StaplCam | Dinesh Vyas, CEO

Dinesh Vyas  0:00  
Thank you, John, and for the invitation for LSI. Today I'm talking about a new novel tool that our team has over the last six years developed based on the experience that I have and my partner's have in the surgical operating room. Sorry. Okay, good. So surgery is very challenging for the surgeons, and there are a lot of limitations. When we do the surgery, you saw the cardiac surgery done, when the first speaker was talking about it. So there are multiple challenges. So the biggest challenge that comes is the camera man. So like, you can see the camera man is standing there. So do I have camera man in my operating room, running the camera, he wants to show me something he can show me, he was directing me to move on this side or that side. So it's a lot of coordination that you need to do your surgery. On top of it, when I'm working on this side, my screen is on the side. So I'm driving with someone else showing me what to do and I'm looking at that screen and working on this side. So it's a big challenge just to operate and do a surgical procedure that makes it hard for any surgeon to deliver a easy surgery a very efficient way. Other problem is, when this camera is running, you have your instrument in between, so there is a huge blind spot which is blocked by your instrument. So those challenges have made the surgical outcome not so optimal that we should have. So our tool is bringing four major advances in one technology in one time, so the surgery become easy. On top of it, we have a huge manpower shortage because of COVID. So this technology will reduce the processing time because we have fully disposable system. So when you go to the operating room, I don't know how many of you have gone, you need to have like all the hundreds of equipment in the back. And then you have a lot of disposables and wiring. And that takes a lot of people to work and make one surgery happen. So this system is will come in a disposable kit, you just open the kit, and it has got all the tools you need. And you just need one anesthetist and one nurse to help you. And you can do like within the operating room seven to eight surgeries in a day.

So I will go quickly over the needs, which I talked about. So to train a good laparoscopic surgeon, you need three times the training you need for pilot professional pilot. So it's a lot of training. On top of it, it's ergonomics as I spoke about. And the other issues that we come about is number of instrument exchanges, the injury to the physician, number of cases he can do and the finances that go behind it. So surgeon doesn't want to operate just three cases in a day and learn learn from tier three cases, they want to do six or eight cases. So you have to have that efficiency model in it. If you look at from the hospital standpoint, you have to as you look in this cartoon, you have to have a stapler, which multiple cartridges, so cartridges basically, tools that fire clips. And for different tissue, there are different clips, if you're a blood vessel, you need a different clip, you need an intestine, there's a different clip, you have a lung there is a different clip. And each clip cost you like 200-250 dollars. So we want to integrate multiple clips into one or change the technology, so that clip identifies what kind of tissue you have. And accordingly deliver your clips into the tissue. And then the autoclaving, cleaning, all that mess in the number of instruments you can see just for the camera. That many instrument you just need for the camera and then the other instruments you need. And then you have to wash and you need people to do that. So that all becomes like a hospital pain point coming to the patient. So patient has got so many holes just to take out an appendix. You go to more complex surgery, you need more goals, more holes, more pain, more chances of hernia, more chances of bleeding. And that all makes patients experience not that wonderful. So right now when I'm speaking here, my team is giving a talk on a new innovation that we have done in stages. Stages is one of the biggest laparoscopic surgery Congress and we have developed a new tool for gallbladder surgery.

So come to the point is we want to innovate the surgery so that surgery becomes easy for the patients. So looking at the all this problem. This is the comparison of the technology. You look on the right side, this is just we are showing the camera part. You need an eight foot tower taller than me just to show what is going on in the patient. You need a huge table of equipment. And if it's a robot, you need two giant elephants in the room. So that cost you $3,500, and you look on the other side, a one pound instrument that's it. That delivers you the surgery and you can see the cost difference. So I will end up with like one of the testimony of other of our testing side person residences, and he's a vice chair of Duke surgery. And also he's president of ASE. I don't know how many surgeons are in the crowd right now. So Association of Surgical education is one of the biggest Society of surgeons in the US. And he has said that StaplCam will not only benefit ambulatory surgery centers, rural hospitals, urban hospitals, as well as global health. And with that, what we have done so far is, these are the four challenges any startup faces, whether it's IP, how much moat we have around our technology, what is our path to FDA, so we are very close to filing our FDA paperwork in next six to nine months. Regarding reimbursement, we are very close to having more CPT codes lined up. We are going from low risk to high risk procedure, but all the reimbursement codes are already defined. So there is not like something we have to do unique. And definitely John is here and we were talking about GPO and you had a session this afternoon about GPO and contracts. So, real quick, I want to talk about what are the market strategy we are looking at. So, there are a couple of things we look at, we look at the surgeon who will take our product, what would be the use case, and what would be the hospitals we will look at. So we are looking at VA hospitals primarily as well as early adopters. VA hospitals especially because they have a mandate of taking disposable equipment if there is one in the market. So that constitute like 10% of the hospitals in the US. And pretty much all the university hospitals with the training program are aligned to VA hospital. So that gives us access to 1500 new trainees every year, in addition to 10% of hospitals, we are looking at Urban urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers and hospitals that have been funded but where these cases happen. We are looking at non obese patients because it's easy to perform those surgery. There is a low risk for those procedures. And definitely with more addition, you can do more advanced surgeries. Coming back to our team, which is the most critical part. Can we execute on our plan. So I'm I was Dean of Research at Texas Tech before I become Chair of surgery at a medical college in California. Northern California. Got a decent number of publications. I have another cardiac surgeon who has like 14 exits in medical device. And one of the endoscopic engrafting equipment that you saw in the slide before in one of the presenters before me, that was his product. And it has got 1.5 billion revenue a year. So very solid physician, entrepreneur, surgeon entrepreneur, part of my team. He's working with me for last three and a half years. I have a Steven Gerbrand he's from here. He's my employee who has been working in medical device space for now 25 years. And Brian Sheahan and he is the chief regulatory for both Auris Surgical Hanson as well as for the first triple aneurysm device. So in short, we are put together a device which we are doing going through FDA clearance process for a faster, quicker recovery, easy for patient financial incentive for hospitals. patient outcomes are better low infection rate and more surgical procedures can be done in a setup where you don't need a lot of financial investment. So just like that, I'm finishing before time and thank you so much