Ondine Biomedical Inc. (OBI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Welcome, everyone. We're excited to have you here today. We may have a few others funnel in here over the next few minutes. But given we're at the top of the hour will get started, I'd like to thank you, first and foremost, for joining our webinar today. My name is Steven Roche. I'm an epidemiologist and the Director and Principal Consultant for ACER Consulting, which is One health consulting firm based in Guelph Ontario. I'm also on a [ junk ] professor at the University of Guelph. I'm here to host and facilitate our event today, which features 3 really amazing speakers who are going to each cover aspects of photodisinfection for food safety specifically. Our event today is hosted by Ondine Biomedical in partnership with Chinook Contract Research. And the event here and many of the other resources and tools we'll be sharing with you about some of these interesting talks is funded by the government of Canada under the Canadian Agricultural Partnership's AgriScience Program, which is a federal, territorial and provincial initiative. I'd like to remind everyone that we're hosting the web -- this as a webinar event within the Zoom platform which means that you can really sit back and watch the presenters as they deliver their content as they've prepared it. But we also want to offer a couple of opportunities. [Operator Instructions] And with that, I'd like to jump into a brief introduction of our first panelist who is Dr. Richard Rusk. Dr. Rusk is a veterinarian, a physician, an adventurer, an avid cyclist in a father of 2, and he believes in the ability of mankind to heal themselves with the right guidance. He received his degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Pretoria, South Africa in 1992 and his Medical Doctors degree in 2005 from the University of Manitoba Canada. He went on to specialize in Public Health and Preventative Medicine just with an emphasis on a different herd. He worked for the Manitoba government and the Department of Health as a Medical Officer of Health for 10 years, where he focused on infectious diseases. He also maintained a clinical practice in the community emergency department for many years and now works as a preventative medicine specialist and consultant physician in Winnipeg. Pulling all of these pieces together, he has been able to consult large corporations about preventative programs for the workforce and appropriate response for the pandemic. His emphasis is on creating healthy workplaces that will improve the quality of life for the employees, both at work and at home. So without further ado, I will introduce Dr. Rusk.

Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you very much for this opportunity. I'm just going to share my screen quickly. Here we go from the beginning. Yes. Well, thanks very much for this. This is a fascinating topic. And I really hope I can set the scene here. I think as you can -- as you heard my background is quite diverse. And so I understand the agricultural side, but I also understand the medical side and that overlap. And so I want to paint a big picture here around food safety around meat processing. And hopefully, that will set the stage for the other 2 speakers on this innovative and I actually think very important technology that's coming down the pipe. So starting, the food processing and the food industry overall definitely has some very important factors and coming from the human side, the food safety is definitely our most important factor right at the top. And I'll actually give some figures a little later as to how serious it can be even with the current processes, safe food processes in place, we still have cases. And then on the other side, we also tend to have around about 10% wastage of food -- of meat, I'm talking about in Canada each year, and that's due to contamination. So if we can work out a way how to not only improve food safety, but also reduce our contamination, this is really important moving forward, considering all the change in resources and things like that. And then the other component that is this huge juggernaut that's coming down the pipe. And I have to admit the agricultural industry is way ahead of the human health industry. But the antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance and antibiotic stewardship is incredibly important. Their predictions are, by 2050 antibiotic resistance is going to have more of an impact than cancer does. So -- and so that interaction between food safety and where the animal is getting to the food chain, we definitely have to keep that in the back of our mind. Animal welfare, much more important nowadays that over the last 20 years. We know that there has been massive changes within agricultural industry, secondary to emphasis on animal welfare. And I mean just so I'm based in Winnipeg and just within the hog industry, we have around 15,000 hogs that are slaughter every single day. And so if we were to end up having a scenario where you end up stopping even just half of that slaughter process. Well, what happens to the rest of these animals coming down the pipe. And we saw that in the pandemic and unfortunately, those animals, they end up going to into pits. It's -- that's definitely something we have to be aware of. So we also know, as I was part of my background, understanding worker safety and labor issues is vital because if you can create a healthy, safe workforce, you're going to continue with adequate production and -- so that is an area that I will touch on. Supply chain, well, definitely, we saw an issue coming secondary after the pandemic. Supply chain is much more important as well as our consumers. Our consumers are expecting transparency in our food and where it comes from, all the way back to given the grain -- so we've got the farm to the fork, but it's not only just the form of where the animals were raised. So it's potentially even upstream to that. And water usage, well, that's definitely one of the issues in this industry. I'm not going to touch on this at all, but it is something that we have to bear in mind, especially if you look at the state of water in a big picture. So I'm going to briefly touch on the actual process. And I'm going to touch on these areas where -- and as you can see, I've said Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 risk. These are kind of the points where potentially we can have the biggest impact to improving quality, improving safety, but also where we really need to focus because those -- the impact there could ripple all the way down in the food chain. So slaughter and obviously, there's an animal welfare component and from my observation I'm not actually worried about the slaughter side of things at all. However, right in the beginning, as soon as you start your Carcass Prep, you definitely can end up having some contamination. And so there has to be potentially even an intervention right at that point to minimize and drop contamination risks, but a lot of that can just be done through adequate training and processes. The meat cutting becomes the tricky part because now potentially you not only have your meat component that is at risk, but your contamination should be -- could be coming from the meat as well as could be coming from all the surfaces. And so how do we do in fact keep the surfaces clean to minimize those risks. The processing becomes even more complex because now you have big machines that are actually doing this additional processing and how do we have adequate methods to ensure that the cleaning of the -- and decontamination of those machines, which -- and the classic example is going back to E. coli outbreaks, and we had the Alberta outbreak a few years ago. And they are often linked back to potentially even a single machine that distributes vast quantities of hamburger or cut processed meats and we have a massive impact. So packaging are in this definitely areas there, but I would say our biggest area we have to focus on is actually a processing and meat cutting. So just very briefly. As you can see, this even -- it's fascinating looking at this data. So you can see in 2020 and within the health industry, we felt that the pandemic had if there's going to be any positive side, it had a positive side on the meat industry in that we tendered, as you can see, our numbers of foodborne disease ended up going down, not 100% sure why, to be honest, but it definitely ended up going down. But those numbers are going to come back up. And as you can see in the U.S., we have over 1,000 deaths in Canada. We have around 500 deaths every year. And so this is not something that we can say, "Oh, well, those numbers are not that high." That is still way too high a number. Okay. So let's briefly I'll go to some other sources. So obviously, the -- going -- sorry, I'll just go back. This is based on, as you can see, bacterial -- predominantly bacterial infections that essentially stem from the animals. Okay? So Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, E. Coli. These are all -- clostridium perfringens, these are all bacteria that tend to be within the animals, they're not necessarily causing disease, but they get into the food chain. And then our other biggest area of potential risk is our cleaning and sanitation chemicals because we need these chemicals and this is mostly on the surfaces. So in the processing side of things and cleaning the machinery and cleaning the blades and cleaning the surfaces where everything is prepared, but we still need these chemical. And so how do you disinfect and reduce that potential contamination. I'm -- antibiotic agents, I bring this up because of that original statement. We are working high up. So we're working with the animals itself to control that. So that's phenomenal within the agricultural industry. However, that definitely can trickle through. So if we have antibiotic resistance organisms that then contaminated a portion of the plant, that can then trickle down. And so I'll bring it up later. But part of the technology of -- and our other speakers will also touch on this part of the technology that we're talking about today actually is able to address that as well. So pesticide, heavy metals, that's also level 1. It's very much high up the chain. So -- and just brief broad overview. And obviously, it's all about the disinfection and the challenges around that. And so the classic is hot water, the mechanical cleaning, high pressure, things like that, and there's specific processes, but there's always some type of chemical component to that. okay? And so that is the area that if we can have -- if we are going to be using different chemicals, these chemicals have to be inert, these chemicals have to be safe. And so that's part of this whole new technology. And obviously, the other side of it is, are any of these chemicals potentially risk to the actual employees. We're using QICs and chlorine, things like that. So definitely, we have to be aware of that. And then we all know that there's -- especially in a slaughterhouse itself, there's always pests there, and we have to control those pests and ensuring that there's no cross-contamination from the rodenticides or the insecticides that are used to control the local pests that may be there. So -- if -- and I've alluded to this the whole way through, and if we can ensure that we are targeting the areas that have the greatest intervention that is not only going to be the most beneficial but potentially would also be the -- our most cost effective and economic and so we need to then aim at targeting the microbacterial load but without creating contamination. And focusing on equipment and with the whole cleaning and sanitation, that is vital. But can we also find a method where we can actually disinfect the meet itself I think, is a very good question here. And what that will do, will reduce our potential cross-contamination of these biological hazards. So I want to bring in antimicrobial stewardship because that is kind of the overarching concept to control the antimicrobial-resistant organisms. Okay? And it's very difficult to create stewardship processes that span right across the whole food safety industry. So far, there's definitely been a lot of headway and improvement on the animal side. But that hasn't managed to trickle into the next stage of the food chain, namely the actual processing. And probably partially because we don't have the technology yet, but it's also really difficult to move this whole process forward, essentially because you need this commitment all the way from upper leadership, from the federal level, from a provincial level and from the industrial level. And so there has to be some form of commitment there. And the one way that is being used within the agricultural and is starting to be used within the human health side is feedback and accountability things like that. We've definitely monitored the antibiotic formulary and we're managing that. But if there can also be additional incentives to industry to adopt new processes and new like technology, that would also move this whole process forward. So it's not just sitting within the animal growth, but also into that next phase of food safety. So there are definitely other innovative options at the moment. And the high-pressure processing, that -- there's been a fair amount of research on that. the classic idea of well, if we can do rapid testing to ensure at multiple levels throughout the processing stage that we are testing that the meat is still not contaminated, then that's another method, okay? And then potentially even using different types of antimicrobial interventions. But these much the same as the photodynamic therapy are also still evolving. So the big piece around photodynamic disinfection is it's antibiotic free. It is well established to target bacteria across the board. And it is essentially an inert chemical. And from my experience, I had -- I was privileged enough to actually be involved with a mass deployment within the food industry of the actual labor force of the use of this technology. It wasn't necessarily for bacteria, it was for COVID. But we had a phenomenal impact in that we were able to reduce cases within the processing plant on a -- for an extended time period. And we had no adverse effects. So the most important piece here is this was a safe technology that we even use directly on the employees, and we didn't have any employees that ended up with adverse events. So potentially using this on the food itself is also a logical next step as well as in the other 2 points. I mean the Ondine has already got Health Canada registration and it's compliant with that. So definitely, I would say that photodynamic disinfection is one of the options that we really have to investigate. So just to sum this all up, and I hope that there will be some questions a little later. But -- so as I said, food safety very, very important component, and we need this ongoing constant improvement, even though there's already very clear established processes in place, we still have cases every single year of not only people getting sick and hospitalization, but also people [ die ]. And as the meat industry is essentially competing against a vegan industry. And so we do have to have way more improvement and transparency in this process. And if we can have a technology that is not going to create antibiotic-resistant organisms, that is an added bonus for the down the road. Focusing on that high impact is important and this not only will have economic impact on the health industry side, but also on the agricultural industry side and on -- and if we can end up having less contaminated products we not only reduce our wastage but we also potentially increase our shelf life. So.

