Innovation @ Penn Virtual Pitch Event

so i'm laurie axeman with the penn center for innovation we're at penn's commercialization organization and um we really launched almost seven years ago as part of amy gutmann the president of penn's vision to expand innovation and commercialization at the university and um it's been really amazing there's been growth across the university throughout the schools right now pci along with our kind of venture department pci ventures as well as the pennovation works campus which is our new kind of piece of innovation infrastructure um is fostering a lot of startup activity across penn we're currently there's more than 30 startups that we've collectively been working with that are raising um capital in various forms right now from c to series a to series b um but today's program is really special to us because i think starting five years ago we made a um kind of exploratory expedition to south by southwest interactive in austin with a group of our startups and we met um this amazing alumni group the pen wharton alumni group who have been partnering with us um for you know all all these years now to um a make us feel very welcome in austin and get us connected to kind of the tech community there and b to support and um help us grow the startups coming out of penn so what we do usually is host an event in austin with the startups who we bring down there and um foster all these amazing connections um but we pivoted like everyone else and we actually did a pitch program last fall after the initial cancellation of south by last year and this we just you know we're doing it even bigger and better this spring and of course we're hoping to be back there in person at some point in the future but i just really wanted to thank them thank everyone who's joining us today to learn more about our startups um i wanted to also thank my colleagues jamie sweet and jessica gupta who have been instrumental in planning this and many other programs we do but before i get to the logistics of today i wanted to hand it over to and some more introductions to emma boss who's the president of the penn wharton alumni club for um you have a few brief words and then we'll kind of i'll give you the brunt of the program emma sounds great hey everyone thanks so much for joining um i'm emma voss and i run the penn warden alumni club here in austin it's a great group it's a combination of our undergrad and our graduate students and it's uh it's vibrant it's it's great there's so many great uh alumni in our community who as laurie mentioned also have been supporting this event for example um navita johnny who's from ojo labs uh has been a repeat supporter hosting this event in person when we could so i just wanted to you know say first of all thank you all for joining um and thank you to some to those who have also supported us at the time when the event was in person um and also you know if uh the great thing about being virtual i guess is folks can join us from everywhere so i hope some of you are from outside of austin but again if in the future once um once these events become physical again or in person i should say uh please feel free to reach out to the club or to me when you're visiting um visiting austin we'd love to see you when when south by southwest returns in its original format i also want to give a special shout out to walter kalman's and andrea commons are on the call you guys can see them they've been uh remarkable supporters i'm so grateful for for their involvement in the pen alumni community they're constantly supporting me and the community with all kinds of events introductions and connections and walter if you want to say a quick word before i head back to lori i mean i'll just send a quick welcome so welcome from austin texas uh we've been uh working with emma and with lori on this event uh even before uh even before uh penn came down to south by we were having uh get-togethers and pitches for people that are you know from san antonio or other people that were pen associated so you have a home here in austin our events are welcome to all no matter whether you're from austin or not uh this is a startup town and we intend to stay that way uh so thanks all of you for coming whether you're from from from near or far and we look forward to hearing the various pitches from the members of this penn community thank you i also wanted to thank andrea walter and emma and also mark arnold with the the alumni club um and the way that we're going to proceed today is we have um eight companies pitching so we've asked them each to pitch no further than 10 minutes and then i'm gonna give kind of first questions to andrea walter and mark and then i'm happy to moderate time permitting um additional questions in the chat um i just want to say andrea and walter are very prolific and amazing investors their their interests are really wide they've invested in one of the companies pitching here today in the past which is really exciting for us at penn and um just that their breath nationally never fails to surprise me and i just got introduced to mark and um he also brings a very impressive background um you guys should all go look him up on linkedin i won't go into further details but um both emma or emma mark and walter are all um wharton undergrad alumni they have other impressive degrees as well um but there there's a lot of um brain power at the table so i think we'll all benefit from the program um so again feel free to put any questions in the chat i know my colleagues will also put contact information for each company that's pitching in the chat so you can follow up with questions um but for now i'd like to um introduce and handle it over to our first company and ceo eric corkill with nora alert well good afternoon everybody let me just share my screen i'm assuming you can all see it yes perfect hey well listen good afternoon eric corkill ceo of neuroalert and i'm going to start with a problem right now hospital stroke detection is a broken manual process that is resulting in significant delays of treatment and what neural alert does is we can automate stroke detection and do it four to five times faster than the current standard of care and that's going to save lives and that's going to improve outcomes so if you're like me you're very well aware of the problem of strokes number one cause of severe disability but what i didn't know before i joined this company was that ten percent of all the strokes that happened happen to patients that are already in the hospital for other clinical reasons and these strokes are not detected for hours after they occur and that one out of five patients who has a stroke in the hospital will die so how is that even possible and it starts with the fact that in the hospital there are certain procedures that are being performed that dramatically increase not only the risk but also the severity of stroke number two it's actually not that easy to detect stroke in a hospital visually because patients are bed bound patients are sedated patients are intubated so that the normal visual clues that you or i would obviously see and detect in terms of a stroke are not so easily observed in the hospital and number three as i said right now stroke detection relies exclusively on timely and consistent neuro checks been done by nurses and it just doesn't happen and what what does happen is that many strokes are detected too late for the hospital to utilize life-saving and stroke mitigating treatments that increases the length of stay increases morbidity mortality increases their litigation cost so what are we doing about this problem well we have a system that uses non-invasive wearable devices that are constantly monitoring