Dipu Ghosh Presents Hepatiq at LSI USA '23

Transcription

Dipu Ghosh  0:05  

Good afternoon. I'm Dipu Ghosh, co founder and chief executive officer of Hepatiq we make a software product that provides a qualification of liver function. There are a lot of tests out there that look at the liver include blood tests, imaging tests, biopsies, they're all looking at fibrosis or scarring in the liver. That has a deuces but it's like, the liver is very different. It regenerates. Body increases blood flow to the liver. So in an attempt to get more functional, what is remaining. So anything that's measuring the fibrosis or scarring in the liver is missing all of that hemodynamic phenomena. We quantify that and we are FDA cleared. We're looking for financing to scale up sales and marketing. So this is the market we are after. This is a research company that looked at the liver disease diagnostics market, it's huge $8 billion a year growing rapidly. About a little less than half of that is imaging, the rest is biopsies and blood tests, and so on. So a little less than 4 billion is what we are after. So here's the problem is solving that's a very sick liver. The whitish areas you see is fibrosis of scar tissue, which is what everything else is measuring. The bumps you see is the liver regenerating it's one of the few organs in the body that can do that. And also, as I mentioned, the body increases blood flow to get more function. And we are the only product in a world which quantifies function. And there's a lot of research that shows that function or performs any measurement of fibrosis, patient outcomes, how do we do it? It's pretty simple. We are pure software product, the physician managing the patient will refer them to a standard scan. It's a SPECT scan, it's like a CT scan with our X rays. And we take those images, our software analyzes that those images, and they get a report, the radiology department that has a SPECT scanner, they collect about $1,400 from Medicare more from private insurance under an existing CPT code. And we collect $95. So there is no there's no capital expense needed. There's no subscription fee, there's no maintenance costs, it's pure fee per use, takes all the friction out of out of the sale. And here's what our software looks like it can run both locally or on the cloud. You can see that SPECT image, sir, very low resolution images, this nature of SPECT is very hard to extract useful quantitative information from these images. And we have done just that with our algorithms, which are patented software is entirely automated, you just press that analyze button, and you get a report like this. These color coded reports have multiple indices of liver disease. The one on the left, top left pH M, is our measure of function. And you can see that a person may have like this person, relatively slightly reduced function. For many years liver disease moves slowly, all the other tests of liberty, in particular elastography would show them as a 400 to four scale. So you don't see the change. But this patient had slightly reduced function for three years and then started deteriorating rapidly. We will detect that. We also detect fatty liver disease and portal hypertension we have an index of alcohol activity. So there's a wealth of diagnostic information that no other liver tests will provide. I mentioned research. This was a eight year multi multicenter prospective clinical trial called the Hot Seat trial that was funded by the NIH and they looked at many different ways of looking at the liver. And our Index PHN was one of the best and is the only one that's FDA cleared. This is a publication that came out just last December from the community Memorial Hospital System in Ventura and here in California, and they feel that hepatic will revolutionize care for cirrhotic patients. As I mentioned, we have patents to issued patents, US patents and we just got a Notice of Allowance on a third patent. This is on liver liver cancer detection, which is harder and hard problem and this will be our next product and We also have nine registered trademarks. So even if somebody were to design around our patents, they won't be able to call the indices what we do. We are now going our go to market strategy is direct promotion to the physicians. So we are going to be attending these conferences this year, I just returned from the Society of interventional radiology conference in Phoenix. And there was tremendous interest in our product. And we got like 60 60 leads from it. This is the team We plan to reason for the raises, we want to accelerate the sales and marketing. So we plan to hire more staff. My background, been basically all my career and medical devices. I was vice president at a company similar to this, which made bone density diagnostic software. But I learned from that, that there's because we sold the software for $22,000. It was a big barrier. So that's why I designed this on a fever basis with no friction in the sale. And also I have a significant amount of skin here. Having invested more than a million of my own money. My co founder and partner Dr. Hayes is Tardy and liver disease. He spent 20 years of his career developing these techniques. And he also has invested more than a million in the company. That market report that I mentioned at the beginning also looked at the players in this in this market. And we are mentioned here among the big boys. This is also our exit strategy. One of these companies can probably write the big check that will induce us to sell. So to summarize, why invest in Hepatiq? It's a huge market. We're the only FDA cleared product that provides quantitative liver function everything else is looking at fibrosis. Do you use the car analogy? fibrosis like measuring the air in the gas tank function is the gas in the gas tank and this particular car's gas tank expands. So fibrosis misses a lot. We have a strong IP position with three US patents four foreign patents and nine trademarks. And so we're pure software. We have exceptionally good margins and our customer has besides getting better diagnostic and therefore better management a patient can make a lot of money. Thank you