Company: OCEA
Filing Date: 2025-04-08
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001641172-25-003155
Chunk: 3392

Company: Ocean Biomedical, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-08
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 3392
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LDH 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. Identifying the critical antigens that are the targets of protective antibodies
on the pathogen is further complicated by the fact that susceptible humans make essentially the same antibody repertoire (i.e., recognize
the same pathogen antigens) as resistant humans, thus masking the identity of the key, protective targets.

Dr.
Kurtis designed the WPDS platform to specifically identify pathogen antigens that are only recognized by antibodies expressed by resistant,
but not by susceptible, humans. The successful implementation of the WPDS platform requires blood samples from well characterized longitudinal
cohort studies of individuals exposed to the pathogen, high quality gene libraries from the pathogen, and one-to-three months of experimental
effort.

The
WPDS platform identifies the pathogen antigens that are recognized by antibodies made