Efrain Torres, Adialante - Silent Compact MRI System | LSI Europe '24

Efrain Torres 00:02
Hi everyone. My name is Dr. Efrain Torres, co-founder and CEO of Adialante. First, I want to thank LSI for putting on such a great event. I was actually here yesterday listening to a great panel, and on that panel, they were emphasizing and talking about the importance of a company's ability and willingness to pivot, a company's ability and willingness to listen to data, pressure test assumptions, and make appropriate decisions to get to market faster and make a bigger impact. Listening to that feedback on that panel was very timely because that's exactly what we've been doing at Adialante for the past two months. We brought in new advisors from Foley Innovation and have been pressure testing our business strategy, where our product provides value and what we do best. With that in mind, we've pivoted. Six months ago, when we presented here, we were a big iron company focused on manufacturing and producing our own MRI products. Now we've extracted that software platform from those systems and are going to market first with that platform. So to reintroduce ourselves, we're now fundamentally an algorithm and software company focused on not just enabling and enhancing our own MRI products, but enabling and enhancing the new industry of MRI products focused on low-cost, effective scanners. This is all in an effort to solve the problems that the MRI industry is facing now and achieve our vision of making MRI a widely accessible technology. Currently, the standard offering of MRI systems is incompatible with much of the world. And listen, I love MRI. I did a PhD in MRI physics, but we have to be clear about the shortcomings of this technology. Over $5 million to adopt, hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate, over 1,000 square feet of space, and it requires precious, non-renewable liquid helium, a resource the world is running out of. The industry and the future need new MRI products that are cost-effective and can scale. Because right now, customers and patients aren't able to fully appreciate the value that MRI systems bring. Less than 10% of the worldwide market is served. Patients wait eight to 12 weeks for a scan, and in cases like stroke patients, they suffer from these delays in diagnosis, making them the third biggest killer in the world.

Now, for the MRI industry to make a product that is able to address these new needs, it needs to be two things: affordable and effective. Now, I'm not the first to outline these problems or say that we need an MRI system that is affordable and effective. There are plenty of incumbents and startups trying to solve this problem, but they're really facing one major challenge, and that's if you drop a system's cost, you end up dropping its clinical value drastically. Speaking of clinicians across the world, we know that that's one thing that they're not willing to sacrifice. But this is the exact problem that our software platform solves. Our software platform brings value in three key areas. First, if you onboard our software platform onto existing MRIs with no changes in the hardware, we can enhance image quality and improve imaging speed. Second, if you allow us to work with you in the back end, we can remove 30% of manufacturing costs without any drop in clinical value. Lastly, if we work together from the ground level, we can design new types of MRIs that are compact, silent, and inform factors that could go to patients, again delivering the clinical value that is unseen. Adialante and our platform technology are positioning ourselves to not only bring to market new MRI products but to be the platform that enables a new MRI industry that is both cost-effective and clinically effective.

To date, on our intellectual property, we have filed over 11 patents covering Europe, the US, and Japan. We've extracted IP from universities that we collaborate with, all to create a strong and defendable IP portfolio that we can go to market with. With the state of our technology, where you can see the images on my left, the two on the bottom are of particular note. We are working with a research institute whose MRI system didn't actually have the existing hardware necessary to image with any other techniques in the world; it was impossible to image. We loaded our platform in, and not only were we able to image, we were able to image 10 times the clinical standard, achieving a 0.1 millimeter resolution.

Now, for our time to market and go-to-market strategy, there are three steps that we're pursuing. First, from 2023 to 2025, we're pursuing early revenue opportunities through government and customer contracts. These contracts will enable us to do two strong things. First, it's going to enable us to bolster our team and grow our company without having to dilute our investors. Second, it actually enables us to grow our network with future strategics and future customers, which we could onboard our future platform technology on. Second, through those government contracts and customer contracts, we'll be FDA clearing the platform that results from it, allowing us to go to market with that in two to three years and onboard it to the over 10,000 MRI units that are in the US alone. The market for that is $1.25 billion. The third step that our company is focused on is transforming that platform into our formal product. Our product will enable us to extract complete value from our software platform. It's going to be 1/10 the size and 1/10 the cost of traditional MRI scanners, yet will bring clinical value that's equivalent to traditional systems. This three-step plan, developed with Foley advisors, will enable us to de-risk ourselves and get to market as fast as possible.

Now, we've assembled a team of strong engineers. Our engineers have a very unique skill set in which most of us have built MRIs with our bare hands. That's a very rare skill set, even in the MRI industry. Now, I mentioned our advisors. Our advisors are critical to this. They guide us, they pressure test us, they challenge us, but that's why they're around. They provide the discourse that we need to get to market as fast as possible and to make an impact with patients as fast as we can, with the biggest impact that we can have. We have Kurt Smith, who spun out over 20 Medtech ventures himself. We have Burke Taz, who's the CEO of Santia. And we have Professor Michael Garwood, who successfully spun out a previous MRI company that was acquired by GE. This team of advisors behind us, alongside our partnerships, are going to enable us to get there as fast as we can.

Now, we're here to do two things. One is to build relationships, make networks, and grow our supporters as well. The second thing is to fundraise. Thus far, we have raised $1.5 million and we're looking to raise a total of $3.5 million. We're looking for $2 million more and providing some nice incentives to investors, such as a 25% tax credit, even if you aren't in the US, and 50% matching funds from the National Science Foundation. And with that, I'll leave it to the next speaker. Thank you. Applause.