Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Enabling AI for Rare Disease Patients | TMA Precision CEO Joshua Resnikoff
28 Plays5 months ago
We’re joined by Joshua, CEO of TMA Precision Health, to explore their innovative approach to tackling the diagnostic odyssey for rare disease patients through tech-enabled solutions and AI-driven insights.
TMA Precision Health is revolutionizing rare disease care by reducing the diagnostic timeline from seven years to just a few months, addressing gaps in accessibility and healthcare equity. Joshua shares his journey from research at Harvard to founding TMA, his personal connection to rare disease through his son, and the company’s mission to democratize healthcare. Discover how TMA leverages precision medicine, whole genome sequencing, and AI to create a scalable, patient-centric system that bridges the gap between innovation and care.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Healthcare Theory podcast. I'm your host Nikhil Reddy and every week we interview the entrepreneurs and thought leaders behind the future of healthcare care to see what's gone wrong with our system and how we can fix it. Today we're speaking with Joshua from TMA Precision Health, a digital health company using AI to improve quality of care. So hi Joshua, welcome to the Healthcare care Theory and thanks for coming on today. Yeah, happy to be here.
00:00:26
Speaker
Of course, and I'm also excited to speak to you today and learn more about
Joshua's Early Influences and Work at MIT
00:00:29
Speaker
TMA. But before we get into that, I know you had quite a bit of background in research. Can you speak more to that and what kind of brought you to healthcare care in the first place? Sure. I mean, I i got interested in in science and research from a really early age. I was a big sci-fi nerd, you know, probably like a lot of people who are who are in the space.
00:00:45
Speaker
um And when I got my undergrad in biomedical engineering, I always knew that I wanted to go into helping patients. Originally, I thought that was going to be through creating organ prosthetics. So I really won like this idea of printing organs. And I ended up working for a woman named Sangita Bhatia at MIT um doing that, but on a very micro level. So, so a long time ago,
00:01:08
Speaker
I was very early into what's called microfluidics. So that's really the idea of using microchip technology to capture single cells so that we can interrogate how those cells work um on an individualized basis because biology is pretty messy.
00:01:23
Speaker
And so as that scaled up, right, the idea of being in the translational space, things that would always have a patient impact, um that's always really where my career has
Research at Harvard and Organ-on-Chip Technology
00:01:32
Speaker
been focused. And so that that carried with me through my work at Tufts doing work on cardiac patches, resellularized cardiac patches, to ending up at the Wyss Institute for Don Ingber at Harvard Med.
00:01:44
Speaker
working on organs on chips platforms to make sure that we can more rapidly create solutions for human patients that don't need animal models that fundamentally just don't work in the first place. so That makes a lot of sense. I know you kind of had a little segue where, well, first of all, at Harvard, I mean, can you speak more to that research? Like what kind of sparked that and what was that project like?
From Academia to Entrepreneurship with Capo
00:02:06
Speaker
the To the research at Harvard Med?
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, so um the the foundational paper was by a guy named Dan Hu, who has gone on to become a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, I believe. um he He demonstrated that you could use a substrate called polydimethylsiloxane to create an optically pure rubberized template that you could grow cells on, right? so My, my graduate work was in extracellular matrix composition and how it impacted stem stem cell fate. Sorry, this is getting a little wonky. Do you want me to stay a little high level or is this, this is okay? We could do high level, I guess. yeah yeah So look, the idea, the idea is that you could take microchip printing technology. So control at a very, very finite level and create um structures for cells that look like organs. And so when you put cells into those structures,
00:03:04
Speaker
they they function like organs, all right? And you can do it in a way that you can now image through. So you can take videos and you can do laser microscopy on all of the the interactions that those cells have. um And so we took that original work that he did in lung and translated it out into 10 or 12 organ systems and then built a machine to connect those organ systems together. So we really had a human on a chip, we called it. um At the time, I think it was the largest DARPA grant ever given for this kind of technology.
00:03:37
Speaker
And so my personal work was on lung and liver and gut and making sure that those chips grew and worked and and and were developed correctly. That work eventually spun out into a company that is now called Emulate Bio. They're down in the seaport. And I think they're still the world leader in organ-on-chip technology. So um really exciting work. It was really, really fun to do.
00:03:59
Speaker
and That's awesome. That's really cool. And that'd be kind of interesting to follow them as they spun out.
