04.10-11.24-HST-Startups-OneCyte-Biotechnologies

KONSTANTINOS TSIORIS: Hello, everybody. I'm Konstantinos Tsioris, Co-Founder and President of OneCyte Biotechnologies. OneCyte is a spin-out from MIT. I'm a former postdoc there. All the founders are affiliated with MIT.

More importantly, we are focusing on commercializing an industry-leading single-cell analytics platform for cell line development. I want to contrast to Jim's company. We are focusing on live cells on the protein level while this other important single-cell company here focuses on the genomic level.

Specifically what we are focusing on is bi-specifics. Bi-specifics are a very important new type of therapeutic with clinical efficacy similar to cell therapies. While the discovery of bi-specifics is fairly advanced, the development is still very challenging. And one of the key challenges here is developing manufacturing cell lines that express the correct heterodimers at a high yield.

There are currently solutions for this; however, all these solutions require significant protein engineering of these molecules, which have a high risk, then, of reducing the function of these proteins.

OneCyte's single-cell analytics solution really focuses on providing unprecedented speed, scale, and resolution to this problem, and basically what this leads to is industry-leading timelines, yield, and quality of these cell lines that we're getting out of that.

Now how do we do this? OneCyte's platform is based on a picowell system where we load microfluidic-- where we load cells into this microfluidic chips, perform our analytics on these cells, can find these high-performance cells that express the right heterodimers, and then can recover these live cells, expand them, and these become these manufacturing cell lines for bi-specifics.

Here, I want to highlight an example. This was a study done with a partnership with a leading CDMO. At the point, the CDMO was taking for this process about six months, and we were able to do this in six hours and getting titers for these-- for an antibody that is, again, on par with what what's industry-leading here.

I want to highlight the time reduction here, like going from really months to hours is absolutely significant. If you think of taking a therapeutic to the clinic or to market, six months is the equivalent of about half-a-billion dollars. If you think about you have a billion-per-year drug and being able to get the six months early to market is a absolute significant impact.

What we are looking for is-- we're starting a pilot program for bi-specifics and cell line development and we're looking for industry partners to work with us on this. We are partnering globally biotech, biopharma, and other types of companies. So if you're interested, please stop by our table later, and we can continue this discussion. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]