Alright, so our next speaker is an entrepreneur and author and is the VP of Invicta Medical
and Acta Valen. Her focus point will be on the convergence of exponential technology,
disrupting medicine, therefore enabling patent-driven healthcare. And as a nice little personal
note, she played competitive varsity hockey for six years while playing quite amazingly at 85
pounds. One tough lady right there. So speaking with the talk of patent as CEO, ladies and
gentlemen, Robin Farman. Sorry.
There we go. All right. How's that? Can you hear me, guys? All right, cool. So I'm going to stand
here because if I stand there, I'll need a stepladder for you to see me. So yes, I'm Robin
Farman-Farmian. Give you a little background on me. My life goal is to positively impact at least
100 million patients worldwide. That's a pretty audacious goal, right? So I decided to hack a
career together that doesn't exist. I'm working now on three companies. I am called the money
girl. I'm the money girl. I'm the money girl. I'm the money girl. I'm the money girl. I'm the
money girl. Right? So I raise money and I do the high-level business development for companies
that are poised to impact at least 100 million patients worldwide. As you mentioned, I'm working
on curing cancer with Actavalon. We're repairing P53, which will be able to cure more than 50% of
all cancer. I'm working on MindMaze, which is a $2 billion unicorn. It's virtual reality for
stroke and brain injury rehabilitation. And I'm working on Invicta Medical, which is a data-driven
platform sleep apnea medical device. So these are pretty hardcore things and pretty
hardcore diseases I'm working on. Well, you know when you hear someone as crazy as I am saying,
yeah, I'm going to help out trying to cure cancer on the side, you know there's a backstory. So with
me, at the age of 16, I was misdiagnosed with an autoimmune disease. All told, I have had 43
hospitalizations and six major surgeries. Now, when you're facing surgery, and especially when
you're a kid, right, you go from hospital system to hospital system looking for the very best
doctors out there. But none of my doctors are going to be the best doctors out there. So I'm
going to give you four, because I'm not strong enough to be one. So my doctor's going to say,
what's wrong with you? Listen, no one has ever looked at me and said, you know what, Robin? Let's
hold off on these surgeries because you're so young and technology is moving so quickly, it
could provide better solutions in the near future. Nobody ever looked at me and said, you know what,
Robin? Technology is hope. But technology is hope, right? In fact, had digital health IT and just
the sheer amount of information we now have access to as patients existed when I was a teenager, I
most likely would not have lost three organs.
Now, at the age of 26, this is seven years after they had taken out my entire large intestine,
my doctors were telling me I was cured, but I wasn't, and I was in extreme pain.
So over a period of years, they kept upping and upping my opiate dose, until eventually
I was on 80 milligrams a day of methadone.
Now, this is a massive dose, and we were talking basically heroin dependency at that point.
And I went back into my doctor's office and I said, I need off this drug now, it is a
horrific medication.
They said, okay, well, the next step would be to surgically implant a morphine pump into
my spine.
I was like, are you kidding me?
I was 26 years old, I was essentially a shut-in, just being able to take a shower was the most
thing I could do on a daily basis, and my doctors were telling me I was gonna be on
high dose opiates for the rest of my life.
So I basically said, F you.
And I fired my entire healthcare team, every single one of them, and I rebuilt it with
healthcare professionals that worked with me as a team and a colleague.
I ended up getting diagnosed correctly.
Put on a biologic medication IV called Remicade, and literally within 24 hours of that first
dose, I went into remission.
Totally overnight.
After 13 years.
So that's what I'm up here to talk to you about, and that's why I've dedicated my life
to dramatically impacting medicine.
I talk on the convergence of exponential technology, let's see if I can do this, impacting medicine.
So when I'm talking about exponential technology, I'm talking about all the sexy ones, right?
Artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, sensors, even being able to utilize
the power of the crowd.
So today, let's start out with a scenario of what it's like to be a patient today and
in the near future.
Well, right now we have a lot of point of care diagnostic devices.
What that means is a diagnostic device that comes to the patient versus the patient having
to go to a traditional setting like a hospital or clinic.
