Ruben de Francisco, Onera Health - Studio Interview | LSI Europe ‘22

Transcription

Nick Talamantes  0:00  

Ruben, thank you so much for joining me at LSI Europe.

Ruben de Francisco  0:02  

Thank you. My pleasure.

Nick Talamantes  0:03  

Tell me a little bit about your company.

Ruben de Francisco  0:06  

So I'm from Onera Health. I'm co founder of Onera Health. We are a company that we do sleep diagnostics and monitoring. We take sleep diagnostics monitoring to the patient home.

Nick Talamantes  0:16  

That's fascinating. Is that normal? Where do you normally have a sleep diagnostic performance?

Ruben de Francisco  0:22  

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a really good point. So typically, if you don't sleep, well, if you want to be diagnosed for a sleep disorder, you go into a sleep clinic. So the sleep lab, that's, that's the gold standard, basically. So what happens is that you walk in, they hook you up with all sorts of wires, you look a little bit like Grace mystery, basically. And, and then you get to sleep in, in the lab. So it's a clinic, it's like a hospital. And then you know, they look at you, and then the next morning, go home, after a few weeks, you get a study the results of your study. So that's exactly what we are changing, actually. So what we're doing is we're taking that study the gold standard study that's so expensive, that, you know, requires a lot of supervision and technicians, and so on. And, of course, it's also horrible user experience, we taking that into the patient's home for the first time. So now imagine that you could do the same type of study with the same diagnostic power, but just in your bed, at home, you could even apply it yourself. We made it so easy that you can just hook it up yourself to a few patches, that you stick that you click, and you're done.

Nick Talamantes  1:32  

Wow. So going into a sleep clinic, I imagine sort of like going into a hospital or seeing the doctor, there's a lot of anxiety, does that affect the outcomes of a sleep diagnostic test?

Ruben de Francisco  1:44  

We can we can imagine, right? That's, that's that's when everyone expects because basically, you know, there's still a first night effects. There's no buts about studies in general about tests in general. And when you're not in your bed and you go somewhere else, then for sure it affects it affects anything, you do anything you test. And then the other element is that sleep disorders can be quite complex. So you know, there are certain issues that you'll see on some nights, and you won't seen some other nights as well. So in the sleep lab, the clinic, you get one shot, you go that night, you know in a different place, and you get one shot to identify what's going on. Right now the moment you're at home, you can look at different windows, different moments where you want to test you know what's going on. So you could do one night, you could do a second night, you could do a third. So you really open a whole lot of new opportunities to you know, to better reflect how usually sleep is for you.

Nick Talamantes  2:43  

So this sounds like it could really change the way sleep disorders are diagnosed and understood. Improving that quality of life for the patient. Tell me how many people have a sleep disorder? How common is this?

Ruben de Francisco  2:59  

Yeah, it's a huge problem. It's really a huge issue. We've really seen that just the tip of the iceberg in a way. So we estimate one in five of the sleep disorder, one in five of the entire world. 

Nick Talamantes  3:13  

Wow. So is there a linkage or any potential to use sleep diagnostics, such as yours to diagnose other neurological conditions is asleep a powerful indicator for certain neurological conditions? 

Ruben de Francisco  3:29  

Yeah so, there are two, there are two ways to towards to look at this. So on the one hand, sleep disorders themselves, there are many, very complex, we hear a lot about sleep apnea. But there are hypersomnia, narcolepsy, really many, very many. Some of them are more linked to cardio, respiratory, cardio respiratory issues, and some others are more linked to the neuro side, like what's going on in your brain versus what's going on in your lungs, what's going on in your, your heart. So so it's pretty complex on its own, how sleep relates to all of those elements. Now, what we're seeing is that this huge level of comorbidity, so people who already are a cardiac patients, respiratory patients very likely to have a sleep disorder as well, maybe 50%, even of those. So basically, if you are treated for one or another thing, if you would know better what you paid, you know, is your patient having a sleep disorder, yes or no, you might change the course of treatment for that patient and actually make it much better for for that person. So neurologist is a very good example. So very clear case. We're actually seeing during the pandemic, and after the pandemic, a lot of people didn't even you know, listen too much to their bodies, right to how they're sleeping and now all of a sudden, hey, actually not sleeping that well what's going on. And at the same time, we seen a huge surge of you know, mental mental issues, right depression and whatnot. So that's an element that that is known that there is pretty strong correlation as well with mental illness with neuro, the neuro site. And, and sleep so. So that's really our goal we're trying to do is to lower that threshold for people to be able to do a study. To be able to do a gold standard sleep study quickly. And now it just so hard to get it done that, you know, it just let it said and said and said,

Nick Talamantes  5:36  

I'd like to understand the technology a little bit more, you you mentioned that it's a wearable device, you put it on you go to bed, are you using any sort of proprietary algorithms or biomarker collection to conduct and analyze sleep in the house? In the home?

