. If we are successful in this exercise of bringing a vaccine forward for COVID-19, we would be very lucky and grateful for that. But can you describe, for a few moments, how this development, how development of this platform can be used in other indications? Does it have opportunities in oncology? Does it have opportunities for other infectious diseases? Just so that people listening in can understand the broad nature of this technology.

Sure, Linda. That's a good point. What we're trying to generate here is a platform where it's sort of a plug-and-play type of technology that whenever there's an emerging infectious disease, we can use the technologies that we're basically inventing and putting into practice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to any others. The principles that we're generating, in fact, many of the systems we're generating here could be applied to flu vaccines, other infectious pathogen vaccines. And as you mentioned, there's also a potential here for -- contributing to the cancer vaccine field, and these are things that we want to explore in the future. But right now, we are in the middle of this pandemic, so we are focused primarily here on COVID-19 and its underlying viral cause. So I just will say one more thing. We are extremely enthusiastic to see the great outpouring of ideas in every aspect of molecular and cell biology that's being applied to this pandemic. We hope they all work. That's what we're hoping, they all work. What we're trying to do is we're trying to contribute to the effort, hopefully, to generate something that's actually successful, but importantly, to take approaches that are not being taken by many other groups, of any other groups. So this is a somewhat new way to try to approach the vaccine strategies. We think it has a lot of potential and we're confident that we'll be able to execute the plans, and we do think we'll be successful in getting vaccines. And once we do, we think it can be a platform that can be of broad use.

Yes. Thank you, Steve. I agree, and I echo Dr. Gould's enthusiasm. This has been really game-changing for the company but also for me as I've understood the power of this opportunity for COVID-19. Along that line, there's another question from the webcast, Steve, which asks why would an exosome vaccine be better than traditional approaches for the development of other types of infectious diseases or even immuno-oncology? What makes an exosome special?

Well, in the context of viral infections, many of the viruses that we're looking at to generate vaccines towards are enveloped viruses. So the way our immune system normally interacts with them is in the context of a vesicle. And exosome-based vaccines are vesicular in nature. So we think that it provides a much closer to native context with which to stimulate the immune system. And in this sense, it's quite a bit different from other approaches that are based on purification of recombinant proteins in outside their context of a vesicle and immunization in that form. So we think that's a major advantage of the exosome display technology. And as far as the mRNA delivery, one of the issues with lipid nanoparticles in general is that they have a tendency to be poorly tolerated by the host and recognized as foreign, whereas our exosome-based mRNA delivery platform basically protects the mRNAs, encompassing them within a vesicle that is well tolerated by people and so much less likely to elicit inflammatory responses on their own and more effective at actually delivering the mRNA in a functional form into cells that can then express those mRNAs, express the proteins and then stimulate a protective immune response and be immunized.

Thank you. I believe there's another question coming in.

Yes. Our next question comes from the line of Ed Tenthoff with Piper Sandler.

Great. I appreciate this update. I've always thought of exosomes as just an ideal delivery vehicle for extracellular content, and I think a vaccine approach makes a ton of sense. What -- 2 questions, if I may. How quickly can these be engineered? And is there any thought or technology that looks at maybe decorating the exterior of the exosome, for lack of a better term, with factors or binding ways that may enhance or even target uptake into the immune system for immunogenic purposes?

Great question. We think alike. So all I can tell you right now is that, that's exactly part of what we -- what's involved in our technology.

I'll hang out and wait. And I appreciated your commentary on the regulatory side and the manufacturing side because I think that's going to be very important in terms of characterizing the exosome. So thanks very much for your important work.

Our next question comes from the line of Xian Deng with Berenberg.

So I'm very interested in the messenger-encoding target antigens. And obviously, you are, right now, organizing animal studies to have the preliminary evaluation. Do you have a general idea of what are those target antigens? Are they a part of S protein or any of the enveloped proteins? And I have a follow up.

Good question. Our -- as I mentioned, we have a tripartite mRNA design, and our thinking on this and our formulation is based on a wide range of studies demonstrating that effective and long-lasting immunity must stimulate the cellular arm of adaptive responses. So we -- part of our -- part of the -- our mRNA is simply designed to elicit antibody responses to the receptor, binding the main of the spike protein. But we -- other 2 components in our mRNA platform are designed to generate Class I and Class II loaded peptides at high efficiency, both for antibody production stimulation but also to stimulate long-term immunity to the virus. So it's complex and I can't get into the details, but we are looking -- our mRNAs are comprised of antigens from all 4 structural proteins of the virus, and those are the S, M, E and N proteins.

Great. And just as you mentioned that you're going to elicit a high level of Class I and II MHC response, have you evaluated the delivery efficiency to antigen-presenting cells with your exosome platform?

That is the kind of experiments that are on the blackboard right now. We're getting to that stage. Right now, we're still in the formulation and sort of preliminary delivery stages, but obviously, a more sophisticated analysis of delivery to different types of cells in the host is going to be one of the things we'll be looking at.

Last one from me. I mean, since you're the leader of a very powerful platform for drug delivery, if we think about the potential clinical endpoints for COVID-19 vaccine, and especially if your competitors are talking about a potential release before autumn, how should we think about using surrogate biomarkers as the clinical endpoint for vaccine development?

Yes, good point. Yes, of course, in a vaccine study, obviously, the gold standard is whether or not you protect individuals from infection and disease. Those studies are complex, expensive, long-lasting and take a while to analyze. Obviously, both in our small animal, our nonhuman primate and in clinical trials, we would be performing detailed analysis of immune responses, both humoral and cellular in the vaccinated subjects. So yes, we have multiple endpoints to the animal and clinical trials plan. Does that address your question?

Yes, perfect.

