“What number of of you’re afraid of needles?” Alina Su asks her viewers as she begins the pitch for her new firm NovaXS Biotech. The viewers shift in its seats. Most individuals increase their palms. “(Now) think about you must inject your self with needles 1,000 occasions (over) three years.” Alina goes on to clarify that she watched her sister endure this each day agony beginning on the age of seven. All of the sudden, the viewers is in her footwear — imagining what it is likely to be like in the event that they, or a member of the family, needed to wrestle with such a painful routine.
Alina Rui Su, Founder and CEO, NovaXS Biotech
With this riveting opening to her story, Alina has entered 5 enterprise competitions and grow to be a finalist in all 5. She has gained three of the competitions outright. Within the course of, Alina raised her first a million {dollars} for the corporate in order that her group might construct a prototype of a brand new system to supply needle-free supply of self-administered medicines.
Her opening grabs the viewers’s consideration and supplies the “vertical take-off” really useful by storytellers. However Alina demonstrates one other vitally necessary ability important for a robust innovation narrative. She breaks the issue into its element elements at first of the story after which pays them off by describing the options of her product that resolve every one.
We’re skilled to anticipate this from the storyteller. Within the Wizard of Oz, for instance, we observe the journey of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Lion and Dorothy. We study that the Scarecrow craves a mind, the Tin Woodsman yearns for a coronary heart, the Lion desperately needs for some braveness and Dorothy desires to return residence. The viewers follows their adventures and totally expects these story arcs to be resolved. In the long run, the Scarecrow is given a diploma for his good sense, the Lion a medal for his bravery, the Tin Woodsman a testimonial to how a lot he’s cherished, and Dorothy finally finds herself again in Kansas.
Even in a fast four-minute pitch, Alina is ready to accomplish this parallel construction in her story. She begins by describing the three elements of the issue she is tackling. The primary is low affected person tolerance. Folks both don’t recognize being jammed with a needle each single day or just select to not get the required treatment, as a result of they’re too afraid of needles within the first place. The second challenge is low accessibility. The method of correctly self-administering the treatment by needle is so difficult that almost all sufferers don’t have any selection however to go to the hospital to get their pictures. Alina’s sister, for instance, needed to make the one-hour round-trip to a kids’s hospital in Beijing each single day for 3 years. Hospitals additionally wrestle, as a result of they aren’t correctly staffed to satisfy this want. The third drawback is a lack of monitoring. With out correct monitoring, sufferers usually don’t take the right quantity of treatment on the proper time and their medical doctors and insurance coverage firms don’t have any proof of whether or not the affected person adhered to the prescribed therapy plan. The US healthcare system spends $39B yearly on regulatory compliance.
NovaXS app and system in lab.
Now it’s time for Alina to repay every of those issues. First off, the NovaXS patented resolution is needle free. It’s a system that generates a high-speed liquid stream the width of a hair that enters the physique by way of the affected person’s pores and immediately delivers the treatment on the subcutaneous or intramuscular degree. The treatment diffuses evenly into the system with out producing exhausting knots. This addresses the affected person tolerance drawback. Secondly, the system has LED security lock sensors that mild up inexperienced when the affected person has discovered the right placement and angle for entry. It solely delivers the treatment, when it may be achieved accurately. It supplies over 3,000 remedies with the identical system (solely the cartridge adjustments). This implies anybody can self-administer the treatment with out having to go to the hospital. Accessibility drawback solved. Third, the system is linked to an app that has the required therapy schedule (together with reminders, scheduling and side-effect monitoring) for the affected person to observe and paperwork every software, which is shared with the physician and insurance coverage firm. This characteristic handles the monitoring bit.
Her pitch is so compelling that a number of potential traders have requested for the answer for themselves. Traders who had been present process in vitro fertilization (IVF) remedies requested Alina to discover this resolution for sufferers like them. IVF can require as much as 4 medicines on six totally different schedules that have to be utilized on totally different elements of the physique inside 4 months. It’s a drugs self-administration nightmare. Thanks partially to this buyer suggestions, Alina is focusing on the IVF market as considered one of NovaXS’s early goal markets along with pediatric IBD remedies, gene remedy with regenerative drugs and diabetes.
Alina who’s a UC Berkeley graduate, is constructing this firm, whereas pursuing a PhD in Regenerative and Scientific Drugs at Harvard Medical College. That’s a narrative in itself. Stand by for the following chapter as NovaXS pursues Grasp File Clearance with 510K and Institutional Assessment Boards medical trials in 2022. It is likely to be much more compelling than the primary one.