The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dr. Lyn Yaffe, Chairman and CEO/Chairman of EPR-Technologies, Inc.

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Dr. Lyn Yaffe, Chairman and CEO/Chairman of EPR-Technologies, Inc. Epr-technology.com Startengine.com/epr-technologies

you wanted the best you've got the best podcast the hottest podcast in the world the chris boss show the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed get ready get ready strap yourself in keep your hands arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Chris Voss from thechrisvossshow.com, your host today. Well, every day, isn't it?

I pretty much, I don't know. There is no other host at the Chris Voss Show. That's probably one of my names on it. Who saw that one coming? Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com 4ChessChrisVoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com 4ChessChrisVoss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. And also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places. Check out the 132,000 member LinkedIn group over there. And our big LinkedIn newsletter that goes out

every day. That thing is killing it over there. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing gentleman on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about his company and what he does with it and all that good stuff. His name is Lynn Yaffe and he's the chairman of his company and his company does some amazing technology things it's a biological spin-off of the safra center for resuscitation research at the university of pittsburgh and is committed to the preservation of human life through rapid profound hypnothermia temporary suspended animation is what that is by pursuing techniques and patented products for emergency preservation and resuscitation, which stands for the EPR Technologies, the name of this company, to save a life when standard cardiopulmonary resuscitation fails, CPR.

Though most of you are familiar with CPR. Lynn has been committed to the concept of EPR as an emergency life-saving utility and potential applications in the field of resuscitation. He completed an undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences, majoring in biophysics. Welcome to the show, Lynn. How are you? Fine, fine.

It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. It's EPR-technologies.com. There you go. And you also have a Kickstarter that you're working on, correct? Yes, we're on not Kickstarter, but StartEngine. Okay. So that's www.startengine.com slash EPR hyphen technologies. And then you'll see our crowdfunding site. Yeah, it looks like you guys are doing really well, raising some money for your project. So tell us what is EPR Technologies, your company, and what do you do there? Well, EPR Technologies is pursuing

techniques and products that enable rapid, profound hypothermia. Now, by rapid, profound hypothermia, it's sort of inducing a temporary suspended animation, to use a science fiction term. I'm talking about cooling the body down to between 5 and 15 degrees Celsius, which is about 41 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. We're not talking about freezing anyone, and we're not talking about mild hypothermia. So rapid profound hypothermia would be used when standard cardiopulmonary resuscitation, as you said, CPR fails. So if you envision an automobile accident and there's a trauma victim and they're massively bleeding and the paramedics arrive and they can't

control the bleeding and they can't give IV fluid fast enough. They try CPR. Maybe they try for 10, 15, 20 minutes, defibrillation, chest compressions, mouth to mouth, the whole bit. But they can't get the heart started. So basically the patient dies. There's no or little to do after that. The same would be for a gunshot victim who's losing a lot of blood, or the same might be for a sudden cardiac arrest victim who has some heart disease,

and they go into cardiac arrest, and the paramedics can't get their heart started. So really, that's the end of their life, unfortunately. What EPR and rapid profound hypothermia is looking to do is to cool the body down to that 5 to 15 degrees Celsius, 41 to 59 Fahrenheit, so that you're in a hypo, very low metabolic state. And at that low temperature, you have no heartbeat, you have no brainwaves, you have no breathing, but the body needs virtually no oxygen for a few hours. So you're in sort of a temporary state of suspended animation. That buys time to get you to a trauma center or a hospital emergency room where the surgeons can attempt to repair the problem to close some arteries and then after they do those surgical repairs those critical surgical repairs then you're placed on a heart lung machine cardiopulmonary bypass

to give you back your blood because saline, in flushing out your blood, ice-cold saline was used to cool you down rapidly. I mean, like, within 10 minutes or so. So then on cardiopulmonary bypass, they give you back blood, and they rewarn you to the point where either your heart spontaneously restarts or they defibrillate you at that point because they repaired the injuries and they get your heart started. That's amazing. Is this kind of like the same sort of, I don't want to use the word technology,

but the same sort of thing like, you know, when they find people that have drowned in maybe a frozen lake or something and the coldness of their temperature of the body enabled them to survive? That's exactly right. There are a number of reported cases, a few reported cases, where, let's say, a healthy skier is covered in an avalanche or a child falls into an ice-cold lake. Their bodies cool down so fast that they need no oxygen at that at that low

temperature of course your heart won't beat your heart does beat if it goes much a few degrees below normal temperatures 98.6 or 37 Celsius but at that low temperature because your body doesn't need oxygen for a few hours, you don't deteriorate, so to speak. And your brain is kept viable. Cold is sort of a neuroprotectant. Really? And when they find these people, they're able to rewarm them and resuscitate. Now, what we're trying to do, we're trying to do it not in healthy skiers, obviously, but we're trying to do it in trauma victims, automobile, motorcycle, gunshot, mass casualty situations, and, of course, sudden cardiac arrest.

