How Owkin K can change a Biotech workflow

An extract from an interview with Ben Mellows, managing director of Micregen

So could you introduce yourself and tell me what you do?

At Micregen, we strive to leverage our proprietary platform technology, ‘Secretomix®’ and products with the latest in technology and innovation. We have combined our deep scientific expertise with cutting-edge AI and machine learning tools to accelerate discovery, enhance precision, optimise therapeutic development and more effectively communicate these outcomes.

As Managing Director at Micregen, I provide leadership to the company focused on developing allogeneic stem cell–derived therapies. Our platform generates therapeutics that retain all the regenerative power of stem cells without including the cells themselves, significantly reducing the limitations of individualised treatments for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, motor neuron disease, and various dysplasia’s.

Secretomix®, our proprietary platform technology, enables the creation of diverse stem cell banks and captures the essence of the body’s natural regenerative mechanisms to develop products targeting a wide range of conditions.

We’re currently advancing our lead candidate, MRG1061, towards clinical trials, with a strategic focus on paediatric, rare, and orphan-designated diseases, particularly necrotising enterocolitis. 

As part of this effort, we’ve initiated a new investment round, which is where Owkin K comes into play.

So what was the challenge you tackled with Owkin K?

We've got a really expansive data set, we've got a product which has multiple components, including a variety of proteins and microRNA within it, and we're opening up our target markets. We wanted to get this across to investors: why our preclinical data’s important to them; why our advances are important to them and why it links commercial value in new target market areas.

And that's where it could take weeks to really go through that with all of our experts - but creating those pitch decks requires us to get them to the right people quickly. Owkin K really did help with that. It assimilated all the information that we were providing and it helped tie the story all together. It helped us also with our presentations and essentially get across a really clear story that was suited to specific investors or institutions from different backgrounds.

And did K feel complementary to your work?

Well, I think as a bio-technical expert you have confidence in your expertise and the links to those new markets and why your product you feel will work well in targeting specific diseases within these. But you can only work to the evidence you have in your hand. The power of Owkin K was to quickly open up the universal public library of data sets from published papers to clinical trials, etc, and bring this information together using natural language processing models and link it with our data.

Owkin K also helps with the scientific references which is absolutely key to us - having a scientific background, being able to go back and go, okay, that's the link, how can we trust that? This really did fill all the gaps for us. It helped us provide that clearer picture and make us far more confident than before.

The literature set is huge. Absolutely huge. So I would say the task would've been almost impossible to do alone, at the scale that Owkin K could do in a few work sessions.

And how did you work with K? What was the workflow like?

We started off with a few ideas and prompts of our own but K started giving us some prompts as well, and that gave us some more ideas for delving deeper into the research, asking more difficult questions, some of which were answered already by K. It was like a story unravelling - almost like being in a meeting room with someone, who you could have that discussion with and pass things off and bounce ideas back and forth. And I think that's exactly how it should work as well, to engage people. Not just ‘here, do the job for me’. A scientist should be involved in that process.  

Overall, Owkin K helped us with the validation of new ideas, with the scientific references, and with concreting that into a way that could be communicated and get that story across. So for some of our own ideas for new programs of work, it builds a bit of trust with your own colleagues as well. It's not just my idea here: there's some validation behind that thinking here and here's some of the evidence.

It saves me hours of going through and going, okay, I need to find this reference for this, and what does that mean? Reading through the paper, summarizing it in a lay fashion so someone else could understand, how it links to the next one and to this idea. So, it was fantastic.

And the $64,000 question: did it help in pitch meetings?

The proof in the pudding to a certain extent is being able to go into a pitch meeting with an investor, a VC, or a financial institution, feeling confident in the material that you've got in front of you and being able to confidently communicate that. Owkin K helps with that.

Who do you think could benefit from using K?

Those with scientific and technical background but also those who are on the cusp of trying to open up new avenues for their organisation. From my perspective, it helped a lot with the early work that is necessary for product development whilst also providing further scientific literature and data confidence. It's those technical leaders who are working on the cusp of that commercial offering but also leading research and development teams that could benefit most.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.