Latest / The BioHub - by Avetix / Episode 151 - Sam Possemiers - CEO, MRM Health

Transcript

Episode 151 - Sam Possemiers - CEO, MRM Health · The BioHub - by Avetix

• 0:06
  Cool Sam, welcome to the bio podcast.
• 0:10
  Thank you. Great to have you.
• 0:14
  I think for the audience listening, we're going to split
• 0:16
  this into a couple of different parts.
• 0:19
  First being a focus on the science and the platform behind
• 0:23
  MRM. And for those listening who
• 0:25
  don't know MRM and Sam and the team, they're the most
• 0:30
  clinically advanced live microbial consortium therapy in
• 0:33
  IBD. And the second part we're going
• 0:36
  to talk about, yeah, the, the, the financial aspects behind the
• 0:42
  company. In September of last year, the
• 0:44
  guys raised 55 mil for Series B at a pretty interesting time in
• 0:51
  the biotech system. So yeah, going to dig into that,
• 0:54
  learnings from that and yeah, what 2026 in the years ahead
• 0:57
  look like. So yeah, Sam, if you don't mind,
• 1:00
  just to get started, give us a bit of background on on yourself
• 1:04
  because you've been in this field for most of your life
• 1:07
  right now. If you look back, I've been
• 1:12
  doing this for more than 20 years now.
• 1:14
  So my background, I'm a bioengineer by training.
• 1:18
  I did my studies in Ghent in Belgium, part of it also in
• 1:22
  Paris. And actually he rolled into the
• 1:25
  microbiome more than 20 years ago by coincidence, because I
• 1:29
  had a professor at the university with Ivor strata,
• 1:33
  which was very inspiring. And he actually came from the
• 1:36
  environmental microbiology side of things.
• 1:38
  So he was using microbes already at that moment for wastewater
• 1:42
  treatment and, and those kind of things.
• 1:44
  But he also saw the parallel of course between treating
• 1:47
  wastewater and, and, and the gut, which actually is also kind
• 1:51
  of a waste treatment plant. And he actually had developed
• 1:56
  this very interesting and intriguing laboratory guts
• 1:59
  model, which which is a set of reactors and pumps and and tubes
• 2:03
  all connected, which was literally stashed in the
• 2:05
  basement of the university. Because in those days there was
• 2:08
  not a lot of interest in the gut, but it was a model, very
• 2:11
  early prototype that could actually simulate each step of
• 2:15
  of the human digestion. Now you had an artificial
• 2:17
  stomach, a small intestine, a colon.
• 2:19
  And in that colon, you could maintain that complete
• 2:22
  microbiome in its, you could say it's full complexity.
• 2:26
  So I got intrigued in, in the model and, and, and decided to
• 2:29
  do a PhD at, at that lab around further developing the model,
• 2:34
  automating it, et cetera, but also starting to study the link
• 2:38
  between microbiome and health and disease at the moment that
• 2:41
  actually there was not a lot known yet.
• 2:45
  Can't forget that microbiome, what we know today is very
• 2:49
  recent signs. It's only the last 20 years
• 2:51
  that, that first in obesity and then also in, in other diseases,
• 2:55
  people started understanding that microbiome is not only good
• 3:00
  for your health, but if there is a disturbance in your
• 3:02
  microbiome, it also is adequate with the disease.
• 3:05
  And most importantly, and as the most recent science is that if
• 3:08
  you impact a microbiome by by using good microbes, you could
• 3:12
  say that you could also treat disease, but that was all not
• 3:16
  there yet that that knowledge 20 years ago.
• 3:18
  But so the model was nice, the science was nice, but we also
• 3:22
  saw, OK, what can we do more with it?
• 3:25
  It's a nice academic research tool, but can we also use that
• 3:28
  for, for industry and, and, and that actually led to my first
• 3:31
  company in, in 2008, Pro Digest, which we set up as acro company
• 3:38
  in the gut health field using that, that so-called shine gut
• 3:42
  model technology as a pre clinical research platform for
• 3:46
  food and and pharma companies. And so that was like my first
• 3:51
  entrepreneurial experience also setting up acro, building it
• 3:54
  into a globally active that company and using it to study
• 3:59
  what happens with food, what happens with with drugs when you
• 4:02
  ingest them? How do they come in contact with
• 4:05
  microbes? And what is that microbiome
• 4:07
  doing for both your health, but also in in the context of
• 4:11
  diseases? And so that was like the first
• 4:14
  real, I would say, entrepreneurial activity, but
• 4:17
  it's mindsight. It's actually that moment 20
• 4:22
  years ago in the basement of the university that they find the
• 4:25
  rest of of my career. Yeah, not for sure.
