“Never in the history of medicine has a vaccine been developed so fast and so quickly.”
In the third episode of SALT Talks: Pandemic Venture Investment Series, presented in partnership with OurCrowd, hear from company leaders developing a COVID-19 vaccine (Eyal Desheh of MigVax), early virus intervention via nasal spray (Dr. Gilly Regev of SaNOtize), and AI technology that catches human error in helping prevent unnecessary patient deaths (Dr. Gidi Stein of Medaware). Moderated by Matthew Kalman, OurCrowd, Chief Content Officer.
MigVax’s potential vaccine offers an added benefit as it can be taken orally and can be stored in a normal commercial refrigerator. Schools could store the vaccine and nurses could easily administer. SaNOtize is tackling COVID from another angle through the development of a nasal spray. This can act as an early intervention in eliminating the virus if exposed and can work on many other types of viruses as well. “The idea is a little bit like a hand sanitizer... You go outside, and then you just come back and you spray [the SaNOtize nasal spray] in your nose and you can get rid of the virus.”
Typos when writing prescriptions is not an uncommon problem that can arise from overworked, tired doctors. These can and have resulted in unnecessary patient deaths. We see the introduction of technology across different areas of medicine to assist and improve medical professionals.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKERS
Eyal Desheh
Chairman
MigVax
Gidi Stein
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Medaware
Gilly Regev
Chief Executive Officer
SaNOtize
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:09)
Hello everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. What we're trying to do on these SALT Talks and our conferences is provide a window into the minds of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we are thrilled today to welcome you to the third installment of our pandemic venture investment series, where top entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders dive deep into the challenges and opportunities arising from the pandemic crisis, and discuss breakthrough technologies that address issues from the coronavirus prevention and cure to social distancing and food supply.
John Darsie: (00:46)
The series is presented in partnership with OurCrowd, which is a leading global venture investment platform, and today's episode is titled, "Startups Tackling COVID and Other Global Health Challenges," and it features Eyal Desheh, a chairman of MigVax, Dr. Gilly Regev, chief executive of SaNOtize, and Dr. Gidi Stein, the co founder and chief executive officer of MedAware. Today's episode will be moderated by OurCrowd chief content officer Matthew Kalman. Just a reminder, if you have any questions during today's talk, you can enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen on Zoom. Now I'll kick it over to Matthew to host today's talk.
Matthew Kalman: (01:24)
Thank you John, and welcome to this, the third episode in the pandemic venture investment series of SALT Talks presented with OurCrowd, where we showcase the latest advances in startup technology that's helping to address this worldwide crisis. I'm Mathew Kalman, the chief content officer at OurCrowd, which is a global venture investing platform based here in Jerusalem. Today, we're going straight to the heart of the crisis to talk to three CEOs of medical startups at the cutting edge of the battle against COVID-19, helping us to overcome the challenges of safer and more efficient healthcare.
Matthew Kalman: (02:04)
Joining us today is Dr. Gilly Regev, the CEO of SaNOtize. They're based in Canada, and they've been conducting clinical trials of what I think is the world's first and only proven therapy against the coronavirus. We also have Eyal Desheh, the chairman of the board of MigVax, an Israeli company developing what will be an oral vaccine against COVID-19. And we have Dr. Gidi Stein, the CEO of MedAware, which uses artificial intelligence to prevent errors in medication that are a leading cause of unnecessary deaths among patients. So we have lots to discuss. Let's start with the search for a vaccine against the coronavirus.
Matthew Kalman: (02:46)
There's been big news this past week about the success of trials of a vaccine being developed by Pfizer. And let's begin with the chairman of MigVax, Eyal Desheh. Now Eyal, you have many years of experience of drug and therapy development in your previous role as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Tether Pharmaceuticals. So from your experience, does the news from Pfizer this week mean that it's game over, they have the solution, and you and your team at MigVax can just pack your bags and shut up shop? Do we still need an oral vaccine.