the patient for symptoms of stroke and when it detects those symptoms it fires off an alert to the hospital staff so that they can immediately assess the patient and more quickly begin treatment protocols so i'm going to walk you through in more detail exactly how the system works and it starts with these bands these bands are placed on patients wrists and these bands contain accelerometers and what the accelerometers are doing they're measuring arm movement specifically asymmetry or weakness in arm movement which is a classic indication of a stroke now these bands they transmit their telemetry to an algorithm that is evaluating analyzing the symmetry data and is looking for symptoms of stroke but what it also does is it mathematically models out all the other things that are causing asymmetry if you're right-handed you move your right hand more than your left and for a patient if they have an iv line or an iv board or one arm that is going to inhibit their movement but that's not a stroke so this this algorithm is separating the wheat for the chaff looking only for those things that are truly indicative of a stroke and when it finds it that's when the system fires off an alert to the hospital staff in our first clinical study at the university of pennsylvania health system on 200 non-mobile bed bed-bound patients know alert was proven to detect 83 of strokes in less than an hour with a 97 specificity rate and you compare that to the current standard of care in which the majority of strokes are not identified and treated within four and a half hours of when they occur and it's because of that time savings and the implication for hospitals that that is our initial market in fact specifically those medical centers that specialize in high stroke risk cardiovascular procedures because they're the most sensitive and the most supportive of a technology that can detect strokes faster now once we've established our value in post-surgical patients it's a it's a land and expand process to then begin to protect any patient that is emitted with an elevated risk of stroke patients with a history of stroke congestive heart failure afib diabetes obesity the elderly and beyond acute care hospitals we're going to expand into long-term care into international and even into the home with a consumer product through partnerships because if you're wearing a fitbit today or an apple watch on one wrist you could put a neural alert band on the other and you would have the same degree of stroke detection ability in your home in your office as you would have in the hospital so how do we make money well it starts with a seat license an annual license fee of five thousand dollars and imagine a seat license like a bed multiple patients can use a bed multiple patients can use a seat license during the course of the year but not two people at the same time so this five thousand dollar cost can be spread over 30 40 50 patients during the course of the year same thing with the bands that cost two hundred dollars per pair they're reusable so that cost is spread so the total cost for neuroalert to be able to detect strokes faster in the hospital is only thirty five dollars per patient and you compare that to what is currently happening that if you have a stroke that goes undetected and is too late for treatment that the inpatient stay increases by two to twenty eight days thousands to tens of thousand dollars of non-reimbursed costs for the hospital so we know of one other vendor that is trying to use asymmetry data for for avia as a vehicle for stroke detection but they don't have our proprietary algorithm they're using pure machine learning pure artificial intelligence and they're actually focused on the non-acute care marketplace but there are multiple vendors that are well established in hospitals that we think are going to help us commercialize because if we're able to detect strokes faster if we're able to enable that hospital to use medications to use technology to use devices from these vendors it's going to generate money for them so that we think they'll help us commercialize now we started were founded in april of 2019 and we've had consistent and now accelerated growth from the first validation of core technology at the end of 2019 to rounding out our management team earlier this year to most recently winning three accelerator programs in a row we are well positioned going into 2021 to move through the fda process which is why we're having this conversation because in order for us to move from commercial from prototype to commercial success we're looking for two rounds of funding the first 1.5 million dollars well that gets us three things it allows us to build purpose-built wearable devices why because there's nothing on the market today that meets the unique requirements and specifications for neuroalert it also enables us to apply to the fda as a breakthrough technology device and for our de novo class 2 approval so 1.5 gets us all of that and once we have achieved fda approval then additional million dollars is all for commercialization it enables us to hire the staff build the bans necessary to go to market and target the first 250 medical centers specializing in these procedures and we think that by 2023 we'll have multiple exit possibilities either through the medical device community or through the consumer health environment now the neuroalert team are experts in their own unique areas co-founder dr messe is a neurologist but he's head of pen's center for neurocardio protection and that's the unit that deals with in-hospital strokes our other co-founder dr weimer who invented this proprietary algorithm is a phd in biomedical engineering and signal processing and by the way the algorithm has already been patented in a different use case but we're going through pens licensing office to gain patent protection for the use of this algorithm in stroke detection our cto ted anson is an expert in fda approved wearable and mobile applications and i as i said i've been in the business for 40 years i'm a serial startup guy nur alert is my seventh startup and i've sold my last five companies for a combined value of 485 million dollars so folks we have a massive problem and there is not a solution available today before neuroalert so we have innovative technology that's going to be patented and protected there's a significant opportunity a positive landscape with limited competition but with multiple partners and we have an experienced team in the clinical technical and business processes to ensure that neuroalert is a success so i look forward to your questions and hopefully a future dialogue about investment thank you austin uh investors i'll let you lead off with questions we do have a question in the chat as well go ahead so i can ask uh this is walter ask the first question i was interested in your a few questions i'll just throw a few out for starters one is sort of the regulatory path you would need to go for for this particular kind of a uh a device number two would be and you don't have to enter in any order anywhere you want uh are these off are these accelerometers off the shelf as sort of this off the shelf technology is there any customization because we've been had some challenges with hardware before it's expensive to build inventory and then sell stuff and there's minimums and uh and then if you when if you thought about getting this into the clinic not just from a commercial purpose but also for research purposes because you could as a research device you might be able to get this on from a research purpose earlier than a commercial application um wilson thanks walter with respect to the regulatory path um we have retained a third party um fda consultant and