Personal Motivations and Rare Disease Diagnosis
00:04:05
Speaker
But I know for you, I mean, you kind of started with this research, really enjoyed your time at Harvard and with the professor you studied on but under, but eventually you started your own company, Capo. I mean, can you speak more to that and what kind of happened there? And what, like, marked this change from research and kind of in the lab all the way and now it's starting your own company, raising money. What was that transition like?
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, so um that's a funny story. So so at the during grad school, um my girlfriend ah had ah had a fermented foods business. And so we used a lot of mason jars just around the house. And I would drink coffee out of mason jars all the time. I spilled a bunch of coffee on myself one day in the car. And I was like, man, someone must make a lid for this thing.
00:04:51
Speaker
Nobody did. I Googled it. Nobody did. My, one of my best friends was a, was a medical device engineer. So he literally was like a freelance guy that people would call up to help them build really, really complicated medical devices. Um, so had him over, you know, for pizza one night and I was like, Hey, I want to build this thing. This little lid that goes on top of this jar. And he basically said, you know,
00:05:13
Speaker
That's a dumb idea, but like, let's do it. And so it was just two friends who we were like two guys in a garage. Like we got, we were both super nerds, right? So we got really deep into like patents and engineering and specking it out. And we made a thing that we just wanted, um, and launched it. And this is, this is, I mean, I'm going to date myself here a little bit, but this is back before you had to buy ads on Facebook or you, you know, Instagram had ads on it.
00:05:38
Speaker
Um, those things weren't even the lengths back then. And we went viral, you know, so, um, we made 500 to start. We sold those 500 in the first 72 hours. We'd sold 3000 by the next week, 5000 the week after. And it just became this like MBA by fire. Um, over the next year, what was crazy is that I was, I was working at the vs so i was doing 60 plus hours a week at the Vis, because if anybody who knows biology and wet work, like you got to go in every day to feed yourselves, right? So it's a lot of work. And so I'd basically go to our warehouse in Somerville in Union Square. This is for Kapow.
00:06:23
Speaker
from like six to eight, I'd ride my bike down to the Vis, work there until about six, come home, do some dinner, and then go back and work until like 11 o'clock at night. And it was just like the only way we could scale.
00:06:37
Speaker
and What I found was that I really liked it. I really liked the commercial side of things. i liked I liked figuring out the numbers and the distribution and all the logistics. And so I really made this transition off of the bench into commercial world while doing both simultaneously. But it really parlayed for me into a career of building businesses. And while I did go run that business for a while, it actually let me come back into the commercial side of biotech and healthcare. care And that's where I'm at today. yeah Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I think at TMM right now it's it's nice because you get that technical understanding even if you're not like doing research day in and day out you're always working with a more technical product and I guess a more impactful space but you got that commercial side
TMA's Tech Solutions for Rare Disease Diagnostics
00:07:21
Speaker
too.
00:07:21
Speaker
for helping develop the product grow, get more customers. And so I think there's a lot of nuances there. It's nice, but I assume you didn't just go into TMA just to kind of go into the commercial side of biotech. I know there's some deeper story behind that, but if you're comfortable with it, we'd love to hear your story and kind of share more about what got you into the space.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, no, very happy to share um something I for better or worse talk about a lot. So um rare disease is is a thing that affects 30 million Americans. So most people, the people hear rare and they think it's like, you know, one in a billion. But the reality is there are genetic diseases and the effect, depending on what stats you look at, one out of eight or one out of 10 people. So in the States, we assume there's about 30 to 35 million people who have a genetic disease.
00:08:07
Speaker
um Like a lot of people in this space, I am here because one of my kids has a rare syndrome. And so um despite being born really healthy and normal about a year and a half into life, my second son Shiloh started having fevers. And we went through what is called the diagnostic Odyssey where we spent two years bouncing through a couple of pediatricians. We were in and out of the ah ER on a monthly basis. um his His is ah basically a hyper-inflammatory issue. So he goes from 98.6 to 105 in about 10 minutes. And so you know between between
00:08:45
Speaker
walking away from him to go like make some chicken nuggets for like a two year old and coming back to the couch. He's just a mess, right? The syndrome does not respond to NSAIDs like ibuprofen or Tylenol. So you actually have to pack a kid in cold compresses and Two-year-olds do not like to be put into cold compresses to keep their to keep their temperature down. So um it's a huge struggle. We are incredibly fortunate. Like in the rare disease jackpot, we we are on the good side. I talked to families on a weekly basis who have kids who are terminal, who have kids who are catatonic, who have kids who are just
00:09:22
Speaker
never ever going to live a normal life. And it's incredibly frustrating to see healthcare fail them, not just not just on the pharmaceutical side, right where we're not developing treatments fast enough, but even just on our healthcare care application. but We have all of these amazing technologies, primary one being whole genome sequencing, that are not deployed early enough. So The sort of broad picture here is that your average rare disease, your average genetic disease patient takes seven years between first symptoms and diagnosis. And during that whole time, they're bouncing between specialists through referrals. They are getting sicker. Their disease is exacerbating. They're spending a lot of money and they're spending a lot of time. There's a lot of frustration for families. We looked at this problem.