• 4:28
  Yeah, it's interesting. And that Shine platform still
• 4:31
  being used by you guys, right? Yeah, Yeah.
• 4:34
  It provides us to still turn that rapidly into a, into a
• 4:38
  globally active IF0. And it is still, it's still
• 4:40
  there, it's still very successful because it is still a
• 4:43
  way to you could say look inside the body in a way that that you
• 4:48
  otherwise cannot easily do. And it gives you really a lot of
• 4:52
  insights on, on both products that you ingest, but also on, on
• 4:56
  the microbiome, on the liquid disease, how we combine it with
• 4:59
  immune models. We combine it with a range of
• 5:02
  different host endpoints so that you can really look at that
• 5:05
  interplay between the microbes and and and the host.
• 5:09
  Yeah, understood and talk us through the beginning of MRM and
• 5:12
  and I guess the the story behind it is a play on words, right?
• 5:16
  It's it's not human resource management, it's microbial
• 5:18
  resource management. How did the?
• 5:23
  How did it start? How did it come about?
• 5:25
  Yeah, indeed. I can come back to the MRM part,
• 5:29
  which actually is kind of a tribute to to that mentor
• 5:31
  Reliver stuff. But how did we get into that
• 5:35
  story? So we had our CRO company at the
• 5:37
  moment that that interest in microbiome was only gradually
• 5:41
  increasing as as from 2010 onwards.
• 5:43
  But as from 2012, 2013, we saw this sudden boom, you could say
• 5:48
  in the microbiome field where where suddenly there was a
• 5:51
  massive industry both from from pharma, from investment aspect
• 5:56
  to really see the microbiome as a new modality, A therapeutic
• 6:00
  modality and use the microbiome to treat this step.
• 6:04
  So that mostly in US, the one biotech after the other popping
• 6:07
  up. Now, of course, having worked
• 6:10
  already at that moment for, for, for almost 10 years on the
• 6:13
  microbiome, we saw that interest, but we also saw that
• 6:17
  and it's, it's not uncommon for novel modalities that those
• 6:19
  initial efforts, those initial attempts to get into, into, into
• 6:24
  drug development that they basically didn't have the right
• 6:27
  technology at time. It's about product design.
• 6:30
  Now, what's the link between the product and the disease, but
• 6:33
  it's also about how can you manufacture it?
• 6:35
  How can you deliver it to the patient?
• 6:37
  We actually saw that those first companies were mostly, you could
• 6:41
  say stool derived applications. So they use the stools from
• 6:44
  health individuals to treat patients initially, often even
• 6:48
  in a rectal application strategy.
• 6:50
  So it's a random product, a stool that is not manufactured
• 6:54
  and standardized and that is delivered in a in a very
• 6:57
  inconvenient way you could say. We saw that there was also
• 7:00
  attempts to improve that as some started using extraction stools
• 7:04
  so that you could try it and formulate it for an oral
• 7:06
  application. Some even already started using
• 7:09
  defined combinations of strains, which we also believe that was
• 7:12
  the way the way forward. But then they bumped onto CMC
• 7:15
  issues because they tried to manufacture all those strains
• 7:18
  individually. If you have 5 strains or 10
• 7:21
  strains, you have 5 or 10 manufacturing processes and they
• 7:24
  were all immediately getting into issue, like how can you
• 7:29
  scale that? If you have to develop and run 5
• 7:31
  or 10 processes, it's very cumbersome.
• 7:33
  You need massive facilities and it also takes a long time.
• 7:36
  So a Long story short, we saw that if you really want to be
• 7:41
  successful in in in that microbiome space, you need to
• 7:45
  have a technology which can design, manufacture and deliver
• 7:49
  a microbiome based product in an effective way.
• 7:52
  And so rather than jumping immediately also into that, that
• 7:56
  hype and, and, and going all out, we actually decided to take
• 8:00
  a step back and deliberately slow down before accelerating to
• 8:04
  give us approximately 5 years to really develop that.