Wonderful. Thank you, Dr. Rusk. Much appreciated. So we'll jump into our next speaker now, that's Dr. Nick Loebel. Dr. Loebel provides technical, scientific and leadership vision for Ondine with primary responsibility for the U.S. operations of the company. Nick has pioneered the development and launch of photodisinfection as an innovative alternatives through traditional antibiotics and has won numerous awards and recognition for his work, including the 2017 Clinical PDT Research Excellence Award in Coimbra, Portugal and the International Photodynamic Associations Lifetime Achievement Award granted in 2022 in Nancy, France. As a biomedical engineer, Nick has over 30 years of experience in drug, medical device and combination product development. And he's also focuses on business development and corporate finance in both public and private market sectors. He's authored numerous publications and patents and lectures regularly on antimicrobial photodynamics around the world. Welcome, Dr. Loebel, please take it away.

Thank you very much, Steven. I much appreciate your help here and as well, I want to reach out to my fellow panelists since I thank you so much for joining us and the audience as well. On what we think is a critically important development for our company and indeed for food safety in Canada and then the rest of the world. I'll just start by introducing Ondine briefly. We are a company with approximately 42 employees now. We are deeply into photodynamic disinfection development. And this is something which is new often to clinicians, to enterprise, our owners, to people who are developing other antimicrobials, but it's actually been something we've worked on for now over 10 years in this particular format. We've spent well over $200 million to develop it to this point. The company has received regulatory approval, as was stated earlier, for human clinical use, designed to remove pathogens in the nose that one might otherwise breathe on to surgical wounds and other health care interventions, which will then create downstream infections. And it's really proven its worth in that arena with significant reductions in infection rates getting into the 50% range at tertiary care hospitals and other available health care systems worldwide. It also is inexpensive. It's very rapid. And as Dr. Rusk indicated, very importantly, it does not produce resistance, which is something that we regard as one of the most important factors and why we developed the technology and why we're pushing hard to get this into commercial production. From a company standpoint, we are a vertically integrated firm. We look at customer need as a primary driver and then we do all the research and development and manage the supply chain and the quality aspects associated with developing these systems. Again, mainly in the clinical domain, we were extremely happy and fortunate to have received this grant from the agricultural sector in Canada and have really worked hard with Chinook Contract Resources just to really get us into a developmental state, which sets up for application of this clinical highly useful system into food processing. And it's not just for meat, although we are focused there right now, this could be across the chain for all proteins and indeed into nonprotein food stuffs. So I'll just point out what this looks like quickly from the perspective of what you might see in a hospital on one of [ Canada's coasts ] or indeed in 1 of 15 or 20 institutions that were on the way to bringing the system into. On the right, you see what is nothing more than a light source. It happens to be a laser, but that's an extremely efficient way to generate light, which then is brought into contact with a photosensitizer. This is a compound which when applied to surfaces in our case, in this picture in human nasal surfaces, the nasal epithelium, that substance will bind to microbes and it binds to any microbe. It binds to all bacteria or fungi or viruses. And that is an extremely rare spectrum. Normally, when we use antibiotics, we think of individual components within bacteria, for example, within gram-negative or gram-positive bacteria or even in viruses, there are particular ways we try and fight them. But this particular approach covers the entire spectrum of nonhuman cells. So I'm going to say eukaryotic cells, but it also targets fungi which are also eukaryotic. So it's a very, I think, clever way to disinfect humans as well as meat proteins and food stuffs from microbes that otherwise might need narrow-spectrum targeted antimicrobials, which often generate or always generate resistance. So it's this combination of the light and the photosensitizer that produces this potent effect. It's caused by a free radical generating mechanism. I'll get into that in a minute. But this is what a patient looks like. At a hospital before surgery, where the substance is placed in the nose. It takes just a few seconds to swab the nose with the blue colored photosensitizer in this case. And then the light is brought in for just a few minutes, 4 minutes in this case. And that will achieve what an antibiotic might take 5 days to do, twice a day. And you can appreciate that antibiotics are rather difficult to administer in a compliant way. They're dangerous to administer in a broad way because they generate resistance and they also have a lot of side effects which can harm patients. So this very topical, rapid, broad spectrum but safe approach is really, we think, a critical development in medicine, and we will see how we're going to deploy it in the food processing industry. Just a couple of pictures of things that we are in development in our pipeline. We're doing the same thing within chronic sinusitis, where biofilms of bacteria and fungi as well as viruses can develop in the sinuses here, you see maxillary and frontal sinus disinfection, a product that is in development, and we are very excited about. Direct disinfection of endotracheal tubes, where the photosensitizer is sprayed onto the inside and even the outside of the endotracheal tube in situ, in a patient undergoing mechanical ventilation. And the light is then brought in, and this system is turned on by computers. So there is no intervention by nursing staff. Every 5 to 10 minutes, the system is disinfected safely and effectively, we can remove 99.99% of all pathogens in these endotracheal tubes, which results in reduced Ventilator-associated pneumonia which results, of course, in healthier patients and a reduction in the very high death rate associated with VAP in critical care units in the ICU. We've also done this directly in plastics with our friends at University College London in England where the folks there embedded the photosensitizer compounds within plastics of medical devices, in this case, of foley catheter. Pretty much 100% of all foley catheters now placed in the bladder over a period of time will infect and very often, those organisms are the kinds of bugs that you might expect such as staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, et cetera, usually skin surface pathogens that then migrate into the urethra and start causing both bladder and ultimately, kidney infections and really can be quite dangerous. So these disinfect from the inside out as it were within the plastics. I'm going to just give you a short animation of how this works. The photosensitizer attaches specifically to known moieties on the surface of bugs, the light turns on, and this free radical production cascade occurs, which then kills the bugs turn off the light. And essentially, the reaction is completely finished. You have a residual field of destroyed microbes, of which either the human or other rinsing approaches can remove, but that is nothing more than the sequence and it's mediated as you see on the right there, Singlet oxygen production. There are other radicals involved, but the primary one is Singlet oxygen. It's produced by surrounding oxygen. And again, it's this direct light-based activation system, which causes that production of Singlet oxygen. Targeting all pathogen classes is very important because there are many sources of foodborne diseases, many sources of human diseases and trying to find the right antimicrobial very often takes a great deal of time trying to find the antimicrobial that isn't already resistant caused by use in food preparation and in human health care. The resistance is endemic and causing major problems in U.S. health care. Dr. Rusk indicated that by 2050, this becomes one of the largest causes of death of any in the health care system. So being able to move from east all the way to virus is a very interesting and important aspect of the technology. I'll show you what an actual slide looks like from humans where, for example, if you