Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Overcoming Skepticism When Commercializing Novel Therapies: Interview with Taopatch USA CEO Dmitri Leonov

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we had a fascinating chat with Dmitri Leonov, co-founder and CEO of Taopatch USA. The company is commercializing a range of wearable nanotechnology light therapy devices aimed at managing neurological conditions including pain management and sports performance.  Dmitri is also an advisor in a number of transformative technology projects. After seven fruitful years at Overture and later at Yahoo, he dove into the startup world. He went on to found several companies, including Sanebox.com, but was intrigued by frequency medicine and started his current venture by bringing Taopatch to the United States from Italy, where it was first invented.In this interview, Dmitri shares how the company was able to garner unique publicity and how strategic partnerships with holistic practitioners, authentic user testimonials, and a creative money-back guarantee strategy were instrumental in Taopatch USA's market success.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and a curated investor database to help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume V. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Dmitri Leonov.

But what I always say is it actually doesn't matter what the studies say. The only study that matters has a sample of one, and that's you. The only person it matters whether it works or not for is you. And the only way to know is to try it. And so the way we addressed it is by having a money bag guarantee. We know that it's completely safe. Welcome to Medsider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs, in medical devices and health technology.

Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful life science startups in the world. Now, here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey everyone, it's Scott. In this episode of MedSiter, I sat down with Dimitri Leonow, co-founder and CEO of Taupatch USA. After several fruit-free years at Overture and later Yahoo,

Dimitri dove into the startup world. After founding several companies, including sanebox.com, he was intrigued by frequency medicine and started his current venture by bringing Taupatch in the United States from Italy, where it was first invented. Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, Taupatch has recently scored some impressive publicity from world-renowned tennis player Novak Djokovic and famous actor Robert Darning Jr. But you can't fake your way into that kind of spotlight. You had to have a working device in the capabilities to scale. Build steady momentum and be prepared to seize those moments of luck when they come your way.

Second, when it comes to market development, first identify those who are going to be receptive to what you're doing. Examine your potential partner's business models and look for alignment. Once you have a solid base of customers, optimize for organic growth using customer testimonials and word of mouth. Third, running huge clinical trials require serious capital and resources. If you've already proven the safety of your device, you can use a creative strategy, like a money dot guarantee, for example, to reach a greater audience and let their testimonials

demonstrate the validity of your product. All right, before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let you know that the latest edition of Medsider Mentors is now live. We just published Volume 5, which summarizes the key learnings from the most popular Medsider interviews over the last several months with incredible entrepreneurs like Gabriel Jones, CEO of Proprio, Kirsten Carroll, CEO of Can Do Health, Dr. David Alpert, founder of AliveCorp, Greg Bullington, CEO of Magnolia Medical, and other leaders of some of the hottest startups in our space. Look, it's tough to listen or read every interview that comes out, even the best ones. But there are so many valuable lessons you can pick up

from the founders and CEOs that join our program. So that's why we decided to create Medsider Mentors. It's the easiest way for you to learn from the world's best medical device and health technology entrepreneurs in one central place. To check out the latest volume, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to the entire library of

interviews dating back to 2010. You'll also be able to see all of our playbooks, which are handpicked collections of the most insightful interviews with the brightest founders and CEOs that join our program. Whether you're looking to master capital fundraising, navigate early stage development, tackle regulatory challenges, understand reimbursement or position your venture for a meaningful exit, MedSider Playbooks have you covered. And last, considering that fundraising can be one of the most daunting tasks for any startup, we created a meticulous database of investors right at your fingertips. Explore a wealth of VC funds, private equity firms, angel groups, and more, all eager to invest in medical device and health technology startups. Access to this database is a premium member exclusive, so don't miss out.

Learn more about MedSider mentors and our premium memberships by visiting Medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. All right. Without further ado, let's jump into the interview. All right, Dimitri, welcome to Medsider. Appreciate you coming on, man. Thank you for having me. Yeah, this should be a fun conversation. I love interviewing kind of more health tech entrepreneurs, right? The show probably it's 75% kind of focused on more traditional medical device,

but I love bringing over a lot of insights, right, to what you're doing in kind of the health tech space and trying to blend the worlds together a little bit. But let's start at the top, right, with kind of your sort of professional bio leading up to kind of co-founding Tao Pact USA. Yeah, so my background is very non-medical. started in investment banking after the university, then spent a few years working at Yahoo, or actually a company that was acquired by Yahoo, and then joined the combination of those two. And this is back when Yahoo was actually cool.