• 8:09
  I would say breakthrough technology that can really link
• 8:12
  the selection of which strains you want in your product with a
• 8:16
  specific disease and that can, can deliver them in an elegant
• 8:20
  formulation. And then most of all can also
• 8:24
  allow for a very scalable, cost effective and, and, and
• 8:29
  standardized manufacturing strategy.
• 8:30
  And so we took basically we used my CRO company, which was very
• 8:35
  profitable at that moment and we reinvested all those proceeds
• 8:39
  into the technology development aspect.
• 8:41
  And you could say that we did the seed stage of the of the
• 8:44
  company. We actually were able to fund
• 8:46
  that ourselves. We had all the infrastructure to
• 8:48
  do that technology development. And so only when we felt OK, we
• 8:51
  have the tools, the technology and we have an initial pipeline
• 8:55
  in our case in IBD close to the clinic only at that moment we
• 8:59
  created MRM Health as a carve out of of of the digest.
• 9:03
  We transferred the assets, we transferred myself to to the
• 9:06
  biotech to continue leading that we had already a core team.
• 9:10
  And as from 2020, we did a Series A round and and we
• 9:14
  rapidly could, could, could move forward it's.
• 9:17
  Interesting that you took that step back to address
• 9:19
  manufacturability as a problem from the beginning, right?
• 9:24
  I guess a lot of the new frontiers in medicine are
• 9:27
  relatively new selling gene therapy, things like that are
• 9:30
  still having issues delivering at at scale at a later phase.
• 9:35
  So it's interesting you took that step back to theoretically
• 9:38
  enable you to go quicker now, right, in the future.
• 9:43
  That's the Coral platform, right?
• 9:45
  The manufacturing platform? That's what we now indeed brand
• 9:49
  as, as a coral and coral is not, it's not one tool, it's not a
• 9:53
  machine. And coral, you could see coral
• 9:55
  as an end to end discovery and development platform which has
• 10:00
  its AI guided discovery aspect. So we really go into
• 10:04
  identifying, selecting which strain impacts which specific
• 10:07
  disease mechanism in a certain disease and where you can then
• 10:11
  combine multiple strains into one product in order to also
• 10:14
  combine multiple mechanisms into that product and you could say
• 10:19
  fight the disease from different angles and have an integrated
• 10:22
  therapeutic approach. So that's the the first angle is
• 10:25
  about which strains. Then we have that single process
• 10:28
  manufacturing technology and we're in contrast with the other
• 10:31
  companies. We can bring all those strains
• 10:34
  together before manufacturing and in one single very
• 10:37
  streamlined process, we can manufacture all those strains.
• 10:39
  And so instead of 5 or 10 processes, we just have one.
• 10:43
  Then we we can dry that into one powder, we can formulate that
• 10:47
  into one capsule. And so that also at the delivery
• 10:50
  level we have just one oral capsule that the patient
• 10:53
  ingested breakfast and then is good for the rest of the day.
• 10:56
  So Coral is really about all the way from knowing which strains
• 11:01
  to take to the delivery of the product to the patient and is in
• 11:05
  a scalable commercial proof you could say strategy, which also
• 11:10
  leads to a very cost effective process which we also cannot
• 11:13
  forget of course, if you want to commercialize it.
• 11:16
  Yeah, understood. And and Coral is the the
• 11:19
  platform that's led to the lead asset NH002.
• 11:24
  I don't know if you have a another name for that at all
• 11:27
  internally. Yeah, I'm sure that's obviously
• 11:32
  been tested in ulcerative colitis already.
• 11:36
  Are you able to give a sort of quick snapshot of what you've
• 11:40
  seen in the initial studies? I guess most recently the Phase
• 11:43
  2, right? Yeah, no, certainly and and so
• 11:47
  indeed MHO 2, we're, we're working now on a, on an easier
• 11:51
  to, to use names, but that will come.
