Company: OCEA
Filing Date: 2025-04-08
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001641172-25-003155
Chunk: 2497

Company: Ocean Biomedical, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-08
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 2497
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 demonstrates both the specificity of drug activity for PfGARP, as well as the lack of general
toxicity to eukaryotic cells. Toxicity assessments show no loss of viability in multiple mammalian cell lines at up to 400 uM, which
was the highest concentration tested. These data are consistent with a selectivity index (ratio of IC50 for mammalian cells/IC50
for parasites) greater than 100.

Figure
13. Molecule kills P. falciparum parasites. 3D7 (top) or 3D7 PfGARP KO (bottom) parasites were synchronized to the ring stage and incubated
with a dilution series of compounds or media control for 48 hours followed by quantification of parasitemia by pLDH assay. Each dilution
was evaluated in quadruplicate and error bars represent SD. The IC50 = 4.8 uM for killing of 3D7 parasites. Results representative
of two independent experiments.

Our
Whole Proteome Differential Screening Platform for Antigen Discovery

Our
infectious disease product candidates are the result of decades of NIH-funded work by our co-founder, Dr. Kurtis and his team. Dr. Kurtis
developed the WPDS platform and used this platform to identify our two vaccine candidate antigens for malaria: Plasmodium falciparum
Schizont Egress Antigen-1, or PfSEA-1, and Plasmodium falciparum Glutamic Acid Rich Protein, or PfGARP. The WPDS platform was first described
by Dr. Kurtis in 2005, and later used to identify PfSEA-1 (published in Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and one of the world’s top academic journals) in 2014. Dr. Kurtis has since perfected the WPDS platform
to discover PfGARP as described in his Nature (the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal), 2020 publication.

33

The
WPDS platform differs markedly from standard vaccine discovery approaches, which rely on the identification of immunodominant antigens
(protein targets that generate large quantities of antibody) recognized by antibodies in animal models of human pathogens. Unfortunately,
these animal models are often poor models of the complex human host-pathogen relationship and the immunodominant antigens are often decoys
deployed by the pathogen to evade protective immune responses