American Gene Technologies Exciting developments for a Pre IPO private company - (For investors)
hey all welcome to ShreTreck this is Raj here friends we have had ongoing relationship with a company called American Gene Technologies for our HIV channel uh where a lot of people have found inspiration from their work on coming up with a functional cure for HIV and for a short period of time we were in a lull because uh there was some other activities that were going on in ag that had to be resolved before we could proceed further but recently I had a very interesting chat with Jeff Galvin the CEO of American Gene Tech Technologies and they have uncovered some really interesting data which makes it very very uh positive uh that we'll have functional cure very soon having said that we already recorded a video on AGT 103 and its latest data and what it says and released it on our HIV Channel but today friends I'm looking at the investment uh channel uh shre genomics and I think this is the right time for us to have a quick chat with Jeff Galvin and understand what American Gene Technologies is doing how far it has reached and um this could be a good opportunity to get in at the ground floor uh of course there are regulations and other things we'll talk about those disclaimers and others at the end of the video but first let me welcome our guest Jeff Galvin hi Jeff hey Raj good to see you yeah good to see you Jeff how are you doing today uh great yeah well I'm a little bit in a food coma because uh yesterday was Thanksgiving in the United States yes so uh I'm still feeling uh a very full belly but besides that I'm feeling great yeah and I think this would be the right time to have a slightly lengthy interview and talk to our investment audience so today uh Jeff usually when we speak we are speaking for the share Trek HIV Channel because you have been very focused on motivating HIV patients across the globe and many of them know you by name uh because of the work that you have done through American Gene Technologies and your therapy called AGT 103-t however many people in that segment uh do not understand that AGT is not just HIV but it has got other assets like Phenylketonuria and then you got IP uh intellectual property of various kinds uh which add value to the company so today I thought uh I would give our uh investment Channel an overview of what you're doing an introduction to American Gene technology so Jeff can you briefly uh give our audience an idea of who you are where you come from and what is AGT sure um so yeah a lot of people know us because of the HIV project because that is our um clinical development and we have a tremendous amount of data and some peer- review journal articles that are out there anybody that wants to look up AGT 103-t can see some data that's published on that that shows that it's got significant momentum towards a functional cure and and that is the goal of that project but the goal of AGT was much broader uh I I come out of the computer industry and when I saw Gene and cell therapy what struck me about Gene and cell therapy is it's very much like software that when you put a gene into DNA the result is very predictable and it's very consistent and if you look at DNA you can almost think of that as the operating system of the cell like the cell is an organic computer that's creating proteins and enzymes that you know sort of interact with other cells but when you change that DNA you can fix things that are missing you can improve things that are there you can even give sales new features and this was a vision that I had in 2008 when I founded AGT and so my desire was to create middleware you know sort of like a a whole platform of components that you could mix and match to form the foundation of new applications on top of it because I saw that there were a lot of things that would be in common across many different solutions Health Care Solutions that would come out of Gene and cell therapy because now that we can reprogram DNA I think that there's almost nothing we can't do you know the Gene and cell therapy will give us the potential of curing about 10,000 diseases which plague Humanity now I'm not this won't happen overnight but long term it's like the software industry you know we're going to just keep getting more and more applications that keep improving our lives but instead of in a digital way and Communications and entertainment and stuff like that it's going to be in health and it you can see it's happening already I mean in 2008 it was just a vision but now there's a cure for a couple of forms of blindness there's a cure for deafness out there there's a cure for a crippling disease called spinal muscular atrophy where kids born with you know one gene missing never had a life they died in uh ventilators at age 4 after never having crawled rolled over you know uh they died because they couldn't breathe on their own and they were just missing one gene but the whole concept behind gene therapy and cell therapy allowed a company to come up with something that repaired that Gene when they were diagnosed and now those kids are running around and having normal lives so that is the kind of Miracles that can come out of this new science and that was the target of AGT now we have components that basically allow us to deliver therapeutic levels of any Gene to any cell and that is the fundamental you know sort of platform that we work on but then we have other components that are useful in chronic viral infections like HIV or in immune-oncology we have a whole bunch of patents and a whole bunch of techniques to light up cancer cells so that the natural immune system without any modification will chase after those cancer cells and eliminate them with surgical Precision okay you know that that's the amazing thing about your immune system is that it can kill an infected cell or a cancerous cell and Do no harm to the surrounding cells right because your immune system is really designed to be that you know um uh ultimate protector of the body but in the case of cancer. can get ahead of that immune system well we found ways to stimulate that immune system by lighting up the cancer we also have you know the ability to uh create solutions that deliver genes to the liver that are missing like in Phenylketonuria and Phenylketonuria