• 11:55
  This is just the, the coding that you typically use at every
• 11:59
  stage. So MHO 2 was developed in
• 12:03
  parallel with Coral. You could say coral led to MHO
• 12:07
  O2, but at the same time, MHO O2 also gave the validation of
• 12:10
  coral. So it's like integrated very
• 12:12
  definition stage. But what we saw is that that's
• 12:16
  if there is one disease where you can can really say that this
• 12:21
  is a disease strongly LinkedIn the microbiome, it's of course
• 12:24
  inflammatory bowel disease. And then you could, you could
• 12:27
  even say that IBD is a disease of the microbiome and it all
• 12:31
  starts with a, a sustained disturbance, this biosis as we
• 12:35
  call that in your microbiome that leads to stress on your
• 12:39
  epithelial lining, on the mucosa of your of your gut and on on
• 12:43
  the underlying immune system. And that continued stress then
• 12:46
  leads to, to a disrupted barrier to continuous leakage of
• 12:50
  antigens over stimulation of the immune system and like a cascade
• 12:54
  of, of, of continuous inflammation and further barrier
• 12:57
  disruption. So what we saw is that today
• 13:01
  virtually all products out there that they target the
• 13:05
  inflammatory components, that they target immune system mostly
• 13:09
  via immune suppression. And if you shut down the immune
• 13:12
  system, you break the cascade, which will ultimately also lead
• 13:15
  to to more causal healing. But what you don't take into
• 13:19
  account is that actually again the basis is at the gut side
• 13:22
  itself is at the microbiome etcetera.
• 13:25
  So we designed that product to have a completely different mode
• 13:29
  of action. And 1st starting with of course,
• 13:32
  restoration of that disturbance, healing the microbiome you could
• 13:35
  say, but that mostly focusing directly on closing the the
• 13:41
  holes in your epithelial lining. So restoring the epithelial
• 13:44
  barrier function and rebalancing the immune system without immune
• 13:49
  suppression. So in a way that we can take
• 13:51
  away the excessive inflammation, but that we can also up regulate
• 13:55
  the protective mechanisms that your body still needs because
• 13:58
  that's of course the limitation of immune suppression is that
• 14:00
  you also take your protection. Now Long story short, so that
• 14:04
  was how the product was designed and and in the Phase 2A study,
• 14:07
  both in ulcerative colitis but also in in the orphan indication
• 14:11
  of bouchitis. Our main goal was to see one is
• 14:15
  the product safe because we should not have safety issues.
• 14:19
  We work with bacteria from the healthy good.
• 14:21
  We don't use immune suppression, but we need to validate that.
• 14:24
  We wanted to validate the mechanisms and then indeed see
• 14:28
  whether we could hit also the clinical endpoints, etc.
• 14:32
  Now both studies gave us a very consistent readout and both
• 14:36
  studies were remission induction trials, meaning that we started
• 14:39
  with patients with active disease in the case of IBD that
• 14:43
  in case of ulcerative colitis that was second line treatment
• 14:48
  in mild to moderate UC. So patients often already 10
• 14:51
  years on conventional treatments were prone to switch to the to
• 14:54
  the advanced treatments of immune suppressants.
• 14:57
  And we provided them like an alternative step up and in in
• 15:00
  parchitis it was a stand alone treatment in recurrent parchitis
• 15:06
  patients. And So what we saw is that
• 15:08
  within that eight week period, we really had on the one hand
• 15:12
  that clean safety profile and we did not see any adverse events
• 15:15
  linked to the product. We saw the mechanisms being
• 15:18
  replicated and we saw restoration of microbiome.
• 15:21
  We saw very consistent proposal healing as measured via
• 15:25
  endoscopy. And we also saw a reduction of
• 15:27
  inflammation for instance measured by by fecal car
• 15:30
  protection, which is a standardized biomarker.
• 15:33
  And that then resulted in this initial proof of concept trials
• 15:36
  in an 18% clinical emission in UC and a 45% clinical emission
• 15:42
  in in of our child. So that gave us your proof of
• 15:46
  concept trials, but it gave us that first few that indeed
• 15:49
  microbiome can deliver on those aspects and the mechanism that
• 15:53
  we're building in the product are effectively replicated also
• 15:57
  in the patient. Nice.
• 15:59
  And is that patient population where you see, I make sure there
• 16:02
  was a 2 sort of filling in in the future because obviously IBD
• 16:07
  you see particularly it's a pretty crowded market, right?
• 16:10
  There's lots of new therapies coming potentially to market
• 16:14
  soon. There's a lot of existing
• 16:15
  therapies. Like you say, these patients
• 16:17
  have a lot of different options. Is that sort of way you see it
• 16:21
  adding most value to patient so? Yeah.