So what I can do is take my FDA approved EKG monitor on myself in my home.
Send the data up to the cloud where it's going to be analyzed by artificial intelligence.
And if I do need to see a physician, I can do one via telemedicine, Skype, FaceTime, even
potentially a telemedicine robot.
In fact, that is the way right now the United States is going.
Massive into telemedicine.
In fact, Kaiser Permanente, that is the country's largest managed care organization, their CEO
came out last year in California and said, by 2018, more than 50% of all of our clinical
visits are going to be telemedicine.
We've done virtually.
CVS MinuteClinic.
You can walk in there any time and see a registered nurse on demand.
They've recently partnered with Cleveland Clinic, one of the best hospital systems
in the U.S.
And you can now see a video doctor on demand from CVS MinuteClinic if you need one.
There are many, many examples.
In fact, almost 70% of in clinic visits actually don't need to be in clinic.
And point of care diagnostics, or what I like to call diagnostics on demand.
We are seeing a lot going on in the world of blood collection, and nothing to do with
Theranos.
Get that out of your mind.
So this company right here, the Core Wellness Tracker, this is essentially a hacker type
tool, right?
Because it's not going through FDA approval.
They did a crowdfunding campaign, and they're expected to launch in the next couple of months.
You can get a spectrometer in your own home now for a couple hundred dollars.
You can do cholesterol levels, blood glucose fasting, things like even inflammatory markers
on a daily basis if you'd like.
EverlyWell?
They did about $3 million of funding, and what it is is mail order labs.
So you just go online, you order a kit.
This is out of pocket, by the way.
This is really hacking your health care.
You're not going through insurance.
You're not going to doctors.
You are self-prescribing lipid tests, thyroid.
You can get every single one of the STDs done through EverlyWell.
They send you a blood collection kit.
You take surface level blood, send it back in the postage paid free envelope, and bam,
you've got your own blood labs.
We're also seeing a lot going on in the world of apps.
BrainCheck launched earlier this year.
This is early detection of dementia and concussion.
Now why this is so important is because, especially with dementia, pharmaceutical intervention
is only successful at the early stages.
But the problem is none of us get baselines on our brain health.
We all know our baseline on our BP.
We know our baseline on our cholesterol.
Nobody knows their baseline on their brain health because you don't go to a neurologist
until you're exhibiting symptoms.
Once you're starting to have symptoms of dementia that are actually impacting your life, it's
probably too late.
So this is a gamified version.
It's a freemium model.
So for free or for a couple dollars a month, I think, subscription, I can do a game for
five to ten minutes that will give me my brain health.
It is fun, it is engaging, and you don't have to go to the doctor.
Everything on this slide is actually FDA approved.
These are clinical grade medical devices that are affordable and able to get as a patient.
You do not go through the healthcare system to get these.
You do not go through your doctor.
You do not go through your insurance company.
Stethoscope and the ear monitoring device, they use your smartphone as the brains.
Hook right into it.
Look in your kid's ear.
Take your own, you know, use your own stethoscope.
And if you do need to see a physician, you can do one on demand via video through their
apps.
I talked about a live core.
That's the EKG monitor.
It's a single lead EKG monitor.
The ultrasound.
This is interesting.
Philips came out and it is a subscription model.
So now for $300 a month, anybody in the country can get their hands on an ultrasound.
That is incredible to someone like me because they usually cost thousands and thousands
of dollars.
And you can only have them in hospitals.
So say you're pregnant or you just need ultrasound for a couple of months.
You can do that with this particular device.
And this is me.
This is me in my own living room.
I have hacked my healthcare in order to get almost every single bit of it in my apartment
or within a two block radius.
I get my Remicade every six weeks now for the past 18 years.
And now I'm doing it in my home.
It went from being $28,000 a year to $2,000 a year.
It went from being a dose, by the way, at Stanford to only $5,000.
And that goes through my insurance company.
So my deductible fell from about $1,000 to about $500 by doing this.
And my recovery time went from seven days to zero.
That's how much of a big difference it makes when you pull patients out of things like
infusion clinics.
I also do IV saline solution on demand.
