Spring greetings from Modulight!

Investor newsletter - May 2023

We’re soon entering the beautiful summertime and wanted to let all of you know what’s been cooking at Modulight since the last newsletter. For starters, we would like to share this video by Technology Industries of Finland, featuring the technologies of the future – a fun splash describing a visit to our laser factory.

Watch the video in LinkedIn

The biggest news so far this year is that in January, we received a premarket approval (PMA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for our laser device for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in the United States. We expect to start launching the product in the U.S. during the first half of 2023 with our partner. The authorization was a significant step forward for us and the whole industry, as the FDA has now in fact granted permission to utilize cloud computing in the healthcare industry.

Read Modulight & Bausch + Lomb press release

Our result for the first quarter of 2023 was published on April 28. In a nutshell, our revenue grew from the previous quarter, but due to our long sales cycle and delays in customer projects, we did not quite reach the level of the first quarter of 2022. We have continued to invest in our growth strategy, which impacts our profitability, but we expect the impact to decline towards the end of the year. Our product development pipeline stayed at 27 ongoing projects, and we expect some projects to have significant revenue potential in 2023.

We are happy to see that our customers have been more active, which is reflected in the number of visitors to trade fairs in the field, and in our clinical development activities. At the moment, we are busy organizing the 18th International Photodynamic Association World Congress in Tampere, Finland in July. We expect an estimated 400 medical researchers and clinicians to share research results and new discoveries in medicine and technology.

Our Annual Report was published on March 15. You can read the Annual Report on our web pages. The report also contains a comprehensive description of our sustainability program and the actions we’ve taken in 2022. A concrete proof of our environmental responsibility is the Green Office certificate awarded to us. Green Office is an environmental scheme by WWF Finland to reduce the carbon footprint of workplaces and consume natural resources sustainably.

Our Annual General Meeting was held on May 2. The AGM re-elected the Board of Directors: Jyrki Liljeroos, Seppo Orsila, Pia Kantola and Timur Kärki were re-elected and Anne Leskelä was elected as a new member.

The strong interest in our projects and our customers’ applications has continued. This time we would like to highlight photoimmunotherapy, cancer treatment, which represents our strategic core application areas.

Anne Leskelä

#KillCancer - what is it all about?

Cancer touches almost all of us: about 40% of people get cancer in their lifetime. Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide. This is why we at Modulight want to fight cancer with science and technology. We have customers and projects related to many types of cancer – to name a few: lung cancer, bladder cancer, glioblastoma, and ocular cancers.

So far, Modulight’s cloud-connected, clinical laser platform ML7710 has been used for more than ten cancer indications. The ML7710 and Modulight Cloud enable using multi-tier drug delivery systems, which all work by laser-activating a drug or an antibody complex locally at the cancer tumor mass. The laser light activates the molecule which targets the cancer cells. This is known as photodynamic therapy (1st generation drugs) or photoimmunotherapy (2nd generation drugs) and can be combined with other modalities, such as liposomal drug delivery, boosting, and better-controlling chemotherapy and immunotherapy (3rd generation drugs).

The clinical laser platform ML7710 has received the pre-market authorization, granted by the FDA for a few indications, and a CE mark for these indications, as well. Additionally, we would like to share an application note about very interesting ongoing clinical trials for glioblastoma.

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive form of brain cancer, with poor life expectancy and impossible to completely remove surgically. New ways to help glioblastoma patients are 1) combining resection with photoimmunotherapy and 2) treating inoperable glioblastoma tumors with photoimmunotherapy solely. In both cases, the patient is given intravenously a photoactivating cancer drug (Gliolan) , which accumulates in the tumor. Then the bulk of the tumor is removed surgically and the margin areas are treated by activating the cancer drug by laser light. Or in some cases, the tumor is treated with photoimmunotherapy without resection.