And people still remember it. Was that when Marissa Mayer was there then? Or was that prior? My journey there ended when right around when she, joined. But yeah, it was actually a really, really cool place to work for a long time. If we look at the alumni from Yahoo from those days, nowadays, I mean, extremely successful people. So really, really, really good team. Great network. Anyway, so then I got the startup bug and launched my first startup, then the second one. And a few years ago, I kind of, I really

got focused on health tech and wellness in general, just from personal experience and just wanting to work on something, let's say, more meaningful, right? And realizing that, especially coming from Yahoo days, where we had so many really smart people focused on optimizing clicks, essentially, right? So optimizing monetization for clicks. And it just seems like, like or seemed like not the most, not the best use of time of all of these really smart people. And it's good to see, I'm seeing a lot of my former colleagues from internet and media and especially gaming move into this wellness tech world. And it's really good to see because, again, they're really, really smart people.

And it's a good idea to leverage all of our combined focus on stuff that really matters for humanity. 100% agree. In fact, I was having this conversation just recently at a cardiovascular conference, right? We were having dinner with an interventional cardiologist in Boston who's, you know, pretty well respected or I should say very well respected in his own right. And we're talking about like the kind of this trend within more kind of traditional business and tech circles, right?

We're talking specifically about the All-In podcast and, you know, how a lot of those guys are talking about, you know, newer health things. even even kind of on the verge of like sort of medical medical treatments and it's just it's good I mean the awareness and kind of overall interest it seems is is is burging right and to your point those are some of the smartest people right in the world working on on tech companies right it'd be it'd be great to have some of those that get some of that that juice right into into areas that impact impact health and health and wellness so and funding funding very important things well right now just time and focus with money oh 100 percent 100 percent because that's the

The reality is like most of these devices take quite a bit of funding, right, to ever see the line of day. So, yeah, no doubt. So the company that you're one of the companies, or maybe the main company you're working on, right, I reference is at the outset of this interview is Tao Patch, right? And obviously, you know, focused as the co-founder of Taupatch USA. It's spelled just for everyone listening, Tao Patch is T-A-O-T-C-H, Tao Patch. And the website is TaoPatch.com, willing to it in the full write-off on MedSider, like we always do. But, Demetri, give us a sense for kind of like what at a high level without going two-partner

to the wheat right now. Give us a sense for kind of what this is and kind of how you came about the technology. Sure. So what it is is a really, really fascinating piece of technology. It's nanomaterials. It's a nanotechnology device that essentially when you place it on your skin, it can capture your body heat. In other words, your infrared energy.

And it can convert it. to a broader spectrum of light, all the way from infrared to ultraviolet. So you can kind of think of it like a prism where one kind of light enters it and then it splits it splits it into a broader spectrum. But then it also, it's like a mirror because it reflects this light back into your body

and back into your nervous system. And the way we describe Talpatch is it's a combination of light therapy and acupuncture. So light therapy is actually, a really well-researched form of medicine. There are over 9,000 studies, peer-reviewed, you know, double-blank studies on PubMed, studying different kinds of light therapy

and the effect of light on different systems of our body. And there's lots, lots of research on, you know, injury recovery, on neurological disorders, on, you know, mood and, you know, seasonal disorder. That's what comes to mind first when we, think about light therapy. But the kind of light therapy that Talabash is closest to is, it's called low-level laser therapy. And what it is, is basically you're taking a very weak laser, so it's

not something that's going to cut through steel, but it just shines light on your body. And placing it on points where you have pain or injury has tremendous results. And so Talabash was a lot of actually invented by a brilliant bioengineer from Italy named Fabio Fontana. Well over a decade ago, he started working on this. And the story is that he himself had a really devastating injury, and he was just in a lot of pain that had to take a painkiller, like a mountain of painkillers every day just to survive. And nothing would help him other than painkillers just for a few hours. So the one thing that he got tremendous benefit from was light therapy.

This low-level laser therapy where you shine the light on some part of your body and your pain goes away. And so the humblement was how do we take that technology and make it more available, make it more consistent? And so Talbatch, the main discovery is this nanomaterial. And the non-material is called a quantum dog. Interestingly enough, just last year, the gentleman who invented quantum dots back in the 90s won the Nobel Prize for physics. So it's a really unique piece of technology. It's really a nanomaterial, so there's no battery, there's no power. All it's doing is, again, it's converting one form of light into another.

And because of this, it works for two and a half years without battery. and so whereas normally with light therapy you would go to a physician's office and apply it for a few minutes or maybe even an hour if you're lucky and then and then you kind of go back to your normal life and yes there are some lingering effects but it really doesn't allow your body to kind of to integrate all this therapy and so by placing towel patch on your body and you can put it you can just apply it with a skin tape or band by placing it on specific points where we have injury, where you have pain, and also we have different protocols based on acupuncture, Chinese medicine. And so placing the patches on those points has a really dramatic effect. And we can talk about it more, but it almost seems too good to be true in many cases. But again, we have a couple dozen studies at this point. Many are double-blind, placebo-controlled.

