Jean-Rene Belanger, Imeka - Combining Diffusion Imaging & AI | LSI USA '24

Jean-Rene Belanger  0:04  
My name is Jean-Rene Belanger, Jr, As you said, CEO at Imeka. So our Why 2 million people in the US suffer mild traumatic brain injury every year that we know of, obviously, if you have mild traumatic brain injury, it means you're probably not going to the ER, it means you're probably hitting your head in the back or just falling somewhere. And so that we know of a 2 million of them each and every year in the US. Mild TBI is not well defined, it is mild because while it's certainly not mild, actually, it's mild because it's not life threatening in the short term, but it has huge consequences in the long term. For now, it is defined as imaging negative, which means there may be symptoms but there's nothing that you can see on an image, be it CT scan or an MRI. TBI brings the burden of 400 billion US dollars to the US economy each and every year that we know of, obviously, some numbers can be all the way up to double if you look in the literature. So it's a huge huge burden in and that's why we call it the silent epidemic. The solution is that mild TBI can actually be detected objectively with imaging. Only we have to look at diffuse white matter injury, we used to think that TBI was a bump on the brain it is not it is something that is happening everywhere in the brain. And that we can detect with Oh, not so new technology, but new technology that is available now on the market. Here is Andy, that's our product. Obviously, it's a very, very small presentation. But that's our reports. So on the right here, you can see that we segment automatically from MRI images. So non invasive MRI images. And with without any tracers, we can separate or virtually dissect the brain and 33 different regions of the white matter. And then we compare microstructural metrics that are only available with certain acquisition sequences to a reference population that is age and sex match. And so it allows the neuro radiologist and their neurologists, to take a look and compare to a normative reference and to see if there's anomalies in certain parts of the brain. Andy is 510 K cleared we got clearance last July. It is a class two LLC and Qi ah, I'm putting that there because Qi H is actually the there is AI and machine learning involved and that's part of the newer indications that have been defined by the FDA. There are also reimbursement codes now CPT three codes. So quite recently, in January of this year, which an MD fits within, and it's quantitative analysis of the brain through MRI, by the way, the reimbursement price that has been already been said by Medicare is almost double of what our report costs to our clients. So there is a very, very good report price here for the technology. Now a little bit more a few characteristics of Andy is that it leverages the current installed base of MRI, no hardware only post processing software. It is cloud based or on premise, it has been cleared for both. So outpatient inpatient setting, everything is possible with Andy. There's a 24 hour rollout. So installation is very simple. Once we if the team on the other side is ready, we can install the software in less than 24 hours. It's all automated processing from from the image acquired all the way to the report being sent back and most important of all it there's no workflow changes for the radiologist. All of this is sent back to the PAC system and the viewer that they are used to work with. So it's a no click solution for radiologists. We are generating revenue. And I thought I'd be a little bit open about this. We got clear last July. And this February we got $75,000 in monthly recurring revenue. We're getting there. We have a pipeline right now to get to 175 monthly recurring revenue by June of this year. So the growth has been great. And it's it's still growing. We're not yet at 100 million, but we'll get there at some point. That's the objective. We have 100 installations in the US right now and counting. We actually reached about 100 to 100 installations this week while I was here at the conference, so that was a good celebration that I did on my own with the team back home. We've generated 2500 reports from since July that were invoice to clients 1400 of which had been done only in the in the past quarter. So there's a tremendous growth and A very, very large interest for Andy. We have signed radnet, which is the largest outpatient imaging chain in the US. So they're in a number one in the US and we are in in negotiation with three more in the top five. So Google it, you'll find a those that I can't name right now. So I put this picture here for saying, Why us three reasons. First of all, I want to be the first one and the only one within this conference that shows a picture of themselves in a skin suit. So that was, number one. Number two, traumatic brain injury is something I know I was Canadian National Team speedskater for 21 years. And third of all is that we are not going to stop perseverance. And grit is something that is in the genes and the culture of America, because of my background, and also my partner's background, in high performance sports. So this is something that we're going to get to the finish line and have patients use globally to help them with traumatic brain injury. But more importantly, maybe the company has not been born two years ago, it was around for a while we were working in research, developing biomarkers based on the same technology for pretty much all large pharma companies developing drugs for neurodegenerative diseases. There's a few examples here, we have ongoing contracts or past contracts with those companies. And this is something that we want to take further. Now, I've been talking about traumatic brain injury since I started this, but there is a path forward in the future in addition to commercializing this solution now, and that is Alzheimer's disease. In our past life, or in our in our life, and with the research, folks, we've been looking at Alzheimer's disease and neuro degeneration very, very thoroughly with the same technology again, and we received funding recently from the Alzheimer's drug discovery foundation to validate our neuro inflammation biomarker, so neuro inflammation being part of the metrics that are already being calculated by Andy and this will be added to the nd platform by q4 of 2024. So huge, huge market opportunity again, obviously, with Alzheimer's disease, in addition to traumatic brain injury. Quick word on the market opportunity. mTBI represents a tam of 200 million in the US, and it will grow but two to 2 billion within our targets within four years. So there are new technology additions, we are actively working in r&d Still in Europe and Canada are the next markets that we want to get to. And Alzheimer's disease I mentioned also, multiple sclerosis is a huge target of ours. That's our three disease indications that we want to get to. Today, I'm here, we're here this week, we're gonna raise a we are raising a series a $5 million. We expect it to close by the end of this year, there are numerous new developments, some of which we I could discuss with anyone that's interested in knowing them. But addition to the current platform of Andy, in addition to everything that I just mentioned, for, for for new disease indications and so on. We are very, very excited of what's to come and what's already there and the growth that we are seeing. And and yeah, please reach out if you want to learn more. I just wanted to touch on the team a little bit. I asked them to wear a skin suit for that picture. They did not want to so I tried anyway, so founding team or exec team on the top two professors, one of which is max Sindacato. He's probably one of the V or one of the KOLs in white matter imaging based on MRI. And so he's a co founder and partner here at I Myka. And the I wanted to show three also of our advisors part of our advisory board. So Rich Macquarie formers synaptic recycler and Michael Davis from so a huge reach into the DOD and army as well. And Lawrence Tannenbaum who's the VP of red net. So that's the team. Thank you very much. Please feel free to reach out if you want to discuss, learn our plans, or perhaps invest in the company. Thank you very much.