THE NEED FOR OUR TECHNOLOGY
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is caused by a number of concurrent factors, the most important being too high blood cholesterol levels, especially LDL-cholesterol. Cholesterol is an essential building block for animal and human cells, since it is a component of cell membrane. Human and animal cells can synthesize their own cholesterol and cholesterol is also assimilated from food. Both processes play an important part in cholesterol metabolism. An elevated plasma LDL-cholesterol level is the most important predictive risk factor for the occurrence of CVD and atherosclerosis in humans and animals. CVD account for about 35% of all deaths in the Western world. Approximately 17.5 million people die each year from CVDs, an estimated 31% of all deaths worldwide.
In the medical world, it was stated that; ‘the lower the LDL-cholesterol levels the better for preventing CVD’. Still, around 60% of CVD patients are undertreated with current standard pharmacological interventions and do not reach sufficiently low LDL-cholesterol levels. As such, many patients ttreated with cholesterol-lowering drugs show non-adherence, as many experience very uncomfortable and sometimes life-threatening adverse effects. Hence, a huge medical need exists for potent LDL-lowering drugs with less-to-none adversity. Our technology not only reduces but also prevents high levels of LDL cholesterol.
OUR TECHNOLOGY
The Micro-Ecological Life Support Alternative (MELiSSA) program, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), is a long-term running space research program organized to develop recycling and purification technologies to enable long duration deep space missions. A (bio-)regenerative ecosystem system is used to sustain the crew of astronauts during long-term space missions such as flights to Mars. Within the MELiSSA technological approach micro-organisms are used that have suitable metabolic features and that are useful to efficiently process waste and produce resources including food, water and CO2. During routine safety tests, one of the microorganisms has demonstrated potent LDL-cholesterol lowering capabilities.
These findings are the cornerstone of ezCOL's following patent lineage, presently in full ownership of ezCOL and subsidiary SEMiLLA Health BV. The technology has been further developed tailored to the standards of the food and animal feed industry and validated in many different in vitro and in vivo models. Currently, our technology is mid-stage preclinical and progresses rapidly to ensure the fastest time-to-market in order to prevent or treat high-cholesterol patients with our natural and safe cholesterol-lowering dietary supplements.
