MassDevice.com is blogging on the topic of building
innovative medical technology for the developing world, featuring
some of the leading minds in the field.
This feature will continue through May 17 and the first
annual World Health
Medical Technology Conference at Boston University.
The conference
is a one-day workshop dedicated to exploring the opportunities and
challenges of designing, building and funding medical technologies
for the developing world. It’s a way to bring together stakeholders
from the medical technology industry with the leading minds in the
Global Health movement. To find out more about the conference,
visit the conference’s website for
an agenda, registration information and a list of
speakers.
This installment features Dr. Anita Goel, CEO of Nanobiosym, a stealthy incubator and
diagnostics company working on technologies at the convergence
point of physics, nanotechnology and biomedicine. Goel is one of
the most respected voices in science and business and her vision of
changing the world with innovation are probably only matched by her
board of directors, which includes Boston Scientific Corp.
(NYSE:BSX) founder John Abele; Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata
Group, one of the largest conglomerates in India; Alfred Ford, the
current chairman of the Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) and grandson of
Henry Ford; and former Ambassador John Palmer.
The company is primarily funded by government contracts from
agencies including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the U.S. Dept. of
Energy.
Dr. Goel took a few minutes to talk about her views on the
developing world and how diagnostics can be made not only cheaper
but more accurate.
Dr. Anita Goel, CEO, Nanobiosym
“I weigh the developing world and the developed world equally. I
see a global opportunity. I see that we sit here in Boston, in the
Mecca of innovation, the wellspring of global intellectual capital,
and we have an opportunity to make a global impact with innovation.
We need to think globally and think about emerging markets like
India and China and other parts of the world on two fronts: One,
that there’s a huge humanitarian need; and second, that there’s a
great new market that’s emerging and it’s naive of us to ignore
it.
“We have the Nanobiosym incubator, which focuses on research and
new science and technology creation at the convergence point of
physics, biomedicine and nanotechnology. We use this convergence
point to create game-changing technologies, new spinoff companies
and new ways of solving global problems. And what are the planet’s
most pressing needs? They’re healthcare, energy, water testing.
We’re operating at the point where fields that haven’t previously
talked to each other can create not just incremental advances, but
quantum leaps in our thinking. That’s the basic philosophy of the
incubator.
“We’re a research company, but we operate as an incubator where
we collaborate with academia and government laboratories. The focus
is on implementing these philosophies of meeting at convergence
points of those disciplines [physics, biomedicine and
nanotechnology]. We’re about breaking the silos. Part of it is
virtual — we have a facility here in Boston, but it doesn’t
all happen in one place. It can be done globally with people in
different places.
“We’ve also spun out a company called Nanobiosym Diagnostics
Inc., which is singularly focused on this technology we’ve
developed that uses physics and nanotechnology to do something that
previously has only been done using the tools of molecular
biology.
“In point-of-care diagnostics some people are using things like
immunoassays and colorimetric assays that work quickly and cheaply
in the field. What we’re doing is a DNA/RNA-based level of test
with a very high level of sensitivity and accuracy. Today, if you
look at diagnostics in the developed world, the gold standard for
testing is technologies like PCR and cultures, which require a
central laboratory structure, and a clinical technology lab
infrastructure to give accurate results. The developing world
doesn’t have all that infrastructure in place yet. The developing
world relies upon assays that are quick, but they suffer from lower
sensitivity and lower specificity. With immunoassays, they are
fundamentally limited in how sensitive they can be, but they give
you a quick answer. With HIV you can use an immunoassay to get a
quick and dirty answer out in the developing world in the
point-of-care fashion, but you still have to back it up with a PCR
test.
“In the developing world they have a lack of infrastructure, but
they use this kind of quick test. What we’ve developed is this
technology that we consider game-changing. Basically, we bring the
capability of that gold-standard level of sensitivity and
specificity and go beyond what the traditional technologies can do,
because we employ physics and nanotechnology to improve the
precision and accuracy with which you can read out DNA, and we
bring that into a developing world context to create a leapfrog
effect.
“A developing-world country would have to invest billions of
dollars just to create the equivalent of the landline
infrastructure in the healthcare system that it needs to deploy the
existing type of technology we have in the developed world. But
with ours, just like you saw a paradigm shift in the telecom
industry, when you saw a shift to mobile devices — you see
villagers and farmers and beggars in places like Africa using
cellphones — the reason they had that quantum leap in
telecommunications was because they no longer needed that landline
infrastructure. There was such a huge need that, when you had the
technology and it came to a critical cause, the technology just
spread.
“We hope to bring a similar paradigm shift into healthcare, by
creating mobilized medicine used to diagnose disease, but outside
of the hospital lab and bring it into the doctor’s office and into
people’s homes in the remote villages. But the key is to do it with
the same, or better, level of accuracy that you would have with a
centralized lab infrastructure.”
“Today there are a lot people in the field using immunoassays to
get a quick answer as to what something someone in a village has,
but they suffer from a high level of false positives and false
negatives. In America those tests don’t survive the scrutiny of
time, because people don’t want to live with the scrutiny of
whether they have Swine Flu or HIV or not. You can’t afford to have
a high level of false positives or false negatives. But in the
developing world, it’s better than nothing. What we bring is a
leapfrog technology that does kind of what the cellphone did in the
developing world. But remember, the cellphone was a breakthrough
technology for the developing world; it’s just that we had all the
infrastructure. So, in essence it was easier for the developing
world to switch over.
“We have a social and humanitarian agenda with what we’re trying
to accomplish. That appeals to some of the public sector, so we go
out of our way to try and create a win-win synergy with them. We’re
not purely driven by the profit motive, or maximizing the
short-term ROI. We’re looking at creating a long-term, sustainable
impact, and that allows us to decrease our profit margin and try to
impact more people rather than hype it up and take as much money
out as you can. We endeavor to find strategic and financial
partners and customers who share our philosophy and vision, as well
as stake holders who have a vested interest in trying to maximize
the humanitarian impact we can create with technology platform like
this. I don’t want to make that sound easy, but we try to stay true
to our integrity and purpose. A lot of people want to acquire it
and do their vision of how they think it should do, but we’re
really in search of those partners, investors and stakeholders who
want to help use it to change the world in a way that’s
economically aligned so that they make a return.
“The way I see it is, if you have the right philosophy you can
actually make a bigger impact and a bigger return, including
financial, if you align it the right way. If you keep looking at
the short term and think only about the exit, then you miss out on
the bigger picture of the humanitarian impact and making a larger
financial return.”
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