“What number of of you’re 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 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 a sudden, the viewers is in her footwear — 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 develop 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 gadget to supply needle-free supply of self-administered medicines.
Her opening grabs the viewers’s consideration and gives the “vertical take-off” really useful by storytellers. However Alina demonstrates one other vitally necessary talent 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 remedy every one.
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 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 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 beloved, 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 features of the issue she is tackling. The primary is low affected person tolerance. Folks both don’t respect being jammed with a needle each single day or just select to not get the required remedy, as a result of they’re too afraid of needles within the first place. The second challenge is low accessibility. The method of correctly self-administering the remedy by needle is so difficult that almost all sufferers haven’t any alternative 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 battle, as a result of they aren’t correctly staffed to fulfill this want. The third drawback is a lack of monitoring. With out correct monitoring, sufferers typically don’t take the right quantity of remedy on the proper time and their docs and insurance coverage firms haven’t 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 gadget 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 gadget 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 remedy on the subcutaneous or intramuscular degree. The remedy diffuses evenly into the system with out producing laborious knots. This addresses the affected person tolerance drawback. Secondly, the gadget 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 remedy, when it may be executed accurately. It gives over 3,000 therapies with the identical gadget (solely the cartridge modifications). This implies anybody can self-administer the remedy with out having to go to the hospital. Accessibility drawback solved. Third, the gadget is related 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 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 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 drugs 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 focusing on the IVF market as one among NovaXS’s early goal markets along with pediatric IBD therapies, 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 Scientific Medication at Harvard Medical College. That’s a narrative in itself. Stand by for the following chapter as NovaXS pursues Grasp File Clearance with 510K and Institutional Evaluation Boards scientific trials in 2022. It is perhaps much more compelling than the primary one.