And so we see just amazing results from putting this little, doesn't even look like a device. It looks like a little plastic coin. Yeah. But it can do miracles. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So just at a high level, if I understand this correctly, wearable patch.

And I presume let's take an example, like say I injured my shoulder, right? am I adding multiple tau patches, right? Or is it literally just one? Is it sort of treatment area dependent on, in terms of like the number of patches that you'd place in that area? Honestly, just one is fine. If it's a, if there's just one injury,

you can place one patch on the point where it hurts and it will make the pain go away. We can talk more about actually what happens in your body. But then we have other protocols for, you know, for example, for neurological disorders like, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's, which actually has been the majority of our customers over the

years. For them, it's a minimum of two patches that are required. Some protocols require three or four, but normally two or three is more than enough, at least to get started. Got it, got it. And the nanomaterial that you're using basically captures or utilizes the heat, the infrared heat coming from bodies and sort of repurposes right into into low-level light therapy or LLT as you mentioned. Yeah, got it, got it. Well, I think that helps. And again, tau-patch.com is the website. If you're listening and don't get to the full write-up, it's tao-patch.com, just as it sounds.

For those listening, I'm sure you might be naturally skeptical, right? This idea of shining lights at your body and then, you know, we then receiving, you know, some sort of host of benefits, right, from this. But as, as Demetri mentioned, it's, it's a very, very proven sort of modality and technology. In fact, there's, you know, there's physicians, PhDs, et cetera, you know, that speak on podium on this, on this, on this data, this, you know, light therapy, photobiomodulation, etc. In fact, Demetia, I'm not sure if you were like before Fastway, which is the company, I started, I spent, I spend my time on now.

I co-founded a company called Juve, which is in the, in the light therapy space. And I was very, very skeptical back in 2015 when I first. came upon this therapy, I was like, what? You shine, you know, bright red or, you know, invisible near infrared lights on your body and supposedly there's all these, all these benefits. But sure not, there's tons of data that support it for such a wide variety of conditions. It's quite, quite amazing. And it's legit, you know, it's legit science. So, so yeah, this should be, I'm looking forward to kind of learning a little bit more about your experience, you know, commercializing the technology and kind of where you're headed next. So with that said,

said, give us a sense, kind of a high-level sense, and kind of where you're at. I mean, if I go to the website, it looks like you're actively commercializing, give us a better sense to kind of where the company do that now and maybe where you're headed over the next 12 months. Yeah. So we have new products coming up.

That's the big, I guess one of the big things we're doing. Well, so we've been very, for the last few years, we've been really focused on neurological disorders, simply because this is where we've seen, we've been able to make the biggest impact. Basically, when the light from, and you know all about this, but when the light from,

Talapache or any light therapy enters your nervous system, it kind of tunes our nerve, it reminds our nervous system what proper communication between neurons is supposed to be like. And it kind of speeds up this communication between neurons, which has all sorts of effects, but the first system that gets affected is your proprioception,

meaning your motion, your balance, movement, location, and space, essentially. And there are two kinds of people for whom this improvement is particularly useful. So the first kind is athletes, because for them, you know, shaving off a few, you know, even a split second, right, from a hundred meter race can be a huge difference. And then the second group is people whose nervous systems. system is not functioning properly. And so these are people with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, fibromyalgia, chronic pain of different kinds.

And so for them, it's been a really, really important improvement to their life. Last summer, we got a really nice piece of publicity from Novak Djokovic, who wears Talbatchman. he at the press conference when somebody asked him what what is this thing you're wearing he said first he made a joke about wanting to be iron man because you wear it kind of on your chest so reminds of iron man but then he said it's the biggest secret of his career and he wouldn't be sitting here without it today um so and so that that that really helped us a lot so we're moving into, we have moved into

sport space and we have a lot of sports teams that are that are using us. We have about 20 Olympians in these upcoming Olympic Games, many of them are our spokespeople. And what we're focused on now

is moving into kind of more of the everyone else bucket. It's not people in your knowledge and sort of not people not professional athletes. you know I guess

the one category I would describe is somebody like myself an aging amateur athlete where stuff starts to hurt a little bit so just improving overall

well-being and longevity and some kind of chronic or pain here and there on your back those things are incredibly helpful and then another really interesting thing that happened a couple of weeks ago, weeks ago, so the actor playing Ironman, Robert Downey Jr. was at the Golden Globes, and he won the award best actor for Oppenheimer. And as he is holding up the award, you can see Tau Patch on his wrist. And so he's wearing it on the

the emotional well-being points. And so we have actually a lot of customers who don't have any physical issues and don't have any pain, but they're wearing it for feeling better emotionally. This is a really, really big thing that we're focusing on. That's cool. I love those stories. And I want to get into those in a little bit more detail. And if I understand it, right, like the next sort of direction for the company in terms of targeting would be people that listen to the Huberman podcast, right?

