Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Why You Can’t Build a Medtech Start-Up Without Publicity: Interview with Peter Vranes, CEO of Nutromics

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we caught up with chemical engineer and serial entrepreneur Peter Vranes, the Co-Founder and CEO of Nutromics, an Australian medtech company that is developing a digitally connected wearable patch to track molecular targets.Previously, Peter founded Biocore Technologies, which developed natural cosmeceutical skincare brands with distribution in 1,500 retailers throughout Australia. He had a successful exit in 2013.In this fun discussion, Peter explains how he learned to embrace publicity as a necessary part of doing business, why getting your device approved goes beyond government regulatory bodies and the reason he never stops raising money. Before we jump into the conversation, I wanted to mention a few things:If you’re into learning from proven medtech and healthtech leaders, and want to know when new content and interviews go live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter. You’ll get access to gated articles, and lots of other interesting healthcare content. Second, if you want even more inside info from proven experts, think about a Medsider premium membership. We talk to experienced healthcare leaders about the nuts and bolts of running a business and bringing products to market. This is your place for valuable knowledge on specific topics like seed funding, prototyping, insurance reimbursement, and positioning a medtech startup for an exit.In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, Premium members get exclusive Ask Me Anything interviews and masterclasses with some of the world’s most successful medtech founders and executives. Since making the premium memberships available, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many people have signed up. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, here's the link to the full interview with Peter if you'd rather read it instead.

I never really, I was just focused, just build the product. You know, I never really thought too much about the PR. That's like an afterthought when you're in the market. I've seen the value for us in doing it now. And I would do it for every future company early. And the advice I would give is do it. I know it takes time. I know we don't have a lot of time and we're all in the rest of it.

But you get a lot of value. When we get now inbound leads, so from VCs, from, you know, hospital networks from other major companies, but we're starting to getting more of that coming in. Welcome to MedSider Radio, where you can learn from proven med tech and healthcare thought leaders through uncut and unedited interviews. Now, here's your host, Scott Nelson.

Hey, everyone, it's Scott, and in this episode of Medsider Radio, we're talking with Chemical Engineer and Serial Entrepreneur, Peter Rains, who is the co-founder and CEO of Neutromics, an Australian MedSat company that is developing a digitally, connected wearable patch to track molecular targets. Previously, Peter founded Biocor Technologies which developed natural cosmaceutical skincare brands that were distributed in over 1,500 retailers throughout Australia.

Peter also had a successful exit in 2013. In this conversation, here are a few things we discuss. Making a great medical device is just the first challenge of building a successful MedTech company. You also have to build brand awareness in the industry, widely publicized, complexly. Petitions and accelerators are one way to do that. Two things to start working on early. Funding and meeting regulatory requirements.

If you fail to build a runway, you'll most certainly run out of money. And the regulatory process has immovable timelines that can hold you up at great cost. Last, it's not just regulators whose approval you need. You have to convince a diverse array of committees and hospitals and healthcare systems that your device will save them money. Frustratingly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for this process. Okay, so before we jump into the discussion, I want to mention a few things. First, since you're listening to Medsider, you're probably aware of how expensive it is to run clinical trials.

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For the medsider audience, with an annual contract, Prove Pilot will provide IRB approval for your first study at no cost. Some exclusions apply, so visit Medsider Radio.com forward slash proof. Prove Pilot to learn more. Okay, second, if you're into learning from proven MedTech leaders and want to know when the new content and interviews go live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter. You'll get access to gated articles and lots of other interesting healthcare content.

If you want even more inside info from MedTech experts, think about a MedSider premium membership. We talked to experienced healthcare leaders about the nuts and bolts of running a business and bringing products to market. This is your place for valuable knowledge on specific topics like seed funding, prototyping, insurance reimbursement, and positioning a MedTech startup for an exit. In addition to the entire back catalog of MedSider interviews over the past decade, premium members get exclusive Ask Me Anything interviews and masterclasses with some of the world's most

successful MedTech founders and executives. Since making the premium memberships available, I've been pleasantly surprised at how many people have signed up. So if you're interested, go to Medsider.com to learn more. Without further ado, let's get to the interview. Peter, welcome to Med Sider Radio. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Scott.

Great to be here. All right, looking forward to this conversation. I've been watching, you know, what you've been doing with the company from afar. So excited to kind of dig in and learn a little bit more. I personally have kind of an interest in the wearable space. And so I know you guys are doing some innovative things. So with that said, before we kind of dive right into kind of your experiences and lessons learned throughout kind of your health tech and med tech entrepreneurial career.

