Using cell science to fight nuclear weapons: How is Pluri revolutionizing health and food tech

Thank you for having me.

So my name is Yaki and I'm the CEO of Pluri Inc. Pluri is a company that is doing cell therapy for over almost two decades. I'm with the company as the CEO. I joined the company as the CFO. I do have a financial background. I started my journey actually in young in Israel and then joined a high-tech company, Elbit Vision Systems. But about 20 years ago I fell in love in biotechnology and aging. I'm one of the few guys in the world that can say that I earned or I got my career because of a graph.

Sure. So about 20 years ago I did see one graph that changed entirely the course of my career and actually my life to some extent. That was the graph that shows the change in life expectancy, humanity life expectancy. And I saw an amazing graph which basically said that humanity doubled its life expectancy in the last 150 years. Doubled. From 45 in average to over 80. And I literally was blown away. I couldn't believe the numbers. So I said it just cannot be true and I did a deep dive into it.

I was actually reading at home or something and I just saw this graph in one of the internet sites.

I was in Elbit Vision.

Exactly. High-tech, machine vision, algorithms. It's a very nice company. And then I said, wow, I really need to be part of the life science industry. If this graph is true, that's going to be the biggest industry in the world. And since then, it was disturbing my thoughts and mind all day. And this is what I did. I understood that if I want to be part of this industry, I need to be in life science, but also more than that, I understood that I need to be involved in regenerative medicine, in like new technologies, because the numbers are just amazing. And if we want to continue to treat our elderly and patients with dignity and respect, we need to come with new technologies. This is actually what brought me to Pluri. It was a very, very young company, it was a year and a half or two years, and I decided to join first as the CFO. And since then I'm devoting my life to cell therapy, regenerative medicine, and using cells for a variety of different things that humanity needs.

Exactly. But I think that helped me quite a lot because when you're coming with a financial background, you are seeing things in a very... you have your own point of view of things. It's not always biology and science. You are not actually taking into consideration the limitation if you grew in the life science or in the academic world of science. And I ask simple questions and I didn't agree to accept answers that didn't seem logic to me. And I always tell, until today, I always tell my team, if you need to explain something and I do not understand it, it means that you're not explaining it properly. So use your logic, explain in simple terms and people will understand. And luckily we are living in a generation that data is available. And I took a deep dive, I learned, I read like hundreds of different scientific papers. And I think that you can say today that I can give a fair fight to most of the professors in universities and hospitals understanding mechanism of action, understanding how cells work, biology. I just love it. The most amazing industry in the world.

Yeah, academic reading, a lot of meetings, a lot of meeting the right guys, being in the right conferences. But that's a heavy lift. I mean, if you want to get this data and information not just to know what people are talking about but to lead innovation, to think of innovation, to be able to challenge your scientific team, which all of them are brilliant guys. But as I said, today the world is open, information is available, and everything, if you are actually curious enough and willing to learn, you can do a lot. That's what I did.

I believe it's a big part of it. Thinking in a logic way and different voice, and also understanding the big trends in science and the big trends that today are in the market. My mind or my brain is always thinking and this is something that I always do. And I believe that today innovation is not limited to being only professional in your field. Sometimes you can look at things, you can look at phenomena and try to ask questions or try to make assumptions based on what you see. So there is always a big difference between the concept and ideas, the execution of it. I always said this world is not short of good ideas. Everybody has good ideas at least three times a day. But it's about the ability to execute. And then of course you need a team which are pros and they can take something which may be an interesting concept but eventually breaking it down and to understand if it really makes sense and to be able to decide on a project. So I must say that I do not limit myself to brainstorm, coming with new concepts, new ideas, challenging the leading scientific guys in my company and in the world. And I think that's something which creates innovation when you are able to have this open discussion and people from different aspects look at the same thing. And we are very fortunate to live in an amazing generation.

So Pluri, it's a big platform. We are based first of all in Haifa in Israel. We employ about 130 employees.

It's good. We are a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, symbol PLUR. For the last 20 years we are dedicating ourselves to build products and solutions based on cells.

So let's start even before the placenta. Let's start about cells. Cells, I always call them the building blocks of life. Every organism on this planet is built from cells. We are built from cells, but also the plants, food, coffee, animals, trees, bacteria, whales. That's literally the building blocks of life. And it's so fascinating to see that the way they are organized in different creatures and it follows very specific rules that I can see the pattern today. And I always say the engineer had the same blueprint across the different creatures creating humans, plants, and more. Pluri is using placenta cells for therapeutics. And I did start and said that I joined this industry because I understood that we need to come with new modalities to treat our elderly and patients. And humanity actually needs new solutions. If you're going to look at the healthcare cost, global healthcare cost, especially in the Western world, it's insane. The US is spending almost 20% of its GDP on healthcare. It increases almost by half a percent each and every year. Wow. It's insane. It's not sustainable. Half a percent of GDP each year in the US? Yes. Crazy. It's insane. Today it's about 20%. And I always said that there are like two solutions. Either we're going to get financial bankrupt because we will not be able to afford ourselves, the second option is a moral bankruptcy, say we're not just not going to treat our elderly and patients. And when there are two options, I always like the third one to say we should find new solutions to treat elderly and patients in a different way, reducing hospitalization days, reducing the chronic treatments. Basically we need to readjust or restart all our healthcare system, moving to prevention, moving to regeneration. Our bodies have regeneration capabilities. When we are young in good health, our body is able to regenerate itself. When we're getting older or sick, we are losing part of this capability. And in Pluri we decided that we should focus on cells. And what can be a more ideal source than using the placenta cells, which are young, potent, healthy cells donated after full-term delivery. In Pluri we are collecting these placentas, we are extracting the cells out of them, expanding the cells. We developed the most advanced technology in the world for cell expansion. It's actually so effective that from a single placenta we can treat over 20,000 patients. From a single placenta. And we are using these cells, we inject them into patients in severe condition, sick patients, and we are able to see that the cells are able to interact and to communicate with the patient body. They're actually receiving signals from the patient body and responding to them, providing these therapeutic factors that leads to healing and regeneration. And starting with your question, this is what we announced also last week when we signed an agreement with HMA Fund. It's a very large clinical center in Ukraine, the largest clinical center, stem cell center in umbilical cord blood. And we provide them access to one of our products that we are developing the last few years with the US Military and the National Institutes of Health. One of our unique cell types, when we use it to a population that was exposed to very high levels of nuclear radiation, we're able to show that we can increase survival from like 30% to close to 100%.