00:10:16
Speaker
and decided that the place that we could be most impactful was to decrease that diagnostic odyssey yeah in a way that made sense for health insurance. And so we built a tech enabled solution that gets that seven year timeline down to three
Addressing Healthcare Systemic Issues
00:10:32
Speaker
months today. And as we move forward a lot through AI, some some through vendors and and partnerships, we're going to be able to get that down to closer to like four weeks in the near future.
00:10:45
Speaker
That's awesome. And before we get into then how you guys have kind of created that not really changed the space so far and getting it down that much. I mean, what do you think this kind of stems from with like rare diseases, of course, in the name they're rare. So it's kind of this less resource being diverted to them. But I mean, in the US, we have a huge focus on acute care. A lot of money spent on this research. like Why do you think some people are kind of left behind? Is there like a lack of funding, awareness or regulations? Where do you think that falls into?
00:11:12
Speaker
Um, uh, the, well, it's a, it's kind of a loaded question and I might get a little trouble here, but the, the problem, the sort of global problem is, is that any of these patients are called rare. It's a terrible, it's a terrible name, right? There are, there are technically more genetic disease patients in the States and there are cancer patients, but you think of cancer as being a very expensive place and a lot of, a lot of innovation happens around there.
00:11:43
Speaker
The, and cancer is an umbrella term, right? There are literally thousands of types of cancer because they're all really mitotic issues at the end of the day, but people think about it as one sort of block. Rare disease suffers from the fact that there are seven to 10,000, we call seven to 10,000 different mutations that fall under the rare disease category. They have to by definition only affect one out of every 200,000 people. 30% of rare diseases are in fact cancers, right? The challenge,
00:12:13
Speaker
To answer your question directly, the challenge becomes that the market opportunity historically has not existed strong enough to interest ah either pharma or research dollars, right? These become fairly esoteric spaces for people. And, you know,
00:12:34
Speaker
Admittedly, for physicians, if they're seeing heart attacks all the time, if they're seeing diabetes all the time, um if they're seeing people at the end of their life who have developed cancers all the time, more of their brain space gets taken up by addressing those issues than by the the one kid with a really high fever who comes in every few years, right? Or the kid who has a really severe epilepsy. They do their best for that child, but you know you're you're your quest is to do as much good as possible. So you're gonna focus on the bell curve. And I don't fault them for that, but we're at a place technologically where we have the ability to go off and address these other diseases. And so that's really what we're trying to enable.
00:13:20
Speaker
That makes sense. I guess the health system can be like pretty utilitarian in that way. And I mean, youve you've seen this problem now, right? Like that there aren't enough resources being diverted here. And of course, it's a hard problem to tackle because for most people, like they don't have the regulatory ability, financial ability to kind of solve this. But you guys did with TMA precision or are solving with TMA. Can you kind of walk through like Not only how do you howd you kind of come up with the solution, what kind of went into idea ideating that, but also what the solution is and provide some background there.
AI in Diagnosis: Balancing Tech and Human Oversight
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, sure. um And I just want to address something you said, Nikhil, because I think it's really important. like You talked about the health system being pretty utilitarian. I think that we really want it to be. right like It's not about the fact that we want to take resources away from cardio patients or from diabetes patients.
00:14:08
Speaker
The idea here is that we're also capable of doing more now for all patients. And that's really about like democratizing healthcare care to make sure it works for for all kinds of patients, wherever they are. So it's like well known that if you live in a city, you're going to get better healthcare. care if you're If you're close to Mass General or Stanford or the Mayo, your healthcare is just better than if you live in a rural area, right?
00:14:34
Speaker
it that Dichotomy might still exist a little bit, but we can flatten that curve a bunch, right? So that people everywhere can get better healthcare. Part of the way we're doing that, part of our approach to TMA is to make sure that we can both rapidly identify those patients and then track them to the right expertise so they're getting the right treatment insights.