regulatory expert group uh we know that there are no predicate devices so we will be seeking a class 2 de novo designation we also know based upon the literature that we are a very good candidate for breakthrough technology designation so that's the process we anticipate applying for breakthrough by june and for the dino application by the end of the year we have not scheduled a preset meeting yet but that will also be around june july time frame um accelerometer no these are all off the shelf um you know prefab pieces which is why we can get this the bands down to a very cheap cost we want to make sure that the that uh we're not building something that is unique and proprietary and not only from from a cost standpoint but from a validation certification for fda and no uh with respect to the clinic uh angle i would like to have a discussion with you about that a little bit later on so if first of all it's really really neat what what legitimate reasons would they not let you put this on does this is there a chance that this could interact with other machines in the hospital i mean is there any legitimacy to any of that like what kind of a network is it on all of those things yeah andrea first of all they're non-invasive devices so they don't require anything that is put into the patient in fact you can strap it to the wrist you can strap it to the elbow you can strap it around an iv board so we're just measuring arm movement so there's nothing pertaining to the patient with respect to the connectivity of existing hospital technology um i we think the first couple of sales can can be done independent of the emr but our cto has already built 23 apis to the top emr vendors in the marketplace so we're going to you know have a an easier path it's never easy but an easier path getting connectivity through existing infrastructure okay uh eric one final question i had and you think about uh alternatives right uh when i think about stroke personally right i think about other types of solutions that can measure you know bioin bioimpedance asymmetry right when i think about uh blood vessels in the brain different sides different hemispheres uh looking for imbalances between the two as a potential indicator for stroke how does your solution compare both from a cost standpoint versus alternatives like that and then you think about um the number of false positives um potentially right that could be generated by your type of detection solution versus others like bioimpedance how do you guys measure yeah i mean so there are some actually multiple devices that are used to monitor or diagnose stroke most of them are fairly expensive and fairly invasive i know of three different products that use eeg technology and interestingly are targeted for the ems community so that when somebody strokes at home ambulance picks them up you put this helmet on their head and you're able to determine the severity of the strokes so the ambulance driver knows to go to a facility that can perform a thrombectomy versus a community hospital in terms of i'm trying to think the last part of your question oh yeah what was the last part of your question in terms of cost so part of it was the alternatives and then then secondarily was in terms of uh false positive rights in terms of the quality of data that you're getting and then the time frame it takes to create that baseline for the algorithm to have a low degree of false positives yeah so i mean again the things that kill new technology in hospitals is inability well first of all negative impact on workflow um so we actually when we did the first clinical study we actually calibrated the system to have a specificity rate a false positive rate of only three sorry specificity rate of 97 which is effectively one false positive per patient per shift which is well within the acceptability range for clinicians um so we think we have that pretty much geared but we're doing a second clinical study at penn right now and we're going to continue to refine if anything we've been asked by the clinicians at penn to create what is called adaptive sensitivity because for the first four to eight hours after certain surgical procedures that's your greatest window of risk so they're willing to have a higher degree of false positives in that initial window and then we can dial it back down after eight twelve hours um okay uh great thank you all there's a there's a number of other uh questions in the chat eric so if you if you get a chance to go there to answer them that would be fantastic um thank you so much you'll hold out all the information to all the attendees after yes everyone will receive all that um next i'm really happy to introduce jason kohl's with katika to be our next startup pitch yes yeah visual right good evening my name is jason coles and i'm the founder and ceo of cotica you know back in 2017 i found myself in a group chat that had over 300 members comprised of young black professionals working right here in the city of philadelphia who on a daily uh daily basis would ask for a myriad of services provided from black owned businesses now in order to find these businesses i watched in real time how individuals would crowdsource the information amongst friends create google docs spreadsheets or create directories on facebook all of which were ineffective and cumbersome solutions you see the digital economy has created many hurdles for black owned businesses which and despite the earnest efforts of a few companies attempting to address the historical digital divide that exist in our country black owned businesses are still disadvantaged because they lack the ability to be discovered online evidence of this can be seen on platforms like facebook and instagram which provide feeds which are filled with posts like tick-tock dance videos cat memes and chris cryptocurrency tips which ultimately create a crowded watered-down marketplace that businesses have to advertise in secondly for companies like facebook and google whose main source of revenue comes from selling ads they promote the highest bidders who are usually well capitalized companies to the top of search results thus diluting the premise that these are democratized search platforms furthermore platforms like yelp actually place competitor links on small business pages and talk and charge a monthly fee to those small businesses to have those competitors removed from the page again creating another small business qualified businesses that bid for contracts from corporations as well as government agencies are often looked over because they're difficult to find they're misclassified or they need to show pre-qualification capabilities so our our solution was to provide both a beaded sorry i had an animation there b to b b to c and b to b solution we first started with making sure to integrate businesses existing content from platforms like instagram and facebook as well as services from utility platforms like calendly and ubereats next we wanted to properly classify businesses by general categories as well as commercial codes to make sure that they could be searched for in our ai powered search engine then we created a very user-friendly interface for general users which enables them to create short videos you see users can then post them to kitika download them to their phone or leverage other social media platforms like facebook and instagram creating a network effect lastly users will have the ability to message message businesses directly or amongst their friends creating cotica communities now how do we make model money excuse me our business business uses a sas model starting starting off with a free basic account and scaling them up in pricing as their business needs increase over