Caitlin Morse, BrainSpace - Automated Intracranial Pressure Management | LSI USA '24

Caitlin Morse  0:04  
Brain is the one organ we can't transplant. It's what makes us human. And when it gets damaged, we lose a piece of who we are personalities change independences lost. This is Dave. At the age of 34, he became a parent with the arrival of baby Benny. He's been an avid cyclist for about 10 years, and a week after baby Benny's arrival, he went out on a long ride. Unfortunately, he was hit by a car and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. But this story could have just as easily been about baby Benny and his arrival as a preemie ending up with a brain bleed. Because brain damage is far too common. It could have been about his wife Sarah suffering a stroke, or his grandma Avira with NPH induced dementia, his niece with hydrocephalus or his nephew with a football injury. While there are many common sources of pressure on the brain, they all suffer from the same immediate solution that's needed. And that is to manage brain pressure. So in the urgent situation, what you're doing is draining small amounts of spinal fluid in order to protect the brain and help it heal you're buying time. And that's because time is brain, the longer that the brain goes without oxygenated blood, the higher the chances are that there will be long term damage. And so this is not only in the immediate days after an injury first occurs, or surgery first occurs, but it's actually during that ICU stay where there is still excess pressure or swelling, which can in many times be weeks. Unfortunately, solutions have not improved much since 1927. Even top hospitals in the world depend on a string level based system. It's high risk for complications, including brain bleeds and coma. It's labor intensive for the nurses that are having to manage these patients. And with an analog fractured system, we're missing clean data to be able to advance the science. So I'm pleased to introduce to you today, the BrainSpace and tele drop, we are improving patient safety eventually. But what we can tell you day one is that we're improving patient comfort and mobility. We're automating the nursing workflow, which we have been told will free up ICU beds for immediate ROI and regenerating AI ready datasets. So I'm gonna walk you through real quick what each of those four look like. When it comes to patient mobility. There are a number of studies that have shown that ICU length of stay is directly correlated with mobilization. And so not only is that saving 22,000 indirect costs, but there are complications that are associated with these patients being immobile. Right now, if you have an external ventricular drain, you're excluded from the typical mobilization protocols, which means mobilizing these patients would result in a 66% reduction in complications requiring additional intervention and cost. Secondly, we're automating the nursing workflow. So right now we ran a study last year where we looked at the amount of time that an experienced neurosurgeon neurosurgical nurse spends managing these patients and found that up to 50% of their time is not only the direct management, but observing and monitoring their colleagues to make sure there weren't complications. Despite this 63% of neuro ICU nurses reported over drainage which can have severe complications for the patient. Third, with reducing the nursing effort required and reducing the patient restrictions on movement, we're able to free up ICU beds. And ICU beds are critical, as many of us saw during COVID With cancelled surgeries and other opportunities to not only free up the ER incoming workflow, but also the elective surgical. And so when you look at how much is produced by neurosurgery, those free ICU beds are very valuable to the hospital for surgical revenue as well. And then finally, beyond the therapeutic and diagnostic and clinical efficiency benefits of the product today, we're also driving the future of neuroscience. So today, if you want to run a study looking from an AI ml perspective on, for example, on GH is looking at hearing coma, that process requires eight hours of MD PhD cleaning up the waveform before you can even input that into a training set. And anyone who's worked in this field knows you've just lost all your most interesting data points in that cleaning process. So we are providing a data set that is integrated, annotated and cleaned at the source. There's no effort on that part from the clinician side. And it's also a much more rich, integrated data set. So some of our early clinical partners are looking at studies on the digital biomarkers, being able to detect sepsis that CSF generated TBI prognostication and treatment interventions, and intercranial compliance, which is really what ultimately most neurosurgeons want to know even more than intracranial pressure. So, where what are we going after? Well, fortunately for us, all of these different types of people that I've been talking about these patient populations are all found in the neuro ICU today. And so that's our initial beachhead market, it's about 900 million, including the pressure and drainage devices, and allows us to be in a single place with pricing, parity, existing DRG codes and existing treatment protocols. But it also positions us very strategically for some enormous opportunities down the road, we have unique access to cerebral spinal fluid being in the fluid path, we have unique access to these analog datas due to these integrated datasets, which gives us opportunities to go after incredibly interesting science in the future. And it's not just about top line revenue, we also are a team who has a lot of experience in bringing products to market and understanding what those cost structures look like. And so we've really gone after the opportunity to have high margin recurring revenue on our disposable. And I have a bedside console where we're not going to have friction on the pricing in order to make sure that we're driving adoption, and that strong unit economics is not only valuable for driving growth and r&d, but also positions as well for m&a in the future if we choose to go that route. So as doing all this, we're an experienced team that has spent most of us most of our careers in medical devices. We have worked in big business, we've worked in startups, we know how to operate efficiently. We have engineering and quality regulatory backgrounds. I'm thrilled to have Dr. Jamie right. She is a neurologist, but she is also a hydrocephalus patient herself, and is big into the patient advocacy side as well as operating on the clinical side and has been doing some incredible work on the research. And then we've also brought in a number of other advisors and consultants to support that. Part of that as part of our clinical advisory. So we have now talked to more than 200 doctors and nurses across 100 institutions, we don't want to build a platform that somebody so box, we want to make sure this really fits the mass market. And then we have representation from our four key stakeholders. So that's the neuro intensivist, who runs the ICU, the neurosurgeon who's placing the device and in smaller institutions is also involved. And then on the neuro nursing side, really freeing up that staffing issue as well as of course, hospital leadership. And these are all people who not only have clinical experience but also have been part of value boards, hospital decision making, and really understand the business of medicine as well as the science. So we've made efficient progress. We are a three year old company, and we have raised less than $5 million. And with that went from a the technology feasibility and 2021 through into the product, put that into doctors and nurses hands and got the feedback we needed characterized it. We're now in safety and performance, and we have our FDA submission coming up. So if any of this is appealing to you, or you know somebody who is there's three main ways you can get involved first of all, later this year, we'll be raising our Series A so happy to have some early conversations with you on that if you know or are interested yourself in participating as an investor, we are hiring and so if you have your favorite engineer or your favorite clinical partner, please let us know. And then we have had interest from a number of clinical sites and are really down selecting two which will be our first and 2025 and so if you have a favorite clinical partner in neuro, we would love to hear from you. Thank you very much