I provide a little bit of context, a little bit of background about yourself, kind of at the outset of this interview. But let's start there. If you can add some context about your personal background and a little bit more about neutromics. Yeah, sure. Let's start off with, I'm a dad to three little kids.

That's always interesting to entrepreneur and dad to three little kids. Yeah, so I started a seven in years. ago, which kind of ages me a little bit. But it's been a long journey, but, you know, probably the most rewarding, one of the most rewarding things we've ever done, I've got to say, one of the hardest things, but most rewarding. So I'm a chemical engineer by background and started a skincare brand many years ago. And eventually we put that into pharmacies and retailers in Australia. So we had about 1,500 different retailers, which is really good distribution. And then sold that a number of years ago, started to work on another skincare brand and had one

of those moments where, you know, I think I was about two years in developing that and really thought, is this what I want to do for the next, you know, five, 10 years? I like skincare, but I can't say that I was like massively passionate about it. And so an opportunity arose where in developing that skincare brand, I was working with a company in Germany looking at, this was a brand that was about skin health. And so we wanted to quantify skin health. How do you know someone's got healthy skin?

So no one had ever done that before. And so one of the factors is the antioxidant level of the skin. And so this company that we're working with, we're doing a trial, and they could measure antioxidant levels, optically. And at the time, I was reading a book by Tim Ferriss before our body. And he talks about a micronutrient test that he did. And he made all these great insights and discoveries. And I thought, oh, gee, that would be cool. And I tried to do it. And the only place that you could get it done was in the

US. And I couldn't send blood there. So I started to talk to this company about in Germany about whether their tech could monitor micronutrients. And that was a start. And from there, we realized, well, no one really cares that much about micronutrients. So we sort of quickly discovered that. Then we looked at, and then my co-founder came on board, he Tishmeta. And there's a whole series of pivots and changes. And this, you know, you always hear it's never a straight line. And for us it wasn't.

And it led us to where we are today, which is monitoring of, well, a platform technology that can monitor any molecular target continuously and in real time. And that's a transformative technology. When you really dig into deep into that, you can change, literally you can change healthcare. There are so many problems that are present because we can't do that today. And clinicians lack timely and actionable molecular data and people die. And that's, that's just what happens. So that's kind of a bit of the evolution.

But yeah, it certainly hasn't been a straight line. You got it. Yeah. And I can completely appreciate the kind of the multiple pivots and the zigs and the zags that I imagine that you've been through over the past few years. But when it comes to Neutromics, I want to rewind the clock and dive a little bit more into like the early kind of what this looked like in its infancy. But for those listening, provide like a kind of an elevator pitch on Neutromics. I know you just gave us kind of a one-liner.

But can you provide a tell us just a little bit more about what you're doing or what you envision more so? Yeah. So, I mean, we've got a platform technology. It's contained in a patch. So we have a patch with microneedles. and on the end of those microneedles, we put a platform sensor. And when I say a platform sensor, what I mean is a sensor that's agnostic to the target. So we can measure, in theory, any molecular target.

So the best comparator is a continuous glucose monitor. Most people have seen those. So diabetics wear it, you know, transform the way diabetes is managed, type 1, but moving into type 2 and any well-being applications. But that technology, as brilliant as it is, just measures glucose. And so this is what we call the evolution of CGM, right? And we call ours continuous molecular monitoring as opposed to continuous glucose monitoring. Because we're broader.

We're any molecular target. So our first market is the dosing of a drug called an antibiotic called vancomycin. So very commonly dose, 1 in 5 in patients in the US, get dosis drug. Really problematic. It has a narrow therapeutic window. 60% of doses are outside that therapeutic window. 10 to 20% of patients get a toxic dose, often leading to an acute kidney injury.

That's one of the top 10 killers in hospitals. It leads to chronic kidney disease. It costs the hospital system $20,000 per patient every time there's an A.K.I. It's expensive. The way that they, the technology is very basic, the way they do it now. and clinicians are searching for a solution. They do this every day. They, you know, they're all about do no harm.

So when the patient comes in with one problem and they give them an A.K. That's obviously unacceptable. And they know that. But they'd have no options. They do the best with what they've got. So there's a real pool for this sort of technology. But beyond that, this is a long elevator pitch, Scott. Sorry.

