Beyond Profit: Our Mission to Change a Billion Lives & Drive Global Impact

[00:00:00] Susannah de Jager: We've spoken a lot about the opportunity for your technology and how it can impact the development of data sets for future medicine. But now I'd like to really talk about what your mission statement is and why you're doing this both commercial and impact.

[00:00:19] Cici Muldoon: Our mission is to make diagnosis more accessible to more people, and earlier. That is the name of the game. It's catching diseases when they're still treatable and when a difference can be made at a low cost. In due course, we'd love to see this touch a billion lives.

Now, we have to be practical. To get to that point we have to get to market, and the best place we see to do that first is in the US. That is where our energy is focused going forward. But of course that in the future we want to expand this globally.

[00:00:55] Scott Sherwood: There aren't many opportunities you have in your life where you have an opportunity to potentially help hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of people and improve their life, and at the same time address what is a over a hundred billion dollar potential market.

I see this as, you know, one of those opportunities and if we can bring better health to people all over the world at a cost that's affordable in, you know, just about any market. You know, that's a huge win for mankind.

[00:01:31] Susannah de Jager: So the mission is to touch a billion lives. The route to market and commercialising that through the US. What do you need in practical terms for your business for the next five years? What are the key wins in terms of the type of investors, the type of partnerships that are going to see you on track to achieve that?

[00:01:48] Cici Muldoon: The key milestones for something like this come around regulation. You have to be absolutely sure that, you know, when you're telling someone that they have cancer, that this has been approved by a regulator.

No one's going to use your technology if it hasn't been CAC mark, FDA approved. So milestone one for us is high quality publications with key opinion leaders that demonstrate that the science is good, and then within 18 to 24 months, a submission for FDA approval, which we hope to get under 5k-10k. Thereafter, it's driving adoption and making sure that this is actually used.

In order to get to regulatory approval in the 18 to 24 months that we would like. We need to be able to acquire the samples, and unbelievably, this is the longest lead item in this whole endeavor, is acquiring the correct disease urine samples.

You need to get circa 350 diseased samples, and then 350 age stratified non-disease samples, and you have to make sure that the disease samples are therapy naive on top of it. Now, this is actually non-trivial to do. You either run clinical trials or you access a biobank, but this is expensive to do.

[00:03:04] Susannah de Jager: How expensive?

[00:03:05] Cici Muldoon: Samples cost between £300 and £400 a sample, it depends on the disease state, and it depends on the type of biofluid. Whether you're talking about plasma or urine. But you're talking hefty. If you're setting up a clinical trial, then these are much higher costs.

[00:03:19] Susannah de Jager: And what are the headline costs for you to get to that point that then you can start rolling it out into clinical settings?

[00:03:26] Cici Muldoon: Talent acquisition, obviously we need to grow the team. Acquiring the samples and building up the biobank, because also if we have the biobank built up, then we can hit the ground running testing. So actually testing the samples in the lab is not as length a process as the actual acquisition of the samples.

Then it's the publication with key opinion leaders, which means, you know, conducting proper clinical trials and projects where you then the outcome is a great publication.

[00:03:53] Ben Turney: One of the challenges for setting up a service like this is to get a lot of samples because the reliability of the testing depends on having a large dataset and database to analyse and to compare and to build the algorithms.

Obtaining urine, you'd think would be easy because it's a waste product. But ethics needs to be obtained for this, patients need to sign forms, samples need to be anonymised, they need to be processed, collected, stored appropriately so that there's robust, collection and, standardised, techniques applied.

But we have that in place and we then hope to be able to collect lots of samples because we see hundreds of patients every month, and hopefully this will rapidly build a biobank of data. That we can then use to profile patients and to predict risk of different conditions.

[00:04:45] Adrian Harris: Ultimately though, the quality depends on getting the right sample from the right patient at the right time, and then you can do that is really with interested medical practitioners and interested patients who want to contribute. So in hospital, of course, specialists in the different departments, would be involved. They will need extra help because testing the research samples you need takes more time and effort. So it's not a cheap process, and it's a long-term issue for the samples and the follow-ups.

[00:05:16] Susannah de Jager: So you are looking for this funding for the next part of your journey. You've obviously got the most extraordinary scientific advisory board already, some of whom we've spoken to in interviews and who can't speak highly enough of your technology. What do you need from investors? Is it just straight up money or is it money, access, network?

[00:05:34] Cici Muldoon: Of course, all of it counts. Money is, paramount. I'd be lying if that were not the case. But we want them to be aligned with our values and our mission. They have to understand where we want to get to and be on board with that, and of course, an understanding of the space is hugely important and understanding of the dynamics. Now, that might be in the context of a US healthcare system or in the context of the UK healthcare system. Both are valid. But definitely an understanding of the space is hugely important.

[00:06:02] Susannah de Jager: And it's interesting because we've spoken a lot about the hardware, the fact that you are in in-vitro diagnostics. But also you've illuminated for us on this data play in long term. So there's a danger that investors see one and not the other and they need to see both.

[00:06:16] Cici Muldoon: Yeah, it's an understanding of the challenges and the opportunity around the data side of things. I mean, it is a scary place. To venture in terms of machine learning and regulation and pattern based recognition. But that is the direction of travel for diagnostics and I think there's a huge opportunity to be on board with one of the first to get there.

[00:06:37] Ben Turney: When I was introduced to Serox as a company, I could see the immediate appeal, of this clinically, and that's really what excited me to be involved in a project like this at this stage is really exciting. I can really see that the value of this could translate very rapidly into patient benefit.

I have worked with quite a few industry collaborators over the years and often our collaboration is really to validate what they've already done. Whereas I feel here that we're really in at the ground and we're sort of involved in shaping and designing the way the company is going to develop and the way it's going to bring the products through to patient care.

[00:07:18] Giles Bond-Smith: This is from the ground up being built with clinicians right in at the beginning, driving the clinical way forward. Then you've got the managerial side, creating the facilities and the infrastructure needed to ensure the project has a successful endpoint. Often what comes along is a haphazard approach and problem solving on the go. What we've really seen is right from the moment that everyone was brought together, a very clear goal, a very clear pathway of how we're gonna achieve that goal, and the right people have been slotted in to ensure the optimal chance of success.

Already we're seeing really good results, unexpected results, and guess what? The team are there ready to interpret, develop, adapt, and move on. No, I haven't worked with a team like this before because I don't think a team like this has actually existed. It's a fabulous team on every single level. Everybody brings something unique to the party. Everybody is an expert in their little field, but together that team is world class.

[00:08:27] Adrian Harris: Working with Serox is rather different to other research I've done. Because of the direct involvement of Cici in the project, her invention, there's no gap between the CEO and the investigator. Communication is almost instantaneous and this personal involvement from the top makes a big difference in attitude and the support you feel you're getting. Which you can't get with a big company, of course.

[00:08:51] Susannah de Jager: To anyone listening that might invest it's money, it's network, and it's a real understanding of the mission statement, the values, and the potential because it starts here in the clinician's room testing, point of care diagnostic and the data opportunity is almost limitless.

[00:09:09] Cici Muldoon: Yeah, this could be the new form of urinalysis. It has the potential to absolutely revolutionise how we test for disease early doors.

[00:09:19] Susannah de Jager: Thank you. Thank you so much for joining today to listen to myself, Susannah de Jager from Oxford+ and Cici Muldoon. We've had such a wide and varied conversation covering a lot, so I hope that we've engaged you and we've answered some of your questions.