Capricor Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CAPR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

It will be an expanded facility, but some manufacturing processes will be largely the same. So therapy manufacturing opportunities has really expanded in the past couple of decades. So there’s a lot of good opportunity there. So not exactly how you envision, but almost. In terms of exosomes, that is one of the areas of great pride for us. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, one of the things that have held back exosomes is how are you going to make the — how are you going to make them halogeneous? How are you going to turn them into our product? And we believe that we have done that. We’ve taken sort of the state-of-the-art and what is known about exosome making lipid nano particles as well as some of the other engineering constructs and are building a really good manufacturing paradigm that also should be buildable and not really pilot plant expansion.

That one will be more like big bubbling bioreactors and that kind of thing as we move it forward. But that’s a procedure that can easily go from a couple of mils to 100 mils to leaders to larger volumes than that, that makes any sense to you out.

Unidentified Participant: It does. You also caught my ear about the ASO undisclosed pharma interest. If I want to go more general, can I get more commentary on the general pharma and suitor interest? Because I’ve been watching this, how much [indiscernible] combination trials? Just if I read some of the literature, right, if I’m wrong, feel free to bat me on the head. There’s been a serious assertion issues for the current gene and cell therapies. And this where CAP-is our Top 100 potentially becomes one plus one equals three, and not two. There’s a lot of interests from those who are in that space. Can you further comment on that in general?

Linda Marban: You mean with the exosomes in terms of their partnering potential?

Unidentified Participant: Yes.

Linda Marban: Yes, absolutely. So that’s — this is one of the great opportunities in biotechnology and pharma is well aware of it. I think everybody knows that lipid nano particles can only take you so far. We’ve been working as a field and I say we because this even predates my own career and science on delivery, a targeted delivery of therapeutics to cells. We know how important that is, and we can now harness something that the body makes naturally to do that. And so that’s why Capricor has really turned our focus in the past few years towards an engineered exosome platform, not working specifically with an exosome made by a cell CAP-1002 makes perfectly wonderful exosomes. We think they mediate the mechanism of action of CAP-1002.

But what we really want to do is turn exosomes into a drug product. And so, you engineer an exosome, you put what you want on the inside and you tell it where to go on the outside it’s like putting in this code on it, and course pharma is very interested in that. And we have a very active business development program right now. And one of the main hurdles was this manufacturing step, which we have succeeded in doing. So we look forward to great opportunities with the exosomes moving forward.

Unidentified Participant: Last question, but this is for AG, I guess, for both of you. This will be a fun question, but it does get to some interesting things. You got $10 million more upfront cash from the last agreement. If you got a grant or another agreement that brings in another $10 million, how would you like it used?