You're fine. You're fine. Beyond that, that's our first application. but we have much bigger plans. As I mentioned before, this is a transformative technology. I don't use that lightly because very few technologies are, but we believe in a vision of a patch for every patient. And we think that there is a value proposition and a utility,

clinical utility to justify that, and that's where we're heading. So this is for triaging, for, you know, early diagnosis of conditions like sepsis, anything that is fast moving, getting a handle on the molecular targets is really important. And the fact that we can do multi-analyte, that's critical. So that means we can stream, you know, on one patch, 12 different sensors for different molecular targets, continuously in real time.

And clinicians that aren't hampered by waiting for lab results, which is really problematic. When you're constantly waiting for information to make clinical decisions, that's a problem. So this real-time information is, we think, is absolutely where we need to go. And that's what we're going to deliver. Got it, got it. So this displaces, one of my follow-up questions was around, like, what does this replace?

And I think, if I understand this, right, you just mentioned it, right? So the physician that's going to traditionally collect this information, via blood work and wait, you know, hours, if not days for the results, you're able to monitor certain molecular diagnostics in real time, giving them, you know, that information now, you know, versus, you know, hours later. Got it. I mean, yeah, clinicians are under a huge cognitive load. That's one of the major causes of medical error. They, they've got a lot of balls in the air. So anything that simplifies that gives them rich data in real time. So they can, they can walk up to a patient and make a decision then and there is super, super valuable. That's what we're delivering.

Exactly that. Got it. And we're going to get into some of the kind of lessons learned, you know, that you've experienced not only over your career, but also a neutromic specifically. But before we kind of dive into that part of the conversation, you mentioned kind of a comparator to CGMs or continuous glucose monitors. That's the first thing that I thought of when I started looking at at at atotomics, maybe six, nine months ago, something like that.

And, you know, one of my friends, Dr. Anthony Guston, who's the founder of Perfect Keto, which is a direct-to-consumer brand that's focused on providing supplements for people who are interested in the kineogenic diet. He made a comment, I don't know, maybe it was several months ago that says, like, look, the reality with CGMs is that you can eat a tub of lard, which is totally unhealthy, but it won't spike your glucose levels, right? Because it's because of its chemical makeup. And he's like, what we need is, what we need is something better, right?

Like almost like a real-time kind of inflammation, a continuous, inflammation marker of some type, right? And it seems like, it seems like Neutromics could be that. So with that said, have you, I know you're, you're kind of focused on, on certain use cases that you mentioned, but are you exploring this at all for like direct to the direct to consumer market? Definitely. I mean, this is, this is in our DNA, what you just said there, right? Fundamentally, we started this company, my co-founder and I, for the one purpose of focusing on prevention, right we have a we all i think most people agree we have a broken system here that we wait for people to get sick we've spoken to lots and lots of endocrinologists for example and we we were looking

in the early days about um pre-diabetes so what happens when a patient gets pre-diabetes what happens then you know what's the next step now typically what happens is that they're told to go away eat less and exercise more, which is of insight to zero people, because we all know that. That doesn't help anyone. And then once they get diabetes, we'll treat you. That's insane. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever because diabetes is preventable if you catch it early enough.

And once you've got diabetes, you know, it's really hard to reverse. I mean, you can go on ketogenic diets and vert, are getting great results. But boy, it's a lot easy if you can catch it early. So, yeah, and we see that all throughout the healthcare system, that it is a system designed to treat sick people, not prevent people from getting sick in the first place. There are diabetes prevention programs,

but they serve as tiny fraction of the number of people with prediabetes. There are 82 million people in the US with prediabetes. There is only a tiny fraction that you ever go through a diabetes prevention program. So we really want to tackle that. So we're looking at acute needs right now just because it makes sense. People die now because you can't dose vancomycin safely and efficaciously right now. So that's where we go right now because that's an acute need.

Where we want to go eventually is to prevention. We want to be able to tell people and have consumers self-empowered to find this information out themselves because they've got a device that can give them insights that they are on the path to diabetes or they're on the path to a cardiovascular disease or one of many other diseases that there are molecular biomarkers early. We want to be able to inform them of that. That's number one. Number two, we want to be able to help them change their lifestyle.

That's one of the hardest things to do. Traditionally, it's one of the hardest things to do. It just so happens that real-time molecular feedback, is great for behavior change. When people see personalized feedback, when I do X, Y occurs and it's personalized to me, that's so much more impactful from behavior change point of view than generalized guidelines, which is what we have now. We have the food pyramid.