is a devastating disease where kids that are born without one gene in the liver can't metabolize I phenylalanine and this causes tremendous havoc in their life in you know up through their teen years but ultimately because they can't process phenol alanine they end up with depression schizophrenia and even suicidal thought so one gene missing can be very serious like in spinal muscular atrophy where people you know never actually form a normal spine and muscles around the spine and therefore you know die at a very young age having had you know no normal movement to pheny allany that could take 40 years till people you know about a third of people that have Phenylketonuria uh will end up committing suicide by uh age 40 and it's devastating disease so that is what AGT has we have over 50 patents that are components that you can mix and match and you know there's dozens or even hundreds of diseases that we could address right now and you know a success in HIV would give credibility to that whole platform and it would give us an entree into you know going full speed on cancer and we have a remarkable set of components there that look like they could completely change outcomes in some of the most serious uh cancers that are called epithelial cancers breast prostate lung liver colon kidney ovarian pancreatic head and neck and skin cancers are all in this one category where we've learned to light up those Cancers and get the Gamma Delta T cells that survey them in this really active state where they can eliminate whole tumors so that's could be our second act uh you know once we finish out this HIV project yeah it seems uh very interesting the spread of the IP assets and the potential targets that are there uh so basically most of the biotech companies that we are looking at they have a pipeline and they are following they have some monetized products and the patterns are coming to an end so they keep on growing the pipeline and turn by turn they come up with monetized products and that's how it happens but for a new company which is a private company which has started up you have to focus on one thing and I think that one thing you have chosen to focus was HIV and you have developed other Assets in your pipeline which can be the next Target as you said as soon as you knock out the HIV of the park and come up with a solution then you can focus on the others uh so that's understandable because uh these days having a lot of resources is important uh in order to have multiple programs going on simultaneously engaging with the FDA doing the clinical trials it's a it's a onerous task so your Prime Focus being HIV I think we have made some Headway out there so that brings us to a very interesting um question that most of our audience would have so why is Raj interviewing Jeff today why not interview him maybe 6 months ago so what is it that prompts us for the interview that's the question our audience would have and I would all love you the pleasure of explaining that Jeff well um some of your audience may be aware that biotech has had a rough couple of years and um you know this does happen from time to time and biotech may have been oversold back in 21 and 22 right and uh and what happened was biotech valuations you know just went up to very high levels it was very easy to fund companies there were a lot of companies that had very immature products um and you know so what we've seen is uh a bit of a weeding out over the last couple of years uh of a lot of we've seen a lot of failures of very early stage project projects that didn't necessarily uh justify the level of investment that was uh being made in them and and we suffered the same way so 2023 and 2024 have been horrible for AG in terms of raising money but now we're seeing it come back and I think that there's it really says something about the company that we had enough assets that as biotech is reemerging from this slump we stand out and so we're starting to see some significant interest in funding and it looks very uh positive in terms of our ability to do the next stage on HIV and to monetize that project because it's that close right and so the other so that the first reason is that you know 6 months ago we were dealing with uh you know just a cash crunch uh you know we were at a very uh low state of activity uh really not moving things forward in any substantial way but we but there was one exception we had blood samples from our clinical trials that we hadn't process yet and we were developing a new assay which could show us the amount of int ta virus within the CD4 cells this is called circulating viral Reservoir in other words if you uh if you if somebody is living with HIV they actually have a very high percentage about 10% of their circulating CD4 cells actually have intact copies of HIV integrated into their DNA this is called a viral Reservoir because those are basically viral factories and you would think well wait a minute they're taking drugs every day to suppress the virus it doesn't eliminate that and the answer is no it does not eliminate that and that is one of the most Insidious things about HIV is that soon as they go off their suppressive medication those viral factories produce a ton of HIV and their viral loads Spike and they start progressing towards AIDS right away again and then they create new reservoirs they spread the reservoir further that's right it increases the reservoirs and so you know that res attacking those reservoirs is a very important aspect to a final solution a an actual effective functional cure to HIV where you could make a onetime treatment and then have them suppress their own virus for Life the theory behind our HIV project is to harden those CD4 cells so that HIV can't get into them right and they can do their job fighting HIV but one of the things they're going to have to fight is those integrated copies of HIV that are already in the body they're going to have to bring those things down and there's never been a study as far as I can tell and i' I'd invite your viewers to search the internet for any project that has substantially reduced the um the viral reservoirs in humans we see it all the time in mice but the H and HIV stands for human it hides in places in humans that mice do not even have and so that is a Critic IAL element and it's never been