Eyal Desheh: (03:25)
First of all, good morning and good afternoon everyone that is listening to us. Happy to be here and share some of my thoughts and our thoughts at MigVax, how we address this challenging pandemic and what's our approach and the view from our window, how it looks like. First of all, I think the announcement by Pfizer that they believe that their vaccine is safe and effective is great news. I am convinced that there will be others that will follow. Different mechanism of actions, there will be vaccine for COVID-19. It is challenging, but it seems to be possible. And by the way, let's not forget it was developed in record time. Never in the history of medicine a vaccine was developed so fast and so quickly. But nobody really started from zero.
Eyal Desheh: (04:40)
That said, I would cautious from declaring victory. I think that if we learn something important and major about the coronavirus since it was introduced early this year, the beginning of this year, is that we don't know what we don't know and we don't know enough. There are so many researchers and studies conducted all over the world. Think I read somewhere that there's an article or a paper on the subject which is issued every three seconds. So a lot of people are really diving very deeply into how to solve this virus and possible other viruses that might follow. We might be at the beginning of an era that's not a race for the vaccine, it's a race after the virus. But I think to start with, it's great news. For me, and you mentioned I spent 17 years in Teva. I didn't do drug development myself, but I did fund it and looked at results and how the process works.
Eyal Desheh: (06:05)
The idea that a vaccine for such a major disease or virus is approved based on a sample of a hundred people that were diagnosed, especially those people that were not diagnosed and were in the trial, it's a little difficult for me to digest. I think that over time we'll have more data. There'll be more people, and I think we need much, much more data and experience in order to be convinced that this is it. There'll be other vaccines no question. Let's say something about what we do at MigVax. We're developing oral vaccine, which is simple to use, easy to administer, doesn't need -70 degrees freezing, can be kept in the refrigerator of the school, and the school nurse can give a small [inaudible 00:07:06] to the students to drink and then come again three weeks later, give them the second dose and hopefully they are immune, they are vaccinated.
Eyal Desheh: (07:22)
So it's very very simple to operate. It's also simple to produce once we cracked, and we believe we cracked, the construct of the materials, which was not easy to develop. That's why it's taking us time. But as I said before, nobody really started from zero or from scratch. We're based on many many many years of our research in chicken, and vaccine that was developed in [inaudible 00:07:57] Academic Institute in the north part of Israel by very experienced and capable scientists. It's a construct of three proteins and [inaudible 00:08:11] that leads them to the right immune system antibiotic. It's [inaudible 00:08:16], go through the throat and then through our digestion system where it activates the immune systems in the body. And it has experience in millions and millions of chickens that were vaccinated successfully with this technology.
Eyal Desheh: (08:36)
Now we validated this with mice, and we're ready to for the final trial with animals before we move into our phase one to humans. And we hope that everything works right. A little less than a year from now, we'll have an oral, a safe, easy to use vaccine that will be available. So let's keep our fingers crossed, because it still is extremely challenging, and as I said, there will be room for a number of vaccines around the world, and at the end of the day, there should be enough to really vaccinate everybody if we want to get rid of this thing.
Matthew Kalman: (09:20)
So you're looking maybe at by the end of next year, this might be ready to be on the market.
Eyal Desheh: (09:28)
Yeah, with the disclaimer that we need to go through the phases successfully, and everybody that was involved in development of vaccines or drugs knows how many things might go wrong. But we're hopeful because we look at the success of this technology with hundreds of millions of birds, of chickens that were vaccinated against a virus from the same SARS family. Very very similar in its structure to the COVID-19. So we know it works. We absolutely know it works, but development is a process with many hurdles.
Matthew Kalman: (10:19)
Let's bring in some other people from our panel, because until we have a vaccine, we need protection from the coronavirus. We have masks, we have sanitizer, we have social distancing, but a Canadian company called SaNOtize believes it can go one step further, and with a simple nasal spray, it can actually kill the virus after we've inhaled it, but before it spreads to the lungs. And Dr. Gilly Regev who's the CEO of SaNOtize is with us. Dr. Regev, so what's the difference between a therapy and a vaccine?