00:14:56
Speaker
And so, again, engineer, you know, in Boston, engineer friends, engineer minds around me when we, well, I'm a systems guy, right? So like, there are amazing efforts on patient advocacy, pushing to make sure patient voices are heard to make sure regulation gets changed. Those efforts are completely needed and and necessary.
00:15:17
Speaker
When we looked at the challenges across the the general healthcare care infrastructure, the system of delivering care to these kinds of patients, the bottleneck that I was able to identify is that payers are the ones who ultimately control access to these kinds of next gen technologies, right? Because they're the ones who have to cover the bill.
00:15:37
Speaker
and You know, is it the best system in the world? I'm not here to comment on that. It's just a system we have, right? So like we got to make sure that we work in the system we have so we can we can meet healthcare for 350 million Americans.
00:15:52
Speaker
What our system does that's so impressive for, for you know, when when people see it, is we make a financial solution for payers to scale precision medicine for patients with genetic disease. So payers already believe in precision medicine. They've seen the effects in oncology, right? They know how effective it is at not just delivering better care, because ultimately payers do really want you to to get healthy, but also saving them money, right? Because they are they commercial businesses, too, whether we like it or not, um they have they have both ah interests at heart. But you can't do one without doing the other, right? Like, unfortunately, you can't just come up with a if it costs a billion dollars to save one person, they can't say yes to that because then they can't help 100 million other people. And so
00:16:41
Speaker
you have to make it work for them. And that's what we've really been able to do. So through ah software that we have developed, some software that developed at Mass General, we're able to ah identify patients who would likely benefit from whole genome sequencing from payers claims data and from EMRs, but that's a little bit easier to do.
00:17:04
Speaker
claims data is the written site. We then go talk to those patient families because we deal with children mostly. So we talk to a lot of parents. um We offer our services. We explain what's going to happen. We have a 90% opt-in rate. We provide whole genome sequencing kits to those families. We get those pits sequenced through what's called a CLIA process. So it's a diagnostic ready process that gets reviewed by a genetic counselor.
00:17:30
Speaker
And then that ultimately goes to a disease expert. So in this case, when we focus on ah pediatric patients with genetic epilepsy, they end up at a pediatric neurologist ah to get treatment insights. And all of that information flows back down to that local care team so that family doesn't have to travel hours and hours and hours to get yeah the kind of care they need. Also importantly here is that we provide all of the information back Not just to the care team, but to the family because fundamentally patients deserve the right to own their own data. You know, as a, as a parent, I believe that. And there's too many stories in the industry and in the academics about um people gatekeeping data from families because.
00:18:14
Speaker
they won't know what to do with it or that. So um we've really tried to make a system that adds value for every single stakeholder along the process. And that's really where we found um the market response to what we're doing. That makes sense. Yeah. Cause I agree. I mean, you're doing the genetic sequencing, understanding like the biomarkers and what's kind of going on, but then I know another side of the solution is also like using AI as like clinical decision support and like,
00:18:41
Speaker
not only aggregating that data, but like interpreting it.
Integrating AI and Genetics in Healthcare
00:18:44
Speaker
And I mean, with you, with a kind of a ah biotech background, more in research, what kind of led you to use software? like What made you know that like software is the best way to solve this using AI? And how are you guys doing that right now with AI and kind of the CDS platform? Yeah. So and so I wouldn't call it CDS, right? like you can think about You can think about TMA as really like So we keep humans in the loop on purpose, right? So we, so we ultimately, we always want a genetic counselor or a pediatric neurologist or whatever the disease expert is to be, to be reviewing and ultimately signing off on what that treatment inside is, right? People, I think correctly don't want to trust a machine's output. I mean, like, you know, go ask Gemini or Chad GPT how many Rs are in strawberry and it it will still give you the wrong answer, right? So there's a, there's like a trust, but verify aspect to this.
