Sharief Taraman 0:04
Hi, I'm Dr Sharief Taraman. I'm a pediatric neurologist. I'm also board certified in clinical informatics. I'm the CEO of Cognoa, and we're really working on making life changing diagnosis and interventions possible through breakthrough digital innovations that save time, optimize resources and possibly positively impact both children and their families. I want to start with a with a patient, because that's the most important thing. This is our North Star always as clinicians and this awesome community of medical innovators, medical device innovators. So this is Charlie. She's two years old, and she has concern for developmental delay identified by her mom, and these home videos are extremely powerful. There's audio in here, there's video. You can see how she's moving. Observation is one of the most important things that I do as a clinician in my practice, that observation, though, and that skill that I have, not everybody has it, and as parents, sometimes we don't know, is this behavior something that I should be concerned about? Is this going to be one of the four children, one in four that have risk for delay, the one in six will get diagnosed with a developmental disorder, or the one in 36 who has autism? And the reality is that there's 20 million children in our age range that have concern for delay, and the status quo is failing millions of children like Charlie. Parents know something's up around 14 months of age, but the average age of diagnosis, not only in the US, but globally, is above the age of four, and that hasn't changed in nearly decades. No real progress. And if you're anything other than a fluent white male, you're less likely to get diagnosed, you're more likely to get misdiagnosed. And when you get a diagnosis, it's going to be around seven years old. Problem, right? It's a huge problem because you're missing the neurodevelopmental window that is critical for these children's development. And when you catch them early and you treat them with appropriate, well documented evidence, these kids do amazing. Nearly four in every 10 will lose the diagnosis of autism, meaning that they have the features, they have the personality, but it doesn't cause dysfunction in their life. They go on to have jobs and families and enjoy themselves and not struggle the way that they do when they're misdiagnosed or late diagnosed. They attend mainstream schools, they get twice the cognitive gains the health system benefits because there's an immediate and long term cost reduction. So we can do better. So I joined Cogno as the Chief Medical Officer, now CEO. But the work that was done out of Harvard, out of Dr wall's lab, and the work that he did at Stanford, and a decade worth of research allowed us to create the first ever diagnostic approved by the FDA, the de novo application to actually diagnose autism. You would have thought there would have been something, but there wasn't. And in fact, because we trained on nearly 300,000 kids of a very, very diverse background, and we capture features in multi dimension, multi time point and multi perspective, this multi faceted evaluation, we can actually beat the status quo. So some simple videos that the parents provide, some questions we ask the clinicians, but any clinician doesn't need to be a pediatric neurologist, because there's only 1500 of us in the whole country. And a caregiver questionnaire, we can immediately accurately diagnose all children, whether or not we can tell them it's autism or not. Every child gets a developmental report that's so powerful it gives not only the autism prediction, but it does the documentation for you. Because guess what? I used to spend two hours at night in pajamas writing reports for families so I could get them services. I don't have to do that anymore. The device can do that for me. It gives me an answer. It gives the parent answers, and they can do next steps immediately, not have to wait a year, or actually even be told you can't get an appointment. We're so backed up, not only in this country, but everywhere, you can't even get an appointment at some of the major children's hospitals in the United States, let alone if we have a foreign diplomat whose child is ill and needs a developmental evaluation, we're med vacuum those kids across the world to come back to the States, but we'll see you nine months a year and evaluate your child. That's unacceptable. I don't know if you know April's autism acceptance month, guess what? I'm not going to accept that. That's the status quo. Nobody should, because we have a better solution. We actually finally have a standard of care. We've created something that's faster, more accurate, allows all HCPs to use it. And again, that cost savings is huge, and the satisfaction is huge. Change. Can you imagine, as a parent, not being able to know what's going on with your child? It's a clear, clear competitive advantage. The historical research based tools that we've used, they have long standing biases that have perpetuated through them. They don't continuously improve. They're not multifaceted evaluations. They don't really fit the need, right? This wasn't technology that we created because we were like, Hey, let's make some technology. It was a real problem, and we had this opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to capture all of these features of childhood development. But that's not just about diagnosis. For us, we've created the largest proprietary data set of children with neurodevelopmental disorders and children developing normally and atypically, and from all of these perspectives, then, not only does it allow us to understand autism, but all these other related neurodevelopmental disorders, we've got a huge patent portfolio. It's about 10 families. We've got 10 issued patents. There's another 10 that are being currently working through the system. Lots of foreign patents available the database, though, is really the magic behind this, because, again, it's scalable. It allows me to go and get breakthrough FDA, breakthrough status from the FDA, which we got both on the diagnostic before it was approved, and on therapeutics, it allows me to actually create tracking so I can monitor these children and really fundamentally change their trajectory. But then that investment to date that we've done allows me to create new indications, label expansion, all these things with this really low research and development cost. And the more beautiful thing is, as we commercialize and people use the product, it actually feeds the R and D, so we can use a lot of real world evidence to really move stuff forward. So our Morningside ventures backed company, we've established medical policy at a very sustainable price point that puts us in a position that we are actually very near term to operating profit, being at a position where we can have multiple positive exit scenarios and those business margins because we're software as a medical device. I have no inventory, I have no storage, I have no manufacturing costs, right? I got some web server. That's about it. The business margins are excellent. And we've really, especially in the digital space, we've been the industry leader in that establishing a real insurance model, a real payment model that is scalable, that can go out into the world, and an exceptional team. So we are in a position to be top of mind. So any HCP, any clinician who sees a child and their concern for developmental delay, Canvas, dx, biccognola, is going to be the first thing that they prescribe. And then, as a byproduct of that prescribing, that flywheel that I showed you is going to create more label expansion, continuous monitoring, drive the research and development that allows us to do many, many things, not just diagnose and evaluate kids with developmental delay, but the entire spectrum. So as always, we're always looking for good partners who can support our concentrated focus and expand that early commercial traction that we've seen and really help us do do right by kids like Charlie. Thank you. Bye.
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