Gilly Regev: (10:56)
Thank you Matthew. Thank you all for being here. First of all, I would like to say I agree with Eyal. There won't be one treatment. It will be a combination of a few different treatment, and vaccines will be some of them, but it's not necessarily just a vaccine. I think the big difference that they're both were talking about prevention. The vaccine will prevent you from getting sick from the disease. It's not that far from what SaNOtize is doing. SaNOtize has, I think we were the first company that actually came out with a nasal spray back in April with the idea that the virus multiply in the nose. And if the virus multiply in the nose and we can kill the virus at that point before it becomes a full blown infection, then we cured the disease.
Gilly Regev: (11:52)
The big advantage of what SaNOtize has I think is it's not specific to this specific virus, or if the virus mutates or change, then this will still work. So our treatment or nasal spray is based on the delivery of nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a natural molecule that we all produce in our body. It is our body's first line of defense against infection. So it's not something new to the body, and when we deliver it, we deliver it topically through a liquid that delivers the nitric oxide. Nitric oxide, there was a publication that came out last month that was from a university from [inaudible 00:12:42] Sweden that the researcher actually said that nitric oxide is the only compound so far that have shown a direct effect on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So we know nitric oxide kill the virus. We know that if you get the right dose to the right place, you will get rid of the virus.
Gilly Regev: (13:03)
What we have done so far, we have already done [inaudible 00:13:08], so we took our liquid formulation, we show that it can get rid of the virus very quickly in the lab, and then we've done recently, I don't think I even updated you Matthew, but recently we have done some animal testing in hamsters and have shown that the day post infection, we got a few log reductions of the virus in the nose of hamsters, which is a very strong model because they have receptors similar to human. So we know that this has a huge efficacy potential. We have completed over a hundred people in a phase two clinical trial in Canada. We've shown very strong safety of this nasal spray, and all that's left for us is to complete a phase two of efficacy trial showing that this is actually working in human and can prevent you from getting infected.
Gilly Regev: (14:06)
The idea is a little bit like a hand sanitizer, where you use a hand sanitizer when you go outside and you need to clean your hands. It's the same thing. You go outside, and then you just come back and you spray it in your nose and you can get rid of the virus. So it could be prevention. It could also be an early treatment, so early on in the disease, and this is the trial we're doing right now.
Matthew Kalman: (14:32)
What are the kind of challenges that you're facing actually doing clinical trials for an anti-COVID therapy? Because in order to test this, you have to find people who might have been exposed to the virus, they might be sick. There's been polls taken in the last week about whether people are going to be prepared to actually take the vaccine if the Pfizer vaccine is proven to be successful. Are you finding people are willing to join the trials?
Gilly Regev: (14:59)
There are lots of challenges. I think there are always challenges with doing clinical trials. We've been in this field for many years and we've done clinical trials and other indications, and there are always challenges in clinical trials. But with COVID, it is so much more. First of all, because as Eyal said, we still don't know more than we know. This is changing all the time, and if you design a clinical trial two months ago, the design may be different today. The endpoints, what you're looking for is different. The outbreak centers are shifting. So our biggest internal joke is all we have is to start a clinical trial in one location and we cure COVID, because then the cases come down and then it's hard to recruit. So you have to shift into a decentralized clinical trial, which is a new term coming out now with doing trials that are not in one location, one center, so you can recruit in different places.
Gilly Regev: (16:02)
As for prevention, I think the big challenge is prevention needs very large numbers to show prevention. It's even a little bit more challenging for us than for the vaccines because we need a control arm, and we need to show that people in the control arm got infected versus people in the treatment arm that do not get infected. So you need a really large sample size. And in the treatment, if you want to look at people very early on in the disease, then first of all, it's hard to find them and you need to identify the people right when they're tested positive. And a lot of people when they're tested positive, they're already sick for a week. So it's not necessarily early. Finding those people early on in the disease is challenging, and looking at what's your endpoint.