Radiation is something that really scares humans because you can't see it and it's significant, massive. It's massive. And we do have several projects, NIH and DOD. We just got a contract from the DOD last year for this product. And the HMA Fund, I know the guy, he's an amazing entrepreneur, I like him a lot. And we said that we're going to bring this technology for Ukraine in case of, God forbid, they're going to need it.

Well, we are complicated human beings, you know, it's always a combination. So for me, maybe because we are Israelis, but also not, the guy, it made a lot of sense. Bring it to countries that really need it. The US is investing quite a lot into it as a preparedness towards radiation. It's not only dirty bombs, it can be also like nuclear melting, like what happened in Fukushima or in Chernobyl. And people don't always acknowledge the numbers, but just for you to understand, in Fukushima, in Chernobyl, actually over 100,000 people died from the first responders because they were actually trying to take control over the radiation. And I wish they had our product which can prevent some of the symptoms and actually keep them alive. And I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's going to be a good business. I mean, the agreement that we signed with HMA Fund of course has a substantial value for us. It's going to be over $100 million in potential value for both parties based on the agreement that we signed. But for me it was an important statement to say we're going to be there, we're going to support, we're going to have access to something which is quite novel and developed here in Israel. And this is what we do.

Of course. So these placenta cells, we inject... when people are exposed to radiation, they will die because the radiation actually breaks the DNA when the cells are actually trying to double themselves. So first of all, it will damage the cells that are fast in doubling, like chemotherapy to some extent. And the cells that are actually broken in radiation, these are our hematopoietic cells. Hematopoietic cells are the ones that create our blood lines, the red, the white, and the platelets. So when the hematopoietic cells are actually destroyed because of the radiation, people will die first from bleeding because they're not going to have platelets, they're going to die from infection because they're going to lose the white cells, or the red cells... but nobody gets to the red cells, they're going to die before that. And today the alternative is to try to provide certain cytokines that can improve the white cells or take these patients to bone marrow transplantation.

Which is not feasible if you need to do even 100 patients in parallel. So when we inject our placenta cells, and we are injecting it after exposure to very high levels of radiation... like you take the placenta cells, you expose them to high levels of radiation, and then the human being was exposed to radiation and you inject... we are taking the vial with our placenta cells, each vial contains about 100 million placenta cells. Just take a simple needle and syringe, take the cells out and inject them into the patient muscle. And what is happening there? Our cells are starting to sense the signals. They are seeing that there is destruction of the hematopoietic niche and they're getting all the signals that the body can translate. And our cells are starting to secrete a lot of different factors, biological proteins or biological factors that do two things. One, they protect the remaining hematopoietic cells. Second, they allow them to start to proliferate very rapidly, quickly. So what we are doing is we are actually reigniting this engine, this hematopoietic system to start to double themselves. And we are seeing that there is an increase in platelets, in white and red blood cells. Eventually that translates to survival. As I said, it's close to 100% survival for one that got the cells. And without the cells, actually there is a destruction eventually that leads to death, which is terrible. But these are very powerful cells, these placenta cells. We use them for radiation, but today we use them for more and more indications, from ischemia to muscle regeneration. We have several cell lines that each and every one of them is dedicated to a specific disorder.

First of all, placenta is the most amazing organ I ever saw. It's amazing. It's like a miracle. I'll explain. Think of pregnancy, which is the unique situation in nature that I'm familiar with, is that there are two immune systems that coexist, the mother and the baby. Even though these are different immune systems, they coexist without the objection of the one against the other. Then you know that a mother can be even a surrogate mother, she can carry someone else's child without genetic match whatsoever, but still she's going to carry the baby. And the organ that modulates or allows this amazing immunological discussion is the placenta, which is missing part of the markers and makes it kind of invisible for the immune system. So you have an organ that is able to interact with two different... the mother and the baby. It's actually one organ that is built from two human beings. And our concept is that we can take donated placentas from hospitals here in Israel, we are using our technology to expand them, as I told you, over 20,000 from a single placenta. And today we injected these cells to hundreds of patients all over the world, US, Europe, even Korea, Israel, across all ethnics, across all genders. And what we are able to know is that these placenta cells, they are like tiny factories that they are able to sense, to interact, to discuss with the patient body. This is what they do. They are native speakers, they understand the language of the body. And that's a very powerful agent for recovery and regeneration. The key advantage is that it doesn't require genetic match. We can just go across without match whatsoever. So it's like an off-the-shelf product, but these are cells, this is a very sophisticated and powerful agent.