Nurturing your Clinical Innovation with AUSCEP

In a special series dedicated to the Australian Clinical Entrepreneur Program (AUSCEP) we introduce you to some of the passionate health professionals taking part in this 12-month program to develop their innovative ideas into products and enterprises.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy is a Resident Doctor at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and co-founder and Director of EosGene Therapeutics, a startup developing a pioneering light-activated gene therapy for diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration using proprietary drug delivery technology – removing the need for painful eye injections.

Yagiz explains how taking part in AUSCEP helped him shift from being a clinician researcher to becoming a translational founder, giving him the language and tools to navigate startup strategy. And it gifted him a community of clinicians trying to solve real problems in different ways.

The program’s third cohort has been delivered in NSW and Victoria, in partnership with MTPConnect and Australian Society for Medical Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ASME) and supported by LaunchVic and NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation (ACI). The next 2025/26 cohort is open for Victorian applications until 20 June 2025 – apply at auscep.au.

This episode is hosted by MTPConnect’s Caroline Duell and Elizabeth Stares.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:16 Dr. Yagiz Alpakso and EOS Gene Therapeutics
• 2:32 Light-Activated Nano Syringe Technology
• 4:57 Treating Eye Disease at the Source
• 6:25 Balancing Medicine and Research
• 8:38 Targeting vision-loss diseases
• 10:28 Stage of innovation on development pathway
• 12:27 Journey of developing the innovation
• 14:04 The AUSCEP experience
• 17:04 Future Plans and Smart CRC Partnership
• 18:42 Advice for Aspiring Clinical Entrepreneurs

Transcript

Natalie Vella: 0:01

This is the MTP Connect podcast, connecting you with the people behind the life-saving innovations driving Australia's growing life sciences sector from bench to bedside for better health and well-being. Mtp Connect acknowledges the traditional owners of country that this podcast is recorded on and recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are Australia's first storytellers and the holders of first science knowledge.

Caroline Duell: 0:33

Hello and welcome to the MTP Connect podcast. I'm Caroline Jewell. Do you have a dream to translate your healthcare ideas into real world solutions? Join us as we meet some of the passionate health professionals doing just that and taking part in the Australian Clinical healthcare ideas into real-world solutions. Join us as we meet some of the passionate health professionals doing just that and taking part in the Australian Clinical Entrepreneur Program. This 12-month innovation program is led by MTP Connect and the Australian Society for Medical Entrepreneurship and Innovation, with support from Launchvic and New South Wales Health, and it's making a difference from bench to bedside. My co-host is MTP Connect's Elizabeth Stairs, who is the Innovation and Translation Lead for the OSCEP program.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 1:16

My name is Yagiz Alpakso. I'm a medical doctor currently working as a resident at Royal North Shore Hospital. I'm also a researcher at the University of New South Wales and, in this context, I am the founder of EOS Gene Therapeutics, a biotech company developing light-activated non-viral gene therapies.

Caroline Duell: 1:38

This sounds like a really interesting area of medicine. Can you tell us about this innovation that you're developing?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 1:48

So EOSGEN is a biotech company, and then what we want to achieve is we want to turn these very complex, invasive treatments, which often require either long or expensive processes require either long or expensive processes into more precise and one-time interventions, and then we use light literally to unlock gene therapy and then, essentially, we want to be able to provide these cures like long-term cures by providing these like precise treatments that are actually affordable.

Caroline Duell: 2:26

So can you describe this nano syringe technology that you've developed?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 2:34

It dates back to my PhD, which kind of like bridges clinical medicine and molecular biology. At the time I was working on genome editing tools like CRISPR and TALENs. Crispr is very popular now. Talens are a bit like has become a bit of like an older technology, but still pretty good. But the idea for EOSG didn't actually come from the lab, it came from the clinic.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 3:02

I remember watching patients during my ophthalmology rotations coming in for yet another injection into the eye for macular degeneration. It's routine in ophthalmology. But confronting getting injections into your eye and I can tell from the patients were not really impressed, even though that's their 20th time, and I remember thinking surely there is a better way. So, linking it back to my PhD and I said what if we could use light literally to control when and where gene therapy happens? So that led us to develop a nanoparticle-based system that could carry these therapeutics and other drugs that can be delivered by standard methods like IV injections and only release or activate them when and where we want them, and we do that by using a light. So that technology we started developing a decade ago and then we improved it over the last like seven or eight years and validated it in cells and some animal models. It worked, and here we are the EOS gene was born.