Gilly Regev: (16:50)
Most of these studies are done in treatment later in the disease, when people are at hospital, very sick. If we want to show it early, then one of the endpoint could be, okay, let's look at hospitalization and how many people get eventually to the hospital, and we want to reduce this. But hospitalization is coming down because there are more young people getting sick. So this shifts as well. So all the shift during this disease and the progression and everything we learn makes it very very challenging in a clinical trial world. And we keep learning all the time.
Matthew Kalman: (17:28)
So Eyal said with all the caveats and all the challenges that need to be overcome, they might have the MigVax vaccine by the end of next year. Are you prepared to tell us when we might have SaNOtize to protect us in the meantime?
Gilly Regev: (17:46)
We just had a good meeting with Health Canada. We believe from what we heard from them that once we show an efficacy in a phase two, they will consider releasing this to the market. So they will not require phase three due to the very strong safety profile of our treatment. So I would hope that by Q2 2021 this will have an approval. That's the goal.
Matthew Kalman: (18:14)
Okay. I'll be speaking to you in about six month's time to check that out. As we know, this crisis has thrown the world's health systems into turmoil. But even before the current crisis, the normal pressures of patient care were contributing to mistakes involving giving patients the wrong drugs and leading to unnecessary deaths. And that's exactly the purpose of MedAware, which is a company that was founded by Dr. Gidi Stein to address that issue. So Dr. Stein, before we come on to talk about your particular technology, I wonder how, as someone who knows the healthcare world well and up close, how much would you say has the COVID crisis changed the way that we deliver healthcare?
Gidi Stein: (19:07)
So hi, and really thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you. COVID is a terrible disease. Millions of patients are dying, but it also presents an opportunity, because it takes the extreme trends that were already brewing in the recent years. And today, we understand that being in the hospital could be one of the worst things that could happen to a patient. Hospitals are not safe. If patients get infected, physicians, nurses also get infected. So we have to change the paradigm by which we provide health and not hurting our patients in the meantime. And there's a lot of turmoil around that, and I think the trend is going into a distributed hospital, decentralized hospital.
Gidi Stein: (20:04)
So think of the possibility that an elderly person can be hospitalized at home. They don't have to go to the ER, they don't have to go through all the crowded spaces, all the nursing facilities. You can just stay at home and get your care at home. Now certainly, healthcare is not bounded by walls and by buildings. The same staff can provide health to a much wider audience and much safer health. Now obviously, there are a lot of workflow issues and technological issues that prevent us from doing so, but today, more and more emphasis is going on on telehealth, on remote monitoring, and I think COVID brings us a wonderful opportunity to really change the paradigms of which we provide health to our patients by really treating them at home and shifting the center from the hospital to the patient home.
Matthew Kalman: (21:07)
So Gidi, if we take that to its logical conclusion, and we've heard similar thoughts from Johns Hopkins and from Sheba Hospital here in Israel on previous OurCrowd events dealing with healthcare, so it does seem to be a move in this direction away from centralized hospitals, but MedAware deals with mistakes in prescribing and the giving of drugs and medications. Don't you think that those kinds of mistakes and problems will be multiplied even more if you decentralize the care so people are taking things in their own homes?
Gidi Stein: (21:51)
So last week, there was a new article published in the Journal of [inaudible 00:21:57] Medical Informatics Association in which MedAware did, in partnership with Sheba, in which we have shown that overworked, tired, sleep deprived physicians [inaudible 00:22:11] have a two to eight times likelihood of erroneous prescribing. Obviously even taking those hospitals and driving them to the extreme, and even in normal circumstances, the likelihood of erroneous prescribing and medication risk is quite substantial, especially in the middle of the night after a too long shift. And I agree that taking the distribution of patients to the home [inaudible 00:22:43] obviously a lot of room for mistakes and error, and this is where I think a technology similar to ours can be of benefit.
