Krishan Ramdoo, Tympa Health - Hearing Assessment Platform | LSI Europe '22

Transcription

Krishan Ramdoo  0:12  

Thanks very much for the introduction. So I'm Krishan Ramdoo, the founder and CEO, Tympa Health. I'm an ENC surgeon by background. And today, I'm just going to walk you through kind of what we're doing at Timber health, where we are today. And actually, what we plan to do in the future and where our financing rounds are coming up as well. So at Tympa, we're really have a vision of how we can truly democratize in hearing health care across the world, not only here in the UK, the US but in developing low income resource countries. And we're managing to do that with our solution, we have an all in one solution, which is a hardware and software solution, which allows you to take the whole air clinic out into the community, in the hands of the non specialists, but do it in a digital way. And the way that we went about that solution was if I take it back right to the beginning, I've been a clinician now for 12 years, in the last few years, very much focused on temper. But very early in my career, I had a patient who came in to the care of the elderly ward. And she was brought in and was thought to have an infection. She was treated for that. But she was still very disengaged with the ward, and not very communicative. So me being a budding ENC surgeon, I thought, well, let me go and have a look at it is. So winter we're looking at is and it was full of wax. So I thought well, let me just go and take it down to the end department remove the wax. And at that point, I got our hearing test. Lo and behold, she had age related hearing loss. And we fitted it with a hearing aid. And she was a completely different lady, she was planning her 80th birthday, engaged with a family. And I thought that simple intervention has made such a big impact on this lady's life. And actually, hearing loss is a huge issue. There's half a billion people in the world with disabling hearing loss by 2030, it's actually going to overtake diabetes and cataracts in the top 10 disease burdens, and affects everybody. And what some people may not know is that hearing loss is the single biggest modifiable risk factor for prevention of dementia, you're three times more likely to have a fall. And it's intrinsically linked to social isolation. So I went on this journey. And as I was seeing the pathway, access was incredibly difficult. And it currently takes people about 12 to 16 weeks to actually access care for their ear in hearing healthcare. And they go to multiple different professionals, multiple specialists, and I thought there has to be a better way. And that's where I looked to streamline this pathway. And we did that with our Tympa system. And that now allows you to that whole pathway, now shortened down to one 30 minute appointment. But as I said at the beginning with an allied health professional. And this is the simple pathway, we've developed a tool, which allows you to do otoscopy, wax removal and hearing screening all in one device. And it really shortens this and makes care much more accessible. And at the moment, there isn't a system in the world, which brings all these elements together their systems which allow you to do various parts of that pathway. But no, not all integrated into one. And they're all done in a digital way. And this is the tool itself. It has multiple attributes. It gives you high definition image of the eardrum, it allows us to wax removal of which 30 to 40% of patients end up having and it does a hearing assessment, you're able to link in with specialists and create a unique digital health record, almost like an eHealth passport. And by doing so, we've amassed a significant amount of data and I'll come on to that later. But that allows us to be much more informed as to where someone is, let's say year one with a hearing, and whether our year five, and could we pick up things earlier. And we developed a unique training system, which has allowed us to scale up here in the UK. And why is it unique? So as I said there isn't a device in the world at the moment. We've got multiple global patterns sitting around that's technology. We've published multiple papers around the system. And as I mentioned the data to date the kit has been used for more than 200,000 patients. We're seeing currently about 12,000 patients a month passing through our pathway. And with that we've created what I believe is in from the published data suggests the world's largest bank of an era in hearing health information, not just the images and videos but some associated health information as well. And it creates that connected Universal Digital Health Record with regulatory compliance with CE marked and FDA cleared 510 K exempt. Very fortunate to date we have been well backed and well financed. We closed our seed round which is quite a large seed round last year of an 8 million And round of funding with some, some funding before that as well. But we've got a great team. So I'm very fortunate that our chairman has joined recently he has stepped down in April as the chairman of the NHS, and came in as a chairman at Tympa. And he's been really driving force. We, of course, we are an NHS spin out as well. And then we've got a bunch of investors out there. Notably, folks like Jim Brier, from bio capital founding investor in, in Facebook, a number other folks around with us. And notably, we have QHP ventures, who were the first spin out venture fund from the NHS. And we, alongside five other companies were one of the first five to be invested in where we are at the moment is we're looking at these new opportunities their significant headwind, in the Ear and Hearing Health space. Only a month ago, there was a new FDA regulation, which allowed for over the counter hearing gaze now to be delivered in sectors outside of Audiology. And with our data as well, we feel we can really support that journey. And the over the counter hearing aid legislation was actually talked about in 2017. But it took such a long time to pass because people were suggesting Well, how could you give an over the counter hearing aid solution to someone who hasn't had checked to make sure there isn't a diagnostic problem, there isn't just wax, or actually do they have a severe hearing loss. And we at Tympa Health, we have a really good opportunity to provide that do due diligence beforehand. At the moment, we're in multiple sectors in the UK, were in pharmacy. Before we entered into space, pharmacists were not delivering the service, we now more than have more than 100 different pharmacies using our solution in the country. We're in three of the top five high street audiologists, when the obstacle space, the cam space, and of course, within the NHS. And with the data that we're bringing together, we feel there's an opportunity for us to have a role in predictive health. So whether that person has normal hearing at year one, and then has abnormal hearing at year five, was there something that we could have picked up earlier, was there something we could have done to slow down their progression of their dementia. And because of the utilization that we're having, with 12,000 patients passing through a month, each of those individuals are very engaged with us to be involved in clinical trials. And there's the opportunity and we're already having conversations with dementia UK to look at how we can involve in some of the clinical trials that they're doing as well. So this is where we are now. So timber for has the opportunity to create this real end to end pathway of diagnostic therapeutics, hearing, and providing a solution. And we're now entering into where we're going to launch within the US. And we're having some multiple conversations. I mean, history is steeped with UK companies trying to go and crack America and doing it wrong. I think we've got a really great base of people who can support us and we're looking at some really already in conversations with some really smart close pilots. We're in here in the UK, we're in boots, UK if you walked into boots hearingcare Tympa would be sitting on the desk for your hearing assessment, and the very strong link for us moving that towards the US as well. And so we're just about to embark on our next round of funding, which is currently taking place and we thought we have a real good opportunity to make a footprint in the US and have to have some questions at the end.