I mean, how many people have had a hangover in their life?
Raise your hands.
There we go.
Right?
So you can next morning, and this is in a lot of the major cities here in the United
States, including Vegas and San Francisco, New York, Boston, IV doc.
It's like Uber.
You go on an app.
You order a liter of saline solution, a vitamin B12 shot, and some vitamin C IV.
They come to your house within two hours.
And it's paid out of pocket, right?
Doesn't go through insurance.
Doesn't go through your physician.
But if you're hungover or if you're someone like me, I have Crohn's disease, I need a
hydration frequently so I can just get one on demand.
In fact, I even get my primary care done in my home.
My doctor out of Circle Medical.
And there's other companies.
That one happens to be in the Palo Alto, San Francisco area.
They come to my apartment for 60 minutes.
60 minutes.
$20 copay.
And they take care of everything.
When is the last time any of you saw a doctor for 60 minutes?
Pretty big deal.
All right.
So back to our scenario.
We had our point of care diagnostic.
We sent the data to the cloud.
We saw our physician via telemedicine.
What about potentially getting our medication delivered by drone?
Well, this is actually happening.
Company called Zipline.
$18 million of funding based in California.
They have gone into Rwanda.
It is one of the poorest countries, of course, in the world.
And their infrastructure for transportation is nothing.
So one of the biggest killers there is maternal bleeding.
And that's solved purely by a blood transfusion, but they can't even get that in Rwanda.
So Zipline is in there.
They've partnered with UPS.
They are creating the world's first completely nationalized drone delivery system, specific
for health care.
They do things like blood transfusions, vaccines, and medication.
White House.
White House went to them a few months ago and said, Zipline, we need your help.
So they are starting out here in the next year, actually in the state of Nevada, and
I think part of Virginia and one other state in the country where there are remote patients
who don't have easy access to doctors.
And we're going to start delivering drone medication in the next year here in the United
States.
We're seeing drones being utilized in other areas of medicine.
This is a flying defibrillator.
If you can get to a heart attack victim in under 60 seconds, you can increase survival.
You can get to a heart attack.
And one of the things that we're seeing is that the survival rates from 8% to 80% massive
change, right?
And one person ambulances.
This is essentially a flying car.
This is real.
This exists.
This one is about a year and a half old, actually.
It's a company based out of China and they are talking to Lung Biotechnologies, a transplant
company here in the United States, for 1,000 units of these.
In fact, countries like Dubai are starting to launch this for consumer travel like taxis.
And one person ambulances.
In fact, the drone industry is exploding.
Last year, as you can see,
it was about a $2 billion market.
That is expected to grow over the next three years
to $127 billion market.
Have you ever seen a market just expand in that quickly?
In fact, right now, we're entering a perfect storm
of technological advancements really enabling
what I like to call the era of the patient.
So starting out with the medical science,
we all know genetic sequencing
is not only on the exponential trend,
but it is dramatically outperforming Moore's Law.
2001, it cost about $100 million to sequence the genome
and it cost about $2.6 billion to get to that point.
Last year, it fell to the under $1,000 mark.
That is the inflection point experts have agreed
would make a massive difference in medicine.
We're gonna start to see things like precision medicine,
a treatment plan based on the individual
versus the one-size-fits-all model
that we have had up until now.
That is a big deal.
We'll also start to do
early-onset diagnostics and predictive analytics.
All right, go to raise your hands in the room.
How many people have heard of the microbiome?
Awesome, okay, I get about 50% in most of my talks.
So what the microbiome is,
it is the colonies of bacteria, fungi, and viruses
that live in and on our bodies.
Totally symbiotic relationship, by the way.
We need them to survive
and they absolutely need us to survive.
Well, genetic sequencing technology
is catalyzing sequencing the microbiome
because it's actually even smaller,
so now we need to start sequencing
the microbiome on our bodies.
And this is going to,
you're gonna start to see this a lot more
in the news over the next five years.
The US government launched a $400 million initiative
last year around sequencing the microbiome.
100 million coming out of the Gates Foundation
and a lot of academic institutions
have gotten on board with this.