Gidi Stein: (22:54)
We can provide the real time monitoring of the sensor data, of the clinical data, and merging them and extracting only those rare events that can actually harm the patient and surfacing them to the providers or the nurses or to the care coordinators. Because one of the challenges in treating patients today, and especially in a distributed manner, is that there is so much information. We are flooded with information as clinicians. [inaudible 00:23:25] to know our left from our right, and within five minutes that we have to see the patient, really understand the the longitudinal patient record. So if there is a sophisticated AI system that can really pick up the specific risk in the mean time and send them directly to the right providers and caregivers, this could facilitate a reducing of the overall patient risk, and drive to more distributed healthcare and patients treated at home.
Matthew Kalman: (23:56)
So just talk us through the MedAware system. How exactly does it intervene in the process in order to try and stop these mistakes occurring?
Gidi Stein: (24:07)
So what we do is basically listen to all the data that comes from the electronic medical record and from the sensors and the [inaudible 00:24:15] data on a continuous, and using our AI technology, we "understand" and learn the behavior patterns of clinicians, and identify outlier situations as potential errors and flag them in the right time. So if a physician will prescribe a medication that is a complete anomaly to the patient characteristics or if suddenly a patient has a new lab test or vital sign which usually is an outlier to the patient medication list, then we would provide the right alert and say hey, we may have a mismatch here. If a patient is bleeding and he's [inaudible 00:24:57], doesn't make sense. And this is where AI platforms identify these risks and alert the clinicians at the right time.
Matthew Kalman: (25:07)
Right. Let's go back to Eyal Desheh, because I wanted to talk to you about the question that Gidi has raised about the fact that this pandemic is not just a terrible disaster, but it also presents a kind of business challenge and maybe even a business opportunity. How do you see the whole business model here has changed because of the pandemic? Because you say these vaccines are being produced in record time, you think you might be able to get your vaccine out by next year. This is not the way that you were used to doing things at Teva I'm sure.
Eyal Desheh: (25:49)
First of all, we learned that options are not just something that high tech companies grant to their employees, but a tool that government use to try to secure the healthcare of their population and willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on buying those options. Many of them are going to be thrown away to the garbage. So yeah, there are significant financial implication and business implication behind this. We don't know the prices. We don't know the prices. We know that if we take the analogy from the price of a regular vaccines, they range between a handful of dollars to hundreds depending on what kind of disease. So the price has yet to be determined, and I think companies are pretty silent about how much they're going to charge.
Eyal Desheh: (27:10)
I want to talk about the other half of this equation. No question that the wealthy world is going to be vaccinated once the vaccine is approved, FDA approved or EMA approved. Any regulatory authority, the Minister of Health here in Israel and so on. But I think it opens a series of moral questions regarding who can afford it, who's going to get it free of charge, or are we going to pay, who's going to fund it, and who's going to finance it. No question, Pfizer is a reputable, respected pharmaceutical company with a high level of ethics, and I'm happy that they were the first to announce success, because they will set the moral tone. But they're not a charitable organization, and they spend money, they got money from the US government, a lot of it. We don't know what kind of agreements they had behind the scenes on that.
Eyal Desheh: (28:35)
But hey, there's seven billion people on this planet. If we want to get rid of this disease and make sure that we can try and prevent other mutations and other viruses that might develop, we will have to really vaccinate the majority of the population on the planet. And at least 65% of the people that live here can't afford it. So I think the question is not financial. I think the question is of morals and ethics.
Matthew Kalman: (29:18)
Let me throw that to Gilly Regev at SaNOtize. You are a small company. You're developing a therapy that could help to save the lives of millions, if not billions of people until we have a vaccine. How can you scale from testing a hundred or 200 or 300 people in Canada to providing billions of doses of your SaNOtize spray overnight?
