Yaky Yanay: Revolutionizing Biotech with Pluri's Cell-Based Solutions

Yeah, it's good to be here. It's a pleasure, Don. Thank you for having me.

Of course, with pleasure. So Pluri is an interesting company, I'm going to talk about it. And I started my journey in biotech and life science two decades ago. I'm actually a veteran of the high-tech industry in Israel with a financial background. And I'm one of these guys that saw like, you know, one graph that literally changed my career and changed my life. And that was the graph of changing in life expectancy that I saw almost 20 years ago. And when I saw it, I said, oh gosh, I need to be part of this industry that is beyond life science and healthcare. And since then, this is what I do and it's been an amazing journey. But yeah, I was in Pluri for more than 18 years in different worlds. And I really think that this is, biotech of course, is the most amazing industry in the world in my opinion. And it's coming big time mainly because of aging and longevity on this planet.

Yeah, absolutely right. I started my journey in Pluri actually as the CFO. I do have a financial background, you know, like standard graduate. But I always, you know, like science, I like the labs and I like research. So I did many roles in Pluri as a CFO, COO, Executive VP, and I even went to a certain period as a co-CEO. And recently I took the CEO position and I love it. I think the experience that I had in the different positions give me a very deep understanding and a very broad understanding of Pluri as a whole that allow me to lead this amazing company to success.

So I always say it's like working with people that are very extreme. When you're holding one position, so you mainly care about what you need to take care of, about your KPIs. You see the organization, but you're always very focused in what you need to achieve. And you know, as a CFO, it's about, you know, budget, cash flow, raising money and make sure that the... And as a CEO, you have operational concerns that you need to take care of. But each and every one of them tells you a lot about the different angles that you can actually or need to evaluate a company. And I think the most important thing is understanding that there is a lot of different issues and aspects to each and every one of the decisions that you make. So today, after two decades, I'm able to make the decisions, you know, easily because from some reason, based on the different roles that I made, I think that I have a very good hunch of how it's going to impact the different departments in the company and how we can bring it all together. So it is important to have a diverse understanding about the organization from all the different angles. And I really hope that these two decades gave me the ability to do it in a wise way.

Absolutely. I believe that we are living in a time that CEOs and executives, I like to call them business leaders, we have responsibilities which are first and foremost our company shareholders, but we have a responsibility for the place and where we live. So I was born and live in Israel and I love this country to my bones. And one of my main goals that I need to achieve, I believe that Israel is one of the most amazing hubs for innovation, biotech, and the ability to impact this world. So part of it, I'm also very involved with the industry. We have a very nice organization here which is a combination of all the high-tech and life science companies in Israel. I think today it's over 500 to 600 companies from big multinational companies to small startups. So this is kind of a network that kind of navigates all the advanced industries companies in Israel, which allow this ecosystem to flourish. So I served as a chairman of the life science, we have like a chairman for high-tech and chairman for life science. So I served as a chairman of life science in the last three years. I'm actually serving as a board member, so I stepped down from the chairman. It was a little bit too busy for me given all the activity that we have in Pluri. But yeah, that's our role and I encourage each and every CEO of every company to be involved with our state, country, environment, community. It is important and we have good impact on that.

Of course. And Pluri is a company that we are dedicated to creating products out of cells. I'm a big believer in cells. And it's very, I mean we all know that but not always acknowledge that with the very simple understanding that everything on this planet is built from cells. Every living organism is built from cells. We're built from cells, our pets, trees, whales, bacteria. Our steaks are from cells. That's the building blocks of life. And our mission, and we learned in the last 20 years, we developed a very novel technology and knowledge base how to develop products out of these cells. And we have developed a very strong IP that allow us and technologies that allow us to expand cells very much in large production. So if you are controlling the understanding of how to develop unique cell products and you have the technology to do it on scale, you can basically create almost every product on this planet. So this is Pluri's mission. We cracked like the code of how to work with these tiny organisms. I really admire cells, you should know. I mean, you should just look at them in the microscope and you understand that these are social creatures. I mean, they communicate with each other, they have their own language which is signaling and interaction. They are social creatures because they need the environment. If you're going to put cells alone, they're going to die. They need really the environment, they need the friends, they need the community. And they are smart, so they have the ability to interact, respond to the environment. And today we utilize it from developing very smart drugs, if I like to call cells a drug with intelligence, or even developing different products that just need mass scale of cells, like food. It can go from creating, you know, meat, fish, but also plant. And this is what we do. We built a very unique model that is relying on Pluri as, like I like to call it, like the mothership. Pluri contains all the knowledge, all the information, all the IP. And we are building around us, we are actually very busy in venture creations around us, that each and every one of these ventures is focused in one thing only. So we have a bunch of activities and companies around us, all of them are relying on the 20 years of knowledge, 140 patents that we have. And we are creating companies that are champions in their fields relying on everything that was built here. And it's quite amazing. And suddenly you can see that, you know, everything is cells and we are controlling these tiny amazing organisms in creating products that people need. And today it's become important from, you know, healthcare system, but also food security, environment, and they can make a huge impact on our life, on a day-to-day basis. So I have nothing but appreciation and admiration to these tiny creatures.

