Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Why Your 'Kitty Hawk Moment' Matters: Interview with Elucid CEO Kelly Huang

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Kelly Huang, President and CEO of Elucid. Elucid has developed a platform that uses AI to analyze cardiac CT scans to provide a detailed, non-invasive assessment of a patient’s arterial plaque. Kelly's journey spans nearly 30 years of leadership in healthcare, with expertise in driving innovation and growth across medical devices, diagnostics, health IT, and consumer health. Before Elucid, he served as COO at Cardea Bio, leading its successful acquisition by Paragraf, and as CEO of Obalon Therapeutics, where he introduced noninvasive medical devices to expand treatment options for physicians. Kelly's career also includes senior roles at L-Nutra, Nestlé/Galderma, Endo Pharmaceuticals, and Johnson & Johnson.In this interview, Kelly shares advice on how to successfully bring novel devices to market, secure reimbursement, and drive adoption by focusing on the essentials—collaboration, trust, robust data, and transparency.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 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and 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 VII. 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 Kelly Huang.

I've got roles in companies where it is about the market's established you're stealing share. It's Coke versus Pepsi. I've got a better promotion. I get better salespeople come my way and you'll switch back and forth. When you go into a category, what's new and my metrics and med devices, the research shows it takes 17 years for the average physician to adopt the standard of care. Like, you've got a lot of work just to develop that modality and having ethical players or like good neighbors doing that together is a lot more helpful. And it's not about stealing share and Coke versus Petsch. It really is about investing in those things that make this adopted by that,

not just the key opinion that there's but that average physician across the country. And that's hard work and it's good work to do together to build that community. 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 MedSider, I sat down with Kelly Wong, CEO of Illucid. Kelly's journey to the company spans nearly 30 years of leadership in health care, with expertise in driving innovation and growth across medical devices, diagnostics, health IT, and consumer health. Before Illucid, Kelly served as COO at Cardiobio, leading its successful acquisition by paragraph, and his CEO of Obolon Therapeutics, where he introduced non-invasive medical devices to,

expand treatment options for physicians. His career also includes senior roles at El Nutra, Nestle-Galderma, Indo- Pharmaceuticals, and J&J. Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, strip your innovation down to the essentials before getting carried away with anything else. In other words, what's the one breakthrough or functionality you absolutely need to show to prove the viability of your concept? Don't overcomplicate it. Resist distractions, avoid unnecessary bells and whistles, and put every resource into demonstrating that your technology works. Second, to secure reimbursement, cloud. with physicians societies and industry groups to present a unified case to payers,

backed by robust clinical and economic data that shows how your product improves outcomes and reduce costs. And don't see competitors as enemies. When you're building a new market, collaboration often works better than going at it alone. Together, you can build a stronger case for reimbursement. Third, adoption starts with trust and proof. To earn it, focus on making your technology transparent and supportive, not a replacement for physicians. Engage key opinion leaders who can validate your product, invest in rigorous clinical trials to back up your clients. and demonstrate clear health economics to show payers it's worth the investment.

All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of MedSider Mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health and other proven medtech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every MedCider interview isn't easy.

That's why we created Medsider Mentor. These ebook volumes distill the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest format. To check the latest volume out, head over to medsiderradi.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes, plus a treasure trove of other resources. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. We recently revamped Medsider with swanky new features, especially for our premium members. In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to our entire

interview library dating back to 2010. You'll also get Medsider Playbooks, curated guides, path with actionable insights and topics like fundraising, regulatory challenges, reimbursement strategies, and more. And if you're fundraising, don't miss our exclusive investor database, featuring over 750 life science VCs,

family offices, and angels. We've even created three custom packages to help you with your next fundraise. Learn more about Medsider mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's dive in the interview. All right, Kelly, welcome to Med Tider Radio.

Appreciate you covering out a little bit of time, especially considering all that you have going on and lucid. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Scott. Great to be here and appreciate the invitation to chat. Yeah, definitely looking forward to the discussion over the next 45 minutes or so. But that said, I recorded a very short high-level bio on your background at the outside of this episode. But I always like to start here to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. If you can give us maybe like a two to three minute elevator-style pitch on your journey leading up to taking on the CEO role of it elucid, that would be great.