We have eat. It's all generalized, right? That doesn't change behavior. Real-time biofeedback together with insights is far more likely to change. behavior. So going to what you're saying, so the food, right, is a classic example. If you could measure, say, glucose, triglycerides, and insulin, you could personalize an individual's diet really well. Like that would be the holy grail. Right now, there's companies like levels that have been very successful. You know, the guys there, Josh, and a few of the other

co-founders. And they're doing amazing work. And that's with glucose. That's just with glucose. They've got a waiting list of 100,000 people. So there is an appetite out there from the market to look at personalized diets, prevention. There is an appetite there, an unmet need. We have a technology that can satisfy it. We want to go there and we will go there eventually. It's a process though. And we can't do all things straight away. But eventually that's where we're going to go as a company is a consumer device that does those things and helps people in terms of personalizing the diet, which is a big one, stress management, you know, cortisol, for example, is a great market for that.

Activity, you know, lactate and other things, performance. And sleep. Sleep is the other one. You know, aura, I've got the aura ring. You know, it's a, it's a great tool. But sleep stages is just something it doesn't do fantastically well. And, I mean, that's, that's, they've done trials on. And so there's still a bit of work there.

So the ability to be able to monitor molecular markers of sleep stages would be a first. We've got some targets already from that because then you can improve sleep quality, not just click duration. And that's something that no one's ever been able to do before. So there's some really exciting things that once you can, once you open the Pandora's box of you can monitor any molecular target, there is some pretty amazing stuff you can do in terms of the healthcare system. Yeah, no doubt. I love that you're wearing the O-R-Ring. I wear one as well, and it sounds like you're familiar with what levels have done here in the U.S. Yeah. You mentioned their weight list. And it's, I mean, it's impressive what they've been able to, I mean, they're capturing that consumer demand, right, that wants access to this type of information. So, so very cool. With that said, we're going to dig into, you know, kind of the early stages of neutromics. But first, you recently, I think you recently announced maybe, I don't know, a month of a month of, a month of,

to or go, your acceptance into the MedTech Innovator Accelerator Program. Can you tell us a little bit more about, like, maybe about the program, but more specifically, you know, why did you decide to, like, do the, or participate? And, you know, would you, would you recommend it for other other med tech and health tech entrepreneurs? Yeah, good question. Because it's, you know, it's US base. We're based in Melbourne. Before we started this chat, well, I was mentioning, you know, we, we're in Melbourne, all our meetings are with the MedTech Innovators start at 2.30 a.m. You got to be pretty serious, right? I mean, it's got to be worth it for you to. Oh, boy, you got three little kids and business, a lot of stuff going on, you know, and pulling all-nighters.

I'm sure I used to do that, you know, in my university days, but it's been a long time, right? There's got to be a pretty big pull. But, you know, in our DNA as a company, what we've, you know, we talked about all those pivots and changes. that happened because we collaborate really broadly and that helps us learn fast. You know, we're in a game, we're all in a game that you've got to learn super fast and your successful failure will be dictated by how fast you learn in a lot of ways. So, you know, instead of constraining a lot of the knowledge, which I know a lot of companies do, and I used to do it within the four walls of the organization, we reach out and we work with lots of different partners.

And it doesn't just mean more partners means more acceleration. It's the right partners as well. So MedTech Innovator, one of the main reasons we went for that was that it gave us access to great companies that we can collaborate with. So like Dexcom and, you know, there's a whole range of, you know, that's relevant one in our industry, obviously, but the whole range of other companies. And so going through that process, you get that. And that's great.

And so we really value that. The other one is that there are 1,100 companies that went for, that go for this. This is the world's biggest accelerator slash competition because it's two and one. So we're down to last 25 now. And I think that there's a lot of great, you know, a PR you can get from being successful in some of these things. You know, you want to focus on building your business and making a product. but there's also a place for attracting attention because that helps facilitate these collaborations. If you're an unknown, it's harder than if you've got an awareness in the sector that you're dealing in.

So we find that, you know, that helps and we do a bit a lot on like LinkedIn and it's something that, you know, throughout my career, I never really, I was just focused, just build the product, you know, I never really thought too much about the PR. That's like an afterthought when you're in the market. I've seen the value for us in doing it now, and I would do it for every future company early. And the advice I would give is do it. I know it takes time. I know we don't have a lot of time, and we're all in the rest of it. But you get a lot of value.

We get now inbound leads, so from VCs, from, you know, hospital networks, from other major companies. But we're starting to get more of that coming in. That's really good. That makes it so much easier for us to facilitate these connections, as opposed to, hey, you don't know me. Are you happy to have a Zoom call with me? And, you know, and often it's no. Because, oh, yeah, it could be no or whatever.

But yeah, so there are the two reasons. Yeah, it's early. It comes out of cost. But there's some pretty nice reasons to be part of it. 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

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