Gilly Regev: (29:48)
This is definitely a challenge. What we have started from the beginning, and in parallel, started to develop a new device for example that can help easily administer the drug. The drug in our case is very inexpensive, which helps to be able to eventually allow this to reach regions in the world that could afford it as well. I think what we are working in parallel is identifying manufacturing facilities, identifying drug production and distribution and partners that have the capabilities and can help us move this forward once we get the approval. So we want everything to be ready.
Gilly Regev: (30:41)
As you know, before you release a drug to the market, there's lots of testing and there's stability data that you need, and there is a lot of safety data that you have to collect before. So making sure that once we get to this point of approval, we're ready to give this to distributors and have the right partners at that point to help us reach as many people as possible. I think the biggest thing in our case may be that even if COVID is solved, I don't know if it will ever be, but in some way, and even if there is a vaccine, our treatment could be a flu preventation. So it's not just specific to COVID or the next pandemic that we're going to see at some point. So I think that everything we do is not just going to get lost if this is not needed in this amount, but at least we'll go into a flu prevention development further.
Matthew Kalman: (31:43)
And Gidi Stein, I want to come back to you. Eyal just raised this question that when it comes to the vaccine and who's going to get it, that's kind of a moral question. But we also see with the application of different medical solutions that you have to take the human factor into account. The whole basis of MedAware is that doctors have been making mistakes. And I just wonder, that's not just a moral question, that's a human question as well. What kind of take up are you getting from practitioners who are prepared to admit to their mistakes and want to use your technology?
Gidi Stein: (32:29)
When we tried to frame our technology, we try to be modest. We're not trying to teach physicians their work, we're not trying to teach their medicine, but you can do an analogy of spell checker. You can be the best poet in the world, write the most wonderful songs, but still have typos. We have a spellchecker. It doesn't make you less of a poet. And we look at our system as a spellchecker for clinicians. You can be the best doctor in the world, but you're human. You make typos in prescribing and not looking up in the right time, all kinds of slip ups. So we can just catch that and surface that. So it doesn't make you less of a doctor. Just shows that we're all human.
Gidi Stein: (33:11)
We have shown that taking this strategy, there's a huge uptake of our system by the clinicians because they are aware of their own mistakes. Although patients are the first to be influenced by the mistakes, but there is a second wave. The second wave is the clinicians, nurses, physicians, and others, and pharmacies suddenly understand that due to their mistakes, some life was taken or a patient was harmed, and this causes depression and even post traumatic stress disorder. Nobody wants to be there. It's not bad judgment. It's a typo. Who wants to kill someone just because of a typo? We're just making sure this doesn't happen. So framing it that way, physicians are accepting our system quite nicely.
Matthew Kalman: (34:02)
Let's go back to Eyal Desheh, because you mentioned something very interesting. Before, you mentioned the funding that various governments have given for the research into this vaccine. There's been a lot of national pride from different governments. I'm British. We heard day after day about the Oxford vaccine and how that was going. I know in different countries, different people want to be first in the race. Do you think that that politicization, if it's occurred, of the funding of this vaccine, has that been helpful? Has it been detrimental? Is it something that you've been able to latch onto, or are you ignoring that nationalistic side of things?
Eyal Desheh: (34:50)
Yeah, there is a new terminology about the nationalization of the vaccine. We're going to hear a lot about this argument in the next few months. If you ask me, I think if the world will learn to be a little less competitive and a little more humble and collaborative, we will all live in a better world. But a few leaders will have to be replaced before that happens. But this is not the political discussion. This is discussion about our health, about the world health.