Sure, starting with the end in mind. I'm an operating executive in healthcare with about 30 years experience across multiple specialties like dermatology and aesthetics, urology, obesity medicine, and now cardiology. It started out. I'm a scientist at heart. Got my PhD in chemical engineering from Stanford in California, and I was fortunate to spend 15 years at Johnson, and J&J is a great talent development organization that invested in me crossing over from R&D to general management.

and we've had a pleasure of relocating my family to multiple assignments from New Jersey to Paris, France, to Philadelphia to Los Angeles. I owe a lot of what I learned about innovation and when I bring to companies even today, both technically and business-wise. It was from those 15 years of J&J. I went off and did some small company experiences and much more in other big companies being president of Heltronics, which is the urology device and services business of publicly traded endo-pharmaceuticalsuitals. I was general manager of the U.S. aesthetics business for Nestle-Galderma, and I was CEO of a publicly traded Ovalon Therapeutics. So in all those experiences, you can see my interest lie in three areas. One, working with physicians to improve outcomes, and that's both clinical outcomes and economic outcomes.

Second, having to differentiate technology platform that is a rich pipeline of product opportunities to bring to market. And third, just working with high integrity, super smart people looking to make a positive difference. in the world and that's exactly what attracted me to Lucid and why I'm here and have the pleasure working with some of the finest people in health care. Awesome. I always love talking to MedTech guys like yourself that have taken swings in other kind of verticals, right, or other sort of categories. It makes for an interesting conversation.

I'm sure you're bringing a lot of those learnings, right, to what you're doing at Illucid. So with that said, the plaque IQ system. Tell us a little bit more for those that are not familiar with the Lucid or the system itself. Give us a sense for kind of what it is and like the major kind of problem you really trying to solve here? Yeah, the problem is pretty clear. We're trying to eradicate preventable heart attacks and strokes. Unfortunately, it's still the number one killer, taking 18 and a half million lives a year, of which WHO, I think 80 to 90 percent are preventable. So getting heart attacks and stroke no longer being a number one killer is an easy, quantifiable mission. And it's interesting

that the specialty often refers to this as a proof point of what we do is really important. we tend to look at it as a severe cause for change. 80 to 9% prevention of 18.5 million lives is something that we need to solve and we need to solve soon. Elucid uniquely positioned to do this as we've taken the hard task of developing non-invasive CT virtual astrology, and that applies artificial intelligence to cardiac CT scans to identify flow blockage and specific components of plaque. Specifically, it luce is the only non-invasive method to measure the lipid-rich and a crotic cortic. which is the inflammatory part and the only reason that you'll have thrombosis leading a heart attack and stroke. So given doctors the ability to measure non-invasively that inflammatory core

that leads heart attack and stroke is an important part of kind of dethroning, dethroning heart attack and stroke as a number one killer. Yeah, is this especially timing. One of my friends, actually, I was having a conversation with earlier this week actually had recently got a calcium scan or score, I should say. And his and a series of blood test too that otherwise, didn't look that out of whack, so to speak. But as calcium score stood out, he was like asking me some questions. I was like, I'm a cardiovascular guy, but I honestly don't know a ton about the diagnostic like calcium.

Let me introduce you to like one of my interventional cardiology friends. But like it hit home, right? Because he's like trying to figure this out. Like my calcium score looks bad. But my other blood work looks halfway decent. Like what's really going on here? And it's timely that we're having this, this conversation now. With that said, I want to talk to you a little bit more about the life cycle of the company.

But in like in the normal sort of patient workflow, so to speak, right? how does someone get access to this technology? They get a CT scan, right, and partner in collaboration with the cardiology practice. That's right. Typically, you see your cardiologist, like your friend, you may have lipidemia, you may have family history, you may have calcium, and to take a deeper look, you go off and get a CCTA, so a cardiac CT scan. Non-invasive, I just did one. It takes about a half an hour of your time laying in a CT tunnel. And that scan is traditionally where the process stopped. Now that doctor, the radiology will slip that into a note on the diacom or just like a folder on your computer, it comes over to a lucid and we do virtual astrology on your plaque. And if you are only

