Going from Alzheimer's to Pandemics: Bringing FLOSS to Bio Testing

Tanya Cushman Reviewer:" Peter van de Ven I'm sure after those last two talks, we're all thinking about locking ourselves in a closet to keep ourselves safe. Hopefully, by the time I'm done, you'll agree that there's some hope and that won't be necessary. So, my name is Tom Cerrito. I'm a CEO and co-founder of Varo. Varo is a biotechnology company focused on preventing the transmission of infectious diseases.

We founded Varo in early 2020 with the recognition of two facts. First, the rate and spread of infectious diseases, of epidemics and pandemics, has been steadily increasing for over 20 years. Despite that, during the same time frame, there haven't been any significant innovations in preventing the spread of diseases. So why am I at DEVCON? Varo shares Vitalik's vision for DIAC and for decentralized pandemic preparedness.

We believe in empowering individuals around the world by giving them access to technologies that allow them to protect themselves and their communities. VARO has built a platform to detect the presence of pathogens in aerosols in real time with exquisite sensitivity, using easy-to- use and affordable devices. Actually let me stay here for a second. So aerosols are the tiny droplets, they're about a micrometer in size that we release when we breathe. These tiny droplets hang in the air, they can stay in the air for days.

So when an infected person is in an indoor environment, like a room like this, for example, they release these aerosols, and they contain the bacteria or the viruses that they're sick with. And those just hang out in the air and wait for someone else to breathe them in. This is how the majority of infectious diseases, certainly respiratory diseases, are transmitted. Until now, there really hasn't been a way to detect the presence of pathogens and aerosols, and that's what the VARO platform is designed to do. So the basis of our biosensor platform is the micro-immuno-electrode.

We call it the MIE. The MIE is essentially a modified semiconductor. What we do is we take an electrode and we attach an antibody-like molecule, which is what we call a nanobody, and that's what binds to the virus or the pathogen that we're looking for to that electrode. This is a technology that was originally developed by neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis named John Cerrito and Carla Yudy.

And the name is not a coincidence. John Cerrito is my brother. He's a professor of neurology at Washington University. And he originally developed the MIE technology to study brain chemistry in Alzheimer's disease. He would implant the immunoelectrodes into the brains of mice in order to study the proteins that cause Alzheimer's.

In 2020, John realized that the same electrode technology that he puts down into the brain of a mouse, he can stick up into the air to detect COVID. He pulled in another collaborator from Washington University, an engineer and aerosol scientist named Rajan Chakrabarty, and these are our scientific founders. And we've worked very closely with this team over the last four years to develop this platform to where it is today. So I'm going to show a brief video of our scientific founders talking about how we're leveraging the MIE platform to develop two devices that are designed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Those two devices are the breath-based diagnostic and the air biodetector.

So can we play the video? This is going to be a game changer. You are not just looking at the current strains, what is prevalent right now. We are also getting ready for what could be in the future. Whether it's something we know, or it's an emerging pathogen, we can go to it very quickly within a span of weeks, pull out a new nanobody, put it on an electrode, and have it ready to go.

Gives us another tool to work with in order to really get on top or ahead of something like COVID, so we won't be kind of slow like we were in the past. We're using this in two devices, then the breathalyzer and the air quality monitor. If you wake up in the morning, you have respiratory illness. You go to the pharmacy to get a test. The technician behind the counter doesn't have to be trained.

They'll take this, they'll pull off the cap that activates the device, breathe into it. A single breath is enough to get a reading here. You then hand this back to the technician who turns the knob. They then take this, plug it into a permanent device, and then within 60 seconds from when you blew into it, you get a result of whether you're positive or negative. Their quality monitor will determine when pathogens are present.

It will also tell you when the pathogens are gone so you can know you can re-enter a room so you keep business open, you keep people safe and healthy, and you can still go about your daily lives. If you can identify that initial route of where the infected virus is being spread from, you can control the further spread of that virus. By deploying this device, we also want to ensure that the inequity which is prevalent in the world is in many ways addressed. Great. So I want to take a minute and talk about these two devices that we're developing.

First is our breath-based diagnostic, what Carla called the breathalyzer. The breath-based diagnostic is capable of detecting multiple pathogens from a single breath in 60 seconds with sensitivity that is comparable to PCR it is a true point-of-care device sorry so you can imagine going to a pharmacy you get diagnosis, you can get your medication before you leave, you can get a diagnosis with whatever the known pathogen is, you can get your medication, you can get a faster diagnosis, you can do all of this at a lower cost than current methods like swabs or PCR. We recently completed a clinical trial with this diagnostic device. And I don't need to go through all the details of this. I don't have time to do that today, although I'll be here afterwards if anybody wants to talk about this further.

