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Thank you for Oxford Global for putting this together.
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My name is Peter Sullivan.
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I am one of the founders and CEO of MyxoTech.
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We have a library of small molecules sourced from a group of unusual organisms called myxobacteria that we're making available to pharma and biotech.
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So this is a well-known image acquired from the James Webb Space Telescope a few years back.
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It shows a small sliver of space looking out from what would be the southern hemisphere of Earth.
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And it shows just the large number of galaxies that exist in space.
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But in this small speck of space, it's also a good representation of the theoretical chemical space that's available to probe for pharmaceutical needs.
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So keeping with this idea, the, I don't know if you can see it's a little light in here, but the small orange Galaxy represents the MyxoTech small, excuse me, small molecule library of chemical space.
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So if we look into this Galaxy or this MyxoTech chemical space, at this point, we have one scaffold that's nearing clinical trials.
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We have 3 scaffolds that have reached clinical trials, of which one scaffold, the epothilone that has been turned into breast cancer drug ixabepilone.
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So these are the big players that come out of our library of chemistry or our pool of chemistry.
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However, there are a number of other scaffolds.
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This is really hard to see, but there are a number of other scaffolds from this chemical space with a variety of mechanisms of action that are relevant to pharmaceutical development.
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So we source our small molecules from a group of unusual organisms called myxobacteria.
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They're part of the phylum Myxococcota.
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So they're obviously visually very charismatic.
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They look like small aliens.
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They're also unique in their behaviour, their predatory.
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So they basically kill all their microbes in order to acquire energy.
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And then most importantly for drug discovery, they produce unique chemistry or small molecules.
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So when comparing known myxobacteria metabolites to metabolites produced by other microorganisms, in addition to a library of a small synthetic small molecule library from a well-established contract research organisation, roughly 80% of myxobacterial scaffolds are produced exclusively by myxobacteria.
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There's 20% overlap between myxobacterial scaffolds and other microorganism scaffolds, but there's as one would expect, no overlap in scaffolds between the CRO synthetic small molecule library and the MyxoTech library.
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So it's essential that we are providing maximum small molecule or chemical diversity for our clients.
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So we built our string library in a way that has maximum taxonomic diversity because as we've shown in the past, taxonomic diversity corresponds with chemical diversity.
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To highlight this even further, when comparing our strain library to what's in the public domain, greater than 50% of our species genera and taxonomic families had our cultured exclusively by MyxoTech and our parent organisation.
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So the dynamics of the Pharmaceutical industry have changed obviously over the last couple of decades.
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But it's important to remember that nature is has been a very effective valuable source for drug development over the last 40 years.
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Roughly 1/4 of all drugs are either natural products or derivatives of natural products.
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So the value has been there in the past and we believe that there's still value in nature in the future as well.
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So as the pharmaceutical industry transitions to a new era in which they are, you know, starting to probe novel targets, the enjoyable protein space, we think that the MyxoTech Galaxy or chemical space is well positioned to provide you first in class molecules to help develop.
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So there are two ways that we'd be able to work together that we're kind of playing.
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We're a brand new company, so we're kind of playing around with our business Model 1 is we can effectively serve as a CRO in which we would sell your library and then offer you services for a fee and then you'd have sole ownership over the intellectual property.
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The other option or the second option would be more collaborative in which there would be no fees, there would be no monetary exchange, but there would be some negotiation with respect to intellectual property or royalties.
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But that's something that we could talk about on a client to client basis.
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So these are the three work packages we offer.
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So the first is access to our library of small molecules.
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So you test our small molecules in your proprietary screening system.
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From there, we figure out what the active component is and elucidate its structure.
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And that's work package 2.
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And then work package 3 would be lead optimization, in which we effectively develop a strategy to get that production tighter that you'd need for downstream development.
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So I just want to quickly go over how option two would work, the collaborative model.
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So we'd effectively be doing all of the chemistry, whereas your company would be doing all of the biological evaluation.
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So we'd have a very partitioned set up in which you basically are handling the biology.
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So we're really looking for companies that have interesting targets and just generally interested in pharmaceutically relevant biology that they're working on.
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Yeah.
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And so this is the team we're all part of Leibniz Prize winner Rolf Muller's group in Western Germany, in Saarbrücken, Saarlandes, which is on the border of France.
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And if you have any questions, I'm here to answer them or we're I think at booth D in the startup section.