00:19:37
Speaker
But you know this idea of using AI, like AI is not a silver bullet, it is just an accelerant. And so you use, or I use, ah software tools all the time, PubMed, you use Google Scholar, you use all of these different things to source information, and then you have to read it and make sense of it. So AI in this point is a way for us to just vastly accelerate the ability to interrogate millions of mutations against the all known data from HBO terms, from variant interpretations, ah things that are clinically relevant, things that are research relevant and put that into a report that we can put in front of an expert. So we get them 80, 90% of the way down the road, incredibly fast, right? so
00:20:30
Speaker
We use AI to give humans superhuman power. We don't ask humans to trust the AI to make the exact right call every single time. Yeah, that makes sense. Because I think ah a lot of the issue of AI is that lack of trust. AI black boxes is always an issue. You never really know what's going on. And even if you do, I think I think the reason why ASN is necessary, because we have so much data and so much going into this now that people are getting more data driven as needed to kind of understand what's going on and build that framework. And I mean, we're working with like, you guys work with clinicians a lot and are almost like reworking the standard of care. How are you guys ensuring a solution not only is helpful to patients, but kind of fits into the doctor's workflow and it's something they're willing to adjust to. Like what does that adoption then look like and how have you adjusted?
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's um a great question. I don't have a hard stop. You can go until 10 if that's okay. ah So historically, that's like the big pushback, right? You hear, and it's one of the reasons why we don't advertise ourselves as clinical decision support. The minute you say that to a Western doctor, they clam up. They do not want anybody telling them how to do their job. And again, if I went to med school and then specialty for like 15 years, I want somebody to tell me how to do my job.
00:21:53
Speaker
But the the truth is there's just so much information in such a big contextual space to interpret for what are really esoteric diseases right today. um And there's so much nuance that goes into understanding how certain genes interact with different pathways and with the compensatory mechanisms might be that having a supercomputer sidekick to hold that space and let you ask questions about that space becomes really valuable. Because we're also dealing with really challenging cases and and cases that have um frustrated healthcare delivery for a long time, we have found a huge acceptance, if not just overall adoption of what we've been able to put in front of the physicians on both sides. The local physician who needs the help and ostensibly doesn't want to have to lose that patient out to referral,
00:22:53
Speaker
And the specialists who want to be able to exercise their specialty knowledge and help more patients. Right. So really we, we, we enable both to do their job better. And through that, we've had a lot, a lot of positive feedback. Um, I mean, I don't, I can't think of anybody who said no to us.
00:23:16
Speaker
at the local level. The only people who've said no to me at the specialty level, frankly, have been blocked by academic appointment. Okay. And so can you elaborate more on that? Why'd they kind of say no? ah it's It's usually because the medical center that they're working for says you can't do consultations on the side.
00:23:37
Speaker
yeah yeah Yeah. So a lot of doctors, and we we have a lot of doctors that we work with, no problem. Um, but some places are still, they still have this like medieval mentality about like, these are my doctors and my patients and only, only we should be seeing these patients.
00:23:54
Speaker
And that's that's like a deeper rabbit hole. We could go down just about the fragmentation in the US healthcare system, but it's a thing that we have to overcome. And and you know frankly, telehealth adopt adoption over the last few years has been a good um smoother of this process, a lot less hurdles to deal with it now.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah. I think not only is it fragmented, but the goal is to kind of miss a line. Does everyone's kind of working on their own, has their own incentives. And just because the goals aren't aligned, it makes it difficult to get like ah the best outcome outcome possible. But that's where like democratizing healthcare kind of ties in. But it's definitely kind of a ah long, long-term goal. I mean, when do you think that'll kind of come into play? I guess- Democratize healthcare care for everybody? Yeah, I think that could take like, that might never happen because like decades, who knows.
00:24:41
Speaker
I mean, if you want my founder answer, give me five years, you know? yeah two But no, I mean, look, we start we start with with genetic disease patients because it's personal for us. Everyone on our founding team has been touched by rare disease. So it's it's really a personal mission.
00:24:57
Speaker
They are the highest cost, highest margin patients that we can intervene with. So it's a really easy place to demonstrate that this has application. But the technology doesn't really care what disease you have, right? like Like understanding the global information space about how to treat a patient.