done before but now we've seen very strong evidence that we're bringing down the circulating viral Reservoir so all of those CD4 infected CD4 cells are being intact by our cells and the cells that they are um uh controlling the uh HIV cd8 cells are attacking this circulating viral Reservoir and bringing it down to zero or near zero in every single p patient in the clinical study okay that is just eye popping and at this point we have enough data to say that we're pretty confident that we're doing a great job on the circulating viral Reservoir and this next clinical study will examine uh not just that and get more statistical data on that but we'll start getting measurements of the tissue resonant viral Reservoir and there's a good reason to believe that we're probably bringing that down substantially as well okay that is a fundamental element of getting to a cure that we haven't seen from anybody else from any other project we've got already got a lead in viral suppression we've got a lead in safety we've shown we've got a a lead in um you know sort of sustained uh lowering of set points uh with HIV all of these things add up and give us confidence that with another clinical trial we'll be able to show this to the treatment companies and they'll understand that a cure is really possible that it might be literally right in front of their eyes and that will motivate them to bring it to the public including you know a a liquidity event for our shareholders so because we've got a dual purpose obviously as a as a uh biotech company not just to solve a problem but to uh get a return for all the people that have believed in this project that is true and I think uh one of the the more remarkable things that I saw from your data was also the fact that um the blood samples that you have recently which you have examined they come from the clinical trial patients who probably had an infusion almost 3 years ago and then they were on uh art which means that uh anti-retroviral therapy was suppressing all their viruses so despite the fact that the AGT cells that you created CD4 cells that you created and put in their body not encountering as many Vons as they need in order to stay viable uh they still survived and when you did an analytical treatment uh Interruption later on they started multiplying they started cloning they started commanding cd8 T cells and started showing their effect and of course then you have also found out about the diminishing Reservoir all of this put together makes a compelling uh argument that now probably is the time for American Gene Technologies to step into the Limelight and I think that justifies coming in here right now and making this uh video out here to inform everyone about where we have reached so far and how we plan to go towards monetization of this therapy so that said Jeff uh uh you are still a private company right so uh I'm thinking that as a private company uh you still have some regulations uh that you have to follow so probably it's uh accredited investors or sophisticated investors who understand how to evaluate risk and uh whom uh various um I am in Canada out here and maybe Canadian authorities and maybe somebody watching from Japan or Europe or India or somewhere all of those authorities whom they consider those kind of invest investors to be sophisticated can definitely uh I suppose approach you through your website and uh get in touch with um Dr Barry or somebody who is in your investment department and if they are interested in getting in at the ground floor I suppose yeah so um we cannot do General solicitations so let me just you know just claim that right now we're not asking people on this channel for investment yeah uh the rules are that we can talk to anybody that is an accredited investor and if somebody doesn't know what an accredited investor is they can just look it up on Google uh but uh it it's even looser when you get outside of the United States CU these are actual actually state laws and SEC laws that uh say that private companies need to interact with folks like that but they don't SEC doesn't have you know sort of international responsibilities but you know look at your you know there's there may be local laws uh you know that uh impact this but I think a general bar is if you meet accredited investors and that you call us we can talk to you and uh we've raised uh you know this is kind of remarkable but over the last 10 years we've raised $85 million from accredited investors and that's how we got to this data and you know now we have line of sight and I think we have a good shot on goal to monetize the HIV asset but then you know move on to some of these other assets of course cancer is even bigger than HIV HIV is is a huge Market when you think about that nearly 40 million people are living with HIV globally but even if you just take Western markets there's about five million people that are living with HIV and it would be cheaper to cure them of HIV than to treat them for life so the Health Care Systems would save money but this would be a $5 trillion market now think about that HIV treatment is about $40 billion a year right now a little bit less than that okay well how many times can you fit 40 billion into 5 trillion so the HIV Market actually is going to go up for some period of time right and at the same time giving much better quality of life to people that are living with HIV because a cure would be much better than having to take constant treatment for life and even some of the side effects that come with that chronic viremia and side effects of the suppressive medication so it's good for the patients it's good for the Health Care system because they're spending approximately $1.7 million per patient in Western countries to suppress them for life that's direct health care costs even if this solution was as expensive as a million dollars they'd still be saving money yes but a million dollars today for say a Gilead that would might distribute this product or a Viv or whatever and they're not saying that they will but you know if the cure comes and a major Pharma company distributes this to those Western markets then you know what would happen is that the there would be cost savings with that Improvement in you know the quality of life for the uh people that are living with HIV and then