It's interesting, I should say, that the original pioneer for EPR technologies was Dr. Peter Saffer. And Dr. Peter Saffer in the 1956 with his associates at the time, invented mouth to mouth resuscitation. It wasn't mouth to mouth resuscitation. Before then, they were doing some strange arm lift procedure, probably not old enough to recall that. But CPR really was ineffective until mouth to mouth was combined with chest compressions. And then Dr. Saffer wrote what was called the ABCs of resuscitation, which was make sure you had an open airway by lifting the chin, make sure you did the breathing for B, and C was chest compressions. And then Dr. Saffer, you know, went around the world pioneering the use of CPR. And together with that, he started the first paramedic service in Pittsburgh. Before that, before CPR, really, there were just ambulance drivers.

They didn't do anything to you. CPR. So it's interesting, a little side note, that he took a number of African American unemployed individuals and also, I think, some hospital orderlies, and he trained that paramedic, that group, to be the first paramedics in Pittsburgh. And things expanded out from there. A documentary was made about that. I haven't seen it in a long time. But Dr. Saffer and doing the Freedom House in Pittsburgh, she went to Israel and essentially became the leader of the Israeli Red Cross and is considered in Israel, I don't know the Hebrew words, the mother of paramedics in Israel. So Dr. Saffer had a very far-reaching influence on saving lives, and he

was always a strong proponent of hypothermia. Now, to go a little further, at the end of the Vietnam War, Colonel Ron Bellamy and Dr. Saffer got together and looked at what were the causes of combat soldiers being killed in action. And autopsies are done on the majority of killed in action. Now, I think they do MRIs as well. But back then, they looked at those killed American soldiers killed in action. And 80 percent of those who didn't have head injury, obviously if you have a massive head injury, there's nothing that can be done. But 80% of those who died without head injury, they had surgical, repairable injuries. They bled out too fast, nothing could be done. So Colonel Bellamy and Peter Saffer said,

what could be done to prevent those individuals from dying in combat if they have repairable injuries? And Dr. Saffer essentially came up with the idea of rapid profound hypothermia. Early on, he called it suspended animation, but we wanted to get away a bit from that aura and it was it was named an emergency preservation and resuscitation epr for short like epr failed then induce epr to have a three letters and so peter sapper was dedicated to this his saying was he wanted to save hearts and brains too good to die. Well, that makes sense. Like I said, that makes sense because there's a lot of people that have been in those frozen states or low-temperature states.

And, yeah, they survive. And you're like, that guy was dead for – and you can be in that state suspended for up to three hours? Well, in large animals, particularly pigs, which represent a very good physiological model for human beings. You may have read more recently about the humanized pig organs that they've tested as a heart transplant at the University of Maryland, unrelated to us, of course, and also they've done some kidney testing of those organs. So in EPR experiments in large pigs, the animals could be kept in that temporary suspended animation, hypometabolic, hypothermic state for three hours and then resuscitated.

Oh, wow. And, you know, pigs are very smart. They can be trained to do things, to have some responses, you know, before they're put through the procedure, and then they retain that. So their brains are protected during the procedure. Wow, that is crazy. Currently, there's an ongoing human feasibility clinical trial at Maryland Shock Trauma in Baltimore, headed up by one of our associates who was on the original Peter Saffer team at the Saffer Center. He's now at Maryland Shock Trauma in Baltimore, and that's Sam Tisherman. I can't talk a lot about the clinical trial, keep the lid on things, you know, until it's completed. But I don't know,

maybe two years ago, we've been on a bit of a pause because of the COVID pandemic, because blood and blood supplies have been, let's say, less abundantly available during pandemic and blood is needed for ECMO procedures for lungs for critical COVID patients. But we'll be hopefully resuming, I guess, was spoken about. And in a lot of the science and medical news reporting, they said a human being had successfully been put in suspended animation for the first time. So we typed a little bit then. And now we're more careful about releasing any information until the clinical trial is completed. But very successful in large, large animals, amazingly successful. And obviously, that's the basis for moving on to humans. So now the company, you know, is attempting to raise some money based on we've had a little bit of progress. We've got, you know, the designs for the essential products that would be needed to make this easy.

