🧬 Magic or Medtech #4 - R&D without the R
Plus: a pancreas in your phone and the best (technically?) remote-first salary-included jobs in medtech. Oh, right, the R stands for "running out of money" 💸
R&D is the fun part of medtech. It’s the part where you get the build the damn thing!
That said, it’s also subject to limitations. Funding in particular.
After the hop, I’ll summarize how Arash Samimi of Eliomedica and Oleksiy Zaika of Vessl Prosthetics recommend you build your vision… without running out of money.
R&D for you and me
My instinct when I’m starting a new project is to open up my text editor and start typing. Just get started and see what happens.
That is not a good approach to medical device R&D.
You need to have a plan. The FDA is a show-your-work organization. You don’t have infinite funding (probably… if you do, consider investing in Magic or Medtech). You might not even know what you need to build yet.
Here are a few practical tips for approaching R&D:
1. Buy a hat rack
You need to be able to switch from wearing your dreamer hat to wearing your business hat.
If you’re like most founders, you have a finite runway and finite resources. You need to know when to play the chips you have.
Set explicit parameters for yourself based on the resources you have available to yourself. Put a structure in place. Then put the dreamer hat back on.
Often, limitations encourage innovation.
2. Understand what you need in a prototype
A prototype isn’t a solution. Its job isn’t to pass FDA and go to market. Its job is to convince potential customers to try it and give you feedback.
You need feedback as early as possible. Feedback is a resource just like your funding, time and materials. You can use it to set the parameters from #1.
But you need a prototype in order to get feedback. Focus your earliest R&D efforts on convincing stakeholders to give you feedback.
3. Develop to a funding schedule
Say you have 8 months of runway. What do you need to prove by month 3 and to whom? What about month 5? Do you need to demonstrate product/market fit or find it?
What technical challenges can you reasonably expect to overcome by month 3 and month 5? What might be unrealistic?
Can you segment your market and develop around that segment?
Emile Maamary of Steadiwear told me his company had to focus on just one subgroup of their customers in order to develop their first iteration with the resources they had. Steadiwear makes gloves that reduce hand tremors for people with Parkinson’s and essential hand tremors.
At first, their product had to exclude people with Parkinson’s due to technical constraints. Focusing on what they could actually achieve instead of trying to solve the whole problem at once allowed them to find customers and build a successful company - and then fund further development to expand to their whole market.
Subscribe so you don’t miss the Magic or Medtech podcast with Emile next week!
In case you missed it, this week’s podcast was with Lisa Voronkova of Ova Solutions.
She had some great things to say about R&D, like how to balance innovation and limitations and how to keep your skills up to date.
The week in medtech and digital health
Spit-take
The Institute of Cancer Research has announced positive results from a study utilizing spit tests to detect prostate cancer risk.
The test was more accurate than the standard blood test.
For the men with the highest genetic risk, the test falsely identified fewer people with prostate cancer than the PSA test, picked up people with cancer who would have been missed by the PSA test alone, and picked up a higher proportion of the aggressive cancers than the PSA test. The test also accurately identified men with prostate cancer that was missed by an MRI scan.
I love this. Making screening more convenient is the lowest hanging fruit of preventative medicine, especially for men.
Get your pancreas from Google Play
CamDiab, an offshoot of the Cambridge University focused on diabetes software, just got FDA clearance for an Android app insulin pump controller - the “world’s first artificial pancreas app.”
The app allows a compatible insulin pump and a compatible continuous glucose monitor to ‘talk to each other’, creating an artificial pancreas.
The app has been cleared to manage blood sugar levels for people over the age of 2 with Type 1 diabetes, including pregnant women.
It will be interesting to see if these kinds of "device data proxy” apps become more common and if that will lead to more technical standardization across medical devices.
Don’t Deny the Lyme
En Carta has raised 1.5m pounds to develop an early diagnosis test kit for lyme disease.
Current tests rely on antibodies which can take weeks to develop to detectable levels, making the disease harder to cure.
I am terrified of Lyme disease. Early detection is crucial to prevent the worst outcomes of the poorly-understood disease. Some physicians are still skeptical that it’s a disease at all, so more point of care testing options can only help.
Luckily, there are also some vaccine candidates in phase 3 trials.
Maybe one day we can live in a world where ticks are just gross.
Remote, salary-included medtech jobs
Alright.
I tried.
I don’t have unlimited time, but I searched for a full hour and I found zero new remote, salary-included job postings in medtech or digital health. A few startups in the Bay area, but most were either hybrid or required you to be located in California.
I guess maybe that says something… either about the job market, or my ability to find job postings.
So. If you have any favourite sources of job postings, or you are hiring, let me know by clicking the button below or leaving a comment.
Sorry!
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
- Clark