Caroline Duell: 4:28

Wow, that's really exciting. Could you just explain to everyone listening what exactly is gene therapy? If you think about, you're designing a platform to help take the gene therapy to the site of the problem that you're trying to treat.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 4:43

Gene therapy is about fixing the source code of the body. So if your DNA is the instruction manual, gene therapy edits the faulty lines of code that are causing the disease. So it addresses the root cause and here's often how I explain it to some of my patients and here's often how I explain it to some of my patients. So imagine your house has a faulty light that keeps flickering. You could keep changing the bulb every week and you can just go and purchase a new light bulb. You can spend a bit more, you can buy these smart light bulbs if you fancy one, but it doesn't solve the problem. It will still eventually start flickering because the problem is not the light bulb, it is in the circuits.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 5:34

So going to the circuit box and fixing the wiring that causes that flickering is the gene therapy. It doesn't just treat the symptoms, it treats the root cause of a disease that caused the symptoms. It is a circuit box. So in our analogy or case, we are using CRISPR to turn down the VEGF gene which drives those abnormal blood vessel growth in the eye which causes, it's essential, the blindness and that comes with the macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy. So in a way we are doing it with a smart switch using light to activate the treatment in the eye to, just like, permanently address the symptoms.

Caroline Duell: 6:25

So right now you're calling in from the Royal North Shore Hospital. You're in your scrubs.

Natalie Vella: 6:29

I am.

Caroline Duell: 6:30

So, you are a practising doctor. You're still training, going through your extensive training program for medicine and, at the same time, working on this incredible research. How do you marry those two together?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 6:46

It's challenging but also actually quite complimentary. So I come from a research background, as I said, sort of a PhD, and then stayed in the research and academia and then moved to medicine later on. It is always challenging to fit the research and commercialisation activities into the clinical time but on the other hand, because I am still working in the hospital, it is my day-to-day job to actually interact with the patients, deliver treatments. I always say I am on the front line, I'm working on the trenches and I actually see how we do things, how we bring these medicine or procedures to the patients medicine or procedures to the patients because it is part of my day-to-day job. It actually better informs me as to what patients do really want from us. What do they actually care about? What are the bottlenecks? Where does the medicines fall short sometimes, or where like to find some rooms for improvement that will actually make change, not not just to the patient alone but also to the system. So it is actually quite privileged to be still practicing medicine, because it just like gives me that perspective.

Caroline Duell: 8:04

And obviously you know particularly these vision loss diseases are, you know, incredibly difficult for patients to deal with, especially as disease progresses, and I understand that this let's call it drug delivery platform that you are developing, you're very much focusing it on targeting vision loss diseases.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 8:26

That's correct. Our first indication is age-related macular degeneration. Is age-related macular degeneration as well as diabetic retinopathy, as you indicated? Well, you're quite spot on. Actually, there are quite a lot of people who suffer from these diseases, particularly because people live longer and with age comes a lot of diseases, including these ones. So macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy are two of the top causes of blindness globally and together they affect about 350 million people worldwide and including over 1.5 million Australians.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 9:09

It's a pretty serious disease, especially if it does not get treated early on. But on the other side, the current gold standard treatment involves injections directly into the eye. That could be every four to eight weeks for years, so it's painful. Those drugs are very expensive. In fact, they top the PBS dispense medications in Australia they're in the top five most expensive drugs and also for many patients it's overwhelming. Expensive drugs and also for many patients it's overwhelming. Imagine you have to get these ophthalmology appointments every month or every two, three months, knowing you're gonna. You have to drive to the clinic, knowing you have to get injected into your eye. It's important, otherwise you may go blind. But that's hundreds of injections over a lifetime. So we want to change that entirely.

