“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 palms. “(Now) think about it’s important to inject your self with needles 1,000 instances (over) three years.” Alina goes on to clarify that she watched her sister endure this day by day agony beginning on the age of seven. All of the sudden, the viewers is in her sneakers — 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.
With this riveting opening to her story, Alina has entered 5 enterprise competitions and change into 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 could 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 helpful by storytellers. However Alina demonstrates one other vitally vital talent important for a powerful 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 clear up 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 house. 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 ultimately 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 points of the issue she is tackling. The primary is low affected person tolerance. Individuals both don’t admire being jammed with a needle each single day or just select to not get the mandatory medicine, as a result of they’re too afraid of needles within the first place. The second subject is low accessibility. The method of correctly self-administering the medicine by needle is so difficult that almost all 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 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 typically don’t take the right 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.
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 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 arduous knots. This addresses the affected person tolerance downside. Secondly, the system has LED security lock sensors that gentle 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 supplies over 3,000 remedies with the identical system (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 system is related to an app that has the mandatory remedy 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 buyers have requested for the answer for themselves. Traders who had been present process in vitro fertilization (IVF) remedies requested Alina to discover this answer for sufferers like them. IVF can require as much as 4 drugs on six completely different schedules that must be utilized on completely different elements of the physique inside 4 months. It’s a drugs self-administration nightmare. Thanks partly to this buyer suggestions, Alina is focusing on the IVF market as one in all NovaXS’s early goal markets along with pediatric IBD remedies, gene remedy with regenerative medication and diabetes.
Alina who’s a UC Berkeley graduate, is constructing this firm, whereas pursuing a PhD in Regenerative and Medical Medication 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 medical trials in 2022. It is likely to be much more compelling than the primary one.