calcified plaque, and it's not blocking flow, you're probably in pretty good shape, that's stable plaque. If you have a lot of lipid-rich necrotic core, that's inflammatory plaque, your doctor, at least leading doctors are now incorporated that and they're thinking about how aggressively do they want to be with your level of statin. Should they include an anti-inflammatory that dual platelet therapy. Eventually, we want to be, we want to see this as a tool that people get screened against medical therapy is administered, and then you can watch the effect of this therapy on the inflammatory part of plaque over time. Your friends calcium score is great to say, hey, high score, let's look a little deeper. Not great for following progress because the,

here you're sure getting a statin, calcium's going to go up because hopefully vulnerable plaque is becoming less vulnerable, but that's going to scare your friend and say, wait a second, calcium's going up. So it's just not a great method. It's a great kind of one-sided test. If you have calcium, let's go do more investigation. If you don't have calcium, it doesn't mean I don't have non-calisphite plaque. So a CCTA is what we think is going to help augment the screening approach with patients in the future and certainly be a method to non-invasely track the progression and effectiveness of medical therapy and potentially the need for PCI, like a stent or, or, you know, cabbage. Or an IVO catheter. Absolutely. Ivil catheter is currently, it's one of the hottest

places in the market. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, joking aside, but I'm on the ones that now to lucid.com for those listening, EL, it's just as it sounds, E-L-U-C-I-D, elucid.com. We'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider, as well as Kelly's LinkedIn profiles. You can check out his background with a little bit more, a little bit more rigor. But before we get into going back in time, learning a little bit more about your journey and then diving into the elusive story. Where's the company at right now in terms of life cycle? Yeah, it's at a really exciting phase, a phase transition going from more of a research development company to a commercial company. We just recently earned FDA clearance for

plaque IQ, which is our virtual astrology. And we're looking to quickly follow up with a flow product, our FFRCT product that will identify and characterize artery flow blockage. So it's been a lot of fun seeing the culture grow with like-minded professionals and adding people that do sales, that do marketing, that do market access and reimbursement, customer success. I can tell you that it's a fun time in the phase transition company. It's also a time that you really need to be purposeful of culture. And then you need to signal a little bit of a change of approach. And one of the concepts that has always been helpful for me with a company trying to do something for the first time is to talk about focusing on the kiddiehawk moment. And that's really

focusing all the resources on the few things you need to show that you actually. You actually actually have control over this system and you know what to do next. And I always tell the story that if you read about the Wright brothers, it's an amazing story that they're two brothers that made bicycles and they have this dream of human flight. That went well beyond their skill set. They did a lot of reading and they knew Alexander Grandbel, who invented the telephone, was also coming to a complex approach is to see if human flight was possible. Their friend Oliver a little bit of flexi died in the process of trying to achieve human flight. But they speak about the big difference is not getting too complex, but really blowing it down to what few things matter.

And they put their money on it. It's got to be lift, power, and control. And they didn't know a lot. I said they go find the best people in the world. Who's the best person about lift? Who knows the most about power? Who knows the most about control? And they focused only on those things. And then they went to Kittioch and they strapped themselves on the wing and they jumped. And they flew for just 12 seconds. And the layman may say, what good is 12 seconds? You're not going across country. But that, to them was everything. Those 12 seconds, the moment that what was impossible just became possible, everything afterwards was just engineering optimization. In the R&D mode, new learnings are valuable and fun. When you go to the commercial mode, you've really got to figure out what are those

two or three things that you need to prove to yourself, you could fly for 12 seconds, and everything else after that is just optimization. So that's what we do. And the idea is really not trying one idea at a time, not jumping to something new that has a faster learning rate because you're running across a hard challenge right now. I liken that to you're designing the beverage card for this right flyer. Like we had to figure out that you can fly before you got to worry about serving cocktails on the flight. And you'll see that there's a lot of things that you pause and stop doing and you focus on, just ask the team, what is it that we need to prove ourselves, strap ourselves to the wing and know we're going to fly for just 12 seconds? Because after we get that, everything else

we can figure out on a timeline with certainty. Yeah, that's great. The kiddie hoc, kiddie hoc moment. I love that. I love that analogy. I always love these, framing up these approaches, right, that are rooted in stories like that. That's great.

So again, if you're like, if this has caught your attention, or maybe you're like a friend of mine that I just mentioned and you're like, this technology sounds pretty cool. I might need it myself. Go to elucid.com and check it out. Again, we'll link to it in the full write-up. On that note, you tackle one of the first questions that I had for you

with respect to commercialization, right? Because you joined Elucid, I think, in June or July of this year, we're recording this in late, late 24. So you've been at the helm, about six months or so, call it, for rounding purposes. And your wheelhouse is commercialization, right? When you think about applying the kiddie hoc moment to elucid, let's talk a little bit more about that. It reminds me actually the story.

