Could 'magnetic blood filtration' change blood-borne disease treatment?

At Biotech Week Boston (September 2018), George Frodsham, Founder and CEO at MediSieve, won first runner up for Best Business Plan at the Xcelerate Startup Pitch Competition. We spoke to him afterwards about the company’s magnetic blood filtration prototype.

How did the company start?

'MediSieve is a British company developing a technology we call magnetic blood filtration. The idea is to provide doctors with a tool to remove specific components from blood in order to treat various blood-borne diseases. They take out various cells, toxins, pathogens, whatever. The company's been going for about three and a half years, and was originally a spin-out from University College London on the back of my PhD. We've raised a bit of money and developed a prototype.'

What’s the next step?

'Well we've just completed preclinical testing of the core platform aspects of our product, which is this magnetic blood filter. That's going into a safety study at the end of this year, if all goes well. And we’ve been beginning the development this year of the magnetic particles that bind to specific components in the bloodstream, which are the part of the technology that enables us to broaden it out into a huge range of different diseases. Those are in preclinical testing phase at the moment in our lab in blood, and we hope to take those through animal trials next year and subsequently clinical trials and hopefully commercialization.'

Are you partnering with anyone at the moment or looking to in the future?

'We have a number of partners in the UK, especially in the hospitals around London, there are some clinical partners there with whom we've done our preclinical testing and with whom we will be doing our clinical trials. We're looking to broaden our partnerships at the moment, particularly when it comes to developing the aspects of the technology which enable us to treat leukaemia, and sepsis and cytokine release storms.

For that, we're talking to a whole host of companies - be it in pharma or medical devices, we're quite open-minded with that. We're hoping to partner with people who can help us get access to key expertise, key equipment, to learn from them and to work with them to hopefully accelerate the development of the product and get it to patients as quickly as possible.'

Looking to the future, where do you see the company in a year and  what's the ultimate goal?

'Well, in one year, I think we'll be doing another round of fundraising. We closed £1.75 million earlier this year and towards the end of next year, or in Q1 2020, we'll be looking to raise further funds. That'll be to support the clinical trials of our products for diseases like sepsis.

Further forward, our grand vision is really to unlock the potential of magnetic blood filtration as a technology to revolutionize the treatment of blood-borne diseases. We want to provide doctors with that tool to enable them to pull anything they want out of blood in order to provide some patient benefit.

It might be a direct treatment or it might be a prevention of a disease. That's our grand ambition because the more we talk to experts about this, the more different things they want us to look at, to take out; other areas in oncology and autoimmune diseases and viral infections. These are diseases which affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. That's our grand vision, but that's not a one-year plan.'

This interview was filmed as part of BWB TV at Biotech Week Boston in September 2018. Biotech Week Boston 2019 is taking place in Boston, MA on September 9-12, 2019. Find out more here.