00:25:17
Speaker
The only place that this technology is really not good for is like broken bones and heart attacks, right? Things that require a ah physical intervention. If you're just trying to get cutting edge information on what the right application or treatment that you should be considering is, our tech does that, right? We just focus on these high cost patients because that's where the that where the burden of change relies on. liza um I think that The idea of democracy, like you talked about incentives and it's a really important thing for founders, people who are for starting businesses to understand because different levels of healthcare delivery
00:26:05
Speaker
patient, doctor, payer, pharma, they all have different incentives. And usually what you're trying to do is effectively like take some margin out of one person's dollar and either pull that into your own company or you're trying to reshuffle it around. And one of the things that I think we've done that's so smart is we haven't asked anybody to compromise frankly, like their revenue stream, right? And so it's, it's been a way for us to align incentives from an economic stance around patients. And ah it stinks to have to talk about patients as paychecks, right? Like nobody wants to, nobody wants to think about human beings as dollar signs. But unfortunately, especially when you start to get into health insurance,
00:26:58
Speaker
You have to come to grips with the fact of of how the financial implications of your solution makes sense. And so that's why when we built the model, it was imperative that it work for payers. Otherwise it's just never going to go anywhere.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think we'd all love for healthcare care to be, it it is very impactful, but I think we'd all love for healthcare to be super mission driven, but I think there's nothing with insurers, like they want the economic incentive and want to see ROI.
Collaborations with Pharma for Clinical Trials
00:27:26
Speaker
And one interesting thing I saw that you guys are doing, because you're working with um pharma companies now to kind of help get them like clinical patients for clinical trials, which is interesting because you have this market of customers that would love to be in this innovative clinical trials and get solutions to their rare diseases, but for the actual pharma companies, they're looking for people people with those diseases, which may not be so common. I mean, what sparked that solution? How have you guys approached that coordination there? so and So let me just be clear that it's a place that we anticipate growing into. It's something that we talk about with pharma right now. um But the idea is, i to your point, right, as more and more pharma... So look,
00:28:08
Speaker
The better we understand how human beings work at a genomic and proteomic level, the more all of us will become an individualized patient, right? Pharma already understands this. And frankly, Pharma understands that the ability to create, instead of creating hundreds of drugs that treat thousands of people or tens of thousands of people, Pharma is incentivized to create tens of thousands of drugs that each treat hundreds of people, right? It's just a supply and demand curve.
00:28:36
Speaker
so Making sure that those personalized drugs work effectively so that you can transition from phase one to phase two to phase three to phase four successfully means that you have to capture a trial population that will respond favorably to your drug. And to do that, you have to rule them in or rule them out by specific biomarkers. If you make a genetic therapy, you need that biomarker to be the mutation of interest, right? You wanna make sure that that the person is gonna actually respond to the drug that you've made them. The more specific you make that drug, the more you decrease your patient population, right? So there's pressures on your, like there's all of these pressures.
00:29:23
Speaker
And so for some rare disease trials, you're talking about like ends of single digits, not ends of tens of thousands. And so being able to pre-identify those patients becomes highly valuable to pharma companies who are looking to make super specialized therapies.
00:29:41
Speaker
Yeah, because they don't want outliers, right? They want it to work and for everyone. And I'm kind of here so you guys are going to this space, but also I know you guys are expanding on a lot of other fronts and are developing pretty quick, growing new people.
Expanding Genetic Solutions and Scaling Operations
00:29:54
Speaker
Can you speak more to where TMA is going to go and whatever goals or long-term vision for TMA is going to be in the next couple of years? Because I know AI is changing everything. A lot of people are kind of adopting AI, but you guys did it pretty early on. So I'd love to hear your story.
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's, so um, you know, today we're really focused on genetic epilepsies. Um, we want to be, because we don't just capture genomes and longitudinal medical records. We capture a genetic counselor, uh, thinking we capture treatment insights from, from disease specialists. We capture, uh, outcomes from patient response to those. Right. So it's not just about capturing.
00:30:32
Speaker
patient foundational information, we're capturing all of the information around how to treat those patients the most effectively. And so we really think that from a foundational training set, that's really where that data starts to become really interesting to even further automate the back end for how to treat these patients. So instead of putting a doctor 80% of the weight down the road, maybe we can put a a doctor 98% of the weight down the road, you know, in the near term, the next few years.
00:31:01
Speaker
We definitely think about expanding into other genetic areas of high unmet needs. So these would be things like cardiomyopathies, neuromuscular disorders, CNS sort of writ large. Some of those can be even in the ah ah things like bipolar or schizophrenia, right? And so ultimately we want to be the deepest data set.
00:31:23
Speaker
for certain types of genetic diseases on the planet to affect healthcare delivery as efficiently as possible for those patient groups. Okay. That'd be really interesting. Epilepsy care has a huge market now. It's good to hear that you guys are expanding. And I kind of want to take it back a little bit. I know, so you kind of started as a researcher, worked at Harvard, loved your work there. Then you started your own startup and now you're kind of commercializing this one within the biotech biopharma space.
