Beyond the Picnic Cooler: Redefining Organ Preservation with Dr. Xiaoxi Wei, Founder and CEO of X-Therma

[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_01] Hello everyone and welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. I'm so thrilled to be with Dr. Xiaoxi Wei. She is the founder and CEO of X-Therma. They're just doing incredible work in the organ space, helping people break the paradigm of what is possible. Just such a privilege to have you here on the podcast, Xiaoxi. Thanks for joining me.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_00] Xiaoxi Wei Thank you, Saul. So great to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:31] [SPEAKER_01] Dr. Xiaoxi Wei Of course. So before we get into the story of X-Therma and why you guys exist, tell us a little bit about you. What got you into healthcare and what keeps you in healthcare?

[00:00:45] [SPEAKER_00] Xiaoxi Wei Yeah, thank you, Saul. Glad you asked. X-Therma is truly about making time available for all those living medicines currently that have a super time constraint. That's why patients are waiting in the vein. So actually my inspiration start from when my grandpa did not have time. When I was eight years old, unfortunately lost him not getting the liver for transplant on time. So my mom as a physician told me the secret behind the transplant.

[00:01:11] [SPEAKER_00] Actually, instead of missing donors, we do not have enough time to keep the organs alive. That's why more than 50% of organs being donated today end up not being transplanted.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_00] Dr. Xiaoxi Wei I found this super unacceptable. So I decided to become a biohacker and continue my journey as a student and pursue my PhD in chemistry. Found the angles I wanted to solve this biggest science challenge to start X-Therma right after my PhD. Now X-Therma is within his 11th year's journey.

[00:01:46] [SPEAKER_01] Dr. Justin Marchegiani What a story, Xiaoxi. And you said it was your grandfather? Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Your grandfather would be proud to know that you're doing this in his name. For so many that need this type of technology, help us understand what the core problem is. Why 50%, which is a huge number, and I agree with you, it's unacceptable. 50% of organs don't make it because of really how they get delivered. Talk to us about that.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_00] Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Yeah, this is a quite shocking fact for us to know. Organ transplant has been as a standard care since 1950s. Why would we not be able to utilize all the organs and be donated? Simply because the technology we use to preserve the organs is so ancient, which involved with sugar salt solution, perfused the organ, use a plastic bag to cover the organ, and then you shovel white icing in there, put it into e-glucle.

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_00] Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Xiaoxi Wei Yes.

[00:02:51] [SPEAKER_00] Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Seriously, this method we'll be using today for 50 years, and it can only make the heart last for four hours, and the kidney longest 24 hours, not even a day. So this is why donors' organs have a hard time to get a match to deliver to the recipient side, and within the timeframe before it expire or perish.

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_01] Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Xiaoxi Wei Yes.

[00:03:26] [SPEAKER_00] Xiaoxi Wei Yes. Xiaoxi Wei Yes. take a full advantage of a lower temperature. So you know everything, your household freezer lasts longer than refrigerator. But in order to have a frozen heart

[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_00] to come out of your freezer, to beat it in front of your face, we need to add antifreeze, right? To prevent the freezer burn. Also, this antifreeze cannot be toxic. And certainly our car coolant or DMSO we use to preserve cells cannot fulfill this goal because we need so much, like maybe you can prevent the freezer burn, but you actually kill the organs. So the question becomes, can we build new molecules? Actually, can be non-toxic

[00:04:24] [SPEAKER_00] and prevent the organ freezer burn? Then this problem will be gone. And here is the interesting part. So where do we find these molecules? As a PhD chemist, I understand actually nature has a 4 billion years evolution. They already show us the great direction. So they make those antifreeze proteins and come with a variety of forms and a variety of species, some fish, some insects, even like Arctic squirrels.

[00:04:53] [SPEAKER_00] So they're able to utilize those very molecularly precise protein to prevent the freezer burn, reduce the freezing temperature, and keep the species alive. So how great is that? It's amazing.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_01] It's amazing. And so you got your inspiration from other creatures in the world that go through this. And you mentioned a couple of them, but talk to us about the process. You didn't always have the answer. You must have gone through so many things before you actually landed on the solution.

[00:05:25] [SPEAKER_00] Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That takes like a, I spent like a five years on my PhD to learn the chemistry and then started my company. So now it's driving for like more than 10 years. So indeed, time comes by. On the beginning, we just start with this concept. So by thinking of, can we like learn from nature, but we cannot really directly utilize the nature's creation because number one, and those type of natural antifreeze protein

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_00] cannot be scaled. Number two, even you can scale it. Couple ton of fish, maybe you get a few gram and even you can put it into the human blood. We're going to facing some allergy issues. You don't want to inject the fish protein directly into your blood. As a chemist, we're thinking, can we actually learn from nature, mimic nature, come up with a chemically simplified structure to rival nature's function? So that's why our whole innovation platform,

[00:06:25] [SPEAKER_00] as X-Therma, is the pioneer in the world, actually using new type of chemistry called the peptoid instead of peptide. The fish has antifreezing peptide, but we make something called a peptoid. It's shifting just like one element over. We create something extremely similar to nature's molecular structure. But at the same time, we scaled it up for one million times. So that gave us the leverage,

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_00] like can mimic nature, but also rival nature's function. And throughout this process, you're right, like there's lots of stay up over the night and a lot of scientific intuitions coming into it. Like, and we also leverage, like we're being privileged, like being in the Lawrence-Burkin National Lab in the very beginning years. So we can totally use a robotic synthesis method, like with our way of doing it. Traditionally,

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_00] one chemist, they would take them making one molecule in one month's time. And now we can have 24 molecules creating in 24 hours. So here, like already creating a big library of new molecules in our hands. Wow,

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_01] that's beautiful. And that's really interesting. And of course, first of all, congrats on finally getting to the solution. And to your point, a scalable solution that can be leveraged for human use. When you were at those points of just like not figuring it out, like what is it that kept you inspired?