Let me give you some scenarios
on how we can look at treating diseases.
I have Crohn's.
Imagine I bank my microbiome
the same way you bank umbilical cord blood.
And get a transplant back when I'm not feeling well.
Or take that one step further.
All of us in peak health bank our microbiomes.
And then if we get cancer,
take antibiotics or just start aging,
we can get a transplant back of our own microbiome.
Now, we are already using something
called fecal transplants for C. diff.
C. diff is an incredibly difficult
antibiotic resistant infection
and that is actually cured now with microbiome treatments.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about software.
So virtual reality,
and augmented reality,
this is both software and hardware,
but the software is the big part of it
that's driven by artificial intelligence.
And I mentioned I'm working in this space as well.
Right now, I mean the obvious uses of virtual reality,
gaming, entertainment, experiences,
you wanna go diving off of Mars,
whatever you wanna do, you can do by VR.
And training, we have been training the military
and surgery and disaster response now
for a couple of years.
But interesting things that we're gonna start to see
pop up over the next six to 12 months.
Trying on makeup, trying on clothes,
test driving your cars, interior design,
architecture, doing all of your meetings
and going to school in the world of virtual reality.
But virtual reality and medicine
is where I get really excited.
This is me, I'm working on,
I mean I'm just trying out a company called DeepStream.
They're based out of Stanford
and they are for pain management control
and it actually works.
You put on the VR, you're in there
and you're shooting penguins and they're snow flying.
High five.
And,
it actually works.
We're also using it for things like
pain anxiety, PTSD, even phobias.
If you're scared of spiders,
you can now get rid of that phobia in the world of VR.
And virtual reality is going social.
There are six to seven major platforms already.
One is called High Fidelity.
Space is launched recently, that's Facebook's version.
But imagine Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn in the world of VR.
All right, so factors to consider.
A couple billion dollars, again,
was invested in the last couple of years.
These are mainstream VCs, these are not niche VCs.
Now we are gonna start to see it democratize,
as I mentioned, over the next six to 12 months.
And that is because of two companies.
First, Apple.
Their 10 year anniversary is coming up
with their iPhone 8 is launching
and it's between September and March.
You'll probably be able to get your hands on it.
It's gonna have a heavy AR focus.
Second one, of course, is Facebook.
With the launch of Facebook Spaces, this is a big deal.
This is why they got Oculus Rift.
And I have about two or three minutes left,
so I'll skip over Hardware.
I have a lot of content.
I could have done this easier.
All right, so all of this technology, though,
is raising the bar on the interaction
between the patient and the physician.
So if you think back to the title of my talk,
the patient as the CEO,
and just like the CEO of a corporation,
where you surround yourself with a fantastic array
of vice presidents, support staff, advisors.
Remember, as a CEO of a corporation,
you are not an expert in marketing, engineering,
finance, legal department.
You hire the best experts.
So as a patient, why not?
Why should it be any different?
You can be the CEO of your own healthcare team,
but you hire all the best experts
to give you advice on what to do.
You are the one who is the decision maker
and you are the one who is essentially responsible
to making sure that your healthcare is gotten to you.
And I understand not everyone is as type A driven
as I am, a very obviously ice hockey player
for six years for Boston University.
This is a pretty big deal.
So I talk about having a COO on the team, health coaches.
And we're seeing this as an industry massively explodes,
both virtual and in person.
And so health coaches can help you.
And they don't need to be skilled in medicine.
They just need to be skilled problem solvers.
Because a lot of the time in medicine,
maybe why you're not getting your treatment plan
isn't because you're not getting your treatment plan.
It's not because you don't understand it
or isn't because you don't want to do it.
But it's because you're 70 years old
and your driver's license expired.
You have no idea how to use Uber
and you don't know how to renew it.
So you have no way of getting to the doctor.
Well, people like health coaches can help figure out
how to incorporate and integrate treatment plans
into your specific life.
So I wanna leave you with this thought.
Now that you're the CEO of your own healthcare team,
and I mean every single person in this room,
you are now the CEO of your own healthcare team.
How are you gonna start to change your behavior today?
Thank you.