• 16:24
  So I think there are two aspects to that.
• 16:26
  So on the one hand, indeed there are a lot of different
• 16:29
  treatments available, also different products in the, in
• 16:32
  the, in the development, in the making with different
• 16:35
  mechanisms. But still we see that today, you
• 16:39
  see patients are still faced with the therapeutic ceiling in
• 16:42
  the sense that no product can treat more than 20 to 30% of the
• 16:46
  patients. And, and often that that
• 16:47
  treatment effect also, yeah, goes down, goes away after some,
• 16:53
  some time. So patients are still really in
• 16:55
  need of novel, novel mechanisms and novel products.
• 16:58
  So microbiome can give you a completely novel mechanism and
• 17:02
  thereby can have a complementary activity in virtually every
• 17:05
  disease stage. That's one aspect.
• 17:07
  Second aspect is today biggest focus in, in, in, in both
• 17:11
  available treatments and in development goes to the moderate
• 17:14
  to severe patients, for the patients with the most
• 17:16
  aggressive active part of the disease.
• 17:18
  While mild to moderate patients, which is still the largest
• 17:21
  fraction of all you see patients actually have very limited
• 17:24
  treatment options. They have a conventional
• 17:26
  treatment, but if that doesn't work, they're also push towards
• 17:30
  those advanced treatments, immune suppressions, which many
• 17:33
  of them actually don't need based on their disease profile.
• 17:36
  And so that's why that initial positioning in in UC we see for
• 17:41
  MHO 2 is in that second line treatment in mild to moderate
• 17:45
  you see patients. So at that interface between the
• 17:48
  conventional and and the advanced treatments.
• 17:52
  But having said that, we of course do see the opportunity
• 17:54
  also to to act in the in moderate to severe space, be it
• 17:59
  as a stand alone, be it as a combination treatment because of
• 18:02
  the completely different mechanism of action.
• 18:04
  When you see there's clearly a space barchitis, it's I would
• 18:08
  say it's even even more obvious because there today there is
• 18:12
  virtually no standard of care and there is antibiotic
• 18:15
  treatment that they do which shows the links with microbiome,
• 18:18
  but that's of course not sustainable over the long run.
• 18:21
  And for the rest, there is except for one, one registered
• 18:24
  treatment in Europe, there's basically nothing.
• 18:26
  So there you really have this extremely high unmet need to
• 18:31
  come up something that is really disease treating and goes beyond
• 18:36
  again only the some symptomatic treatment of eradicating your
• 18:39
  microbiome temporarily with with antibiotics.
• 18:42
  Yeah, sure. And where are you at now with
• 18:46
  things? Obviously the recent press
• 18:48
  release Ind cleared for Phase 2B for starfish again, slightly
• 18:54
  catchier name than MH002 this time.
• 18:58
  How excited are you for that? Obviously starting off with the
• 19:01
  US and then Europe as well coming online this summer.
• 19:05
  This is of course a a great opportunity.
• 19:08
  It's, it's for the company and it's a great opportunity, but
• 19:12
  also for the microbiome field because we were, we were we
• 19:17
  could say pushed into that leader leadership position now
• 19:20
  where we are by default to most advanced company in the IBD
• 19:23
  fields in in the microbiome. So this trial that we're setting
• 19:26
  up now a 204 patient trial aims to give us as a company that
• 19:31
  robust validation of indeed in a larger population across Europe
• 19:35
  and US you do see again the same signals in a robust manner as we
• 19:40
  saw in that in the earlier trials.
• 19:42
  But by extension, it's also you could say a trial the field is
• 19:47
  is waiting for because it would also be the largest trial in the
• 19:53
  microbiome field to validate the microbiome as a, as a
• 19:56
  therapeutic modality. And so that trial indeed.
• 20:00
  So we can come back on, on, on on the challenges of raising the
• 20:05
  funds. But the moment we had the funds
• 20:07
  end of August, so communicate the beginning of September, we
• 20:10
  pushed the button and, and within four months we had the
• 20:13
  the Ind approval secured. And now we are in in full
• 20:16
  startup phase waiting for the first patients to be dosed.