Right now, what the surgeons do, they sort of do some jerry-rigging. But we want to make this very easy to do in the emergency room, in a trauma bay, and ultimately even easy to do at the point of injury, in combat or at a mass casualty or a shooting or an automobile accident in the U.S., obviously. And that's all feasible. You know, there's no reason that it shouldn't ultimately work. You know, it took a while for CPR to be fully introduced. But, you know, one needs to keep in mind that for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands that CPR each year, you know, it's not 100% successful. It depends on the given medical problems, the given trauma problems, how quickly it

started, how well it's done, whether the individual survives. You know, for let's say heart attacks that occur out of the hospital, maybe 15 to 20% of CPRs are successful, that the patient's heart is or the victim's heart is restarted. If you have a heart attack in a hospital, there's a higher success rate because the team is right there to start immediately. You don't necessarily depend on a bystander or wait for paramedics to arrive. So bystander CPR is becoming more common. More people in the U.S. take the Red Cross course, as everyone should try and do in order to help save a life. But in the hospital, you know, the different studies, it's hard to collect all the statistics.

It varies somewhat from, you know, university center, I suppose, to a smaller hospital can be as high as 40 percent. So if you're going to have a heart attack, it's better to have it at a hospital. But a very significant, I think it's 60% of sudden cardiac arrest and heart attacks actually occur at home, and 40% not at home, you know, in the workplace. Now For trauma victims that need CPR, only 5%, 5 people out of 100 trauma victims, is the CPR successful. So in trauma victims, you really need, in one sense, rapid, profound hypothermia. So you can buy time to potentially correct whatever organ damage there is and do surgical and medical interventions to have a delayed chance at resuscitation. So, you know, the statistics aren't wonderful. And, you know, it'd be very nice to give a loved one one more chance.

And so that's the story in a nutshell. All of the research and the current feasibility clinical trial has been funded by the U.S. military. I think that shows their level of interest in taking care of combat casualties. And obviously, they don't mind spinoffs. You know, the US Army are strong researchers in infectious diseases around the world. And you know, the original research that Dr. Saffer did in cardiopulmonary resuscitation that was funded by the army as well. It's of interest to Dr. Saffer was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times because of all his work in resuscitation. And as I said, he died in 2003. I worked with him from about 1995 to the time of his death. He was working up to about two weeks before he died of cancer. And before he died, when he became professor emeritus at Pittsburgh,

they named what was the International Center for Resuscitation Research, they named it after Peter Satter. Oh, wow. He was honored that way. And he's been honored around the world. Oh, one other thing of interest, and I have a lot of these historical updates at the StartEngine website where they allow you to, aside from the terms related to investing and all of the details that one has to post, you know, to meet the Securities and Exchange Commission crowdfunding regulations, I'm allowed to put up updates. So there are updates about Peter Saffer, videos of him doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the first experiments.

There's one about the paramedic ambulance service that I mentioned, Freedom House. And also Peter Saffer recognized that to do CPR properly, you needed a simulator to train people on. You know, it's like if you go to the Red Cross now, they usually have some sort of a simulator. So Dr. Saffer met Osmond Lairdahl, a Norwegian doll maker, who at the time really wasn't involved in anything medical. Now Lairdahl, a Norwegian, it's become Lairdahl Medical. They make defibrillators and a lot of medical equipment as well as advanced simulators.

Not only full-size mannequins with software so that you can, so a medical student or a physician can train different procedures on it. They also made the very first mannequin for CPR called Rassassa Annie. I don't know if you've heard of that. Rassassa Annie was the first mannequin, and the face of Rassassa Annie, they used a death mask that was made from a young woman that jumped into the Seine River in Paris and for some reason committed suicide. If you go to Google and type in resuscitators at the Wood Anesthesiology Museum, they have some information about resuscitating. It's all very interesting history that Dr. Saffer, who the father of cardiopulmonary resuscitation was involved in from the mid-1950s, really up until his death in 2003.

So I'm very excited to have been and still am part of the team that's pursuing this. And very hopefully, one day this will become the standard of care, sort of a revolutionary game changer to give everybody one more chance at survival. And that's really ideal, being able to get one more chance at it. So tell us about the investment thing you're doing. You're on StartEngine.com. What's the minimum investment? How much is the offering?