[00:07:58] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, the basic theory, because we know lower temperature extends life and we need to really find the best molecular design and to prevent the water finding each other so we can prevent the freeze burn of the organs. And those molecular design also need to have no interactions with biological samples so we can keep the toxicity very low. Once we anchor this point, we see

[00:08:27] [SPEAKER_00] this is the direction can go forward. Because there was a fundamental heliose equation, you know, for example, the sperm of the eggs, like they can be vitrified minus almost 200 degrees C Celsius. So technically it can last for centuries. So we know lower temperature can bring life back. And now we just need to find how to. And along this way, like we are also very lucky because Lawrence Labs supports and also we have unprecedented success

[00:08:57] [SPEAKER_00] like having all the prestigious grant fundings coming from the U.S. government and the European government. So that gave us like a great leverage to work with only the world best surgeon scientists. So we are demonstrating from the cell levels to in vitro transplants and in vivo transplants from the small molecule now to human-sized animals. All the progress has been made and keep us checked and motivated.

[00:09:27] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm very glad to recently Nature Biotechnology recognized us as the trailblazers for the entire field of a sub-zero organ preservation.

[00:09:38] [SPEAKER_01] Congratulations on that. And look, you had an oversubscribed Series B and landmark regulatory designations. As you're entering this next phase of scale and you look toward your Series C, what specific operational and clinical milestones will this round accelerate?

[00:09:55] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, thank you, beginning, we did not go out to raise funding because we see this is truly demonstrated sci-fi into reality. Now, the sci-fi has been demonstrated as a side fact and you can see we have oversubscribed Series A, Series B and now to the point we're going to open up our Series C round. So this is going to be our last venture round. We have very clear deliverables. We currently hold the only sub-zero

[00:10:25] [SPEAKER_00] organ preservation solutions in the atmosphere pressures and also the temperature sub-zero can have up to 120 hours and that's five days instead of less than one day for keeping the funds. the FDA has destined to push this technology forward. Here, our deliverable is to conduct a very strong clinical trial as a medical device. We're very excited to start

[00:10:55] [SPEAKER_00] saving life very soon.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_01] That's brilliant, Shashi. I think there's a huge opportunity for this technology. Folks, stay tuned for the latest that X-Therma is doing. Definitely one you'll want to keep your eyes and ears open for. As we get to the end of this episode, Shashi, what call the action or thing do you want our audience to be thinking about?

[00:11:19] [SPEAKER_00] I always say in the last 10 years, we proved from zero to one. And now you can think about because X-Therma has such a strong patent portfolio, so over 40 is globally granted. And they give us the very blue ocean opportunity to tap into the applications has not been fully solved by XNurma yet. So we're looking for a partner so I could join us in the journey

[00:11:49] [SPEAKER_00] such as we already have a commercial product in the regenerative medicine field. By the way, we removed the DMSO from the equations, so the life-saving CAR-Ts, MSCs, HSCs, all the iPSCs stem cells can now be preserved as a good quality and with a CGMP grade product without the DMSO's drawback. So we're very excited for the field. We're launching a new product to support tissue engineering

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_00] to put them on demand. So see here is the platform technology and we call ourselves more like the building blocks for all living medicines. We're looking forward to hearing from the audience. If you have a need to preserve life, please reach out to us. Obviously, there's another exciting part because this is representing a new era of the material. Think about in the 1990s

[00:12:47] [SPEAKER_00] when peptide just started to break through into one or two therapeutics areas. Today, how big is the entire peptide market? Even just a single GLP-1 is over $100 billion market today. We strongly believe we're going to come into the new age of peptoids. If you're interested in learning about chip coolings and solving a big strategic pain point to best

[00:13:17] [SPEAKER_00] cool the chips and best prevent ice formation as a new material, please reach out to us.

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_01] What an incredible close there. If people did want to reach out, where can they find you?

[00:13:29] [SPEAKER_00] Yes, you can reach out to us by info at xtherma.com and also reach out to us on LinkedIn.

[00:13:36] [SPEAKER_01] Beautiful.

[00:13:37] [SPEAKER_00] We're happy to collaborate and partner.

[00:13:39] [SPEAKER_01] That's fantastic. Xiaoxi, thank you so much for a fantastic session today. You guys are doing incredible work for our audience. Make sure you check out our show notes where you could find the summary of our discussion with Dr. Xiaoxi Wei and all the ways to get in touch with her and the team at xtherma. Thank you all for tuning in and Xiaoxi, thanks for being with us.

[00:14:04] [SPEAKER_00] Thank you so much us all.