“What number of of you might be 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 elevate their arms. “(Now) think about it’s a must to inject your self with needles 1,000 occasions (over) three years.” Alina goes on to elucidate that she watched her sister endure this each day agony beginning on the age of seven. Out of the blue, the viewers is in her sneakers — imagining what it is perhaps 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 change into a finalist in all 5. She has received three of the competitions outright. Within the course of, Alina raised her first a million {dollars} for the corporate in order that her crew 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 gives the “vertical take-off” advisable by storytellers. However Alina demonstrates one other vitally vital ability important for a robust innovation narrative. She breaks the issue into its part components to start with of the story after which pays them off by describing the options of her product that clear up each.
We’re skilled to anticipate this from the storyteller. Within the Wizard of Oz, for instance, we comply with the journey of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Lion and Dorothy. We be taught that the Scarecrow craves a mind, the Tin Woodsman yearns for a coronary heart, the Lion desperately needs for some braveness and Dorothy needs to return residence. The viewers follows their adventures and absolutely expects these story arcs to be resolved. Ultimately, 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 facets of the issue she is tackling. The primary is low affected person tolerance. Folks both don’t admire being jammed with a needle each single day or just select to not get the required medicine, as a result of they’re too afraid of needles within the first place. The second concern is low accessibility. The method of correctly self-administering the medicine by needle is so difficult that the majority 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 fulfill this want. The third downside is a lack of monitoring. With out correct monitoring, sufferers usually don’t take the right quantity of medicine on the proper time and their medical doctors and insurance coverage corporations don’t have any proof of whether or not the affected person adhered to the prescribed remedy 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 answer is needle free. It’s a system that generates a high-speed liquid stream the width of a hair that enters the physique by means of the affected person’s pores and immediately delivers the medicine on the subcutaneous or intramuscular stage. The medicine diffuses evenly into the system with out producing arduous knots. This addresses the affected person tolerance downside. 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 medicine, when it may be completed accurately. It gives over 3,000 therapies with the identical system (solely the cartridge adjustments). This implies anybody can self-administer the medicine with out having to go to the hospital. Accessibility downside solved. Third, the system is linked to an app that has the required remedy schedule (together with reminders, scheduling and side-effect monitoring) for the affected person to comply with and paperwork every software, which is shared with the physician and insurance coverage firm. This function handles the monitoring bit.
Her pitch is so compelling that a number of potential buyers have requested for the answer for themselves. Buyers who have been present process in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapies requested Alina to discover this answer for sufferers like them. IVF can require as much as 4 medicines on six completely different schedules that have to be utilized on completely different components of the physique inside 4 months. It’s a drugs self-administration nightmare. Thanks partly to this buyer suggestions, Alina is concentrating on the IVF market as one in all NovaXS’s early goal markets along with pediatric IBD therapies, 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 Medical Drugs at Harvard Medical College. That’s a narrative in itself. Stand by for the subsequent chapter as NovaXS pursues Grasp File Clearance with 510K and Institutional Assessment Boards medical trials in 2022. It is perhaps much more compelling than the primary one.