Caroline Duell: 10:14

You're going to change it to one injection, not in your eye.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 10:18

Correct.

Caroline Duell: 10:19

What stage is your innovation at on this development pathway?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 10:24

So we are in the advanced preclinical stage. We have built the platform. It works in the lab very well and now we are focused on generating the functional data that gets us closer to the clinic. And we have secured quite a bit of non-dilutive funding from different government resources and more recently we'll talk about that later but we were selected as an official partner for the $238 million Smart CRSD, australia's flagship regenerative medicine initiative. So we are at the level where we are taking our research from the lab to the clinical stage and then we are hoping to achieve first-in-human trials in the next one and a half to two years.

Caroline Duell: 11:14

That sounds like a really bold innovation and obviously it's attracted a lot of attention to be part of this new smart CRC. It's fantastic, congratulations.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 11:24

Thank you.

Caroline Duell: 11:25

You talked before about your co-founders and also that you have been working on this research for what sounds like a significant amount of time. How long has this journey been for you and who else is involved?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 11:39

So I have two other co-founders. I have been working with Professor Iwa Galdas, who was my PhD course supervisor many years ago, as well as Associate Professor Wei Deng. She's our nanotechnology expert and we've been working on this project for I think it will be 10 years at the end of 2025. It started as a small extension of my PhD project, but also after that we took it to the next level because what we found in the lab was really good and promising and then when I combined that idea with what I saw in the clinic and potential pathway, it just like became the next stage for us. So yeah, it's been going on for about a decade now, and the good thing about that is because, as co-founders with EY and Way, we know each other so well, because we're working together for 10 years. We have a very strong team. We know our strengths, we know our weaknesses, we know what brings us together. We have a fantastic working relationship. Ey and Way are the researchers at UNSW and UTS.

Caroline Duell: 12:59

Wow, what a team. Have you commercialised this research out of the university system so that you've spun out, or you're a spin-off?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 13:08

Yes, we have spun out of University of New South Wales and we did that about two years ago because we decided, once we accumulated sufficient preclinical data, that proving the technology actually works in the lab very well, we filed patents and we went through the full prosecution phase. I mean, we had filed patents let me correct that about six years ago when we first started developing the technology, starting our preclinicals. But following that initial provisional filing, we actually took the provisional patents all the way to the full prosecution and defence and I'm glad to say, our patents were approved in US, Australia, EU states, UK and then during this time we actually fully spun out and become a company.

Caroline Duell: 14:05

Elizabeth, flicking over to you now to sort of talk a little bit about the AusSet program.

Elizabeth Stares: 14:10

Yeah, thanks, caroline. As you know, we run the the AusSet program and you're part of our New South Wales cohort, so cohort three. What has attending the OSCEP program brought to you? What have you learned?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 14:25

So many things Absolutely love being part of OSCEP. So OSCEP helped me shift from being a clinician researcher to becoming a translational founder and, as much as it's easier said than done, it actually has so much further, deeper meaning to it. The program kind of gives me the language and tools to navigate startup strategy, regulation and product development. But more importantly and that's probably one of the things that I love the most about OSEP it gave me a community of clinicians trying to solve real problems in a different way. It helped me to start thinking like someone building something that has to work in the real world but still thinking outside the box and how to make that happen.

Elizabeth Stares: 15:35

Thank you. I think one of my favorite memories was in one of the pit stops when the whole table were around and they were so ent. Are you able to look at this kind of cancer and can you look at this illness or this disease? And they came up with lots and lots of alternative uses for your gene therapy.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 15:49

It was one of those moments that also I remember immensely and I actually took notes from that and I took those notes back to my founders and our business advisors saying, hey, I've been part of this OSIP and guess what, today we had a great discussion and the good thing about that is we're all clinicians in that cohort.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 16:08

So the ideas are coming from the people, when they understand what I'm doing, how actually it could be implemented, not just in the way that we think, but also to add to our pipeline. All these, all these thoughts were very valuable and the best thing is, like normally we would be spending our own time out there trying to survey these clinicians, trying to get the right audience to understand our technology and give a bit of feedback. Osep is the platform where we just like show up and then they're all there. They're like our fellow participants, but they're actually their clinicians and it's very valuable to get their feedback. And it's such a friendly environment too, so we don't actually get stressed about not saying the right thing at the right time.

