Michael Phillips, Vena Medical - Improving the Way Strokes are Treated | LSI USA '24

Michael Phillips  0:03  
Hi there. I'm Michael, one of the cofounders of Vena Medical, and we're providing physicians with the world's smallest camera. This is not clipart. This is not a mock up. This is a picture of our product next to a dime, about a third of a millimeter in diameter. We decided to use this technology to help physicians treat stroke. Currently there are 800,000 strokes each year in the US. And the healthcare system spends $34 billion, treating those stroke patients, when the healthcare system no longer covers the care that they need. their loved ones need to spend another $34 billion. Everybody knows somebody that has suffered a stroke. And they know the devastating ramifications, leaves millions of patients unable to speak, unable to walk. And that has a huge impact on their loved ones as well the same way it did to my grandfather 30 years ago. They made great strides and how they treat stroke since then. And now they're able to physically go into a patient's hip snaked devices all the way up into the brain, and mechanically pull the clot out to restore blood flow. But when physicians want to do this, they need to use X ray from outside the body. And this is the x ray that they're looking at are mechanical engineers from the University of Waterloo. Between the two of us we have seven physicians in our immediate family. Phil's dad's an interventional radiologist, he brought us into the angio suite showed us these procedures and kept bringing up situations where he felt like he didn't have enough clinical information to decide how to treat that patient. So the idea was, let's provide them with a camera full color imaging from inside the blood vessel so they can make more informed decisions. And that's what we decided to do. Made a lot of sense to me, my dad's a general surgeon. 100% of colonoscopy is used to be done with X ray. And now 95% of them are done with a scope. So through preclinical pilots at the Baylor College of Medicine and UTMB health, we've shown that our camera can do things that the gold standard x ray simply cannot do. We can image beforehand and tell them exactly what type of clot they're dealing with. Whether it's a red or white clot, like you can see behind me here. This has a direct impact on which $6,500 device you should be using to treat that patient. This red clot is actually an example of one that didn't even show up on X ray and would have gone on to block smaller arteries if we hadn't seen it. So while developing this device and our preclinical pilots, we actually invented a second device that was originally designed to get us better images with our camera. This is the balloon distal axis catheter. It's already Health Canada cleared and pending a 510 K clearance. So this device replaces two devices that physicians currently use, and is compatible with both common techniques aspiration and stent river for pulling these clots out. So both of our technologies are covered by five granted patents across the US, Canada, Israel, Japan and China. This is why Lean This is the first patient ever treated with Vina technology. She came into the hospital 59 year old woman full right side paralysis and unable to speak. She went to the cath lab Dr. Maj decided this is a perfect case for the vino balloon dyslexic catheter. And within 10 minutes, he traveled all the way up into the middle of the brain and pulled the clot out on the first try. Right there on the table. She was moving the right side of her body. Two days later, she walked out of the hospital. And two months later, when I was fortunate enough to meet her again, she was renovating your house and playing with our grandkids. These are the kind of homerun situations that we're going after getting the clot out on the first try. These patients are what's known as a first pass success. These patients do way better over the long run. And they're also $6,500 cheaper to treat on average. So through preclinical or through clinical studies at The Ottawa Hospital so far, we've shown that we're able to improve the first pass success rate from the industry average of about 44% to what we're seeing so far at 64%. But then perspective that could be about half a million dollars in savings for the average sized hospital are 440 million system wide down in the US here. So next with the full venous system, including the vena micro endoscope our camera, we hope to improve this number even further from the 64% that we're seeing so far to what we saw on our animal studies, which was 100% first pass success rate. Put that in perspective, that would be a $2 million in annual savings for the average sized hospital and $1.75 billion system wide savings. Currently, it's projected that there should be about 240,000 patients eligible for this type of procedure across the US. Each one of our systems is roughly $8,000 reimbursed by DRGs. These are single use devices. And this is powerful because that means that we have a $1.9 billion beachhead market opportunity 5.7 billion globally. So we've raised a significant amount of capital, we actually just closed our second oversubscribed round from industry experts such as Maria boy Tez, who sold her most recent company to Medtronic for $150 million. She's on our board Word is invested in the company three times, and is a great supporter of ours, Dr. Peter can who invested in our company after using our device in our preclinical pilot, as well as Y Combinator down in Silicon Valley. So our team is made up of fantastic optical scientists pushing the bounds of physics and optics. We also managed to recruit Adam as successful director of sales in the interventional space as our head of commercial operations. And we have a great team supporting us. We also have an army of key opinion leaders ready and excited to study our technologies. These are the kinds of people that shape our industry. So another recent milestone of ours is that we just completed the first inhuman for our camera, we were able to actually have a patient who was 46 years old, they had recurrent strokes, where they kept having strokes on the same side, and they're unable to diagnose exactly where that stroke was coming from. They tried CT angiography, they tried carotid ultrasound, and they couldn't figure out the nature of that of that lesion. They ended up using the micro endoscope, they were able to identify what's called a carotid web, which creates a little pool of blood, causing a thrombus. And then eventually it turns into a stroke, they were able to stent it, make sure that it got pushed up against the vessel wall. And now that patient doesn't have to worry about strokes anymore. With that information that they got from the camera, they were able to change the clinical decision for that patient. And that's exactly what we're trying to do with this camera. We're actually even treating patients today, which is really exciting. So as of right now, as we've already closed an oversubscribed round, we're looking for investors and strategic partners for our next financing round, which will probably be in you know, a year to 18 months. So we can start building relationships. As we accomplish these next milestones. We'll be publishing first in human clinical studies for both of these devices. We'll be getting full FDA clearances for both of these devices. And then we'll service the early demand up in Canada and eventually down in the US. In Canada. We're already getting long term contracts with hospitals, which is really exciting. So we're Vina medical, we have the world's smallest camera that I'm more than happy to show you. I have in the back there. It's about a third of a millimeter in diameter very small. We have a return on investment for hospitals that is being played out in the clinic right now, which is very exciting. And we have a $1.9 billion beachhead market opportunity because every system every patient is another system. Thank you.