So Steve, thank you very much. This has been very helpful, and I will just ask 1 question from my desk. Can you elaborate a little bit on what the previous question entailed, which was time line? So our competitors are saying they will be in human subjects by the fall. Can you kind of give an idea of what you think our time lines will be in terms of getting into animals and then ultimately into patients, all things being equal?

Yes, it's always difficult to predict the future in a developmental project like this, but we are very far into our display vaccine projects right now. We -- if progress continues at the pace it's been moving, we anticipate being into our animal models within a month. And some of these animal models are short, some of them are longer. Some of them do not measure infectivity, others do. Our anticipation is that, provided that the research enterprise continues to go unaltered by the pandemic, we, too, hope to be into clinical trials in 2020. As for the mRNA vaccine, we're -- it's a little bit behind. It's just a different time course study but we have the same kind of projections currently. So I think these are not particularly difficult vaccines to produce, so we don't anticipate significant problems in getting them actually into animal studies in the time line of between 2 to 4 months, 1 to 4 months, that kind of time scale. But again, I can't really predict that, and that is our provisional estimation, not something that can be absolutely rock-solid at this point in time.

Great. So thank you. Another couple of questions from the webcast. One is, you mentioned that we are embarking on a strategy that involves all 4 proteins. At Capricor, we call them MENS, M, E, N, S. Can you explain for the listeners what the potential of a 4-protein vaccine is in corona or other types of applications?

Yes. So as I mentioned, obviously, one part of an effective vaccine strategy is to try to generate protective antibodies that target the receptor-binding domain of the S protein. However, history of vaccines in the coronavirus field, which has been dominated in the agricultural industry, has shown that effective immunity usually requires more than that. In addition, a completely antibody-focused approach, I think, always raises the possibility of eliciting what's referred to as antibody enhancement of disease, where actually you find that antibodies or antibody-biased immune responses actually are not protective, and in fact, some cases, can actually accelerate infection and disease through complex mechanisms that are not completely understood. For that reason, we again feel very strongly that we want to elicit very strong cellular responses to a broad array of host antigens. Now some of these are on the surface. S protein, it gathers the most attention in this particular virus. But actually, the most abundant protein on the surface of the virus is the M protein. Now as part of our vaccine approach is to have the M protein in there. The E protein also is on the surface. And the N protein, being the major capsid protein of the virus, is also very important to have in a vaccine formulation. So there's -- part of this is conceptual about how immune systems generate protective immunity. And part of it is derived from specific studies of vaccine efforts in the original SARS virus and in other coronaviruses, which have shown the importance of the M protein as being part of the vaccine.

Okay, that's very important and thank you for highlighting that. And then there's one more question from the webcast, and I know you already answered it but recognizing people are probably furiously taking notes. Can you just highlight other applications of this type of technology? We talk about a lot, between ourselves, the plug-and-play nature. Can you highlight one more time how this could be used in other indications besides coronavirus?

Sure. Our lab's main focus is really developing the technologies that are broadly applicable for a number of purposes. So for example, we -- the display vaccine technology that we're developing are also applicable to the development of exosome-based receptor decoy types of drugs. So there are a number of biologics out there that are based on single proteins that are injected and act by targeting a circulating factor that is, for example, pro-inflammatory, and some of these molecules are very effective at arthritis treatment. We think they're fantastic drugs. We think that displaying some of those drugs on exosomes actually has the potential to make those drugs even more effective for a couple of reasons, one of which is that exosomes, as I've mentioned in my opening statements, tend to accumulate at sites of vascular leakiness and sites of inflammation are vascularly leaky. So we think that it actually has the potential to target those types of therapeutics to the sites in the body where they're needed most. On top of that, the exosome display puts a lot of the drug in a very small area and changes significantly the binding constants for their target protein. We feel that this may make them much more effective inhibitors of some of these pro-inflammatory signaling molecules, which could either lead to: A, enhanced efficacy; or B, actually a reduction in the amount of material that needs to be injected per dose in order to get a therapeutic benefit. So we think that these are really exciting possibilities. Of course, there are many, many variations on exosomes that one can imagine for all kinds of applications, but that's just one. Likewise, the mRNA vaccine that we're developing is actually helping us understand how to use exosome RNA formulations and treatment of other types of diseases that could be amenable to mRNA delivery. And the list there is quite extensive, and I'm sure people can imagine how that could apply without going into any specific examples.

Yes. Thank you. I think that was very helpful. Are there any more questions, Melissa?

There are no other questions at this time. I'll turn the floor back to you for any final comments.

So Dr. Gould, thank you so much. Every time I listen to you, I learn as well, and so I hope that everybody enjoyed the presentation as much as I did. Together with Dr. Gould, Capricor is looking forward to expanding our exosome-based platform and joining in the battle against the novel coronavirus. In this pursuit, our goal will be to develop a vaccine that is different from anything else that is currently in development. I'd just like to highlight one last thing and that is that Capricor is not a passive bystander in this development. Dr. Gould's lab will be running primarily with the research and early-stage developments of the product. And then this is where Capricor will be able to provide real value to the development, in that we have tremendous experience, both in cell therapy and also in the isolation, purification and growing of exosomes. So we envision ourselves as his ideal partner in the product development aspect of this. And we believe that working together in concert with his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and our team here at Capricor that we will bring this important therapeutic forward but also set the stage for the development of a platform for exosomes, for which we have been working over the last several years to bring to the fore. So I would like to thank you this morning for joining our call. Thank you very much for your time this morning or early afternoon for you on the East Coast. Dr. Gould, I know that you're working literally 20 hours a day on this, and I can affirm that from our frequent conversations. So thank you, and let's all stay in touch and hope that we can go back to work and our lives very soon. Have a good day.

Thank you. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.