compare the impact of what this photodynamic system can do before and after in broad-spectrum plates or directly and only in staph on a selective plate. You can see how fast it is in just a few minutes, you get this deep kill versus other effective techniques which take longer, such as the use of povidone-iodine, alcohol or antibiotic themselves. And the important aspect of not producing resistance is caused by the external influence of the technique, it destroys the external components inside these microbes or outside these microbes and because of the short period of time of application, little of the photosensitizer enters the microbe or other cells, and so it doesn't produce a great deal of internal damage. The microbe is essentially destroyed from the outside in, primarily targeting proteins in the walls of these microbes as well as proteins and other components in the walls of fungi and viruses. And that's producing this very rapid kill without accessing the genomic material, which might otherwise react and cause either genes by [ generacion ] or additional influences on the microbes, which might allow it to generate resistance. We overwhelm all of these resistance producing mechanisms to create this broad spectrum and extremely difficult to resist effect. The action against viruses were touched on by Dr. Rusk in a major deployment in humans where we reduced the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 in the nasofaringes in the upper airway in order to reduce the severity and incidence of COVID-19. We spent a lot of time trying to help in the war against COVID-19 in the tick of it, and I think we did a great job. I can show you a couple of interesting pictures, courtesy of Dr. Caetano Sabino, who has provided them to me of what happens when you treat virus directly in situ, in this case, the fibropapillomatosis, a case a dog, here you see this is a virally mediated -- alpha-herpesvirus mediated disease, direct irrigation of these lesions with the photosensitizer. And then after activation, you see them start to resolve and after only 2 treatments the animal looks almost perfect an animal, which would otherwise have been put down. So you can see how directly active this is and how useful it is without resective surgery to create these outcomes. And this platform has many applications, depending on which particular method you use to apply it, be it a swab, a syringe, a spray, one can then connect it to a specific way to deliver the light. For example, in the top right picture, you see folks receiving the system in the nose, which is where our bread and butter sits, we disinfect thousands of patients every year, tens of thousands of patients have gone through this system over the last 8 years, and it's proven highly safe and effective. And we've talked about some of the other applications. On the bottom, you see the burns and wounds program, which is a program we're very excited about because of the difficulty of treating third-degree burns, especially when they're undergoing graft procedures, and you get graft delamination caused by the bugs. So how does this all get applied to food safety. We are targeting clean, green protein. We don't want to use antibiotics. We don't want to use complex chlorides or biguanides or anything that might produce resistance in the targeted microorganisms across the industry. And of course, we recognize that the contamination potential as you get folks involved in meat processing is high. We note that there are a great deal of more COVID-19 infections than in nonfood processing essential workers, and that's in part because of the conditions. And so what we are focused on is how we deliver this extremely efficient system into these kinds of environments. And I'm just going to spend a minute here talking about how we will migrate or are migrating the system from its use in humans for clinical utility to its use on food directly and food surfaces we need to ensure that there is enough kill of the microbes. We're looking for nothing less than 99.99-plus percent kill. We need to do this in a very short period of time because the food industry is time-intensive and time is money and processing throughput is critically important. And we need to make sure that the components of our system, the chemistry as well as the light are in place at appropriate levels to generate the required kill. And so we focused in this development program on making sure we can get the optimal light exposure levels to get those 4- and 5-log kill levels, those 99.99% kill levels. We know exactly how much light these microorganisms need and we know how to tune our sensitizer concentrations. This is not similar to a disinfectant where more is better. This is finding that appropriate concentration where the light, as you see in this bottom picture can penetrate deeply enough through the photosensitizer to reach the meat surfaces but not so deeply that you waste the light nor so shallowly that all of the disinfections occurring at the surface where you don't really need it. And so there's this U-shaped curve that we tuned to. And the research program which Chinook has really focused on identifying those photosensitizers that do not have objectionable color and taste. And Joe Ross will talk a great deal more about this. But -- they are designed to eliminate these foodborne microbes extremely quickly, seconds to minutes and efficiently at this high kill level without leaving behind something that might be objectionable on a food surface. And we have focused on food safe sensitizers as a result, things you might eat and are completely unaware that appropriately pumped with appropriate concentrations of light cause this dynamic effect. This is what some of the renderings as well as some of the real products that we're working on look like. On the left here, you see it's a little difficult to see with the dark picture, but you see the light panels on the right-hand side of the picture, that are illuminating knives that have been used in meat cutting processes. These knives can be disinfected very quickly. We may use combinations of photosensitizers and combinations of light sources as this program develops, but we can affect this extremely potent broad spectrum disinfection on these kinds of knives and food processing surfaces. In the middle, you see a render of meat that is processing underneath illumination, usually chilled illumination exposure units that are being sprayed with the sensitizer and then the light applied. The sensitizer can be removed either by rinsing or it can be left on because these are food safe and non-objectional photosensitizers. And you see on the right side, something that is something we're working towards potentially in the next phase or phases of these kinds of grant developments. Finally, I'd like to talk about the fact that, we have done the mathematics and the design to prove that we can, in fact, disinfect large surfaces such as carcasses. These then require expansion into much larger industrial facilities, conveyor belts will move food components like these, and again, not just limited to meat, but food components through these types of systems. We are working on additional developments here where we can put these kinds of sensitizers directly into food packaging. And they're so efficient at causing this disinfection that we believe that we can generate this disinfection inside the terminal package that is at a supermarket, either within the packaging itself or in the films surrounding the package. And so just bringing this brand-new system, brand-new technique that is being deployed so widely in humans directly on to meat and other protein surfaces. Okay? With that, I'd like to close. Thank you for your attention to this. We are a company that recently a year or 2 ago went public on a London Exchange called AIM, and we are intending to do nothing less than revolutionizing infection control without using antibiotics and bring this critical technology to both humans and food safety in the future. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thanks, Dr. Loebel . And without further ado, we'll jump right into Dr. Joe Ross in his presentation. Dr. Joe Ross holds a B.M.Sc and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Western Ontario. He has over 20 peer-reviewed publications and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Lethbridge. His major areas of expertise include microbiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, mammalian cell biology. As a senior scientist at Chinook Contract Research, Joe has designed and executed studies for product registration to Health Canada, antimicrobial and antiviral efficacy studies and antimicrobial resistant surveillance studies in Southern Alberta. Please take it away, Dr. Ross.