Absolutely. And very interestingly, that everything is built from cells and in many aspects I see like the blueprint that created all of us used the same blueprint probably for different creatures. So this is what allow us to be able to go across the different industries. Let me give you a few examples because as I said, we're always going to work with cells. But a second part of our strategy is that we're going to always partner, we would like to partner with companies that have the access to market and can identify or can characterize very clearly how the product should look like. So Pluri is focused in the innovation and the large scale manufacturing and our partners are focusing the go-to-market, like facing the market itself. Let me give you a few examples. Let's start with our healthcare sector or our healthcare vertical where we are developing products that are derived from placenta cells. We are collecting cells from placenta after full-term delivery. These are donated placentas, so the mother needs to sign a consent of donation. We are able to extract cells out of these placentas and then using our system, our bioreactor, to expand it massively. Actually, these systems are so efficient that from a single placenta we can manufacture over 20,000 doses. And when we have this product, and we have different products from placenta, I'll give you like two examples. One is a collaboration that we have with the US NIH and the Department of Defense. They had the need, or we are doing a collaboration that we are developing a placenta cell-based product as a counter measurement against nuclear radiation. So if people got high level of nuclear radiation cases like Fukushima or Chernobyl, we are using our product in order to support the recovery of this individual that was exposed to high level of nuclear radiation. So the US government is preparing for a case of such massive disasters and we were able to show that if we inject these placenta cells to population that was exposed to radiation, we can increase survival from like 30% to close to 100%. So this is how it works. In this case, the partner is defining exactly the scope of the product, they are funding it, we got a contract from the US government for that, we are doing the development and the manufacturing and they're going to use it for stockpiling and more as much as they need. Let me give you more examples. We are doing the same concept, for example, for knees. But this time we partner with the largest clinical center in Europe, the Charité of Berlin, that they came with the spec of what the product should do. A placenta product that we are using it today for treatment of knee osteoarthritis, that they are conducting all the clinical studies that we are doing. But what really changed in Pluri that happened about two and a half years ago, that we decided to expand as we said to more industries. And one of the most amazing examples that I like to share is that we got a lot of interest around the cultivated meat industry. People were trying to create, you know, meat on large scale production using bioreactors, but nobody had the scale. So it was too low of production, too high of a price. And we understood that we can actually contribute significantly to this industry. So then the strategy kicks in. We approached, we contacted the largest food producer in Israel, the name is Tnuva. It is a subsidiary of Bright Food, the second largest food producer in China. We showed them, we told them, this is what you're going to do, this is the technology, this is the expected scale and pricing. We opened a joint venture, they invested the funds into the venture and we created an entity that is solely focused on cultivated meat. And efficiently, in 12 months, we were able to demonstrate numbers that nobody in the world was able to show ever, like several folds better than anything else. It was convincing enough that a few months ago we got the two major strategics, one from the US and one from Europe, that stepped in also to this joint venture. And if everything is going to go well, I believe in 2026 our subsidiary, Ever After Foods, will be able to show a system that will produce several hundreds of kilos of meat each and every run, bioreactor run, which takes about a week. So things are changing and Pluri is there on the forefront to use the technology to create products. And today we are doing even crazier stuff than that around the plant and more. So it's quite an amazing journey. Like, I don't know if you're drinking coffee right now, but I can tell you a few things about coffee and how cells can actually benefit this market as well.