Elizabeth Stares: 17:03

Yeah, so it's been a great experience so far. Yeah, everyone's there to learn and I think that's and that's shown definitely in the, the atmosphere, in the environment that the pit stops and the, the communication between you all has shown. So what's next for you? So you mentioned that you have your smart crc and I know you got um, a aea grant as well. Um, yeah, and this is going to take you to clinical trial. Is that right?

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 17:29

um. It's definitely give us a very good runway to further our technology to prepare for the first in human trials. So the aea um grant that we received just like gives us the fuel to generate the key preclinical data for us to move forward, particularly in our first targets in ophthalmology, and the Smart CISO partnerships gives us something even more powerful a seat at the national table. At the national table we are one of the 63 partner organisations and some of the industry giants like CSL, merck, cytiva, and to the best of my knowledge, we are the only start-up on that list. It validates what we are building and positions us within Australia's regenerative medicine future, not just as a participant but as a contributor, I would say. And then the next stages for us is to raise further funds to bring our research into the clinics and running our first in human trials in the next three to six months or so.

Caroline Duell: 18:42

And Yigiz, do you have a message for anyone who might be considering joining the Australian Clinical Entrepreneurs Program, because we're opening applications in May.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 18:54

I cannot stress how important it was for me to be part of the offset. I'm not just saying it because I just attended and I just like want to say a few words. It was actually had. It made a real impact. So I would say all my fellow clinicians out there who have been working in the system, either public or private, who have seen problems and let's face it, it's there everywhere they're, like it comes from every lines of work either.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 19:22

If you're a doctor or a nurse or a paramedic, you see something and you see, and if you ever wondered let me put it like that if you ever, you know, after the work went back home just like told your friend you know what I've seen, xyz. And wouldn't that be easier if we had done this, or if we developed this, or if we have, you know, created this app, or if we have did this research, wouldn't that make like fantastic changes? If you ever said something like that, don't think twice. Osep would be there to equip you with the language and strategy to successfully bring your ideas to real life.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 20:07

So, and that's all I can say, and I'm very strongly encouraging all the fellow clinicians out there to consider OSEP and I don't think you will disappoint. It's such a well-structured program. So I just want to say one more again, and obviously to you, elizabeth it's just like such a fascinating program. In fact I feel a little bit like sadness that I know it's about to end and I have to say should I apply again just to be part of the same, maybe another cohort? But no, I really strongly encourage all the listeners.

Caroline Duell: 20:44

Well, hopefully you'll be able to keep in touch with your cohort and your peers, who sound like a great inspiration to you and you to them. So we wish you all the best, and it's been great to hear about your entrepreneurial spirit and your passion to bring this new technology drug delivery platform for gene therapy from the bench perhaps, hopefully soon to the bedside.

Dr Yagiz Aksoy : 21:12

I'm sure I strongly believe in that.

Caroline Duell: 21:15

That was Dr Yagiz Aksoy, a medical doctor at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and co-founder of EOS Gene Therapeutics, talking about developing a new technology platform to deliver gene therapy for vision loss diseases like diabetic retinopathy. To find out how to be part of the next Australian Clinical Entrepreneurs Program, visit the AUSCEP website to find out more. A-u-s-c-e-p dot A-U program. Visit the OSCEP website to find out more. Auscepau, you've been listening to the MTP Connect podcast. This podcast is produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri people here in Narm, melbourne. Thanks for listening to the show. If you love what you heard, share our podcast and follow us for more. Until next time.