Torrey Smith Presents Endiatx at LSI USA ‘23

Transcription

Torrey Smith  0:06  

Thank you so much for that. And thanks, everyone for being here. You know, we were just on the balcony looking out at the ocean, and basically imagining what it would be like if you could suddenly see all the fish floating around in the ocean. Right, unobstructed? Or what would it be like if you could be one of those fish and swim around and see the world the way they do? Well, disease is similar to that, right? You know, we have this amazing human body. And unfortunately, we don't really know what's going on inside it all the time. And I think everyone here at LSI is working on that. The thing we'd like to add to this is a platform, a little robot, a concept that you could go inside the human body and do things, but that you could do that using microscopic robots. And so if I describe the ultimate vision that I have for this with my team, it would be, say, rice grain size, you know, imagine something scary, like a butterfly larva that could worm its way around and eat a cavity. That's actually happened in the human brain before terrible, scary, right? Well, what if you could tell that butterfly and larvae to go eat a glioblastoma? That'd be pretty amazing. And why aren't we actually doing that? And so we'd like to start beginning to take those steps. So if I walk that back from a microscopic little future robot, maybe nuclear powered, what's realistic? Well, maybe you could swallow a pill that had some tools on it. Maybe you could take a tissue sample, maybe you could do a simple surgery or a polypectomy. And then if we're, if I was to walk that back to today, what can we do right now? Well, what I'm holding in my hand is called PillBot. And this is our MVP. This is our beautiful little first entry into what we hope becomes a category, micro robotics and the human body. And so my question is, is there any value in a little friendly swimming robot pill, especially something that costs about 35 bucks to make. And we have a specific gap that we're trying to address. So for example, if you have anything going wrong in your upper GI, ultimately, the thing to do is jam a tube in your body and fix the damn thing. Let's look around with the endoscope. Let's go take a tissue sample, let's let's find what's wrong, let's fix it. But if you ask a patient what it took to get to that moment? Well, usually you don't get an endoscopy on your first visit, you know, you might go to the emergency room with stomach pain, they determine you're not dead. So they they send you home, you get a referral to your GI, you go meet your GI, well, they can't jam a tube in you right there. They need to run you through some processes. Let's try you on a diet. Let's try you on antacids, eventually, you qualify for an upper endoscopy. And in five minutes, they figure out you have gastritis just looking around. So our question is, maybe we could take five or 10 minutes of looking around in the stomach and just front loaded. Put that at the very beginning of that patient journey. And this is where we're trying to take the next logical step from the world of pill cameras. You know, we've been swallowing pill cameras for 25 years. And I think everyone took notice when given sold to Covidien. But the question is, why are they only used 1% of the time, you know, there's an uncanny valley, if you will, of this passive use case, versus an active use case. And I think it's critical to give a huge amount of credit to the world of magnetic actuation. With magnetic fields, pervading the entire human body quite easily. You can do amazing things and people from Atlas endoscopy are doing this entre botica with magnetic pill cameras. But our question is, what if you could swallow a pill that could move under its own power? What if you could swallow a pill that could move around over a zoom call? What if you could do that at home? And so there are various ways you could look at the opportunity, you might say how many endoscopes are sold every year, and you would see a large number. Or you might say how many people get endoscopy is every year, and you would also see a huge number. What I see is an opportunity to take the next logical step. You know, in the old days, you would cut someone open, do an exploratory surgery, hopefully find what's wrong. So in backup, then we had minimally invasive surgery, poke some holes, slide some tubes. So what's the next logical step? I think, let's get the tip of the catheter minus the catheter. And so I think we I think we're kind of covering the value proposition for a patient is just look, let's have a quick look around. You know, if we find something scary, if we find something that pill bot can't help you with. Great, let's get you into the hospital months earlier in your visit. Right This is this will be a lot of fun if we can pull this off. And so our goal is basically a little moving eyeball in the stomach. And the way it works is basically a series of electric motors and pump jets. And basically, this thing can squirt water in six different directions. Right now, sometimes we've used four thrusters at a time, sometimes we've used three thrusters at a time, I ultimately think that we might want to go with a spherical geometry. And I sure would love to unfold robot arms and do manipulations with it. But the bottom line is, we live in a world where a kid can go to a toy store and buy a drone and fly it around their neighborhood on a Saturday for 50 bucks. And I think we can use that same technology to go in the human body. And we really love building robot pills. We've been incorporated for just over four years, we're up in the bay area in Hayward. And this has been a journey where we simply began by building hardware, and showing our stakeholders that we were serious, and just step by step by step, approaching something that you might think looks a bit like a pill. As of today, I've actually swallowed 15 of these robots. Some of the pictures you see on the right hand side are from my own stomach, I think you can tell pretty obviously, we're working on our image quality, we're looking at working on the video, clarity the frames per second. But this is real technology that is moving very quickly now. And we're very proud to be partnered with with lawyers who can help see this vision and help us take it all the way. At this point, we have a growing portfolio of IP that we think gives us a reasonable foothold, at least at the table to say that we want to be the ones to make this real. But we're here for execution. Honestly, the the fact that we could save millions of lives if we could catch things years and years earlier, I think is more important than who does it. But I'll be honest with you, I sure hope I'm involved. I'm an aerospace engineer. I've been working for 17 years in the medical device industry. I've been fortunate enough to see a few successful exits. So just as an early employee, but this is the first company I've named. And in the medical industry, as you know, you have to pick a weird name. So Endiatx. Go inside, figure out what's wrong. Fix it. Some of you might recognize Dr. Kumari who heads gi over at Mayo Clinic. They lead the world in gastroenterology. And we're very excited to be working with them. Alex from Google X has been a mentor of mine. And the remaining people on this team are from the world of deep tech, and anyone who truly believes that this is part of our future. We just signed up with Mayo Clinic we became closer and closer with Viv and his team. And it became clear that we needed to formalize that arrangement. And Mayo Mayo is getting very excited about this because Kumari himself says he he does maybe 12 to 14 endoscopy a day, personally. And up to 80% of the time. He's not even taking a tissue sample. And so we see this, this opportunity for this quick look around. We think that's the first step. We put together a scientific advisory board because I like to have tough bosses. And if gastroenterologists are not tough, I don't know who is. But at this point, these folks are asking us to make this tech real. And what we're asking for is people to maybe come talk to us, you know, we'd love to show you some videos, you'll see that our videos are not perfect. You'll see that our technology is not yet ready for the market, but in a couple of months that might change. So thank you so much, everyone. What an honor to be here.