Thank you very much for the kind introduction, Steve. And I want to thank you on the opportunity to talk to you today about this very exciting research program that we've done in collaboration with Ondine. So without further ado, I'll introduce our company very briefly. Chinook Contract Research is small CRO or Contract Research Organization, we essentially conduct scientific research for health. We're a small Alberta-based company and we specialize in things like applied and environmental microbiology. And in particular, we grow any microorganism you can think of, and we will test efficacy of antimicrobials or antivirals or disinfectants in a way that supports the registration with organization like Health Canada or the American FDA. And a particular area of expertise that we focus on is growing and testing of biofilms, bacterial and other kind of biofilms. So why is this important? Well, in contrast to the free-swim so-called planktonic mode of growth where these antibacterial cells are floating around against to this day, most new antimicrobials and disinfectants are tested, biofilms happen when they sell to surface and they start to multiply and they start to excrete ins of proteins and polysaccharides and DNA and so on, and they formed this sort of slime layer called the extracellular polymer substances, or EPS matrix which shields them from access from by disinfectant or antimicrobials. And so these biofilms consequently are up to 1,000-fold called to kill than these free-floating planktonic forms. And so our opponent said if you're going to test and develop a new antimicrobial or disinfectant technology that you should be testing it against biofilms against planktonic bacteria. So what do things actually look like? We're shown here -- well, this is a latex catheter and the picture on the top has no biofilm, the bottom has a biofilm, you can see this crusty layer. You'll sometimes hear this called biofeline. And if it's electron micrograph, so if we zoom in 1,000-fold, you actually see individual cells embedded in that [ EPS matrix ] I talked about. So you can imagine how difficult it is to get a liquid sensitizer and antimicrobials to kill these. So what do we do after this for this Ondine program. We first identified and acquired 32 possible photosensitizer. And as Nick alluded to, these are things like Canada approved food coloring agents, certain vitamins, things of this nature, natural products, but all food safe and we screen them in combination with various light sources against panel of 4 bacteria, which we grew as biofilms. So there are important 2 pathogens, Salmonella enterica and methicillin-resistant staph aureus or MRSA and 2 of them are bacteria that are associated with food spoilage. So these don't make a sick -- these pathogens but these will cause of order of flavor and of appearance on meat and other packaged foods. And so on a very high level, we ran the screen and we took our favorite to our top 4 hits, top 4 leads. We further optimized for sensitizer concentration and for light fluence. That's a total dose delivered to users as well as looking at some interesting pairwise combinations of some of these hits. So how do we actually conduct a screen. This is important. We use a standard protocol or based as of a standard protocol called the MBEC assay for Minimum Biofilm Eradication Concentration which is why we call it the MBEC. And it's fairly simple. We're starting with a pure [ cult ] of whatever bacterium or would indeed fungal organism the way we want to test and we're going is -- in liquid culture. So this is just a rich growth broth, nothing fancy and you incubate this for an appropriate period of time, end up with what we call a saturated culture. So you've got, in this case, about 10 to 9 or 1 billion cells per milliliter forming this very cloudy or what we call [indiscernible]. We can take this, we can dilute it, put it in the wells of the [ 96-well ] plate. And this plate as a special lid with all these plastic pegs. So you can imagine put the lids and pegs are immersed in the liquid. And what we're doing here is liquid inoculant is we're starting to get cells that are free-floating, planktonic cells when in terms of stick to the peg and form the biofilm and we can test -- easily test against this biofilm. So we can pop that led into a plate containing saline to rinse away those free-floating platonic cells, then we can pop it into a 96-well plate containing whatever photosensitizer or potential photosensors we want to test. So in this particular case, this example, I'm just showing you a case serially diluted a set of photosensitizers from Row A to B to C and so on you can actually see the color diluting out as we dilute them. And we would then put that pegged lid harboring those biofilms into this plate, cover it to protect from light incubate for a short period of time to allow adherence of photosensitizer to biofilms and then radiate, so what I'm showing here on the right is 1 of these 96-well plates and off the show of LED light device that we purchased for this program. And this picture here shows the device at its lowest 1 of 5, 5 out of 5, I could not possibly take a picture of it. It's just too bright. So 5 out of 5 on the bottom here, this is what it looks like when we cover it with the box, wrapped in aluminum foil and covered with black curtain. So these are very intense bright lights. So hence goggles everyone wears for the safety cautious at CCR. But this enables us important you do very short of radiation is to achieve the appropriate light fluence. So we are in the pegs one more -- and make sure we've gotten rid of all of those free-floating planktonic cells and we finally put the lid into what we call a recovery plate is simply as a 96-well plate containing another layer of broth. And we put it in the bath sonicator and we use ultrasonic -- to physically break up this biofilm and we're trying to get them to break back down into these into free-floating planktonic cells in the context of this growth meeting and the wells of this recovery plate. Because what we can do is we can now [indiscernible] how many cells are left on the pegs that we treated versus those that we didn't. So we take some of the light of that recovery plate, that recovery broth, we put it into a new 96-well plate in a case serially dilute, 10-fold, 100-fold and so on down to 1 in 10 million dilution. And we spot that onto an agar plate. And on the right is an