time now in order to be a verified business on cotica businesses need to pay for a monthly licensing fee starting at 4.99 and our mobile app which allows businesses to create their own video stories and messaging starts at the next tier and commercial businesses have a more rope we'll have a more robust profile cater uh catered for bidding for contracts and we also plan to charge corporate and government organizations a monthly license the search for commerce tools entities to fulfill their diversity supply mandates now despite philadelphia having a reputation as the largest poorest city in the country we actually have a gdp of 388 billion dollars the same gdp as the countries of portugal and ireland and we use that as our tan now our city spend for contracting wd smbe companies averages around 1.79 billion dollars which is our sam and based on the feedback from one of our first customers we believe that we'll be able to generate six million dollars in targeted revenue by targeting fortune the many fortune 1000 companies that reside here in the greater philadelphia region as mentioned previously light business campaigns and black labeling by companies like yelp and google do not truly address the underlying issues that hinder those businesses from being discovered we think we have an advantageous value proposition that positions us above the competitors by being a platform solely focused and compromised local business operability to tie in proven utility platforms such as opentable ubereats and calendly our go-to market strategy will roll out in two phases as we deploy our products to the marketplace in phase one we plan to register black owned businesses with our affiliated partners prior to launching to the general public to ensure a positive first-time user experience and when ready for the public we we will launch a digital campaign primarily through facebook ads and phase two will be the launch of our commercial product which is still in development but again we will populate it utilizing our partnerships with groups like ems dc and the enterprise center now the cotica team is comprised of myself and four other team members who have a range of experience from corporate marketing to teaching as well as working for international startups and full stack development advisory teams diverse business makeup allows us to gain critical insight from established principles sewers and crucial as well as best practices to implement as we execute our platform now we know there's a direct correlation between the rates of high crime and high economic disparities of employment cotika's mission is to accelerate the equality of equality for the black community by connecting black owned businesses with conscious consumers because we know that in order to realize the change that we all want to see in our city is going to take a joint effort from everyone but we hope that you'll join us in making inclusion easy thank you thank you for your friend that was the main thing and i appreciate you highlighting our spending power in uh philadelphia um andrea walter mark i'll hand it over to you all for first questions um fanta it's a it's a fantastic initiative so explain to me the core issue i'm trying to get to the root of the issue is the root that that businesses are independent and therefore they don't have this like the spend to spend on google ads and is that really the issue i think the issue is twofold one as i mentioned discoverability so right now a lot of businesses they'll create a page on maybe a facebook or an instagram however those are just they're not true marketplaces right because you're competing with host about um you know cat memes cryptocurrency and so the focus for a customer is taking all over the place if i'm looking for a specific service so what we're saying is that we're creating a platform solely focused on providing services and products from black owned businesses got it and so that's a whole new user experience a whole new app and a whole new way that you need to then funnel people into absolutely but we do tie in their existing let's say if they have instagram and facebook and they have photos from their business there we can then bring those photos into kotika to not you know read the will or we will so we can also bring in different utilities like ubereats or calendly opentable as well into the platform is this like so is a way to think of it as a craigslist or an angie's list for the for the black community is that a way of looking about at it i would i would say a better yelp for the black community oh okay okay not trying to pigeonhole i'm just trying to see clarity the same thing yeah or sure yeah yeah only because craigslist i i would say doesn't provide um it doesn't have the ui experience like what exactly sure needed is angie's list but it's still a community for people that are looking to that's more looking for sort of swap stuff but it's a community that's for the black community to exchange from a business standpoint correct the business exchange for the black community and anybody's welcome but the businesses that are advertising and are that are on that are usually black owned businesses is that right yes and then anybody the other people are advertisers is that what you're looking at as an ever so can if you're not a black owned business um do you and you're looking to i think i think you had listed there a larger community of people that could could advertise are you looking for sponsors in uh brought anybody can sponsor ads or do things on that on that on those pages absolutely um so one of our um early partners is going to be amerihealth characters or is an early partner and so um they would be uh putting out different initiatives through our platform or if they have um if they're seeking to contract services from a black vendor they can utilize our platform and find them that way as well too so a lot of we found that a lot of corporations have small diverse uh business participation uh funds that they have to you know allocate towards minorities and so we're just trying to bridge that gap essentially from the b2b side okay uh any kind of content that you're going to be putting together or creating for engagement in this area to help draw people to the site how are people going to get drawn to the site sure um so we have a what we call the katika b school of entrepreneurship where we kind of guide entrepreneurs through a basic business 101 curriculum so everything from back-end admin so getting your lc ein wrestling with the city city of philadelphia to get a text id number etcetera so we have content to educate folks as well as tie them in with actual services mark anything from you yeah i was gonna just ask is there a um kind of a social interaction right so as a business would then go and set up their profile right on your site is there a way to make it interactive so whether it's you know if i'm in a community and i find a business that you know i want to go and promote as well as a potential customer that i could do geo-tagging or i could there's ways to do kind of peer-to-peer you know like yelp reviews that i could um attach to the business in terms of my experience right to enhance or create some form of rankings is that all part of the algorithms that you were describing earlier as well yes definitely um so the for the part of the this new revision i would say think of um like snapchat videos as well as like a a yelp combined so now if i go out to a restaurant i have the ability to create a short story about this great experience i had at this restaurant i can tag that business and then post it to facebook instagram tell my friends about it and so that creates a network effect of marketing for those businesses