It sounds like, right? People that are proactive about their health, you know, kind of on the leading edge of that, but don't necessarily have maybe a certain conditions, so to speak, that they're trying to treat. But that's a really helpful overview. And I do want to ask you a little bit more about like your experience is generally kind of, you know, sort of engaging with, you know, big names like Novak or others, for that matter. But before we get there, just to level set the audience, too.

When Dimitri mentioned like light therapy, you're sort of tuning the nervous system. This is not distinctly different than the neuromodulation devices that we see often in MetTech, right? Where it's like an implantable device. you're in essence, you're modulating the body's nervous system. And the tau patch, you're just sort of doing that naturally, right? Because you're using your body's own heat to repurpose that energy to enhance cell signaling. And that's, I remember having a conversation, gosh, this has been a while ago. But we were looking at the efficacy of using green tea in combination with light therapy.

And I always thought, oh, it must be because of the aura, the high orc score of green tea, right? That probably is maybe synergistic with light therapy. And no, when you look at the data, it's actually because green tea helps induce better cell signaling, which is naturally synergistic to light therapy. I mean, they work kind of in parallel, right? I mean, the goal is, again, you're modulating your nervous system to function better. So I just wanted to call it out because it resonates with me. And I just wanted to ensure people are kind of tracking with kind of the underlying mechanism here that we're talking about.

Well, actually, can I just, you said you use the word resonate. And that's a really important point. So in this whole field of frequency medicine, right, which is very, very young and very early on. And by the way, there's a quote by Albert Einstein who said that future medicine will be the medicine of frequencies. At least the quote is attributed to him. I haven't heard him say it on video anywhere. But it's look it up. It's used a lot.

But anyway, so frequency medicine is a really fast. fascinating form of medicine. So we have light, sound, electromagnetic frequencies, right? And the reason why this is so revolutionary and why, you know, I personally agree with Mr. Einstein, this is a, you know, but if you look at the, at the world from the quantum mechanics point of view, and everything is a wave and a particle. And, you know, it's a wave before it gets observed. and then it becomes a particle, right? So just very 100-year-old quantum physics. And if everything is actually a wave,

then one of the most kind of basic or fundamental ways of affecting something is through other waves, and specifically through resonance, because everything does resonate with everything else. And so, yes, to a traditional mainstream community, to a doctor who went to a normal med school, this is kind of crazy talk. And frankly, even just seeing how, or reading a study on how shining a very faint light

on your acupoint, right, how that can have any kind of an effect, it sounds crazy. So, ergo must be placebo effect. And again, we have plenty of placebo control studies and other people do as well. And if you look at, if you go on our website, tamopash.co, you can see the videos of people before and after. And most of them are taken on the same day. So these are people who couldn't walk in a straight line before because of the disorder that they have. They put the batches on and they start walking normally. And we just finished a 800-person study on pain. And the results are just incredible. I mean, we're seeing, again, same thing. Within minutes, the pain goes away. And it's, again,

placebo-controlled study. Yeah. No, that's awesome. And I love. the fact that you're actually like allocating resources towards towards actually proving this out in studies. Right. Because that that overcomes a lot of the natural skepticism that comes with newer therapies like this. But I kind of on this topic of like, you know, you talked about the Albert Einstein quote

as an example, right? The analogy, because we have a fair amount of like investors and entrepreneurs that listed the program. And there's this notion in tech that's like if you, from an investment perspective of like, you want to be investing in things. that like all the nerds are doing on the weekend right in their spare time right that's usually like a sign of like this really smart group of people they're like passionate about whether it's bitcoin 10 years ago AI five to seven years ago etc like they're doing they're spending like their weekend time

doing you know messing around with the stuff that's where the trends are and I think the same thing holds true for a lot of like whether you call it health and wellness or medicine is like things that are happening at remedy studio in LA as an example and in the sound sound bath, there's people paying out of, out of pocket, a lot of money for these services. They're working in some capacity, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't keep paying out of pocket cash for like these services, these product, et cetera. So it's like that's sort of the framework I'd like to use when it comes to a lot of this, a lot of this stuff is like it's, it's early. It feels maybe kind of crazy. But if people are doing it and paying a lot of money for it,

they're not going to just paying cash for something that's not working. So clearly it's making a difference, you know what I mean? And so that's, we're going to likely see some of this stuff come to fruition, you know, and in the more mainstream, you know, call it five to ten years ago. So, hey there, it's Scott, and thanks for listening in so far. The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium Members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. You'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Renee Ryan, CEO of Cala Health, Nadid Miarid, CEO of CVRX, and so many others.

As a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible medical device and health technology entrepreneurs. In addition, you'll get a copy of every volume of Medsider mentors at no additional cost. To learn more, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash premium. Again, that's Medsiderradio.com forward slash premium.