John Uecker, ClearCam - Disposable Intra-Operative Lens Cleaning Device | LSI USA ‘24

Speaker 1  0:04  
Thank you get some visual aids. As he said, I'm John Uecker, I'm CEO of clear cam. And in my life, I've had some interesting opportunities, interesting leadership opportunities. I was the ship's surgeon on the USS Enterprise in the northern Arabian Sea when we were responding to events of 911. I was a trauma surgeon on the frontlines in Iraq led a trauma team during the invasion of Iraq, and I've had multiple other leadership opportunities, including being on the board of directors of med to market, which is the largest privately held bio skills company in the country. What is clear cam? Well, we have this idea that surgeons should be able to see during minimally invasive surgery and whether or not the vision is obscured a significant portion of the time during surgery in the current standard of cleaning the lens is really archaic. So what is that? So you're doing minimally invasive surgery, you make little incisions, you put trocars or ports in the patient. You have a laparoscope and the patient has other ports and instruments you're operating. This is hooked up to a camera that's hooked up to a video towel you're looking at that camera gets dirty. What do we do the standard of care right now is to take that camera out, stick it in something like this was to hold it for five seconds, then wipe it off on one of their towels. Put it back in the trocar Oh, there's some debris on that trocar that's dirty, you take out their little q tip thing, clean out the trocar gotta clean off your scope again, and put it back in. It's pretty ridiculous. So we think and we know there's a better way to do that. And we have a windshield wiper for the laparoscope. So what are divided this is our device on a laparoscope and instead of doing all those gymnastics. When you're operating. Whoever's driving the camera simply turns the knob. Keep operating clean the scope, and no interruption in surgery very analogous to windshield wiper on a car. So that's our product. This is it right here. Again, you just slide it over the laparoscope. The text that sits up on the back table takes about 30 seconds and turn the knob and it's ready to go. This works and you know the beginning of surgery, there's frequently condensation. That takes care of condensation, whether you encountered blood fat, other body fluids, splatter from the car battery, whatever the case may be. It's very effective in cleaning the debris. I've personally used it on multiple operations myself. So we're FDA cleared, we actually got FDA cleared back in 20. We've done it's a safe, simple, disposable effective lens cleaner. All right, SP is 147 50. We're very well protected from an IP standpoint. We have over 30 patents issued and these are protected around the world. It's a big market opportunity during this nine minute talk. There's over 250 cases done around the world laparoscopically. So it's over 1.7 5 billion market over 700 in the US and that's not including the robotic market and just talking about laparoscopic So what is our history, we started this company in 2018 raised some money back then we got FDA approved product, actually with less than a million dollar raise with the help of some grant money. We did clinical trials, we've added over 1000 cases, we identified some opportunities for improvement. We improve iterated a couple times. This is our second generation product that's in market now we've done over 1000 cases. With that. We raised some more money in 20 and now we're we're wrapping up a seed series three currently, we identified who are where we bring the most value and that's in thoracic surgery and video system thoracic surgery. Camera gets 30 A lot. Multiple cleaning events. gynecologic surgery during laparoscopic hysterectomy and things like that, and in some general surgery brings a lot of value forget surgery, colorectal surgery, things like that. We currently have a five millimeter zero and 30 degree product in market we have a 10 millimeter that's we've developed that we haven't launched yet. And even manufacturing this in Austin, Texas at low volume we have gross margins of 58%. And when we model that out to doing higher volume X us can easily get above 80% margins. We have you know our channels have been selling to hospitals doing kind of the conventional thing having a sales rep. Go and get a surgeon champion navigate, do a trial navigate the value analysis committees and so forth we're starting to engage with we've signed an agreement with thoracic medical device distributor comm as well as another medical device company. And we're also about to be on contract with the largest GPO in the country. We've published our several white papers on this, including our initial human data of 160 cases, which demonstrated that we decreased, removing the scope by over 90%. And that was a very initial cases, we've gotten better. Since then, our roadmap includes, we started with what we call the killing that was our first product in market. The current product I've held here that's in market is called Clear scope. We have on the horizon, we've made a electronic version push button medic mechatronic. And probably most exciting to us is we have an automated lens cleaner that integrates software that we have that interprets the clarity, the visualization, our engineers have used AI and machine learning to teach that model how to continuously interpret the clarity of the visualization, and integrated that with electronic version of our hardware to make an automatic lens cleaner, I really think is the future and minimally invasive surgery, particularly on all these robotic platforms are Salesforce. We did a lot of this with one man sales team, which is challenging and have grown a little bit with the director of sales and a couple of sales reps. And now we've, as I said, are engaging with distributors and other medical device companies for manufacturing and about to go and contract the GPO which will ramp up the sales we have some established customers that have been ordering and reordering product, ascension, several ascension facilities in Central Texas Baylor Scott and White which is in Central Texas, a core row Health Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Michigan, we have some newer customers that are also ordering and reordering that we're getting that we're growing in including a ASC surgical care affiliates ASC in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Some other hospitals, we have some big ones in the pipeline that we've been cleared to do pilot pilots, including a VA in Orlando, Methodist in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, and HC several HCA facilities. So we think these are actually some realistic sales projections without help of a strategic or another partner in selling half a million dollars worth in the next 12 months, 2 million in subsequent 12 months and six millions after that. We are interested in strategic partnerships and we're moving down that road with one. So we have a great team of diverse individuals with complementary skill sets and personalities that really work well together. It's a fun place to come to work. And what we're doing is we're raising a seed series three as of this morning, that's actually now 850,000 that we have available. It's priced equity. And we're using most of that to commercialize this product that I mentioned, develop the automatic product and mechatronic product that I mentioned and operate the company. And we're kind of seeing things up for series A later in the in the next nine to 12 months. Thank you very much