#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Neil P. Ray, MD, Founder & CEO, Raydiant Oximetry
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Monitoring babies’ oxygen levels to improve maternal and fetal outcomes
Raydiant Oximetry, Inc. has developed a low-cost, non-invasive biomedical device to monitor oxygen levels in fetal blood and improve outcomes of both mothers and their children during childbirth. Neil P. Ray, Founder and CEO, opened up about his medical professional background, how Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding has impacted his company, and how policymakers can better support innovation that addresses the country’s critical needs.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create Raydiant Oximetry?
I'm actually a physician—an anesthesiologist—and I've been practicing since 2005. It was through my clinical practice that I saw this opportunity to solve a significant problem in labor and delivery. I had an idea, but I didn't have a background in engineering or know how to run a company. It was really fortuitous that I pitched my idea to a non-profit medical device accelerator in the Bay Area called the Fogarty Institute for Innovation. They’ve been around for about twelve years, and they’ve incubated roughly thirty companies, taking on two to three companies a year for a three-year program, which is different from most startup incubators. And they've had great success. Ninety percent of startups fail, but at Fogarty, ninety percent of their startups succeed. Of those thirty companies I mentioned, I'd say half have already been acquired or are commercial on the market. So we were fortunate that the problem we were addressing resonated with the Fogarty Institute. That's where I learned how to transition careers from a clinical physician to a medical device developer.
What is the work you all are doing at Raydiant Oximetry?
We are looking at a baby's oxygen saturation non-invasively, from the mom’s abdomen. Oxygen saturation is a vital sign for predicting if babies and mothers are in trouble. And we are building our technology on the foundation of pulse oximetry, a technology that has been around for the last thirty years. Pulse oximeters have recently received a lot of publicity during COVID-19 because the products were suspected to have inaccuracies when used by patients with darker skin. Pulse oximetry basically is a color analysis of blood; when blood is oxygenated, it's red, deoxygenated means it's blue. So if you can do a color analysis of the blood, you can tell how much oxygen it has. That's essentially what we're doing, but from the mom's abdomen, non-invasively.
There's a whole industry exploding around the use of light as a modality to diagnose and treat diseases. Some of the technology we use is similar to Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which is used in self-driving cars today. There are lots of exciting things going on in the photonics industry, and we are applying new advancements in biophotonics to solve a problem during childbirth that has persisted for the last fifty years.
You mentioned working with the Fogarty Institute—what has been valuable about those sorts of incubator and accelerator programs, and what can policymakers do to better support organizations like Fogarty?
It's not cheap to run a non-profit educational system and nurture small companies for three years. It takes a lot of capital and resources. I am fortunate, being in California, that I was able to access such an amazing institute. But there are brilliant people across our country with great ideas that don't have the opportunity to execute them because they don't have the resources from an organization like the Fogarty Institute. So I believe that we need to increase our investment in research and development (R&D) and institutions like the Fogarty Institute if we are truly serious about tackling serious problems.
Also, the skills I honed at Fogarty aren't necessarily skills that you learn from university. In fact, there can be a tension between the skills and mindset you need to run a company and how you learn to operate within an academic environment. The only way to develop a new product is if there's a financial opportunity. And I know so many doctors who have commercializable ideas, but they do not act on them because they feel like their universities will encumber the intellectual property, so what’s the point? We need more institutions where a tech-transfer office doesn’t get in the way of innovation.
We saw on your website that you've received funding through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. How did that impact your journey as a founder?
One discouraging fact about women’s health innovation is that a lot of the fundamental (R&D) has to start from the ground-up. Historically, for example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) only spends 10 percent or less of their funds on women’s health care issues. So at Raydiant, we had to start with the basic R&D ourselves, as opposed to companies in the oncology or cardiology space, where technology often ripens in established university programs and then can be licensed out to startups for the commercialization phase. We started from the very beginning at Raydiant Oximetry and survived on the SBIR program for initial support. Thankfully, we have been able to access capital for our company from multiple SBIR awards to get us through the “valley of death”—the period between the emergence of a company’s new tech and its arrival to the marketplace. We're solving a problem that women across the globe face during pregnancy, and without the SBIR program, I don’t know if we would have been able to make as much progress as we have. Right now, maternal mortality is a hot topic at the Federal and State level. In the United States, we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any country in the developed world. If we are truly committed to fixing this problem as a society, then we need more resources going to R&D.
Do you have any reflections on things that could improve the SBIR program or its application process?
The funding life cycles for SBIR need improvement. If I have an idea and want to apply for a grant, I can only submit that idea three times a year, and I've got to wait almost a year before it gets funded. That timeline doesn’t work for startups that need to act quickly. We have received SBIR funding from both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NIH, and the NSF has recently streamlined the process to six months. An option for lawmakers to consider would be to have some SBIR money awarded to accelerators and incubators, who can then more quickly deploy the capital to innovative startups in their community.
Another promising program to model is the NSF Engineering Research Centers (ERC). These consortia are associated with universities and have access to capital. We recently started a collaboration with Texas A&M and Rice University. The relationship started when the ERC reached out to us as an NSF SBIR award recipient. They offered to find a technical expert within their network who could help with any technical hurdle that we had encountered. Within two months we had an expert connection and $200,000 of funding to look into this opportunity. I was able to access this program because of our relationship with the NSF. This is an example of a program that I believe is working well.
Recently, I visited Switzerland for an international women's health care conference. The Swiss want to establish themselves as the world-leaders in women's health care innovation. They are actively encouraging early stage companies to relocate to Switzerland and get their ideas funded right away with very little bureaucracy involved. The venture capital recipe for success is to fund a lot of high risk research that may ultimately fail in order to get high rewards. If we want the United States to continue leading innovation around the globe, we cannot be afraid to support high risk opportunities that initially sound crazy.
What are your goals for Raydiant Oximetry moving forward?
Our team is hyper-focused on getting our technology to the market. Making a new medical device is a ten-year journey, and we’ve estimated our development costs to be thirty million dollars. That's how much capital is needed over the ten years to build and test our technology. As of May 2022, we are five years into the journey with $10 million invested, so we have another five years to go and $20 million dollars to raise, if all goes as planned. There is a lot hanging on our company’s shoulders. Raydiant Oximetry’s success will raise the tide for women and children’s health care innovation more broadly. We need success stories in this space to generate additional interest in investment because there are so many unmet clinical needs that women and children face. I'm hoping to not only be successful, but to help catalyze innovation in this space.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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