organically they didn't have to pay for that average time and so um build an experience for the user as well too and then their friends can see hey my friend just went to this business and so it creates that community got it thank you great um thank you um with that i think um that's an amazing idea um with that i think we're gonna move on to the next company and thank you jason and i'm really pleased to introduce joe camarata with qrs who is one of our more somewhat more seasoned entrepreneurs and who will be pitching next good thank you lori hello everyone just give me a second to uh share my screen here please okay we're set good so good afternoon my name is joe camarata i'm president and ceo of quantitative radiology solutions we help physicians make better treatment decisions through the automated analysis of medical images we offer best analysis of images in radiology radiation oncology and medical oncology we're commercializing a technology from the university of pennsylvania that aims to reduce the side effects from unnecessary radiation exposure for cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy and i'd like to take a few minutes to tell you about that application so first of all over a million patients a year will receive radiation therapy as part of their cancer treatment unfortunately about 30 percent of those patients one in three will have an unwanted visit to the emergency room or even an inpatient admission due to a side effect from that therapy and studies have shown that about 50 of those side effects are a result of the treatment planning process so the treatment planning process for radiation therapy is fairly complicated there is a group of clinicians at their symmetries the radiation oncologists and medical physicists they work together in order to create a plan that directs the delivery of the radiation to the tumors to the tumor site there's an important step that happens during that it's called the organs at risk contouring and this is where the clinicians will outline those structures those anatomical structures that should not be irradiated so a really good example of this if you're looking at a head and neck study now on the screen a really good example is the esophagus you put too much radiation on the esophagus the patient can't swallow the patient isn't swallowed they don't eat and then then they'll wind up being hospitalized for malnutrition the way it's currently done manually is that it is that a clinician will sit down they'll use their mouse they'll look at a a splice a medical image on the screen and they'll manually outline as you see on the screen they'll not only outline those structures that need to be protected this is really a very inefficient process it takes an hour to an hour and a half it's very inaccurate process there's a lot of errors that occur and it's inconsistent it really is depends upon the level of sophistication or knowledge of the person doing the contouring in order to get it right now there are some existing automatic approaches out there but they're not widely adopted because they require too much manual editing so we decided to step in and try to solve this problem and we are commercializing a technology called automatic anatomy recognition or aar the best way for me to describe this to you is it's like facial recognition for medical images you give us a ct exam we identify the body region we recognize all the anatomical structures and then we contour those structures now why i make that sound really easy in three steps this is where the secret sauce is the out the ai machine learning that we're applying here is very advanced and it is actually the subject of our ip protection um uh for the technology so tell me about aar what does it offer it offers benefits three benefits to these to the existing approaches first of all it generates results that are consistent with the medical guidelines not based on an individual's performance but what the medical guidelines say how the medical guidelines say the con the organs should be contoured it delivers good results even for what we call problematic structures or studies so for example i might have a ct exam and the ct exam may have some screenings that are caused by medical metal implants right makes it really hard most automatic algorithms can't contour that at all we actually can contour you might not think that's a big deal but we actually have looked at over 400 cases from penn and problematic studies occur approximately 75 of the time you can't handle them you're not getting an option but the most important benefit is that we have less manual re-editing than the automatic solutions now we've been working on this technology for a number of years and we got it to a point where we have developed it in a cloud-based system and there's a software-only technology it's running on amazon web services and we ran a clinical evaluation at the four sites that you see here on the screen those four sites enrolled 214 patients on our behalf they sent us the studies we analyzed them we processed them we sent them the back the results and we asked them to evaluate them based on accuracy acceptability and efficiency so let me show you those results so from an accuracy point of view what they told us was that the aar contours were more accurate and consistent than the manually or clinically drawn contours now from an acceptability point of view in eight of the ten structures that we tested that the aar contours were able to be used with little or no modifications directly into the treatment planning system and most importantly that we saved an average of about 20 minutes per treatment plan by using aar as opposed to a manual contouring approach so that increased productivity manifests itself in many ways to a healthcare provider so i'm showing here on the screen what happens if you save 20 minutes per plan how many new more plans can you do and how many more treatments can you do that's important because providers get paid for creating a plan and they also get paid for treating customers right but i think more importantly is not just the revenue impact that it has but the impact that it has on the quality of care being able to plan more accurately and be able to replan during the six to eight week course of treatment to account for anatomic any anatomical changes that may occur during the treatment to mention there are some competitors in the market there's a number of traditional approaches we evaluated these back when we started in 2016 not widely adopted bad quality not flexible much flexibility there are some newer approaches that have come on the market recently they're using pretty much straight deep learning techniques um we believe that we have an advantage within the counter quality and in fact one of our clinical evaluation sites that has told us that when it comes to problematic studies that we that our algorithms perform the best that they may be evaluated it's important to recognize that this isn't just a one application aar really is a platform that we can use and to do a number of analysis and we have a a grant from the national cancer institute that allows us to start looking at treatment response for what we're calling renal oncological agents we're able to do a regional assessment of that response giving a better prediction in terms of how that treatment is helping the um helping the patient than the existing response mechanisms that are there so if we look at the overall market we actually participate in a one billion dollar market for advanced image analysis for cancer care i mean imaging is used quite a bit in managing patients for cancer care our first application that we talked about the contouring is about a 200 million