Matthew Kalman: (35:30)
I just wondered how the politics, if its impacted the business at all [crosstalk 00:35:35]
Eyal Desheh: (35:35)
I'll tell you what I think. I think that the politics of the vaccine is bad politics. Throughout the past 10 or 11 months, we've seen a lot of money poured... And yeah, I can understand. I am an economist by education. I can understand that it's cheaper to throw money to the hands of pharmaceutical companies and research institutes to come up with the vaccine than to throw it on economy and fund the employed. It's much [inaudible 00:36:15], more economically efficient and effective. I can understand that. But what I haven't seen is global collaboration. I've seen China doing their own and Russia doing their own and the US doing their own and Israel is trying to do their own with our limited resources. And you're British, so the UK takes a lot of pride at the Oxford development, which is brought to market by AstraZeneca with all the complications. It's British pride.
Eyal Desheh: (36:53)
We'll have to forget about it. We're talking about a global pandemic, which has been delivered from country to country by iron birds that were invented a hundred years ago. There's no way to stop it. And anybody that believes that they will or make sure that their country's immune and the problem will be solved, it will not be solved because there will be other diseases. I think that calls for some global collaboration. Unfortunately we haven't seen that. We have seen that in wars that countries create treaties in order to fight a joint enemy. This is an enemy which is now worse than some of the worse enemies of mankind in history, and there's no collaboration between countries. So if you ask me, the vaccine politics is bad politics. I hope it will change. Excuse me, and apologize for being a bit blunt.
Matthew Kalman: (38:02)
That's what we're here for. Gilly Regev, I want to ask you a slightly different question. Here we are in something that's become known as impact investing. We're looking at commercial companies, but we're also trying to do good and help people. When you approach your science and your business, are you looking at this in a straightforward business manner, or are you also thinking, yes, I'm also helping to do good here?
Gilly Regev: (38:37)
I'm personally in this to do good. That's why I'm doing this. I don't think anyone would be able to work the way we work these days if there wasn't anything besides just to be successful. This is to change the world. This is to do good. We started this to help people with diabetic ulcers, to help people that are suffering from chronic sinusitis and from pain all their lives and trying to do good here. So I think part of our... And a bunch of our investors are impact investors because part of the reason we're doing this is because nitric oxide can kill drug resistant bacteria, and I think this is the big problem that we started the company from, is the reality that antibiotic is not going to work forever.
Gilly Regev: (39:30)
Who knows, the next pandemic could be due to antibiotic resistance and not due to a virus. The options are getting lower and lower. Large countries do not develop new antibiotic because it isn't worth it for them because they get resistance very quickly. So there must be a way to address the problem, and the only way is to get this impact investors and people that really care about what they put their money in and trying to not just make a successful business, but also a business that would change the world, that would help people. And I think that's a very important point.
Matthew Kalman: (40:11)
Gidi Stein from MedAware, what was your motivation for founding the company? Was it because it looked like a good business, or was it because you saw this problem up close?
Gidi Stein: (40:26)
Before I started this company, I was a full time physician on the way to professorship in Tel Aviv University. I teach students and residents, and I thought this would be the trajectory of my life, and I definitely never thought I would do startups. I thought a completely crazy idea. But then I was encountered with a case of a nine year old boy that here in Israel died simply because his physicians clicked on the wrong entry on the medication list and gave him the wrong drug by mistake. The ease by which physicians can kill a patient just by clicking on the wrong button without any really safety mechanism was haunting. I thought it could happen to me as a prescriber, it could happen to one of my kids, god forbid, if they go to the doctor. And I thought we should do something about that. And here we are today.
Matthew Kalman: (41:22)
Okay. Well we've reached the end of our time. Today, we've heard from just three of the 200 companies in the OurCrowd portfolio, and you can see more technology and startups and investment opportunities in both med tech and many other sectors on the OurCrowd platform. That's all we have time for. I want to thank our speakers, Dr. Gilly Regev from SaNOtize, Eyal Desheh from MigVax, and Dr. Gidi Stein from MedAware. Make sure to join us for the next installment next Thursday. Thank you to John Darsie and our partners at SALT, and we'll see you next time. Thank you very much.