Name: Brainstorm Health 2024: Reimaging Lab Testing
Uploaded: 2024-05-21
Duration: 10 min 19 s
Description: Vasu Nadella, Co-founder and CEO, Vital Biosciences Moderator: Andrew Nusca, FORTUNE

Vasu Nadella, Co-founder and CEO, Vital Biosciences Moderator: Andrew Nusca, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Health 2024: Reimaging Lab Testing 

Conferences

Hi, I'm Vasu and this is my co-founder Munir. We are incredibly excited to be speaking to all of you today. Everyone in this room is doing something to make health care better, whether that's moving care closer to the patient, making care more proactive or bringing uh clinics and pharmacy clinics into pharmacies and care into the communities. One thing we realized is that as people are trying to move care closer to patients, they are fundamentally constrained by the limits of lab testing and the physical infrastructure necessary to deliver care. In particular, we realize that the fundamental constraints around care model innovation around lab testing are fundamentally limiting the things you can do, whether it's moving care into the home, into pharmacies or even things like telehealth. We decided to do something about that. So over five years ago, over 100 biochemists and engineers brought together the best of the latest advancements in microfluidics, biochemistry, computer vision and optics to build something that people said was impossible. We built the first platform that enables comprehensive routine lab tests in minutes everywhere patients are all from a small sample of blood. We call it the vital one and we're really excited to show it to you today. So, di vital one only uses 600 microliters of blood. That's less than 3% of what's typically used for a comprehensive panel like this. What that means is you can use either vacutainer or micro tainer from a finger stick sample. So man is going to drop the micros today into the vital one and then he's going to slide in our two consumable components, a disc pack and a support pack. And from there, he's going to hit go in less than 15 seconds of hands on time. We're going to return within 15 to 20 minutes. A comprehensive panel of tests including a complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, HB A one C for diabetes and immuno acids like thyroid stimulating hormone or vitamin D covering common and guideline recommended tests. Let's contrast. This is what happens today. We draw tubes and tubes of blood from patients. Then it takes over an hour to let that blood clot centrifuge it and process it to get sent across the country to be run and have lab results returned days later. Instead with the vital one, we're going to enable patients to get their blood drawn while they're getting roomed. And by the time the physician is ready to see them, they're going to have access to a comprehensive panel of tests to enable what we call real time medicine. So you're all probably wondering how does this work and we got a few slides to go through today to show you. So inside that disc pack are three microphonic discs. Each disk does a different modality of tests. And within that support pack are reagents and tips within each disk are these small Lioy beads. Those beads contain all the regions that are necessary to run these tests and they're freeze dried to eliminate the need for refrigeration or coal chain shipping, seamlessly fitting into your workflow. Now, I'm going to show you a video of the inside of the system. So the left hand side is the front of the vinyl one. You're going to see the drawer come in and you see that we actually mix those samples within the system, removing a big source of pre analytical error from poorly mixed samples. Users are never exposed to any blood. So the tubes are dec capped automatically, we automatically also move each disk into each of their respective subsystems, taking a small volume of blood and buffer and dropping it into the center of each of those discs. And what you're going to see is that those disks starts spinning. So unless you can blink 6000 times a minute, it's really hard to see what's going on on those discs. Luckily, I've got a stroboscopic video for you here. So what this is doing is taking a picture every, every rotation of the disk to let you see what's going on. And what we want to tell you is that all we're doing is accelerating and decelerating this disk to run all the footing functions that are necessary to process these results. We're using high precision injection molding to deliver high quality lab results with high precision accuracy and most importantly, repeatability. We have tested this extensively. We've run this on nearly 6000 patient samples with partners like labcorp and academics from leading institutions. We're incredibly confident with the data we're seeing. We're also really transparent. We put it all on our website for anyone to go and see vital bio.com/data. Our team is working really hard to follow the rules and do this right. Work as regulars like the FDA and we're well on our way, I want to leave you with two things. One, the future is coming, right? We're going to expand the design space that all of you have to deliver care more proactively and closer to patients. And the second is we need to work with everyone in this room. We need partners like all of you to