But the clinical trial was a great success. It showed that we have exquisite sensitivity and specificity, and patients reported that they preferred this method of diagnosis, which is, of course, non-invasive, compared to PCR or the swabs that we've all become familiar with. Our second device is our air biodetector. So there's never been a device like this before. This is a device that will sit in a room like this, passively sampling the air in that room.

So if somebody were to enter that room who were sick and infected, producing pathogenic aerosols. The air biodetector could sense those pathogens before you could infect most, if not all, of the people in that room. So this truly gives us the ability to interfere in the transmission of disease and prevent it in those environments where people are most susceptible, which is in indoor environments. During COVID, we know that the overwhelming majority of cases of COVID were transmitted in indoor environments through aerosols. So what does this mean for DIAC and what does VARO mean for DIAC?

So both of our devices rely on the MIE technology, but the MIE is a true platform technology. And we believe that there are many applications for this, some of which we probably haven't even thought of yet. We want to empower people around the world to innovate with this technology and develop new things, new ways to do it. People that have different backgrounds, different ideas, different goals than what we have at Varo. By empowering people, by giving them access to this technology, we're giving them the ability to protect themselves, protect their families, and protect their communities.

So how are we doing this? Varo has adopted an open source business model. We're making all of our plans, designs, and data publicly available. We've signed a pledge that we will not enforce our patents against third-party innovators. In fact, we're going to encourage people to adopt this technology.

We're hiring an open source community manager to put all this information and make it available, package it up so that it's easy for people to access, and even promote people to come and enter into the open source community and learn about our technology and hopefully motivate them to take up this technology and use it themselves. We've embraced the principles of free and open source hardware and this has become sort of the core of what we're doing in Varo. This is the core of our business model. See, infectious diseases don't care about patents, right? They don't care about borders.

They don't care about intellectual property rights. And we all know this, right? We all lived through the same hellish pandemic for the last four years. What we want to do at Varo is open up all of this technology. You know, we recognize that as a small company, it's going to take a lot of time for us to be able to access markets like Southeast Asia or Africa.

Viruses, bacteria don't have those restrictions. So by empowering governments and companies and individuals around the world to practice our technology and to innovate around that technology, we're giving them the ability to protect themselves, protect their people, and protect their economies. It also allows us to ensure that important technologies like this can get into markets in low- and middle-income countries that may not normally have access to these types of technologies and hopefully address the gruesome inequity that we all saw during the pandemic, which Vitalik actually spoke about during his opening remarks. So typically in the pharmaceutical industry, patents are your competitive advantage. And I've been in this industry for my entire career.

I've developed drugs and gotten them approved by the FDA. I've started about a dozen biotech companies. Patents have always been sort of the bedrock of the biotech community. But patents are a negative right. Patents basically give you the right to tell someone else they can't do something.

What we're trying to do at Varo is turn that on its head. Instead of standing behind our patents and preventing innovation, we're going to leverage our patents and promote innovation. We're going to get all of this out into the world. Our competitive advantage instead of our patents will be our R&D. So we're based in St.

Louis, Missouri. We're in this great area called the Cortex Innovation Community. And we're building a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to produce MIEs. And our challenge, our competitive advantages, will be to produce the lowest cost, highest quality MIEs in the world. And then supply those to our innovators.

Give them the ability to innovate and give them that secret sauce, the MIEs, that they can incorporate into their own devices. Or they can build capacity for their own countries. We're doing something else. I haven't been keeping up with my slides. build capacity for their own countries.

We're doing something else. I haven't been keeping up with my slides. There we go. So we're doing something else with our R&D platform that's important when we think about pandemic preparedness as well. We're creating a nanobody library.

So you may remember I said at the beginning of my talk that nanobodies are the proteins that we link to our electrodes to make MIEs, and those are what bind to viruses and bacteria. We're creating a library with trillions of different nanobodies. very quickly against whatever the next emerging pathogen is, whether it's SARS-CoV-3 or monkeypox 2 or whatever comes along that threatens to become the next pandemic. Our platform, our R&D capability, will allow us to produce new MIEs against those emerging pathogens within a matter of weeks and deploy devices so that hopefully the next time this comes around, we can get out in front of it. We can either bend the curve or maybe even prevent the spread by getting those devices for those emerging pathogens out into the world.

So at Varo, we're very passionate about preventing the spread of infectious diseases. We're grateful for Vitalik for his support and for his support in supporting a new business model for innovation in the biotech industry. So I will be here. I'll be out in the back. I have a few demos that I can show of the the breath-based diagnostic device.

I have some MIEs that I can show. So feel free.