example that you can see going clockwise, we're going from undiluted all the way down to 1 in 10 million dilution and we count colonies. And so now we can say how many colony forming units per pegged that we have and our treated versus our untreated pegs, untreated would be we treat with water instead of photosensitizer in water, call it a vehicle control. And we can look for log reductions as of a magnitude of kill are we seeing. An alternative way that we also did sort of employed for looking at anti-biofilm potency to turbidimetric acids, we're actually visually looking for growth in the wells. So just to remind you what that challenge plate looks like on the left where we have the serial dilution going down the rows, that recovery plate, rich broth, after we've sonicated the biofilms, they've broken up and gone into that medium, we take plate, we incubate it for an appropriate period of time. And if there's one or a few cells alive in these wells then in incubation, they go cloudy, they go turbid, which such as these 4 wells right here in Row D. However, if we killed all or almost all the cells, we know growth in the -- after the incubation period and the wells remain clear, such as what we're seeing here. And then we simply ask, okay, what's the lowest consumption of a given photosensitizer that gave us that kill, that's called the Minimum Biofilm Eradication Concentration. So we have employed both of these methods to measure potency of these photosensitizers. This is my colleague, Dr. Amritha Prasad, in her natural environment, which is the lab. Here, she is labeling literally hundreds of agar plates. This is 1 days' worth of plate. We did this at least 3 days a week for several months. So she and I probably have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. But what do we get out of it? So out of that initial screen of very large panel of 32 photosensitizers, we've got about 10 hits, which is to say 10 promising lead compound we define that initially as anything that first off was reasonably easy to work with. So don't want to be working with a photosensitizer that is not very water-soluble that you have to dissolve in some harsh organic solvent, which would, of course, defeat the purpose of using food safe agents here. And it had to yield a statistically segment, which is to say reproducible decrease of at least [ 10 points ] in colony forming units relative to that vehicle control I talked about. So again, that's more if we're talking about a photosensitizer dissolved in water. And it had to do this against all of the tested organisms in our panel. We certainly had some photosensitizes that worked well against 1 or 2, but we can for that broad spectrum efficacy. So that had to pass all of these criteria. And we took the 4 most effective, the 4 that gave the largest log reduction, and we did the optimization. We looked at them individually as well as some of their pairwise combinations and we -- as for photosensitizer concentration, and this turned out to be really important. As Nick alluded to, if you dilute the photosensitizers, then as expected, it doesn't work as well against the bugs. But if it's too concentrated, it also doesn't work well against the bugs. So you got to find that [ goldilocks zone ] for efficacy. And similarly for light dose, we're looking for the minimum light fluences, the Radiant dose delivered to the surface that's able to yield that optimal efficacy. And so we were able to do that. And because we're using high-intensity LED devices here, we're talking about a few minutes to achieve sufficient efficacy. But how much efficacy? Well for our optimized photosensitizing light combinations, against MRSA, we were seeing upwards of 5 log reduction. That's 99.999% agar reduction. And that's biofilms. I'll remind you, not planktonic cells should be easier to kill. For S. enterica, we achieved Max kill and that's a [ copout ] what that means is we didn't recover any [ cell ] at all when we treated the pegs, so we don't really know what the log reduction is. We just know it was greater than some amount in that -- define by however many colonies we recovered from the untreated or the control peg. So that's what I'm showing you on the right. The top plates or what resulted from pegs that were untreated or were treated with water and the bottom are those that were treated with photosensitizers see there's just no colonies on the bottom plates. So we call that Max kill, very effective. For reference, if you're going to register a new sanitizer use against a non-food contact surface, then again, the current part is still to test against planktonic, not by [ S. enterica ], you only need to achieve a 99.9% reduction for food contact surfaces a bit more stringent. It's 99.999%, and we're there. So that puts this technology in the same ballpark as those chemical disinfectants, such as bleach or peroxide or so on. And it's principle, of course. It's all well in fine to conduct the screen and the optimization on these biofilms somewhat artificially formed on, on these plastic surfaces, but there are many other more relevant surface on which biofilms grow. So for the purpose of project, will that one of those surfaces, it's meat. So we actually emulated spray bacteria and grew them on the surface of chicken, beef and pork, treat them, irradiate them, swab and count how many colonies recover, but also hard surfaces that are much more relevant than those plastic pegs. So we've grown biofilms instead of things like stainless steel, mild steel, galvanized, aluminum and so on. And we saw efficacy in the same ballpark we're seeing on the pegs. So a very large log 4, log 5 reductions. I'll leave it at that. I thank my CCR team. Dr. Merle Olson, our research director. I don't have a [indiscernible] Barbara, she's in charge of Quality Assurance. Scientist Ann Hammad, Lab Manager Kendall Beaugrand, President and CEO, Nick Allan, his wife Malia, who's very important. She's the HR lady, so she signs paychecks, got a new lab tech, Dan, lab manager that's on Matt leave, Crystal Schatz, and I cannot thank enough my partner in crime on this program, Dr. Amritha Jay Prasad, who has a Ph.D in microbiology and specialized in photodisinfection. So you can imagine why she was on this research program. I want to thank again our -- and a major thank you to Ondine for the opportunity to collaborate on this absolutely fascinating object. And with that, I'll be happy to take any questions.

