This Medical Tech Startup is Enhancing the Lifespan of Donated Organs

The founders of CasNx explain how their genome-editing technology prevents infection in organ transplant recipients

Transcript

00:00At Casanex, we do gene editing of transplant organs. So these include donor organs like kidneys,

00:08livers, lungs that go into a patient. What we're trying to do is do some sort of genetic

00:13engineering on those organs so that they're better and safer for the transplant. In my

00:17clinical practice, I see patients suffering, right? The patients are waiting years to get

00:21an organ transplant. Once they get the transplant, they want to go ahead and live their life. But

00:24unfortunately, after the transplant, sometimes they have disease processes, viruses that come

00:29from the donor that affect the life of the allograft, which makes the transplant last shorter.

00:34Currently, we have a pump that's right behind you that stores the organs. Our goal is to

00:40be proactive, not reactive. We want to treat these organs before these organs go inside

00:45the patient. What is that like with the timing of how fast this has to get done and how does

00:50that factor in with all of your research and development to make it be quick enough to still

00:54keep the organs viable? So usually with kidneys, we have about 40 hours

00:59or so maximum. During this time window, we place the kidney on a pump and we can treat

01:04the kidney using CRISPR-based technology during that time window. Usually, we only need about

01:09eight hours or so to treat the kidney. With the livers, we have about 12 hour time window

01:15and we can treat the liver in that time window. So we only need about eight hours or so to treat

01:20the organs. And the cool part about this pump is that the fluid recirculates. So it's the

01:26CRISPR technology that we give the pump, it recirculates and we don't have to remove it.

01:31So there's enough time in that eight hours with higher doses without affecting the human

01:35outside the body that the organ can get treated in the pump itself.

01:39That's incredible to think about all this technology that you guys are harnessing to make this happen.

01:44Is this operational right now? Has it been used on actual people? Where are you at in terms

01:49of the timing of that? Yeah, so we are in research and development phase right now. We've partnered

01:54with an organ procurement organizations who kindly donate us organs like livers and kidneys that

01:59they otherwise would have thrown away. They instead give it to us so that we can do our research. So

02:03we've proven this in organs. We are able to remove viruses from the organs and get it down to a level

02:07where it's really minimal and our immune systems can take care of it. But what we haven't done yet is

02:13a human study where now we have to take these edited organs and put them into a human. So that's

02:18where we are at next. We are here at TechCrunch to raise money so that we can do this next step of

02:22FDA authorization for any human use. And what do you guys see as the next step? You're obviously

02:26putting into a human body, but as you look a little bit farther beyond that, what do you hope that this

02:31will accomplish, you know, five, ten years down the line? This technology has the potential to be

02:36the next therapeutic line of drugs. Like we want to replace antimicrobials, antibacterials,

02:43because CRISPR has the ability and our proprietary tech which uses CRISPR-based DNA technology to

02:49change that. So we hope to create using our platform to create a new line of therapeutics.