Robert Israel and Dawn Bitz - Lazzaro Medical, Private Partnering Interview at LSI USA ‘23

Transcription

Robert Israel  0:06  

Hi, I'm Rob Israel from Lazzaro Medical. I'm the co founder.

Dawn Bitz  0:11  

And I'm Dawn Bitz. I'm the president of Lazzaro medical. And I've spent the last 27 years in the medical device industry and I'm passionate about airways, respiratory sleep, people breathe better.

Robert Israel  0:21  

We're really excited to be here at this amazing LSI event. And we are fixing a disease that's called trachealbanca Malaysia, which is personified by chronic cough. And it's a just like, folks have knees and shoulders and hips that fail, so does the trachea. But when that happens, you can't replace it. And it's a major problem for the for the patient. And we are we are developing we've developed technology to help those patients that have been told they have no choice but to get their affairs in order, they're going to not live to live a remarkable life after that

Dawn Bitz  0:59  

was our medical we've actually crafted a scaffold system that actually goes on the back of your trachea that helps treat tracheal bronchial Malaysia by reconstructing the airway.

Robert Israel  1:09  

Currently, the there's no there's no real option for our patient population. There hasn't been until Dr. Lazzaro did the first ever procedure and did a robotic repair of the trachea. Prior to that there was a a full body opening, needing to access the trachea now with five simple incisions using robotics, we can go in and in a way, it's currently a six hour surgery, repair it repair the trachea from the inside using the scaffold system. With this, this, this scaffold system is what we're currently inventing. And we have are about six months away from our FDA filing, soon to be ready for primetime and be able to use it in patients. Currently, the fix is with a standard surgical mesh. But that that procedure has only been able to be done by the best surgeons in the world, namely Dr. Lazzaro and a few select others. With our scaffold system. We're democratizing this across all thoracic doctors that can work on using the robotic using robotic technology. And we feel that we'll be able to do this across all the all the patient population and, and all doctors and thoracic surgery. So it's basically democratizing this procedure. As I said before, there's right now no real solution for this. And folks, our patients are told to get ready, there's nothing we can do for you, you've got to prepare your your affairs you are going to die. And six hours later, they leave the hospital after a day after a six hour procedure. And two weeks later, they're playing tennis, running and living a different life. It's that it's that linear and it's quite amazing.

Dawn Bitz  2:49  

So when you look at the just the recovery time of an open tracheal bronchial plasti procedure, which was the previous procedure, it was number one if they even if you could even survive the procedure first and foremost. And then the recovery time was up to even a year afterwards before you'd even have some quality of life back when we're talking about the robotic procedure. And then ultimately using our scaffold system and that procedure. We're literally talking about walking out of the hospital within a couple of days. And within really a couple of weeks getting back to things that you're normally used to doing. So we actually have video and we've got patients that have come back to you know, kind of testimonials of them being able to go back to church singing in the church choir, being able to play tennis, being able to play golf, playing kickball with their children. We have a 47 year old patient who was given a death sentence, receive the treatment received the procedure and is now able to play with his children. 

Robert Israel  3:45  

That was his one dream. He said to us, you know, he was a 47 year old gentleman told he was going to die. I just want to play kickball with my daughter, and we 47 years old. So it really is it's a remarkable difference in life and quality of life. The open procedure is, as Don was saying, long time to heal very, you know, complications. This is this, we believe with our scaffold, the current procedure done by the best in the world by Dr. Lazzaro is taking about six hours or so six to eight hours, we believe will be cutting that surgery time in half. So in a two to three hour procedure, we're going to have life changing events. By using this amazing scaffold system that we're building. It's actually a three part system. So it's for the trachea and the tube bronchi.

Dawn Bitz  4:30  

As you can see here, our scaffold system is actually back is affixed to the back of the trachea. There's a three part system here where we actually have a system designed for your trachea and in two specific design systems for your bronchioles. They're attached on either side of the trachea to the cartilage, and then through our very unique zip tie mechanism. They get pulled together to restructure the trachea taking it from very flat to more anatomically correct your normal trachea Is is nice, it's healthy, it's got a nice structure, if you look at it, kind of cross sectionally. It's got a nice D shaped anatomical kind of configuration. But what happens is when the cartilage breaks down, the trachea becomes flaccid. So when your trachea becomes flaccid, you can see that it actually elongates it flattens. And this is really the hallmark of the disease tracheobronchial Malaysia. The other thing about tracheobronchial, Malaysia, or TBM, for short, is that it's, it's number one, it's a progressive disease. So once you actually start having the cartilage breakdown in your trachea and in your bronchial is, it actually progresses over time and gets worse. The other thing, it's also the diffuse disease. So once you actually start having TBM, it affects not only the trachea, but also the bronchioles and goes all the way through your entire airway. So when you need a fix for your trachea, not only do we fix the trachea, but we also fix the wrong feels. And that scaffold system actually allows again, the reconstruction of that disease trachea to create, again, a much more anatomically correct trachea after the procedure. So we're excited to be at LSI for one because we're doing a presentation on the company on the technology at the event on Wednesday. So we've got a featured spot in track three to present the company, we also have an opportunity to have a table at the innovation pavilion here. So it's very exciting to be able to even demonstrate and show people physically the product that we have, and just being here interacting with our colleagues on the startup and on the small company side, being able to build that network those relationships, being able to connect the dots as well as then being able to have conversations with different investors and then the support companies that also help us bring products like this to market LSI is just a wonderful event, particularly for the smaller companies like Lazzaro Medical