Vena Vitals | Ray Liu, CEO

(Transcription)

Ray Liu  0:04  

Good morning. My name is Ray Liu, I'm CEO and co founder of Vena Vitals. Avena vitals, we make a small wearable device that monitors blood pressure continuously. We're a clinical stage company and we're backed by Y Combinator, MedTech Innovator amongst others as well. So blood pressure is one of the most important vital signs. It's the number one indicator for cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer in the world. But for such an important metric is blood pressure. Our tools today for monitoring are very limited, you know, the traditional cuff, which gives us only snapshots in time, even though our blood pressures are constantly changing, whether that's in the operating theatre, or in our daily lives. On the other hand, to get continuous blood pressure, the only way today to do that is through an arterial line, which is an invasive procedure that involves stabbing a catheter directly into your artery. So not only is that a painful procedure, but also it's something that requires a very skilled physician to perform. And it introduces a number of risk factors and complications. So Vena vitals, we've developed a solution that brings the best of both worlds, giving us continuous beat to beat blood pressure, and a non invasive, non invasive and wearable package that transmits wirelessly to a mobile device or to a tablet. So how does it work? Well, as you as you think about it, when your blood is flowing through your artery, it's pushing up against your arterial walls, which in turn applies pressure to your skin. And that's exactly how we fill our pulse. Well, what we do is place a soft capacitive sensor that's able to pick up all of these small perturbations. It's a material science innovation, that allows us to be extremely accurate and extremely sensitive, and also allows us to build it in a small wearable and stretchable format that adheres to the skin. And also, we're able to make this at a sensor cost of about 60 cents per device. So how well does it work? Well, our early studies indicate this is actually one of our first patients here. He's coming in for a nasal sinus surgery to remove a tumor in his skull, the arterial line plot is on top. And below that you see our device. And we're tracking each and every breath, every single heartbeat, as well as the fluctuations as blood pressure. As the incision is happening in the middle there, you see, blood pressure shoots up, and we're tracking all of those fluctuations. So what we can show is that number one, we're able to bring continuous blood pressure monitoring in a non invasive package to replace something that's invasive, that's currently performed more than 8 million times every year in the US alone. So just to repeat that, we're able to replace an invasive procedures, that's happening 8 million times just in the US alone every year. And also number two, with our form factor and ease of use, we're actually able to bring continuous monitoring outside of the clinical hospital setting into the home and in our daily lives. But I do want to drill into accuracy a bit because that is the most important thing. So here, this is another patient more recently, who came in for a cabbage procedure. So this patient has a very high BMI of 37. That's considered level two severe obesity. And also, with a lot of these cardiac patients, they their blood pressure waveforms are all over the map. There's a lot of anomalies, and it's really difficult to track. And you can see how accurately we're tracking this patient. When you zoom in into the waveforms, everything from the pre induction to post induction to vascular presser. That's a totally different waveform that's being presented in the arterial line. And we're matching that exactly. And this is a really cool stuff. So when we place an array of our sensors onto the surface of the skin, at the position of an artery, we're able to map out the surface topography. And what that allows us to do is actually be able to identify all the noise and interference and motion artifacts and be able to subtract that out, giving us a very robust and reliable signal. So I mentioned we're a clinical Stage Company, and that's a support our FDA 510 K path. Currently we validate our technology in the operating room and 78 subjects head to head against the arterial line. We have another 500 subjects lined up for this year. So what we found is when we share our data with physicians, they get really amped up and excited about our technology and they want to participate and they want to bring our device into their operating rooms. And also what's remarkable is that we've been able to do this on a wide range of patient populations. So BMI. Is and different ages, and also be able to measure at the extremes of high and low blood pressure, which is difficult for a lot of devices. And the market for continuous blood pressure or market for blood pressure in general is enormous as you can imagine, because blood pressure is used everywhere. And we do intend to play in each of these markets. But we don't plan to boil the ocean all at once. So where we're starting in our roadmap is where continuous blood pressure is used today the most. And that's inside the hospital in the operating room and ICU. From there, we'll expand into sleep monitoring, and ambulatory and remote patient monitoring. And we won't stop until we come up with a strong viable solution for chronic condition management for the billion people out there who suffer from hypertension. But we're taking it one step at a time. I do want to drill into sleep for a minute because sleep is a phenomenal opportunity. If you think about it, sleep disorders and cardiovascular disease are inextricably linked. But there's no way currently to be able to measure blood pressure during sleep. Because as soon as you try to you're going to wake up the patient, or very minimal, you're going to disturb the data during their sleep. Until now in our technology, what we're able to do what you see here is actually been able to track the variation in blood pressure as a result of the sympathetic activity as the patient is recovering from apneic events. So you can see that after every apneic event, there's a corresponding surge in blood pressure. And we pick that up extremely well. And to put it more succinctly, on the left, is a volunteer subject who is a normal patient, healthy patient without sleep apnea. On the right, this is a patient monitor with our device, who has been clinically diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, who has been prescribed a CPAP machine, who by the way, is not using that CPAP machine hasn't been using it for a year. It's remarkable what we're able to pick up. And this is unprecedented because we're able to do this just in a wearable sock. So the use cases for sleep are quite broad and deep. So I won't go into all of them. But just to highlight a few we can do everything from being able to do early detection, to just help solve the millions of under diagnosed cases of sleep apnea, as well as be able to support the apnea hypopnea index with an actual hemodynamic view of diagnosis for sleep disordered breathing. And then also on the treatment and management side to be able to look at a patient be able to say, hey, it looks like your CPAP is either working or not working. If it's not working for you, then maybe it's time to explore alternative treatments. If it is then hey, maybe we have to improve that adherence. So as a company, we've come a very long way. In the short two years that we've been in existence, we've raised so far 4 million in our first two years, and we have another million in grant funding coming. So that actually covers us for our first beachhead market of the operating room, and ICU, which is the top line. Then right now we're actually raising another 4 million so that we can tackle sleep in parallel, because we see a lot of synergies with this product, to be able to bring this technology to market faster. If you're interested, I'd love to chat with you in the breakout. And finally, to close out we have a phenomenal team in place that's executing on this every single day. To make this holy grail a reality. We have both large company discipline from the likes of GE Healthcare, Siemens, Qualcomm. And also we have entrepreneurial chops having launched and exited startups that have sold to Cigna and Vizient and Philips. And really, were on the bleeding edge of tackling something so critical as blood pressure monitoring, and we'd love to have you join us on this journey. Thank you