there'd be societal savings because once somebody's cured they're non-infectious for life so you don't have to worry about them missing some medication and accidentally infecting somebody or not being good about taking their medication so this is a win-win win all the way around that's what we're aiming for in terms of what we want to deliver with a functional cure and we just think that it goes out into a very positive environment if we can show that data and then this recent data is really eye popping because the uh the viral Reservoir is really the fundamentally most difficult part of HIV and we just showed some tremendous data that says that we are able to attack and reduce that Viral Reservoir really by up to 99.98% or more than that actually all the patients were below that uh if I recollect it was at 04 yeah that's where we were yeah I mean most of the uh viral reservoir from the tests that we did from the blood samples that we had from the phase one and the analytical treatment Interruption and as you said this was you know data that we accrued over more than 2 years that's how long these folks were in the trial so we've showed that this effect is durable but right out to the end of that most of them are showing undetectably low circulating viral Reservoir in other words this very sensitive digital PCR test that literally takes 8,000 cells from their body and can individually inspect every single cell to see whether it has an intact copy of HIV was unable to detect any in most of the samples so that is a you know a really great uh you know sort of sign that we're on track doesn't you know I never want to say in biotech that you can guarantee any outcome but this is exceedingly good news on the road to something that is huge and you know I I feel very uh uplifted uh you know and very enthusiastic and uh you know uh given this this data that we recently have been able to gather so the next clinical trial we're starting to see some good interest in the US amongst some substantial check writers to support this project we have an investment Bank uh you can look them up it's uh the um rage if you don't mind maybe you can just put them right in the comment section it's called Merit advisory and uh me Merit healthcare advisors uh you can find them online but they're looking to raise US 60 million from funds but in the meantime we're raising a bridge round uh of uh it looks like we should have about 5 million by the end of January that allows us to kick off the next clinical trial and we have a commitment already from a uh large health care provider for 15 million in 2025 well those two things together give us really good assurances that we can get the next clinical trial done and we can show more of this data in a statistical way and that could be the stepping stone to uh an acquisition of this project and a return on the investment and a return on all of our hard work over the last 10 years yes Jeff so actually in our Channel what we have been doing is we have a bunch of genomic stocks that we track on a regular basis and there are many companies which are don't have a monetized product and they're all in the process of going through clinical trials and the share price has dropped significantly and we are still interested in many of those companies our audience is interested I have also invested in some of them and the reason why I thought that you should uh come in here and talk to our audience is also because of the fact that uh if they knew that you had this quality of uh candidate in your pipeline right uh that that is something that uh that would be a good thing for the audience to know what they do with that information is a different issue altogether because we don't do Financial advice but bringing that information across uh is I think very important so that people who are genuinely interested can then reach out and do whatever they need to do in order to uh progress their own uh ideas so from that point of you uh the only difference between American Gene Technologies and some of the companies that we have in our checklist or short list is that you're are not in the stock exchange and they are in the stock exchange and because they are in the stock exchange we continuously see information about them and the trading is ongoing basis and that's one of the reasons why I think this channel has got to bring companies uh which are in their pre IPO stage who are building a lot of intellectual Capital uh so that we give our audience an opportunity to have a look at those which they may otherwise not be able to identify or even imagine to be available yeah no I I think you could you know there is a difference between being a public stock and being a private stock and that's something to consider when people make investments but also um if you look at our clinical data and you compare that to public stocks what you see is that we have a tremendous level of efficacy signal and it gives you some sense of where this could be in terms of you know if it achieves that liquidity point and so you know it can sometimes be the kind of bet that an investor wants to have in their portfolio along with public stocks yes a general diversification strategy this may be you know one of those things where uh it could uh have a very high multiple uh it may have a you know a concomitant risk that comes with being private right but at the same time you know there may be enough signs there that it could be intriguing to some of the folks that are that follow your channel and follow some of those other stocks but yeah I think Gene and cell therapy is the future so you will always find me as an advocate for anything that shows that it's working okay and you know the because there will be a deluge of Solutions in the future we hope to license in or you know be the platform where many of these things can be developed that's why we focused on this what we call middleware right this uh these components that can be mixed and matched to make foundations for these apps and these apps can be as easy to write as apps on an iPhone one day it's more complicated now but we're putting in all the support you know that allow people to do that on our platform so you know the the future of Gene and cell therapy is I think exceedingly bright I think we will you know step one the industry I'm