Wonderful. Thanks, Dr. Ross and really interesting presentation, series of presentations really and really exciting work, and I think a really quite a nice narrative that 3 of you have put together. Before we jump into a couple of questions, I do want to just acknowledge we are running a little bit long. [Operator Instructions] We do have a couple of questions. We'll take a bit of time beyond the top of the hour, if we needed to answer those questions so that everyone has a chance to have their comments and questions heard. Dr. Ross, I'll just start off with you with 1 here. Just as a sort of a nice follow-up from the presentation you've given. Have you actually looked at other organisms beyond bacteria such as viruses or yeast? Is that maybe in the works? What's sort of your thought there?

Not yet. So one exception is we did do some optimization work early on where we're developing this assay against Listeria. So Listeria being another gram-positive bacterium you could most closely compare it to MRSA and it was very effective. The technology is very effective, equally effective, I'd say, against Listeria as MRSA, which is important because Listeria is a big problem in the food industry, and it's hard to kill. It serves cold temperatures and high salinity and things like this. And so that was really encouraging. And we're going to follow up on that. I do want to follow up with an antiviral program. As a matter of fact, that's something that we basically just didn't have time for under the auspice of the current funding program. But it still stands to reason and based on what we know about this technology, in particular, and disinfecting technologies in general if it works against some of these bacteria that I've described is going to work against viruses. And so we're going to work on that soon. But Ondine has done enough work in this arena to show that this technology if it's working against these gram-negative and gram-positive bacterial bugs that have looked at, it should be highly efficacious against viruses and we're going to follow up on that. A similarly, we want to do that with yeast, so can did yeast for [ gram-films ] and that would be a good candidate to look at and filamentous fungi or molds is worth looking at. These are all right topics for follow-up, the fact we're going to be starting to work on some of these shortly.

Yes, very interesting. And you could just see the number of pathways that you could start to explore this further and further, which is really quite exciting. Dr. Loebel, if I kind of work backwards through our panel and a question for you here. You talked a lot about where the technologies come from, how you've brought that to market and some potential applications, both continuing in the human side of things, but also looking much more closely at the food supply chain, the livestock and so on. One thing I wondered about was, are there any downsides or negative consequences of using photodisinfection that we need to be cognizant of?

Thanks for the question, Steve. We are amazed after a decade of using the technique, of course, with a lot of preclinical work, development in models that we do not demonstrate any serious or significant adverse events. For example, in 50,000 treatments that were done in food processor workers during COVID, the largest adverse event was a mild runny nose in 1% of the people. And so there's a swap that's being put up there and so forth. It's remarkably safe. There doesn't appear to be any significant downside risk to using the technique, and we expect that to be the case in food as well.

Yes. Really quite amazing. Dr. Rusk, go ahead.