dollar market and the second application looking at the thoracic disease burden is about another 500 million dollar market and this market is really driven by not just unfortunately the growth of people who cancer but the increased use of imaging and managing the disease in terms of our early adopters um right now our technology is with the fda we've got we've conducted our clinical evaluation we're a class two device we've completed our five 10k clearances with the fda we expect to be a market in um in april of this year and are we're looking at the pro the so-called proton centers as our early adopters proton therapy is an advanced form of therapy where you deliver very high doses of radiation to precise points it's a good thing that that precise point is a tumor but a bad thing if it's healthy tissue so these sites benefit the most for our increased accuracy and efficiency so these 36 centers in the united states will be our early adopter parties so the management team is myself i'm joe camarata i have 35 years experience in medical imaging with companies such as siemens healthcare and and ge healthcare our cto steve ellen steve and i worked together as siemens steve actually started the software development organization for siemens healthcare that's located in princeton new jersey and then he went off to work into the pharmaceutical industry our co-founders are of dupa and dr tarijin from the department of radiology at penn dr duke is a computer scientist and dr terry james a radiologist still very much involved in the company and working with us in order to optimize our algorithms and get the products to market just gives you an overview of our financials so today we've been funded by grants we have raised um two and a half million dollars in non-diluted funding through sbir grants okay um starting in 2020 we still have a little bit of grant money left but then we're looking at customer revenue coming in and you know we look at these if you look at those red numbers for 2021 and 2022 you'll see that kind of explains why we're raising two million dollars we're raising two million dollars in our series a round to drive us to a break-even point but also to demonstrate adoption of of our technology so that we can sign the distribution so here's our target acquisition partners there's two types of companies that would be interested to buy us first are the radiation treatment planning companies these are the companies that make the big equipment or the software that does the treatment plan their focus is really around the physics of treatment planning not necessarily the image analysis piece so we complement their we complement them in their capabilities there's also a number of image analysis companies out there that create that are producing images on a regular basis and are looking for technology like ours to help them differentiate themselves to to to the customers from the radiation treatment planning companies we've been working um with these companies or developing relationships with them over the past four years they were the ones who actually helped us set the um the criteria and the outcomes of our clinical revaluation because i simply asked them what do you want to see from us in order to make that decision so i mentioned already the grant funding you know we had two and a half million dollars for our first application another uh 250 000 for the second application and in addition to that we raised uh 500 000 in convertible notes that's allowed us to develop our product do the evaluation submit for 510k clearance we're doing the two million dollar series a round right now that's focused on um commercialization and opera uh commercialization and operations and product enhancements about 50 50 50 50 split that's how we'll use those funds so in summary that's what i'd like to introduce about qrs um very exciting technology on the verge of being in the market and we believe that we have a path to exit within the next two to three years i'd be happy to answer any questions okay i'll just say we probably only have time for one question just so we stay on track with timing um andrea walter mark welder do you prefer to go mark if you've got a question i'm happy to defer to you so in terms of the model right you described it as basically a cloud-based sas model have you thought about again some of these potential acquirers down the road of scaling this as a licensing model as well as part of your business plan unless i understand the question in terms of would you would you consider have you thought about licensing the software oh yes yes yes very good yeah but yeah in fact that would be i mentioned a distribution agreement eventually this application should be integrated in with the treatment planning system that's the best way to to integrate into the workflow yes exactly okay um okay and there's a uh i'll ask a quick question from the chat um how much equity was diluted with the 495k um well it's all convertible notes so it really depends upon the valuation right um and i can i can show you some examples depending on the valuation how much that is but it's a convertible safe and a convertible day okay and who's paying the bill um inpatient outpatient how's this coded that's probable thank you yeah treatment planning actually is reimbursable there's an existing cpt code so it's paid for about two thousand dollars for medicare and about two to three times that by private payer okay great okay thank you so much joe uh great to see you okay thank you yeah great presentation um next i'm really happy to bring up the team from osteo who actually did come with us in the past down to south by southwest um and got to meet this team in person so um i'll hand it over to jessica ari um thanks for being here sorry about that my name is jessica denoyer i'm the ceo of osteo and our goal is to improve the lives of children with craniofacial defects why is it so specifically we're focused on the over 200 000 children who are born each year with conditions that lead to growth restriction of their scholar mandible left untreated these conditions can have debilitating to life-threatening consequences and what's otherwise a healthy child so for example things like impaired neurological development difficulty breathing inability to eat but the treatments themselves can are often devastating to these children and their families significant blood loss as in up to 40 percent of total blood volume overwhelming infection at a rate of 35 percent visible scarring in nearly 20 percent of cases or the treatment may only work for a limited few of the treatments distraction osteogenesis is considered a gentler surgical technique and that it leverages the body's natural ability to heal but with distraction what you do is you implant a device and then use you surgically implant a device and then expand it or use it to expand an abnormal bony segment as that abnormal bone is expanded new bone regenerates in the gap that's created thereby allowing you to gradually lengthen and reshape the bone but even though distraction is has been used successfully throughout the skeleton within the craniofacial skeleton it comes with its own set of challenges so this is what destruction looks like when it's been reduced to practice and and we would say this is one of the nicer images of the treatment at work but these devices are primordial they all have an external component that pokes through the child's skin to allow for manual expansion of the of the device a parent then has to take a screwdriver attach it rotate it a prescribed number of times up to several times a day in order to provide treatment this external component increases patient risk for infection and other complications the very