Ann: Successful Major Milestone - Human Retina in a Dish Models, page-22

Welcome to the future. What is a retina in a dish and what does it mean for the future of drug development? If you want to know, the article Disease modelling in human organoids refer footnote ⁴ in PYCs announcement, is a good start. The long term goal is whole organ transplantation but immediate applications include drug testing.

I'm only guessing but the validation from successful tests using an organoid model may be instrumental in attracting the right kind of equity to run the clinical trial (or pre-clinical deal). It would appear that success in an organoid model may be a predictor of results in a clinical trial, particularly noting, as SoT reminded us, that the retinal organoids will be grown from the patients that will be the clinical trial participants. Think de-risking.

The article points out that liver and brain organoids, among other organs, have been developed. Its hard to miss the fact that PYC and Partner's pipeline in 2020, refer slide 9 of the September presentation, includes programs in neuro-degenerative disease and genetic liver disease. The PYC Investor Presentation was made available on September 4, 2019 which is prior to the announcement of the strategic partnership with the Lions Eye Institute. So we now know that the LEI was the partner being alluded to in the program for inherited retinal disease. Is LEI also branching out into the Brain and the Liver or is there another partner in the wings.