00:31:50
Speaker
And you've had that long journey from a research to entrepreneurship. If you could go kind of back in time and kind of plan out your career, I mean, how would you do differently? And what advice would you have for going in your space? Um, I don't, I don't know.
00:32:10
Speaker
I mean, I think like my kind of guiding mantra is like talk to everybody. You know, you never know where your network's going to take you. I think everything important that has happened to me has come through my network, right? um Through my mentors, through my colleagues, um through my interns, right? Through people like you that I get to just meet because I get to say yes to to doing a cool podcast.
00:32:36
Speaker
um
00:32:38
Speaker
I think I don't know that I could have like overthought it or or mapped a different way here. you know if If I didn't have ah a kid who had a challenging sickness, maybe I'd still be on the bench. right like um If I didn't have the experience of like having a viral startup that went on Oprah's blog, you know like like maybe I never would have made the jump to commercial. right so The same way that like looking back, it all feels sort of deterministic, like all those experiences added to my skill set and my quiver to let me be effective at the job I have today, I don't know that I could have proactively assembled that skill set. you know And I think it's just like, stay open to
00:33:24
Speaker
what comes in front of you and and be ready to pursue opportunities. Because it's not like I started this company yesterday and it's been a really easy ride. right We've been working on this for for almost five years through the pandemic for very little money, dragging my family along with me. like there's There's all of these other costs that go into starting a business. um And if you just want to make some money, like there's way easier ways to do it. So I think for me, the biggest driver has been having something that I want, that I'm passionate about. And that has really kept me, kept my grit in action, right? To make sure that we're going to, we're going to get it. And we're, we're about to close our first financing, our first, our first, uh, uh, equity financing and, um, really start to scale. So it's been, it's been a great journey.
00:34:17
Speaker
That's awesome. And I have one last question. Congrats on the equity financing closing the round. I know it's kind of a headache dealing with like VCs and other equity partners, angels, but I'm curious. I mean, you kind of had like with most reps, it's not revenue generating or it takes a lot to run a profit of whom it does after a few years.
Entrepreneurial Journey Reflections
00:34:34
Speaker
And at what point did you realize that like, this is really going to work and really going to scale? Or did you always have to have that belief that this is going to work from the day?
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. So, so, uh, we joke around that my rare disease is being pathologically optimistic, right? So yeah I think if you, if you want to found a company, you have to believe it's going to work. You also have to stay open to throwing out all of your preconceived notions about what is going to work or what is not going to work and be willing to listen to experts and take advice and internalize that and pivot where necessary.
00:35:12
Speaker
Right. So like when we first started the company, we were going to solve all rare disease, you know, and ultimately like our technology still is built to do that, but we can't do that at once. So we have to focus, focus, focus. Um, but yeah, you need to care about the thing that you're doing because you're going to have a lot of tough times. And people told me this and, you know, maybe I listened, maybe I didn't, but it's the truth. And.
00:35:39
Speaker
Being passionate or being driven about the thing that you're doing is is going to be the way forward. And it's 2024. It's not 2019. Like money is not just falling off of trees anymore. And so you better be sure that you want to take the ride that's in front of you because there's going to be a lot of ups and downs. You know, the ups are really great. The downs are really bad, but ultimately if you can go affect the thing that you want to deliver on,
00:36:05
Speaker
I mean, hopefully hopefully it's not only rewarding for you, you know, emotionally and and financially, but hopefully it also makes a big difference in the world around you. And I think that's the biggest impact any of us could ever ask for. A hundred percent.
Guiding Philosophy: 'Be Here, Do Good'
00:36:19
Speaker
That's what, yeah, I definitely agree. And it's definitely difficult to be listening to the market, listening to others say it, but also stay core to your beliefs and your vision. But I think once that really happens, the stories are really great.
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, look, I won't, I will end on like a fairly corny note because I'm a heavily tattoo guy. But right here, it says be here, do good, right? Like, yeah that's just for me like that. If you can make even a little bit of positive change in the world, I think that's a a life that's really worth living Thanks for listening to The Healthcare Theory. Every Tuesday, expect a new episode on the platform of your choice. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, any streaming platform you can imagine. We'll also be posting more short form educational content on Instagram and TikTok. And if you really want to learn more about what's gone wrong with healthcare care and how you can help, check out our blog at thehealthcaretheory.org. Repeat thehealthcaretheory.org. Again, I appreciate you tuning in and I hope to see you again soon.