actually take great technology like this and bring it to patients and change how care is delivered. We're going to be hosting a handful of demos in the Bay Area in L A in early June. If anyone is here and interested, we'd love to show you. We're also right outside the door. Happy to take questions and you can feel free to play the vital one yourself Thank you all for the amazing work you're doing to advance healthcare and thank you for having us. That sounds pretty cool. Good to see you, by the way. Thanks Andrew. Um I got a couple questions for you. So look, we have been talking a great deal about hype versus reality at this event and I want to know every test has its limitations. So what are the limitations of this device? How do we make sure that we don't, you know, imbue this with every hope and dream that we have totally. Look, central labs aren't going anywhere. We're not to bring every liquid biopsy test to detect every kind of cancer to the point of care. What we think we can do is bring all of your routine tests to enable primary care and urgent care to be a lot more productive. And if we can do that, we can improve outcomes, close gaps in care and take what is today a very disjoint experience and make it a lot more cohesive and better for patients. Got it. All right. So the one company that's on my mind that is probably on the minds of a lot of folks in here when we're talking about rapid blood tests. Rhymes with barrow nose. Yeah. Um I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, me neither. Me neither. Me neither. Um No, I wanted to ask you. Look uh that came before. Sure. Yeah. Here you are pitching a rapid blood test. Um, reception might be a little bit cooler than uh if that hadn't happened. Uh So tell me a little bit about that. Uh What are your challenges in this regard? Uh Where, where are people's heads at when you start talking to them about this? Yeah. Look, I think it's a shame. People look at what happened there and completely stopped working or innovating in blood testing. We almost look at it as like this amazing, you know, billion dollar consumer research survey, right? It captured our attention, it captured our imagination because we all saw the impact innovations like that could have. And I think from the very beginning, we were really thoughtful to try to get the most skeptical people aligned with us, right? Working with folks like labcorp, we even have like former directors of the FDA in diagnostics on our board. And we tried to bring in all these folks to tell us how to do this the right way, how to have the highest bar and how to compare ourselves to the gold standard properly. So all we can say here, right is we're just incredibly focused on doing this the right way, doing it with the FDA and, and not, you know, cutting any corners. Um And we're just gonna be relentless in doing that if the mission is too important to give up just because, you know, we get compared to a company once in a while. Sure. Sure again, never heard of them. And then um you know, before you stepped into this role, you were an entrepreneur in residence uh at Innovia Capital. So you worked with a number of different health companies and I'd love to know some lessons, some observations from that time before you were so hyper focused on this. You know, I think like a lot of the round tables here and, and conversations in general are going to, you know, talk about things like you got to really focus on aligning incentives and fitting into workflow and all of those things are incredibly true and you have to do all those things. But I think something I've come to appreciate having spent time with founders and now working on vital for five years is that it all comes down to that founder's relentlessness and ability to push through those barriers. Like that's the thing that you're underwriting to in these situations. And so I think what's amazing about health care is we all see the impact we can have and all these great companies that have come out of the last 10 years in digital health and in therapeutics and diagnostics. They've all come from a place of real mission. And I think that's what's been really important for us too. And when we in bringing in really great talent, my last question for you, my session yesterday talked all about the great reckoning in the market for health tech start ups, I wonder are you feeling like it was good for the category? What, what's your, what's your mindset about it as a, as a founder, you know, for us it's like a rising tide, you know, lifts all both. It's always been great when markets are great for us to go raise capital. But on the other side, I think being a company that's focused on the data and pushing forward kind of doing what we're doing. What we say we're going to do has meant that we get kind of our pick of investor and I think the best companies get to pick their shareholders and we've been really lucky that way. So look, I think it always sucks when you see a bunch of things turn over and companies die. But out of that comes all of these other really great things, people can work together, they can bring teams together that weren't possible before and that's been true for us and it's been awesome. Right on. Well, thank you for joining us at Brainstorm Health. Thank you, Andrew for sure. Appreciate it.