not just talking about AGT right now we hope to be the Microsoft of this but you know that is yet to be seen But the industry is going to cure 10,000 diseases they're going to extend Life by getting rid of so many things that kill us and this is happening already right cares agree bringing hope to people that would have died from acute myoid leukemias or lymphoid leukemias and the uh and this is a um you know a miracle level stuff in the places where there have been Solutions so far but this is really the drip, drip, drip of the initial power of this new software for your body so we'll eliminate all 10,000 things then we can start looking at the fountain of youth okay because it will be possible to extend life that way with Gene and cell therapy and then one day we will literally control our Evolution which may be important to stay ahead of you know all the technologies that we're creating we may literally be able to steer it sounds dystopic in a way right and I'm talking about something that's hundred years off so don't worry if you're watching this that you know we're making a superum being in the back room here we're not uh but one day that's what gene and cell therapy will open up we can improve humankind and we can direct our Evolution and that's you know that shows you what a future there is for this software industry and we haven't even seen the last software industry Peak out yet it's still going right and just to clarify to the audience the concept Jeff you're talking about it basically is that um just like in the software industry you have a middleware and people can deploy the middleware and put anything on top of it so that it can speak to anything below it without having to worry about stuff so the same way I think you have created intellectual properties which form components of any therapy cell or gene therapy that could be created to Target any diseases so once you have certified all these things all these components then anyone who is trying to address a particular uh condition or a disease uh has got to focus only on that area as far as delivery is concerned and other things they're already certified so you don't have to redo all the clinical trial for those components they are readily available so the work and expenditure everything is focused only on a particular disease Target or whatever they are working on so that's how you become a middleware kind of person that's the way I understand your uh architecture you explain it beautifully I mean you're hired you should be working on our marketing department so yeah everybody Raj did a great description of this it's about efficiency right why do you develop your app on an iPhone or an Android instead of starting from scratch right because all the common elements are already in there that's what we are focused on and middleware in our case is between delivery vectors like viruses or liquid nanoparticles or whatever and these creative elements where really what you need is expertise in the disease to decide what genes need to be changed where and it might right be right in our toolkit right in that middleware where you could get to that outcome in you could be doing your Phase 1 clinical trial and getting efficacy data in two years spending $10 million instead of 5 years spending $250 million right efficiency is what it's all about you know if uh if Microsoft was run like a drug company Excel would cost $20,000 or $50,000 a year okay and uh you know and um and it wouldn't be getting innovated every single day right that's the point is now that we can look at the body is as almost being deterministic we can look at your body as being trillions of cells that are collaborating on a giant Network that's electrical chemical and physical right you have the most complex Network in the world within you and you have all these cells that are like cubicles in your corporate body right that each have their own job but the instruction manual is almost the same for every single one of them but each one of the managers in that Cube knows what their job is they carry it out they collaborate with the rest of the cells in your body and that makes you well now we can go into that instruction manual that they're all reading and we can fix it we can improve it and your description of the middleware is really perfect once we have reliable elements you don't have to reinvent the wheel a we don't have to reinvent the wheel once we cure HIV it'll be you know relatively easy to reapply all those same comp components and cure other chronic viral infections like htlv or maybe you know the other thing that's happening in this industry that's really similar to software is the costs are dropping Like a Rock right so this stuff that's only you know viable in Western Nations now will eventually be cheap enough that we can have it for everybody in the world look at how cell phones have expanded these are supercomputers from the 1970s in the pockets of people in African nations well they'll also have shots in the arm that cure their HIV and cure their cancers and you know this is a global Revolution a technology that will scale very much like computers and that will follow cost curves very much like computers and will eventually touch every person on Earth but right now wow you know in Canada in the United States we have access to to that stuff today and it's happen so it's an amazing world that we are getting into and uh Jeff I I would really like to thank you for uh sparing some time investing some time coming to our Channel and having this U open discussion with us and giving us an insight into where AGT has reached uh so far and I hope our audience has liked this and I'll invite our audience to uh put their questions in the comment section uh if you have any specific questions about anything please put it in the comment section and um I'll check and see how I can get back to you after getting in touch with Jeff and um Jeff all the very best for you and um we hope to hear more from you in the near future or maybe someday uh we'll see you on the stock exchange yeah well thanks for uh having me on the program Raj as always it's a pleasure and uh if we have any more news I will reach out to you and uh I'd love to stay in touch and uh see you again sometime thank you so much Jeff that was nice [Music]
2024-12-15 07:54
