David Kuraguntla, Alio - Noninvasive Remote Monitoring for Complications in Dialysis | LSI Europe '22

Transcription

David Kuraguntla  0:10  

Everyone, it's an honor to be here. I'm Dave Kuraguntla, co founder and CEO of Alio, behind me is one of the world's most amazing humans. Maddy has done everything from work at Goldman in the city to being an avid Windwalker, skydiver, and about every other dangerous hobby that you can imagine. Interestingly enough, every, every night after Maddie does her daring feats, she also has to go home and hook herself up to a dialysis machine. She's been doing that for almost 20 years. What's interesting is that she's very, very important about taking care of each detail of what she's doing in her life, what she's eating, how much fluid she has, and everything else around her. But despite all that, about a year ago, Maddie was out hiking in Scotland, she was going up to Ben Nevis, and she started to feel a little woozy. Her heart wasn't feeling quite right. It seemed to be beating really fast. She said something's wrong, but maybe it's just because I'm hiking, went home, and found herself waking up in the hospital about two days later. And what had happened is that access the artificial conduit in her arm that she cares so much about and was very diligent about making sure it was open, had unfortunately started closing off her dialysis that she expected to work the way that it should wasn't. And the potassium levels in her body had risen so high that she was at risk for a potentially fatal arrhythmia. And Maddy story is not alone. For dialysis patients around the world, they spend on average about two years, sorry, two days each year in a hospital about 11 days each stay, that's driven to an excessive amount of cost. In the US, it's about 1% of the Medicare population, but almost 8% of the overall Medicare budget, just the hospitalizations alone are about $14 billion each year. Here in the UK, for example, to spend more on ESKD patients than breast, lung, colon and a few other cancers combined. The reason that drives these hospitalizations is actually three pretty well known issues counts for about 85% of the hospitalizations. And that has led to the fact that there are international guidelines around where to keep these patients in terms of normal. But it's also led to federally mandated monitoring, because of the need, and the recognized need to keep these patients out of the hospital because of the cost. At the patient level. It's also incredibly overwhelming. Here in Europe, almost 80,000 patients each year, get onto dialysis, joining about 700,000 patients that are receiving dialysis each year, and 3.7 million people worldwide. And if you can have a remote patient monitoring technology that actually leads to a global tam of almost $9 billion, but at the patient level, they feel overwhelmed. They feel like they don't have any power at all. And that's where we can, Alio can empower both the patient the physician, while also aligning the interests of the payer and the provider to reduce those costs of hospitalization. So Alio is a fully non invasive, multi metric, dialysis patient monitoring, wearable, it starts off, as you might expect, with a wearable, there's no needles, nothing else is sharp proof, sweat proof, and even has a little bit of shape memory inside of it so fits to any contour you need inside of the body, outside of the body, I should say on the body. And so being able to then take that data throughout the day, transmit that up through through the cloud, where we take our series of proprietary algorithms and put that out to the clinicians. The benefit, once again, of this patient population is that there are already well defined guidelines and clinical workflows that are well known for when the what to do when the patient is outside of those norms. So we fit in seamlessly into what is utilized today. Unfortunately, what's utilized today to get that data is blood draws imaging studies. Even if they're trying to implement an at home system, it's trying to get so many different tools that patients are non compliant. And Alio simplifies that with a completely non invasive patch that does not require any input from the patient at all, and is taking that throughout the day. At the same time. From a technology perspective, we get more than anybody else can do in a single patch today, we get your basic vitals as you might expect, and that clearance has already been allowed as well. We're starting to go past that into some other really exciting areas looking at once again, what drives that heart failure admission for the patient in terms of fluid overload. Looking at that through both their blood pressure and whether or not they're how much fluid is inside of their body and helps them also manage things like anemia, which is often done with a very expensive drug, being able to pay attention to whether or not that access is open and whether that vessel is is as paitent as it should be. And then through a partnership with NHS we really started attacking non invasive electrolyte monitoring so became the world's first company to be able to do non invasive potassium monitoring, amongst others that are in our amazing pipeline. At the end of the day, though, the clinicians want to make sure that it's as accurate as they expect today. Right now they do blood draw. And across hundreds of patients and 1000s of blood samples, we show that we have comparable results to actually sticking a needle into a patient multiple times in some countries here in Europe, they actually take that blood draw before and after every single dialysis session, which as you might imagine, is incredibly cumbersome, expensive. That's where we believe Well, we certainly stand on the shoulders of giants. We've been skating where the puck is going, being able to actually do all of that in one spot as a platform that can be used not only within the CSAT population. But as we continue to develop the further metrics, going into other areas such as chronic kidney disease, and making sure that patients don't end up on dialysis in the first place. Heart failure, PAD and stroke are all within reach as well from some of our early clinical data. The question though, is why do Why do customers partners want to work with us, for example, how we got to working with the NHS, is they were actually sending nurses to patient homes. And sometimes they're driving two to three times a week, almost 50 miles each way to do a point of care of blood draw. And they saw if they could do that, they could actually reduce the number of hospitalizations and the overall cost. But as you might imagine, that is not a very scalable solution. And so they put out a global RFP, which we were happy to answer and said, We can do this together and showcase that there is a cost efficient, remote scalable way to keep those patient costs much lower than they are around the world. Whether you're a value based provider in the US, a single payer network, in other areas around the world, your costs aren't actually driven by your dialysis services. Much of it's actually driven by those preventable hospitalizations. And that's where the customers have actually started reaching out to us. Landmark legislation in the US has actually pushed almost 50% of patients into a value based network, which means that the insurers and the providers are both reaching out to us as they grow use of these new arenas, there is also fee for service reimbursement for the fee for service side of the market, where clinicians can be incentivized, and where we stand out differently, as unlike just the RPM codes, you can also utilize the RTM codes, as you manage some of the drugs for the patients with the metrics that only we can provide. What that has led to for Alio, some amazing partnerships. We've got them across the world from both the US and the GCC to, even in here in the UK, with the NHS as well. They've been great partners pushing us forward. And there's quite a bit more inbound. That's not up here today. What that means from an Alio perspective, is that we certainly align the interests of the patient, the physician, the provider, and the payer. And I think that's the first thing that's really important for us to do. But number two, there's a really exciting recurring revenue flywheel that's buttress by the tailwinds of switching to value based care, the fact that monitoring is federally mandated, and the fact that there is reimbursement for what we're doing already. Below that is a technological platform that actually supports not only an amazing entrance into a otherwise underserved off neglected market that has is ripe for disruption, but also into some more traditional cardiovascular markets with what we're able to do. From a legal perspective. We're really excited to be getting pretty close a lot with a lot of momentum on our $20 million series C that gets us into the commercialization. almost fully committed but we are looking for one more partner particularly why here in Europe is because given our reach into EMBA, we would like to bring a partner into the fold that has reached out here and able to help us continue moving forward. If you'd like to learn more about Alio please do let me know