Ray Liu, Vena Vitals - Non-Invasive Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring | LSI USA '24

Ray Liu  0:04  
Ray. I'm Ray, CEO and co founder of VENA vitals. So at VENA vitals, we make a small wearable device that monitors blood pressure continuously. What you see on the screen here is actually real patient data captured from the operating room. And we are a clinical stage company. We're currently supported by a number of accelerators like Y Combinator and MedTech Innovator, as well as the NSF and NIH. So blood pressure is one of the most important vital signs, but our tools today for monitoring it are very limited. We have the traditional cuff, but that gives us only snapshots in time, even though our blood pressures are constantly changing. Now today, the only way to get continuous blood pressure is through an invasive procedure called the arterial line, but that literally involves stabbing a catheter directly into your artery and being able to track those changes. Now not only is that a painful procedure, but it requires a very skilled clinician to perform, and it introduces a number of potential complications. So VENA vitals, we solve these problems by bringing the best of both worlds, by being able to non invasively capture the continuous beat to beat changes in blood pressure. So how do we do it? Well, we use advanced sensing technology with our devices, where we place them, anywhere you can feel your pulse. And what's happening is, as your blood is flowing through your artery, it's pushing up against your arterial walls and applying pressure to your skin. And each beat coming through squeezes our sensor. So if your blood pressure goes up, it squeezes our sensor harder. If your blood pressure comes down, it squeezes our sensor softer. So how well does it work? It's extremely accurate. This is one of our very first patients that we measured on in the operating room, and you can see the chart on top is the invasive arterial line, and our device is directly below, and we're tracking each and every breath, every heartbeat, as well as in the middle where the surgeon made the first incision, blood pressure shoots up. We track all of those changes extremely well. So what does this mean? Well, it's really two things. Number one, we can replace an invasive procedure that's still being performed in the US more than 8 million times per year. That's 8 million times just in the US alone each year. And number two, because of our wearable form factor and our ease of use, our comfort, we can actually take continuous monitoring outside of the hospital into other applications such as home remote monitoring or sleep monitoring, which I'll talk about in a minute as well. But first to drill a little bit deeper into accuracy. So what you see here, this is a coronary artery bypass procedure on a patient who has a relatively high BMI of 37 and you can see how well we're tracking all of the anomalies and arrhythmias of the patient, as well as when you zoom in into the individual waveforms, we track those throughout the stages of the surgery, from vasopressor delivery to anesthesia induction and central line placement. And if we zoom out, the story is just as compelling. So this is a five hour surgery where we're tracking wild swings in blood pressure throughout the surgery, and there's also quite a lot of motion that's happening on the operating table, you can see from the accelerometer the bumps and repositionings. And despite that, we're able to, within that five hours, capture the entire surgery without having to do a recalibration. So it's no surprise that our first market that we're going after as a beachhead is the hospital operating room and ICU, because we're exceptional at it, we're extremely accurate. But this market is also enormous. If you think about it, there's more than 300 million surgeries that are performed each year. All of those require active blood pressure monitoring. And if we do a bottom up analysis looking at just the US alone, if we capture 20% of that market, that's already a billion dollar a year business, just from the US alone, and we're well on our way in our 510, K path. So we validate our technology already at more than 300 subjects in the operating room head to head against the arterial line across six different study sites. We're getting ready for our FDA submission, which we'll submit within the next two, three months. But really what's remarkable is that we've been able to demonstrate that we're accurate on a wide range of patient populations, so different age groups, different BMI, as well as at the various ranges of blood pressure, between high and low blood pressure as well, where many other technologies do fail. So our second beachhead, I want to talk about for a minute, we're also extremely excited about because in and that's sleep monitoring. So in sleep monitoring, this is one of the or sleep disorders are one of the most under diagnosed conditions. And yet it affects nearly a billion people worldwide. The consequence of this is really all the downstream consequences of potential risk to cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke and also much lower life expectancy. So what does blood pressure have to do with all of this? Well, if you think about it, whenever you have an APNIC event, so you're missing the oxygen, and that just means your body has to work that much harder to recover that lost oxygen. So you go into this sympathetic response, and your blood pressure surges upward. And no one's been able to measure this historically until now. And what we're able to show is that just by wearing a simple sock, we can track all of these sympathetic surges in blood pressure, and we're showing that they're quite dramatic. So just to give you a visual demo of this, this is actually on a patient that we measured where you can see our array of sensors. We have eight channels, and channel six in the middle, that's where the artery is located. So that's real live data coming through. And our surrounding channels on channel two were actually picking up the respiratory information. So from tidal breathing, we can pick that up as well. So what you see here actually in channel two, the patient had an APNIC event. So you can see the respiratory information is actually stunted, and so now they recovered. Now take a look at blood pressure. Next in channel six, you see that surge that happens. So this happens in a scan in a span of five to 10 seconds, and other technologies would completely miss this. So what's the significance of this? Well, we're showing that these surges, they can happen quite frequently, and they can also be quite severe. So on the left, what you see is a healthy subject, and we zoom out, so I showed you earlier that was a single event. Now, if we look at an entire night and here just in an hour duration, you can see that for a healthy subject, there's really no surges above 30 millimeters of mercury. But for somebody who has been diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, you can see the degree of surge, the frequency, and all of that is extra stress placed on the patient's cardiovascular system. And we're seeing surges that occur that are over 100 millimeters of mercury. So that's quite dramatic. So as a company, we beyond sleep and the hospital we are, we do have a very healthy roadmap, but and those include ambulatory monitoring, remote patient monitoring, as well as chronic condition management. But really we want to, we don't want to boil the ocean at all at once, so our focus is really on these first two clinical applications in the hospital and the opera and the sleep in the sleep space. So we're so what we've done to get to where we are today, in the last four years, we've really accomplished quite a lot. We've raised 8 million in funding, about 3 million of that has been non dilutive, and right now, we're preparing for our FDA submission. After that submission, we plan to do our series, a fundraise towards the end of this year, where we'll target 15 million to be able to go for commercialization and further build out our sleep product. And finally, what I want to leave you with is our team, because this is really our greatest asset. So not only do we have large company discipline from the likes of GE Healthcare and Siemens, but we also have entrepreneurial chops. So having launched and sold companies to Cigna and vizient in the past, we're really on the bleeding edge of tackling something so critical as blood pressure monitoring, and we'd love to have you join us for the journey. Thank you. Applause.