I remember the, yes, this was probably a couple years ago. I think it was like, it might have been as towards the tail end of COVID. And the flex port CEO, Ryan, his last name was escaping me. But he went to the L.A., I think the Long Beach port and was like, I'm going to, I'm going to go there. and figure out what the world's going on here? What is the log game? Because if you, I was in Southern California at the time, you could see all of these freighters, like out in the bay.

It was wild. And he spent, I think, two days, had a food truck go come, and he basically talked with everyone. And he's, this is actually, it's not as complex as you might think. And this is literally like a classic case of applying all of the resources towards the key bottlenecks,

which is like the Kitty Hawk stuff that you're talking about. So when you think about using that to launch a really novel system in Plaque IQ, what else is important when you think about how to really move the needle with these commercial launches? Yeah, a lot of it has to do with setting the context around what are the important things. So we talk about the kiddie-ac moment. And then it's also about a lot of interdependent work now. I would say when you're in the R&D mode, there's a lot of times a swim-layer approach

where a lot of independent work changes are happening and someone's integrating this. Maybe a founder is the key decision maker and hearing all the interests and putting it forward. when you start going into the commercial airspace, it's about let's get the key decision makers in a room. Let's talk about technical challenges with the business people. Let's talk about sales challenges with the technical people. And let's identify what exactly do we need to do and focus on. Even my marketing team is looking at new ways of pricing and value. And it's okay, like we could try those new ways that the market's never seen before.

And we'll talk about what's the kiddie-up moment. What do we need to see from a customer to say, yeah, this is what we're going to do. So it's working together interdependently, and it's really having a key, understanding the key constraints. There's FDA regulations that you have to earn clearance and you have to do health care compliance against. And to me, just understanding where those parameters are and being innovative within the, what people would say, constraints of regulatory environment, which really become barriers to other people to enter your market. That's where a lot of the fun and innovation comes on the business side. Yeah, yeah.

That idea of moving from more individual swim lanes to an interconnected web, it's especially important, right? And that's not for the faint of heart, right, especially as the organization is growing, right, not only to make that shift, but like you're adding probably, I imagine, like a lot of folks to the commercial team, whether it's marketing or sales, and just getting everyone connected, in essence, right? Building out that web to ensure like those different functions are talking to each other. That, are there, like, you've been at, you've been a leader in various strategics as well,

startups. Are there a few things that kind of come to mind that really help instill that, that interconnectedness? Yeah, I mean, being purposeful about the culture is important as you add all these new people on that, are really new appendages, right? You're adding 50% of the company in six months of people doing things that were never done before. So what I could say is it really all comes down to the people, being very clear about what you want the culture to be. And then we spend as much time understanding motivational factors. when we hire someone as much as their technical skills and capability and experiences. Do you hire someone that motivational factors are not part of the company values or the objectives

that you have at the moment? You're going to run into some serious challenges and you're going to spend a lot of emotional capital on both sides trying to get that right. So getting the motivational factors of people that want to make a difference and want to work hard and be collaborative, that's a huge part of making sure that you don't add on an appendage that gets rejected. That's great. That's a great way to put it.

Yeah. But even just like to your point about just being intentional about it, right, at that phase, sounds relatively straightforward, right? But much, much easier said than done, right? And I imagine that filters all the way down on how you go about the interviewing process, right? I'm looking for those kiddie-ac moments, maybe even through the interview process that really align with those, the culture that you're trying to establish. That's really good feedback.