• 20:21
  So that that really moves. Moves fast and starfish indeed
• 20:27
  is a more catchy name. It's it we stay within the
• 20:30
  aquatic team. We have coral now we have
• 20:32
  starfish and and, and that's actually a link to to the
• 20:36
  proposal healing aspect because of starfish is one of the only
• 20:39
  animals that that really can regenerate and and can heal
• 20:42
  itself. And therefore it wasn't an
• 20:44
  appropriate name for the the type of mechanism we pursue.
• 20:47
  Yeah, yeah. It's a cool, cool story behind
• 20:50
  the naming of that trial for sure.
• 20:52
  That's obviously in all sorts of colitis.
• 20:55
  What's the story with Pouch Drydis?
• 20:57
  Is is that close behind or? The opportunity is is is
• 21:03
  massive. So the, the, the, the, the, the
• 21:07
  and that need is there, but also because it's a rare disease
• 21:10
  where we've filed already the orphan drug designation process
• 21:14
  because if we can develop this as an orphan drug, we can
• 21:17
  actually pursue market entry with one additional single
• 21:21
  pivotal phase three trial. And if we succeed in that, we
• 21:24
  can dramatically accelerate market entry because you see
• 21:28
  it's enough to be or probably still need to do phase three
• 21:30
  afterwards with patchitis. We could go straight there.
• 21:33
  But to get there, we're still extending the round today.
• 21:38
  And the 55,000,000 is largely going towards the, the, the UC
• 21:42
  trial and social clinical problems.
• 21:44
  But we're still trying now to raise an additional amount of
• 21:47
  money in order to set up that, that barchitis.
• 21:50
  And the faster we can do that, the faster of course we can
• 21:52
  initiate also the the Phase 3 barchitis.
• 21:55
  That's a very nice segue into from the exam.
• 21:58
  Thanks for that. Yeah, you obviously touched on
• 22:02
  it throughout a few bits there. But yeah, it was announced that
• 22:06
  was September but finalised in August of last year, which yeah,
• 22:11
  I mean last year was was tough right across by.
• 22:14
  A. For raising capital, certainly a
• 22:16
  Series B in Europe, there's there's probably not that many
• 22:20
  other examples of a raise at the level that you guys made.
• 22:26
  I'm sure you've got a few battle scars from it.
• 22:28
  Talk us through the process. How?
• 22:30
  How did you find it? Just a few, no, I, I, so I think
• 22:37
  so we set up those, those phase 2A trials.
• 22:39
  I had the first data from the, the UC trial, second-half 23,
• 22:44
  the the Parchatis trial early 24.
• 22:46
  So we had very, very high hopes that with those robust initial
• 22:49
  data, we could go to the market and we could raise a substantial
• 22:53
  round to immediately move forward.
• 22:55
  But when we did that, we were talking end of 23 early 24.
• 22:59
  We actually were confronted with one, there is no financing
• 23:03
  climate. There was just no money
• 23:04
  circulating in general. So the whole biotech scene was
• 23:08
  was desperate for, for fundraising, but specifically in
• 23:13
  the microbiome. Also there microbiome was even
• 23:16
  more challenging at that moment to fundraise on because the, the
• 23:19
  initial hype you could say was over by that time.
• 23:23
  And, and I was referred to the, the Gartner hype cycle there
• 23:27
  because it's, it's, it's a typical process for, for, for
• 23:31
  new modalities that the initial hype in microbiome with those
• 23:35
  companies not necessarily having the best, the best technologies
• 23:38
  yet resulted also in some disappointments, some clinical
• 23:42
  failures, some products which never even made it to the clinic
• 23:45
  because of the CMC, some pharma partnerships which, which
• 23:48
  failed, some investors which got burned.
• 23:50
  So basically by the time we came to that, that Series B rounds,
• 23:54
  there was a very strong weight in C mentality within the
• 23:58
  microbiome field. We were by then the most
• 24:01
  advanced company already in, in IBD.
• 24:03
  There was no reference points not for us, but also not for
• 24:07
  investors on, on how actually do you need to develop it further
• 24:11
  and what is the value you can effectively materialize with
• 24:14
  with that macro Biome as a as a modality.
• 24:17
  And so we saw that in a very challenging financing climate,
• 24:22
  institutional investors were hesitant to put the little money
• 24:27
  they wanted to spend in microbiome because they were
• 24:30
  waiting to see which company would really crack the code in
• 24:33
  the microbiome and which company would be that one that could
• 24:36
  revive the whole microbiome field.