What are they getting for what they're investing in? I'd love to say that. But I'm instructed by StartEngine and SEC rules is not to discuss any of the terms. Okay. So I'm very careful about that. Do you want me to read them off the site? Can I read them off the site to our listeners? I prefer not to.

I don't want to upset anyone. If you don't mind, I'd like to hold up the website. If you can all see that now. www.startengine.com slash EPR hyphen or dash technologies.

Let's go to startengine.com You can read all of the terms. You know, the SEC requires when you put down the terms and, you know, one can make, I can at least say, a range of investments. It's not an amount from small to large. But the SEC requires that people who are exposed to the terms also are exposed to the risks. I mean, there's no guarantee on any investment, you know. And so I want to follow the rules. And I appreciate being able to mention the Start Engine site. If you go to our website, those are the bottom line.

There's a lot of information about things, but if people are interested in learning more, and there's a whole lot of information and videos on the site. The trauma surgeon doing the feasibility clinical trial, he did a TED talk. And so he presents a lot of information. I apologize for looking down because I tend to look at you and not in the camera as much. I'm not an experienced podcaster. But if you go to our StartEngine site, there's a lot of information. And at the bottom, at the very end, if you have a question or a comment, you can type in your question and I'll be notified of it within a few hours, and I'll endeavor to respond within a few hours, at most 12 hours or by the following morning. Any question about what's on the site or anything that you might be concerned about that's not mentioned on the site, I can respond.

Because when I respond to a comment, everybody sees it and anyone who's already invested is notified as well so it's like everybody has all the information if I were to say something here not everybody necessarily sees this podcast so it's the idea of everyone has to be exposed to the same information involvement with crowdfunding. And I have my fingers crossed for success. And very popular. StartEngine is one of the pre-strikes in crowdfunding for a range of injuries, not only biomedical health tech, but other industries as well. I mean, it's a different, you know, controlled thing compared to, you know, GoFundMe, where people are legitimately asking for some help in tough situations. But

StartEngine is a range of legitimate startup companies where they've done due diligence, and you've met all the compliance regulations, you have to go through a financial review done by a CFO before you're permitted to do crowdfunding on the site. So it's interesting. I mean, years ago, this sort of thing wasn't available. Oh, yeah. In the last few years, I think even certified large amount investors go through the internet to look for opportunities.

It's very interesting. Yeah, very cool. It looks like you've raised some money on here, according to their website. Yeah, we recently got started. So hopefully this exposure will get people to go to the site and help us save the lives of you, a loved one, a friend, or someone out there that's important to you. And now with the terrible, terrible situation in Ukraine, it's unfortunate that rapid profound hypothermia isn't already the standard of care

and easily administered the way bystanders do CPR. Obviously, rapid profound hypothermia is a little more involved than CPR. But as time goes on, you can make it more and more, let's say, automated, easier to do when the equipment and the ice cold saline are available to do it. We're looking to do it obviously at trauma centers first, emergency rooms, hospital wards, then hospitals, and then with portable designs that we're working on to allow a training certified paramedic to ultimately do it with FDA approval. Yeah, yeah. This is really interesting in the future of medicine.

I mean, any more ways we can save lives is awesome. Anything more we need to cover and touch on on what you guys do and how you do it? I think we've covered all of the important points. You've let me hold up my little sign. I appreciate the interest and the opportunity. I'm not a big watcher of podcasts, but this experience is going to get me involved. There you go.

There you go. It's a terrific opportunity. It's the new generation. I guess part of the old generation trying to leapfrog into the. People love podcasts. It's crazy. And we've been doing it for a little bit of time. And you can listen to them on the radio while driving.

Yeah. Or people, you know, I've had people tell me they listen while they're doing the dishes or chores around the house or working on something. I usually tend to listen to them while I'm working on the computer and doing something kind of mundane like, you know, a spreadsheet or something. And I'll play one in the background when I'm not eating ours. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Lynn. Thank you very much for sharing this wonderful data. And, man, I'm really hopeful for the future of this coming out. Yes, yes. And everyone out there, let's say, can do their bit to save a life in the future if they help us out.

There you go. Give us your plugs one more time, if you would, those dot coms. Okay, I'll hold up the sign. There you go. So that you can pause it. That makes sense. Part engine dot com slash EPR hyphens technology. There you go.

And there'll be a link on the Chris Voss show. So if you go there, too, there'll be a link you can click to go to both websites. Anyway, thank you very much for being on the show with us, Lynn. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks, Monis, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Tell all your friends, neighbors, and relatives to subscribe to the show. Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. All our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those places. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.