On that note, let's talk a little bit about something that's commercially related, right? And that kind of it really truly is, right? which is coverage, right? And there's big news recently with the expanded Medicare coverage and increased reimbursement from CMS. That's huge, right? I think we all understand that. Everyone listening to this understands that you kind of need to know who's going to pay for it, who's going to pay for this technology. Even if it's awesome technology, like someone and ultimately has to pay for it, sometimes it's patients more often than not, it's payers. And so with that said, I know you just joined the helm six months ago, but were there, when you think about this function

in general and being able to achieve some of these significant reimbursement milestones, Are there a couple of key things that really come to mind that other founders or CEOs need to think about? What are the key hoc moments to getting to this, achieving these types of reimbursement milestones? That's a good question. You make it sound like it's obvious, but I've seen a lot of companies fail because they don't understand who's going to pay for it or they can't quantify their better approach actually being cost neutral or cost benefit to the system. So unfortunately, you get these companies that are stuck in the middle with a great technology, but the interventionalist is not going to pay for it. the medical device cop is not going to pay for it. You're not getting reimbursement. You're just not going to get adoption. Tremendous Medicare commercial payer tailwinds. Unbelievable. I'm sure you've never

seen this in your time. I haven't. Where Black Procter just being launched now, an AMA has determined that it'll be a category one code in January 2026. Typically, you call a new technology, you're a category three emerging technology that doesn't get really reimbursed in your collecting data for three to five years. To be an established technology a year after kind of the market entrance, it's pretty phenomenal to see the government getting behind this. And I really have to credit a lot of the especially as a whole, the group as a whole, with these major wins that are really wins of patient access to therapies that are going to save lives that matter. We have physician societies we work with and we support like the Society for Cardiac CT, the American Radiology Association,

all joining hands and giving out position papers and working with government to understand the value of the economic value and the clinical value here. Industry groups like Advent and MDMA. We have a market access person that's on the kind of market access groups of both of those. And I can say Carpenter is like heartflow clearly and elucidiv, all joined together with proposing the clinical data, the outcomes and the health economics that affect these monumental changes in reimbursement. when you're going into a market that you're trying to develop a new technology, these competitors are really like great neighbors. We're going to work together. The parks will be clean.

The streets will be safe. We're going to invest in developing a new modality that's going to save lives. So it's great to have ethical players with you when you're developing a market, as you will with IVL. And coordinating among them, whether it's directly, which we are as well as indirectly through societies and through industry groups, that's critical. your point though is anybody looking to do a startup has to think about market access and reimbursement. And we fortunately have a great person in-house that's doing our market access and collaborating these societies, collaborating with other companies to come up with the information that's needed to justify and prove positive that this is both clinically a win and economically

a win. Yeah, that if you're new to this kind of market access or reimbursement game, that picture that you painted about being good neighbors, right? And we're going to work together to keep the streets clean, the parks clean, et cetera. It's a really good way to think about that. Because I think if you're listening to this, you're like, wait a second, is a lucid going to collaborate with clearly or Hartflare or some of these other players? That seems odd, right? And I'm sure that's not to underappreciate the fact that everyone's a little bit of competitive, right?

But when it comes to achieving some of these significant coverage milestones, it does take a truly collaborative effort, right? And yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, you point out a big difference. I've had roles in companies where it is about the market's establishes your stealing share. It's Coke versus Pepsi. I've got a better promotion. I get better salespeople come my way and you'll switch back and forth. When you go into a category, what's new, and, you know, my metrics and med devices,

the research shows it takes 17 years for the average physician to adopt the standard of care. Like, you've got a lot of work just to develop that modality and having ethical players or like good neighbors doing that together is a lot more helpful. And it's not about stealing share and Coke versus Pepsi. It really is about investing in those things that make this adopted by the, not just a key opinion that there's but that average position across the country. And that's hard work and it's good work to do together to build that community. I could take a message, right?

If you're maybe earlier on developing a novel technology, like Lucid's as an example, right, start to not only do you not just need to think about who's going to pay for it, but if it's something that's not widely covered or is truly novel and disruptive, like you need to be thinking about who else is going to kind of join forces to help you push that boulder up the hill. So it's a really good point. Let's transition to talk about fundraising a little bit. So Elucid raised a pretty large C. I think last year was over 80 million, at least based on my nose, something in that range. And that is especially impressive, considering 2012 23 was really brutal fundraising environment. So to raise that large of a round,

it probably speaks to just the space in general. This is like a super hot category. But again, huge feat to get something like that done. So when you think about the fundraising that either you've done personally or just been around throughout your career, for another CEO or founder maybe that's raised a little bit of C capital but is now approaching more of the sophisticated round, Series A, Series B, C, and beyond. Are there a few things that you would tell them or coach them up on how to go about that? Hey there, Scott. 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. Here's why. First, MedSider Premium Members get access to every single interview dating back to 2010. That's over 200.

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