Video Transcription
Dominic Senn 00:02
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed lunch. My name is Dominic Senn. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of machineMD. machineMD is a health tech startup with operations in the US and in Switzerland, and we are active in the market of neuro diagnostics. Imagine you wake up one morning and that's how you see the world. It is blurry. Most likely you will go to an optometrist or an optician or an ophthalmologist to find the cause. Actually, the cause could be within your eyes, so the structure of your eyes, such as AMD or an eye infection or a cataract, but it could also be within your brain, so that you have brain disorders such as MS or Parkinson's or a stroke or many other potential brain diseases that can affect you. So vision and brain health, the two of them, they are very closely related to each other. If we look at the numbers, today, there are 8 million Americans living with vision disabilities. About more than 40% of people are affected by brain disorders. So by the sheer numbers, these two things are very closely related, but they are also closely related due to our biology, because the visual part in our brain is taking up so much space in the brain that chances are very high if something is not working in a certain brain region as it's supposed to work, that this can be detected based on the eyes. So the eyes are really a gateway into brain health. There are two ways to access the brain through the eyes. One is by imaging, so looking at retinal cells, which are basically brain cells, the only brain cells that are visually accessible from the outside without opening the skull, and then the other one, and that's what we are doing at machineMD, is to look at pupil and eye movements, because pupil and eye movements tell a lot about how visual signals are processed in the different brain regions, and then how the different brain regions that steer all the muscles that allow us to actually track an object or to change the pupil size, how those brain regions function. Our mission is to bring this clinical way of looking at brain health from highly trained specialists where it's today, they are called neuro-ophthalmologists, into secondary and primary care. For this purpose, we have developed the first neuro-ophthalmology device, we call it Neos, which is based on commercially available VR hardware. It works as follows very simply. You put the VR headset on, it gives you very specific visual stimuli, so patterns moving, light shining in and out into the eyes, and then it's capturing the reaction of the pupils and the gaze to those stimuli. So what it does, in essence, is it's a fully automated and standardized neuro-ophthalmic workup that we are doing. So basically the same that you get in a 40-minute visit with a neuro-ophthalmologist. These are highly trained clinical specialists, but they are not accessible. There are just 600 of those worldwide. So basically, for most patients, they never see one of those clinical specialists. And we allow with Neos to actually bring the expertise of those specialists where it's most needed into secondary and primary care. It's very easy to do the exam, so you put on the VR headset, it's intuitive, it's portable, so it doesn't require any dedicated space in the clinic or practice. And for us, it's a scalable solution, as we are buying the hardware, so we don't need to produce any hardware ourselves. As I said, our goal is to get into screening applications in primary care, we do this in three steps. So we launched the first version of the device that is approved in the US and Switzerland. In May this year, we will get to see marking for a class two. This allows us to provide more diagnostic information in the coming weeks and beginning of next year to clearance as a class two with the FDA. And next year, we're going to include disease progression monitoring functions mainly targeted at MS and also Parkinson's before we then move into primary care with a model that basically flags patients with a five-minute examination that have a neurological disorder that needs to be further examined and referred to a neurologist. So it's not like if you realize that the eyes don't react as they are supposed to react, that there could be something wrong; you know that there is something wrong and further clinical examinations are needed. That's one example of a clinical study that is running with the university clinic in Zurich and the university in Exeter in the UK, where we are building a machine learning-based model for Parkinson's disease. Commercially, we have a pay-per-exam model. So we are selling the hardware. We charge an annual license for the access to our cloud backend, where all the data is stored, processed, and the clinical algorithms also run in the cloud. And then we charge $10 per exam for clinics and practices. There are two models: out-of-pocket is one, and the other one is leveraging existing CPT codes so they can get reimbursed for an exam with our device between $80 and $120 in the US. As of today, we are in the market of neuro diagnostics. This market is heavily growing. It's supposed to have a volume of about $15 billion in 2031. The market growth is mainly driven by the aging of the population and the prevalence of those disorders that is going up steeply. And there is also a huge need for point-of-care solutions that allow for diagnosing and monitoring of patients with neurological disorders in primary care, but also in secondary care. If you look at MRI, which is still kind of the standard today, most people don't have access. Actually, 7 billion people in the world don't have any access to an MRI machine. In the UK, you have to wait four years to get a scan. On average in Denmark, it's like half a year, so it's very hard to get the right diagnostic means for patients that are affordable and also accessible. We believe that we can place about 100,000 devices in the years to come in secondary care and primary care, which will add up to a market for ourselves of about $1 billion. If we look at the competition, we have two aspects here. One is access and affordability of the solution. The other one is diagnostic capability. So at the bottom right, we have companies providing different devices to do brain scans. They are great diagnostically, but as I said, they are not affordable. They are not going to make it into primary care, and they are also often not accessible for most patients in secondary care. Then we have all those companies that come from the ophthalmic equipment market that use their existing imaging devices of the retinal cells to then run clinical algorithms, AI models on top of it to detect systemic health issues, including brain diseases. machineMD is the world leader if we look on the functional side of things, so directly measuring the function of all the different brain regions involved in processing visual signals and steering the eyes. The good thing there is that we can not only tell whether or not something is wrong, we can also say where in the brain, in which brain region something is not okay. We can't tell what it is. It can be a lesion, it can be a trauma, it can be MS. This needs further investigation, but we can flag the patients that need further examination. In terms of financing, we raised $10 million so far, and we are looking to raise a Series A in the second half of 2025 with a volume of also $10 million. We are a strong team, about 25 people based in the US and in Switzerland, most of us quite experienced with decades of experience in the field. We have the top KOLs in our field on board, the likes of Joe Rizzo from Mass Eye and Ear. He's one of the leading neuro-ophthalmologists in the US. We have Bob Zurgo, a neurologist specialized in Parkinson's, MS, and eye movement disorder diseases. We have Axel Petzold, who is one of the leading figures in Europe. We would be intrigued if you could join us on our mission to improve access to brain diagnostics and monitoring, not just at university hospitals, but also in secondary care, and especially in primary care. Thank you very much. Applause.