act of taking a screwdriver and following a surgeon-directed protocol is imprecise unintuitive and emotionally traumatic for many parents and because the surgeon is blinded to the treatment process an intensive postoperative course of weekly clinical exams and x-rays is necessary in order for them to monitor treatment progress this is where osteo will make a big impact our integrated therapy includes a fully implantable device an automated contactless driver and a remote monitoring platform and at a high level our technology works by leveraging magnetic coupling to transfer torque and thereby enable contactless expansion of our device so looking at the device first because our device can be expanded in a contactless manner we are able to remove the external component and with that reduce the associated the risk of associated complications our automated driver will make providing treatment as simple as a push of a button for parents alleviating their stress and reducing the non-compliance that comes with manual expansion via a screwdriver and finally our remote monitoring platform will allow surgeons to track treatment progress in real time rather than forcing them to rely on weekly parental notes and x-rays so that they can address complications before they become irreversible or cause harm we have two non-provisional patent applications that protect the general concept of a magnetically driven craniofacial distractor as well as key features and safety functionalities of the device we've also completed a fair bit of foundational work to characterize the force requirements that are needed throughout craniofacial distraction treatment for our system as you can imagine these are things that weren't known before since this hasn't been done in the craniofacial skeleton as well as the distance over which contactless distraction will have to take place our proof of concept prototyping validated the feasibility of our approach as well as the form factor of our implant and driver designs we're now working within a quality management system and have since completed two additional design sprints as we're pushing toward our alpha prototypes and i should mention that we've also held a couple of pre-submission meetings with the fda that allowed us to confirm a class ii regulatory pathway for indications in both pediatrics and adults this is an existing market with established reimbursement so in the u.s it's currently valued at about 75 million but growing at a healthy seven percent it's also a a nicely concentrated market with a limited number of players and many of the big names in orthopedics you'll see represented here however all of these competitors only offer the medieval types of destruction systems that we've been discussing our go to market strategy really hinges on the specialized nature of this treatment so because about half of the procedures take place in just 49 centers we're able to go to market in a really targeted capital efficient way while still capturing a significant procedural base and our plan would be to partner with a handful of influential academic centers where we could pilot our system while building out the clinical and health economic data needed to support our value proposition and i should mention or just clarify that that is in a post-market setting not required for product clearance and then we would leverage our these kol relationships to really drive awareness and penetration in a targeted way we've also completed a health economic analysis and because our system squarely addresses features of existing technology that are linked to complications we were able to show that we can reduce hospital costs per patient by up to four thousand dollars and our plan would be then to split that savings with the hospital allowing us to come to market at a fifteen percent over competitive technology now we're clearly focused on the existing and growing pediatric market but as i mentioned these devices are unique in that they offer indications in both pediatric and adult populations now use within adults has been somewhat nichey as you might imagine adults are far less apt to sign up for a treatment that requires a device that would poke through their skin post-operatively but what we do know is that mandibular lengthening is performed in adults and mandibular distraction in particular is emerging as a safe and effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea so given the benefits of our technology over existing systems we believe we have the potential to open up what have previously been untapped adult indications starting first with surgical obstructive sleep apnea and then downstream moving into severe osa patients who have failed non-surgical therapy and really have no alternative treatment options left to them which is an ex a potentially explosive market so m a tokens for comparably sized orthopedic opportunities have been pretty prolific in recent years uh having sat within strategics myself throughout most of my career i know that a strategic typically does like to see some demonstration of commercial viability with early revenue prior to acquisition but given that deals have ranged in size from about 35 up to 70 million we have just over a million dollars invested into the company just over 500 000 of that has come in the form of non-dilutive grant funding and i should mention that we do have a five-year annually recurring grant in place in which we're just about to enter year two uh but we've also raised a 520 000 equity round that was led by the children's hospital of philadelphia and this initial financing allowed us to complete our foundational studies as well as to begin our regulated product development efforts so we're now raising a 3 million dollar seed round that will get us through the rest of our design engineering verification and validation testing and 510k submission our team has deep clinical clinical translation and medical device industry knowledge that spans all of the necessary functions needed to successfully bring this technology to market so starting with one of our co-founders in our chief medical officer dr taylor is a specialist in craniofacial in the treatment of craniofacial disease and in fact a pioneer in the use of destruction osteogenesis within the craniofacial skeleton he's currently chief of plastic surgery at the world renowned children's hospital of philadelphia but also a recognized kol within the medical device industry the other co-founder and chief technology officer dr west also is a plastic surgeon but he brings to the table deep clinical translation expertise as well and finally brett nolan and myself have diverse medical device industry leadership experience that spans everything from early product conceptualization through commercialization in between the two of us have brought many medical device products to market so finally i just want to give a shout out to our partners and investors without whom we wouldn't be where we are today and and with that thank you so much for the opportunity and i'll open it up for questions um great thank you um we probably also have time for about one question um so um anyone yeah i'm happy to jump in so when you think about the product launch strategy the go to market strategy kind of post fda clearance right what are you thinking in terms of leveraging partners and partnerships in order to accelerate that um is that the strategy and if so how are you progressing with those those key partners yeah so so definitely i think there's opportunity there um you know again the good the good thing about this face in in especially in thinking about pediatrics where it's an existing market and we can go out and prove our technology we don't need a large