Ruben de Francisco  5:52  

Yeah, so. So yes and no, actually, so what we have done is polysomnography, which is the gold standard going to PSG in short, it's, it's been the gold standard in the lab for many years, over 30 years, this is what doctors are trained for the understanded, you know that they're able to understand all of those signals, they're very complex and very many, right, they can understand really well. And we've got many, many treatments, so we're not sure of treatments. So here the tough The tough thing is how do we get many diagnosed? How do we connect them to the right treatment? And then how do we make sure that the treatment is actually working? Now, the technology is well established. So we didn't want to reinvent the wheel here didn't want to come up with something totally different. So we said was, let's make that technology, that's great that we understand that's really good, available outside. So how can we just turn it into something very simple that people are not afraid of, non invasive, they can apply themselves. So we put a lot of effort into that. And and of course, we built a lot of secret sauce and special technologies to be able to do just that right? clinical grade. With a great user experience, a lot of work went into that. Of course, we realize that just a device will not will not fully change the user experience and entire pathways. So what we've done is to create an entire software platform around it cloud platform. So what we actually do is that we go end to end. So Doctor requests the study, we ship, the centers you applied at home, we analyze the data, deliver a report back to the clinician, and the clinician is able to issue a final diagnosis, alternative therapy. So it's really the full the full thing.

Nick Talamantes  7:45  

Democratization and accessibility and healthcare is a really important issue that we're trying to address right now. So it's great hearing how you guys are doing so in sleep diagnostics. Tell me a little bit about what stage your your company is at. 

Ruben de Francisco  8:03  

Yeah. So we've been working very hard this past years. And that got us to a product that's CE marked for Europe. Okay. And FDA cleared for the US. So this was this happened just earlier this year. Thank you. That was that was a huge win. Very exciting. It opened a lot of doors. It was a very strong clearance because we were able to demonstrate substantial equivalence, which is technical term and against the gold standard traditional PSG system. So that opened all the doors for us. And we just launched our PSG as a service offering earlier this year. We were in June in the US, the major event slipped Congress and in Europe, the European respiratory society Congress in Barcelona in September. So we just got out there. We've got a very long list of clinicians that would like to work with us. So ask them a little bit of patience as well. Right, right. But we're getting there. So we're just setting up all our first customers in Europe. And in the US.

Nick Talamantes  9:02  

You're FDA cleared. You're in the in Europe with the CE mark, are you pursuing a specific territory there? Or are you trying to go to both? We right now? Yeah,

Ruben de Francisco  9:15  

Yeah. So we go both to the US and Europe. We've been in the US already for a few years, although with a small organization, and we're ready to we're ready to grow it. And in Europe is pretty big, and many countries and they all have differences. So we like to be everywhere in Europe as well. And in the future everywhere in the world, of course because you know, it's about democratizing sleep, as you know, democratizing access to health care. I mean, our goal is to make healthcare and sleep diagnostics, monitoring, in this case, very, very accessible to anyone who needs it. So that's our dream. But bear with me for now in Europe, we were going to be in Germany and in the Netherlands.

Nick Talamantes  9:56  

Tell me a little bit about your scaling plans. What's coming next for you guys?

Ruben de Francisco  10:01  

Yeah. So we, we have a bit of like a two step approach, if you will. So right now we want to make sure is that our products are PSG service offering fits really well in the clinical pathway, the patient journey, and so on. So we were testing that out in the markets with a few key customers in this geographies in Germany, the Netherlands in the US a few key players. And yeah, again, making sure if it's really worked great user experience we learn from as we improve as we as we might need. And that's what we're doing. And once that that's, that's working very, very well, then we are going to be ready for a lot of volume. And again, because it's about democratizing access to healthcare, it's about making it as available as possible to as many as possible, we are building a fully scalable solution. So that's something that's in our DNA from day one. So absolutely anything we build needs to be very scalable. So, you know, we've got our own chip technology, actually, to allow us to, you know, to get to patches to devices, that will scale in volume, we've got a cloud platform, so that, you know, we can we can do AI assisted scoring. And so we call the you know, analyzing all of the signals into one. And we have a an end to end business model as well. It's built for scalability, right? So that we are able to run 1000 sleep studies a year, or 10,000 sleep studies a year, you know, in a couple of years, if you know, we have big customer that wants us to run a million studies a year we'll be able to do so.

Nick Talamantes  11:49  

That's great. We're here in Great Britain at LSI Europe, what brings you to the conference?

Ruben de Francisco  11:56  

So we just got started with a Series C financing rounds, we raising 20 million to make the dream come true. Right. So basically what we're doing is to accelerate our expansion, commercial expansion in Europe and in the US. And at the same time, we are preparing for the launch of our gen two which is the volume solution of our offerings. So that's that's what we're doing here. And it's been great so far. Lots of really good investors, professional investors, corporates. So great, great place to be.

Nick Talamantes  12:30  

Are you in talk with any strategics that are known for being in sort of the respiratory health market?

Ruben de Francisco  12:38  

Yes, we are 

Nick Talamantes  12:39  

Not allowed to talk about it? 

Ruben de Francisco  12:40  

Not right now. 

Nick Talamantes  12:41  

Okay, well that's exciting news either way. Well, Ruben, thank you so much for stopping by the great conversation and hearing about your company. 

Ruben de Francisco  12:49  

Thanks so much.