e-Scopics | Claude Cohen-Bacrie, Founder & CEO

(Transcription)

Claude Cohen-Bacrie  0:05  

Thank you very much. I've been in the field of ultrasound imaging for the last 25 years. And today with his colleagues, what we want to do is to democratize the use of ultrasound, but to democratize it as a service, we also want to change the business model of ultrasound. And we believe it's going to be the ultimate digital transformation of ultrasound. Why? Because what we actually do is exactly what happened for the photo industry. In the photo industry hardware became software. And we have now software running on our smartphones, which makes pretty pictures the same way hardware was made making pretty pictures with the professional cameras. And this is exactly what we're going to do with ultrasound, we are going to transform these big machines into a piece of software that you can download on your computer to emulate an ultrasound system. So why do we do all this? Obviously, we've, we know that diagnosis is a bottleneck in the patient pathway. We've seen that with COVID. And we had to transform PCR test into home based tests in order to sustain the volume of diagnosis that had to be done. And for imaging. It's exactly the same thing. There's an increase request for imaging in the diagnosis phase, and we have a shortage for ultrasound of sonographers or a shortage of cardiology. So what happened already for ultrasound is that ultrasound started to penetrate upstream and downstream to this workflow. And we see now ultrasound in emergency medicine, anesthesiology. It's so true. That point of care ultrasound is today what drives the growth of the ultrasound market with 8% CAGR compared to 3% 400, PG cardiology, or OBGYN. And these, this is done through miniaturization of ultrasound, which you see some products here, butterfly networks is probably the best known product. And when you do shrink a product, when you do miniaturize a technology, you lose performance. And of course, you can have affordability and accessibility for ultrasound. But still, it remains a modality that requests education to be interpret. And what he's capex is doing is actually not miniaturizing. But D materializing an ultrasound machine, putting the ultrasound engine as a software. And the software now runs on the computer, the tablet or on your smartphone with the increased computational capabilities that these devices have today. And what are the benefits of doing so you can now retrieve the performance that you had with premium ultrasound. And amongst these performance, what I'm referring to is Haji omics imaging biomarkers, measurement of tissue parameters that will allow direct diagnosis of the tissue and here is an example of the stiffness of a liver, which is exactly correlated to the fibrosis content of the liver. So in a way, hydraulics is the ultimate way you can democratize the use of ultrasound because you no longer need expertise to be interpreted. So how are we growing and what is our strategy compared to all these miniaturised version of ultrasound which are pushing technology towards primary care, and of course the adoption is difficult. We are going to go from the bottom up, we are going to first democratize the use of ultrasound amongst different clinical specialties. We will start with diabetology and gastroenterology moving to phenomenology and hematology and then move to primary care. For the example of the first use case of our technology, it's an app for chronic liver disease. chronic liver disease is the development of fibrosis in the liver due to fat today, this is called Nash generating a lot of healthcare costs, obviously, but what you really want to follow in this disease is the development of fibrosis. And what we propose is a complete shift in the patient in the workflow that the patient goes through. We anticipate that tomorrow and we know actually today that more than half of the type two diabetes patient have fatty liver and that 20% of them are going to develop fibrosis. So there's, it's it's not possible to have all these patients go to the pathology for diagnosis, we have to integrate the tool earlier on to do triage. And this is exactly what we propose, with our first product our first application to give the diabetologist and the primary care, an ultrasound tool capable of measuring fibrosis and monitoring the evolution of fiber Disease in order to select the patient that are then going to go to the pathologist. So basically we are replacing two exams, two devices, a big ultrasound system, and a fibrosis measurement tool called FibroScan into a single device that we will give to the Epital to the diabetologist. Sorry, the first app is called the petro scope. For lack of a better word, I mean, it shows the evolution of the state of the of the liver. And here again, the go to market strategy is going to be in three phases, first, to the pharma industry, that is developing drugs for Nash with a fee for service, then to the dermatologist and guest on technologies that will prescribe these drugs in the future screening their patient with a better scope. And then to the general practitioner. We have a business model based on the SAS business models, obviously, with a significant clinical marketing activity to support the acquisition of new customers and a low churn rate in that business model. And we have already gotten under the radar of, of some pharma companies that are developing drugs. For Nash, we actually were obtained a seed funding from Gilead science when we started the company, a seed funding on which we added non dilutive funding from government funding. And we are we intend to demonstrate the medical economical benefit of our solution, putting ultrasound earlier in the chain with a multicenter clinical trial in Europe and in the US. The technology is much broader than just deliver application as you have understood and it was identified by some industry partners. And we actually closed the licensing deal at the end of last year for a very specific application of ultrasound in DR. So we we did all this with this funding, and today we are looking for 5 million additional funding, in order to proceed with a multicenter clinical evaluation that I talked to you about, but also reach commercial traction within a limited territory, we want to put in place 100% Digital commercialization strategy, the doctor would get the probe through the mail and it would download the software on his computer, but also move to to other applications. And I've talked about them terminology being able to develop biomarkers for fibrosis and edema, and also hematology to develop a biomarker on inflammation of the joints to diagnose polyangiitis. The team is an experienced team, we went through the creation of a business our my previous company was called supersonic imagine, we went from inception to IPO and then the company was sold to Hologic. And we also have a very diversified board, which which helps us both in the clinical strategy, and also the signal processing technology that we are putting inside this software, which changes completely the way we do ultrasound today. So as a conclusion, I think through this first FDA cleared application, we have shown that the concept of Dnata utilizing ultrasound can be done. We have a first product, it's a real time imaging mode, it preserves the capability of premium ultrasound in it. And with this product, we want to now start to demonstrate the clinical traction, the commercial traction of this product with a platform leveraging the concept of software based system they Lea completely sell these days business model, but also move to the other applications, rheumatology and immunology, as well as establishing key strategic partnerships with industry to develop additional verticals with this technology. And the recent example I told you was a multi million deal for the licensing of our technology. I thank you very much for your attention. I brought the probe with me and I have the software on my Mac. So if ever you want to have a live scan you you're welcome to join me in the breakout room. Thanks very much