• 24:39
  Of course we anticipated and knew that we would be the
• 24:42
  company, but that doesn't make it easy to to to convince
• 24:46
  others. And so I think what what
• 24:48
  happened was a very challenging 18 month period, which
• 24:52
  ultimately I would say was, was concluded because we shifted
• 24:59
  from, I would say more classical institutional investors to
• 25:03
  strategic and family offices where we identified parties that
• 25:08
  had that belief that microbiome could really be the be the, the
• 25:12
  groundbreaking modality of the future.
• 25:15
  And where that belief was was integrated from bottom to top.
• 25:19
  So all the way at the top of either the strategic order or
• 25:22
  the, the funds that that believe in microbiome was there.
• 25:25
  And so we identified by a Codex friend by a pharma company to
• 25:31
  not only take the leads in the financing round, but also become
• 25:34
  a strategic partner in terms of manufacturing and and future
• 25:38
  product development. And we got a strong support from
• 25:41
  from Athos, a German family office, among others behind Bio
• 25:46
  N Tech, which also really had that belief.
• 25:48
  And it was at that moment that those pieces of the puzzle
• 25:51
  combined that also our insiders pushed through.
• 25:55
  We also got time BNP party by private equity on board and we
• 25:59
  could secure that, that that first closing fairly rapidly.
• 26:04
  So, so the process took long, but once those pieces were all
• 26:08
  there, it it went, it went quite, quite fast.
• 26:13
  Yeah, it's interesting. I think I remember you saying
• 26:16
  that the you, you got the final call saying that everything was
• 26:20
  sort of done, ready to go when you're on holiday, which is
• 26:23
  usually the way with these things.
• 26:24
  I think you know it's linear if I remember probably.
• 26:28
  Yeah, indeed. Yeah.
• 26:30
  Yeah, that's indeed typically it takes 18 months and then
• 26:33
  ultimately the all the decisions, all the strategies,
• 26:36
  the documentation, etcetera was reviewed in two weeks, which
• 26:40
  happened to be the only two weeks I was away family on the
• 26:43
  first day he started negotiating.
• 26:46
  As an anecdote is indeed that some of my most important
• 26:50
  decision makings there were were made while I was literally
• 26:53
  hiking on top of a mountain in the sun with the family.
• 26:59
  But OK, we pulled that through and, and at the last day of the
• 27:02
  holidays, I I got all the documentation signed and, and we
• 27:05
  were ready to go. So yeah, it's not done that.
• 27:08
  Well, but. Luckily, this time it had a a
• 27:11
  successful ending. Nice.
• 27:14
  And how's it compared? Obviously you mentioned the top
• 27:16
  up for the power chart study. How's it compared the past six
• 27:21
  months? Six months, isn't it, I guess
• 27:23
  since since it was announced. Have you found the climate?
• 27:29
  It's not that suddenly investors were queuing at our doorsteps to
• 27:33
  our wanting to invest there. So I think that general
• 27:36
  sentiment on the microbiome has not not changed.
• 27:39
  Of course MRM Health today is seen as a different company.
• 27:44
  We're no longer an early phase, an early Series A company
• 27:50
  desperate for money. We are a well financed Series B
• 27:53
  company moving towards pivotal trials.
• 27:55
  So we do get that respect. We do get the doors to open, but
• 28:00
  the hurdle to invest is still is still still significant.
• 28:03
  So it takes significant effort still today to to secure that
• 28:08
  additional funding. But we are used to challenging
• 28:12
  fundraisers. So I think that's no, no issue
• 28:15
  for us to keep pushing through, of course.
• 28:18
  Yeah, not sure. Well, look, it's yeah, it's
• 28:21
  going to be interesting to see how it progresses.
• 28:22
  And yeah, wishing you all the best for slightly easier run
• 28:26
  this time round. But we shall see.
• 28:29
  Yeah, it's been a pleasure having you on.
• 28:31
  Can't wait to hear about the first patient dosing on the
• 28:34
  starfish study. And yeah, all the best with with
• 28:38
  enrolment and hope it goes well. Super.
• 28:41
  Thanks a lot and I'll certainly keep everybody updated.
• 28:45
  Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for coming on, Sam.
• 28:49
  Been a pleasure.