“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 fingers. “(Now) think about you need to inject your self with needles 1,000 occasions (over) three years.” Alina goes on to elucidate that she watched her sister endure this every day agony beginning on the age of seven. Instantly, 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 battle 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 turn 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 workforce might construct a prototype of a brand new machine to offer needle-free supply of self-administered medicines.
Her opening grabs the viewers’s consideration and offers the “vertical take-off” really useful by storytellers. However Alina demonstrates one other vitally vital talent important for a powerful innovation narrative. She breaks the issue into its element components to start with of the story after which pays them off by describing the options of her product that remedy every one.
We’re skilled to count on 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 dwelling. The viewers follows their adventures and totally 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 liked, 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. Individuals both don’t respect 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 difficulty is low accessibility. The method of correctly self-administering the medicine by needle is so difficult that the majority sufferers don’t have any alternative however to go to the hospital to get their photographs. 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 battle, as a result of they aren’t correctly staffed to satisfy this want. The third downside is a lack of monitoring. With out correct monitoring, sufferers typically don’t take the correct quantity of medicine on the proper time and their docs and insurance coverage firms 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 machine 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 machine 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 degree. The medicine diffuses evenly into the system with out producing onerous knots. This addresses the affected person tolerance downside. Secondly, the machine has LED security lock sensors that gentle up inexperienced when the affected person has discovered the correct placement and angle for entry. It solely delivers the medicine, when it may be executed appropriately. It offers over 3,000 therapies with the identical machine (solely the cartridge modifications). This implies anybody can self-administer the medicine with out having to go to the hospital. Accessibility downside solved. Third, the machine is related to an app that has the required remedy schedule (together with reminders, scheduling and side-effect monitoring) for the affected person to observe and paperwork every utility, 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 buyers have requested for the answer for themselves. Buyers who had 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 drugs on six totally different schedules that should be utilized on totally different components of the physique inside 4 months. It’s a medicine self-administration nightmare. Thanks partly to this buyer suggestions, Alina is concentrating on the IVF market as certainly one of 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 Faculty. That’s a narrative in itself. Stand by for the following chapter as NovaXS pursues Grasp File Clearance with 510K and Institutional Assessment Boards scientific trials in 2022. It is perhaps much more compelling than the primary one.