And I would actually add a little bit there in that, this is -- or that whole process is right on a very sensitive mucous membrane as opposed to this food safety side is on inert surfaces and then if the entry of potential the chemical that may still be a residual, that entry is now actually going into the GI system, which we know can tolerate substantially more than nasal surfaces and mucous membrane. So I would not expect there to be an increase in safety risk here, when we are moving up the chain as opposed to actual treatment of people.

Which is -- Joe, do you have a comment there?

I was just going to throw on the additional point that the photosensitizer employed on that very sensitive nasal mucous membrane having no adverse effects is one thing. But what we're talking about here are food safe photosensitizers. So I just cannot [ fathom ] a scenario. I can't imagine a scenario. Some of these are vitamins, like they're literally vitamins. And so it's -- the only reason they're having this antimicrobial efficacy is in the context of being rated with the right wavelength in the absence of that, you can eat some they're good and they're even good for you. So no, no adverse effects would be expected down the chain.

Yes. That's great. And Dr. Rusk, I wanted to kind of probe thinking a little bit higher level about some of the topics and concepts you brought forward, have chatted with Nick at length about our collective source or search for alternatives to antimicrobials given resistance and -- the message we continue to need to embrace the One Health message around we all have a role to play, and we need to really be thinking about what's prudent use and then looking quite significantly towards alternatives. When in the context of food safety, what are some of the ethical principles we need to remember when really thinking about food safety and perhaps our further exploration around non-antimicrobial alternatives in this conversation around food safety.

Yes, yes. Excellent question. So obviously, we want something that is going to have the biggest impact with the lease potential risk, and so it sounds like that technology from Joe has -- he's already started to find that. And so -- then if that is the case, then it moves to the next phase of well ethically do we even like -- so actually, let me take one step back. So in public health, we use a precautionary principle a lot of the time, okay? And the essentially, pandemic was managed through the precautionary principle, okay. Now the flip side of that is if there is new technology and you are being too precautious, you potentially can have -- you can create more half. And so the ethics of it is there needs to be more support from that higher leadership from public health, from the health department, things like that to -- and not just on the agricultural side, but also on the human side, to recognize that we have got a potential intervention that can have this impact and admittedly, we're looking 20 years down the road, but we have to look at these impacts very seriously now. And that is -- that's in my mind, it's not even an ethical dilemma, but I mean -- if you sit around some of the tables, they may bring it up as well, how much harm can does potentially do. And my question is how much harm if we do not use these new technologies. So that is, in my mind, ethical dilemmas.

Yes. It's quite interesting to get into that conversation. I think I find myself agreeing with you there in terms of positioning around this. Dr. Loebel, maybe one final question before we wrap up here. When we think again in the context of non-antimicrobial alternatives and opportunities here in food safety, some of us might think about ultraviolet light disinfection or spray on disinfectant some of the more common alternatives that have been used today. How does photodisinfection stack up there? And is there a value proposition to photodisinfection that sort of exceeds the previous ones I've mentioned there?

Yes, that's a great question, Steve. And we get that a lot mean using UV, especially the short wavelength UVs, the UVC for example, UVB is specifically contraindicated on human cells because that light can damage human DNA. And therefore, it becomes a putative mutagen. That's not something we can tolerate directly on human cells. On meat, which as Dr. Ross said is inert, we have the potential of transforming taste with UV. Now appropriately calibrated, there may be a role for UV, especially in the longer way of like UV closer to 400 nanometers, especially when we can use enough intensity to reduce the time that it takes to do it. And we may blend UV approaches with photosensitizer approaches. There's no restriction on us on how we develop this technology further. But in general, ultraviolet light will transform proteins in such a way as to create a taste. Some have likened it to sunscreen lotion tastes or it could create an off color because of the impact of the high energy radiation. In human cells, absolutely not allowed. In food safety, there's a clear role and we're exploring that further. I think there's a strong potential for blending the 2 technologies, especially where pathogens require killing in very short periods of time, seconds rather than even minutes.

Yes. Quite interesting. So if nothing else, there's some synergies to have. But again, it sounds like there is a strong value proposition over and above what we're currently using today. And to sum up some of the other comments, some exciting pathways to look at further development of this technology, but some really promising results, not just in the applications you have approval and have seen in a health care setting, but also looking much more broadly at the food safety and food production supply chains, which is quite exciting.

Right? We're very excited about the potential. And of course, this could go in any number of directions. You've touched on pathogen directions, yeast and certainly, viruses were very effective against those diseases, those bacteria that are involved in food spoilage as we've proven here. But there are a variety of other techniques that we may want to consider. And those involve embedding photosensitizers in plastics, utilizing self-disinfecting surfaces directly on the meat cutting surfaces, disinfecting within fabrics or any sort of plastics that are exposed to natural room lighting. Some of these photosensitizers identified by Joe's team have proven so effective that we may be able just to illuminate them with lower intensity light for longer periods of time, like, for example, room lighting that stays on for 8 to 12 hours a day. So there's just a huge number of approaches in a brand-new field which we can bring to bear on the problem.

Wonderful. Well, taking a look at time and not seeing any other questions, I might suggest we wrap up here. I do, again, want to thank all 3 of our panelists for excellent talks and engagement here. and everyone, of course, attending and listening in today. Finally, I do want to make another call out and thank you to both Ondine Biomedical, Chinook Contract Research. And of course, our funders, the government of Canada, the Canadian agricultural Partnership's AgriScience Program for making this work possible. So thanks again, and we look forward to chatting with everyone again soon. Have a great afternoon.

Thank you all.

Thanks very much.

Thank you very much.