LifeBridge innovations Investor Update Q2 2022 - 1
We wanted to send out a quick update and expect that we will have more in the next few weeks.
1. Ping Yeh has formally joined our Board Of Directors
We are very excited to have Ping Yeh be the first official LifeBridge BoD member! His Bio:
Yung-Ping Yeh, MS, MBA, PgMP, PMP
Mr. Yeh co-founded StemoniX, Inc., a biotechnology company, in April 2014 and served as its Chief Executive Officer and a Board Member through its successful merger with public company Vyant Bio (fka Cancer Genetics) in 2021. Prior to co-founding StemoniX, Mr. Yeh commercialized multiple technologies to the tech industry. Highlights include serving as team lead for the first solid state drive product for Seagate Technology, leading the global partnership between Samsung and Seagate to create new flash technology and program managing the operating system software development for Dell enterprise
storage systems. Mr. Yeh has successfully led through a multidisciplinary approach for the last two decades of career. Mr. Yeh holds a bachelor of science and master’s degree in mechanical engineering (nanotechnology focus) from University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in business administration from University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. He has attained professional certifications in program and project management from the Project Management Institute and Mergers and Acquisitions from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Mr. Yeh serves on the Medical Alley Board of Directors, UC San Diego Alumni Board of Directors and on the board of directors of Oncodea, a cancer diagnostic device company.
But the real story of Ping is not in his Bio...
Ping was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma (blood cancer) and was found to be chemo resistant - after four months of grueling yet unsuccessful therapy. His doctors had to resort to using a more potent version of Chemo and thus, more toxic. In his own words his therapy “came very close to killing me”. He felt like a guinea pig for both the initial and ultimately successful, but incredibly harsh final Chemotherapy.
And just like Peter’s founding of LifeBridge, Ping thought there had to be a better way to treat cancer patients! He made it his mission to develop a way of determining the efficacy and the side effects of a therapy on people – before giving them the therapy. The current method of giving it to the patient and just seeing what happens (good or bad) was not acceptable. So, he formed StemoniX to build “micro-
organs” using their skin cells through a Nobel prize winning process he licensed for his company. Chemo as well as many other forms of drugs could now be tested on the actual organs and genetics of the person, but in vitro, before actually giving to them.
Anyways, he tells his story much better that we can. Take a look at his Ted Talk that you can watch Here. It is very much worth watching.
Perhaps even more impressive than his story and accomplishments is how Ping has jumped in with both feet to help, guide and work on the LifeBridge opportunity. A great example of this is our most recent trip to Minneapolis to meet with our Animal Lab, TLC Electronic (our ATTF array manufacturer) and our corporate advisor/attorney and our longtime regulatory consultant
2. Visit/update with our animal lab
Peter, Rick and Ping paid a visit and got an update from our animal lab. We have contracted with this lab to do our biocompatibility testing and animal safety study. We bought one of our custom rabbit array vests with us to the lab. Our liaison there told us that we were approaching the process the right way. I.e., doing a face-to-face pre-sub meeting with the FDA first, submitting our animal study protocol to the FDA for review, running a one animal pilot study prior to our multi-animal safety study, etc. She noted that it is common for companies to come to them and claim they know that everything will work the first time and they know what the FDA wants. They then pay $150K plus for a full-blown animal study - and have it fail outright and/or be rejected as insufficient by the FDA. They then have to pay to do it all over again - costing lots of additional time and money. We have our Clinical Consultant Mike Winegar to thank for implementing our animal study strategy for us.
3. Engineering update and product development meeting with TLC Electronics
TLC Electronics owner and president John Haley and his team hosted Peter, Rick, Ping and Marty Pribula (our Mechanical Engineering consultant) at their plant. TLC manufactures our ATTF arrays and is currently building the arrays needed to conduct our biocompatibility and animal tests. The TLC/LifeBridge Team worked on improving the accuracy and repeatability of some of our manufacturing processes so that we are ready for high volume production. Marty also shared with the team his 3D printed mock up for our quick disconnect tool and we discussed how it could be modified to conform with the over-molding on our new connector assemblies. We also set some new responsibilities for the disc fill project and identified our five next steps and tests in that process. All in all, a very productive meeting.
4. Meeting with our Corporate Council and Regulatory Consultant
Steve Kozachok (right), our corporate council, hosted us at the Taft Law offices in downtown Minneapolis. This trip provided a great opportunity to have Mike Winegar (left), our longtime regulatory consultant, meet with Ping and Steve. Turns out they know, and have worked closely with, a lot of the same people over the years. In fact, it was Steve who introduced us to Ping. Steve and Ping had worked together when Ping was forming and growing StemoniX.
Summary
We are very happy with our team’s development and our ongoing progress. We continue to expand it by recruiting top talent like Steve, Ping, Marty and Mike. It is all part of building up a strong network and deep expertise in the medical device space.
Finally, we thank you, our investors, for helping LifeBridge continue to achieve these and other milestones towards our mission of transforming Metastatic Cancer from a terminal prognosis into a manageable disease. We will keep you posted on any new developments and progress as always.
Sincerely
Peter
“Because they have more life to live”
Peter F Travers
CEO
LifeBridge Innovations, PBC