commercial force behind us in order to do that we can literally go to four to five centers and probably have about 20 of um the procedural base right there within those centers that said certainly as we look to scale we would want to partner with a strategic in the space and i think we have a number of opportunities there starting with current players who would be interested in having a differentiated distractor beyond their their current product offering but as well looking at other players in the orthopedic space who who have deep expertise in rigid fixation with plates and screws but haven't expanded into the near adjacent cranium maxillofacial segment because they don't have a bellwether product to do so placement screws being very commoditized and so that's another group of people that we could look at as far as how we're going in those discussions i i worked at deputy synthesis for many years and have contacts within both the orthopedic business as well as their innovation centers and business development teams we are currently working with the ao foundation who is a partner of depuy synthesis but um a widely recognized and revered group who focuses on teaching um within sort of the cranium maxillofacial segment and so we've already had our technology evaluated by them they've shared it with deputy synthesis there's interest in having us move forward in a partnership potentially with them um in in sort of a development capacity initially so that's that's one angle that that we're pursuing um okay great thank you i think um at this point we should probably move on uh but great to see all the progress from osteo um thanks so much for being here in progress i don't know how many years ago i haven't seen your face before how many years ago what was when what ari when were you here um was it three or four years ago like i was yeah crazy yeah so hopefully um we'll we'll be there again but um anyway wonderful that um you guys have partnered up as a result of that trip um okay next i'm pleased to bring uh david yawns with cogware hello it's great to see everybody thank you for the time today i'm david johnson the ceo of cogware and i'm going to talk to you today about our efforts to improve behavioral health care i'd like to start and tell you a patient's story and our patient in this case is sarah and she's typical of most so sarah wasn't feeling quite right with physical symptoms and she's kind of a little down so the first step that she has is she went and saw her primary care physician at that point he took some vital signs gave her a anxiety and depression screening but and did some physical tests physical tests came back negative nothing showed up on the screening method uh but he thought you know maybe there is something going on so prescribed an antidepressant for six weeks later really no change so from from there he decided well maybe let's get her in touch with a behavioral health therapist so she was shocked to find when she started calling around that it actually was a three to four month wait to see a behavioral therapist and this is just from the cake the fact that already behavioral therapists were at their capacity seeing up to 60 patients at a time concurrently but now with the covet 19 pandemic it's an overwhelming burden for them and she also found that her her while she started her therapy over telemedicine her therapist was exhausted to start and over time things started getting better but by session number seven she had a work event had to miss a therapy session and during that time unbeknownst to her therapist she started taking a turn for the worst so when she came back and saw her therapist right away she knew something was going on so her therapist referred her to a psychiatrist for a different medication at this point the psychiatrist there was a wait to see a psychiatrist he's prescribed a different pharmaceutical and then about a month after that things started turning for the better for her now this was about a 10-month process before she started actually seeing results from care and she's not alone 15 million adults are seeking treatment just for anxiety annually and she's one of the lucky ones patients who don't see results are often referred to other type of interventions like transcranial magnetic stem or surgical interventions but even the results from that are not entirely known because there's really no good quality metrics that is based on physiology to measure how things are going and one final piece of this whole puzzle is insurance companies are looking at this as well payers are seeing this whole process seeing a lengthy process not seeing very many metrics to assess care and then also look at it from the standpoint that there's a huge bolus of patients now coming into the system and they run the risk of having a blank check condition because this is really a chronic condition behavioral health therapy is a lot different from physical health therapy and just like and if we look at physical health where you go into the doctor and there's vital sign measurements that they take temperature weight blood pressure and they're helpful not only in diagnosing the condition but then over time using them as a trend to see how the patient's doing what if we could do the same thing for behavioral health and that's precisely what we're going to introduce at cogware our first product that we're building is a vital sign for anxiety that is based upon underlying brain biology and we're going to do this by using the wearable that we're creating and this is a cognitive wearable that looks and feels like your favorite yoga headband and pairs with your your phone just like the just like your fitbit now because of this we can directly measure brain biology into physiologic measurement and we can measure cognitive functions engagement excitement distraction and we have a ton of applications beyond just mental health that we can get into what allows us to do this are two patented core technologies so the first one is our nano technology sensors and these sensors allow clinical grade eeg to be measured anywhere anytime for as long as you need and it works in active environments as well the second key technology are neuro targeting algorithms they improve predictive accuracy by 26 percent versus questionnaires and by 58 versus what's possible from standard wearables and to date these have been validated in human studies with nearly a thousand participants so all these these technologies together give us an advantage versus the other companies that have either tried to bring wear wearable eeg to the market or have tried to develop a physiologic quality metric for anxiety a little bit about our system that we're developing there's really three main components the first is that the headband we've just talked about the second is a is a mobile app interface this allows the patient to interact with the device but this device also is where the patient will interact play a game it's part of our gamified algorithm eeg data is sent from the headband to the mobile app and then ultimately up to a cloud based data platform this is a hipaa compliant data platform we're structuring it in a way that the data is going to be de-identified that'll allow us to provide future big data algorithms on on the database and finally there's a provider portal a piece of this this is where clinicians can go and see their entire patient database and also the the provider will have the option set up flags so if somebody takes a turn for the worse they can be alerted to that we we did ethnographic research two rounds of market research with clinicians so clinical psychologists psychiatrists

2021-03-27 06:53

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