Name: The doctor pioneering affordable at-home PCR tests
Uploaded: 2021-10-19
Duration: 5 min 23 s
Description: “We are trying to bring accurate, affordable, and immediate diagnostics to anyone,' Dr. Adam de la Zerda of Visby Medical says.

“We are trying to bring accurate, affordable, and immediate diagnostics to anyone," Dr. Adam de la Zerda of Visby Medical says.

The doctor pioneering affordable at-home PCR tests 

Dr. Adam de la Zerda - CEO, Visby Medical 

Health

I started a company about eight years ago when I felt that it was really important for us to really change the way that we in medicine are dealing with infections when patients are struck by either a virus or bacteria, we typically treat them first and only later diagnosed what they had and nowhere else in medicine are we doing it like this? This is literally the only major field of medicine that we first treated only diagnose what you had. And this is what will be medical is trying to change to bring affordable, accurate and immediate diagnostics to anyone who needs to diagnose those infections, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever context it might be. So if you walk into a hospital you would find a very large machines about the size of the sofa that's called PcR stands for preliminary exchange reaction. It is the gold standard. The accurate way to diagnose just about any infection you care about. What we have done is we found a way to take an instrument the size of the sofa that cost close to a million dollars and literally requires you to have a PhD in clinical chemistry to even supervised one of those And we militarize it to device that is filling the palm of your hand by militarizing the device. So much so, but not changing the underlying technology of it. This is still the same physical devices, big million dollar surfaces machine. You're now allowing to put the accuracy of any PcR test that you would otherwise find a hospital at the hands of anybody anywhere anytime. Everything of course if we do is regulated by the FDA will work very closely with them. Well on full clinical trials and we all have to rely on the FDA to make sure that devices that are coming out to the market are both safe and effective for patients and with the approval of just gotten to our sexual health tests. A few weeks ago we have now come that much closer towards fulfilling this reality. So the FDA just recently authorized our Covid test to be used in a setting called pulling what this means is now instead of just taking a single device and take a single patient sample and put it in, you can now take samples from as many as five people pull them together into a single sample and put it in a single device. Of course once you pull five people, if the test comes back positive you don't know which one of them was positive. Now you need to run them individually which of course you can do with five more devices where it works particularly well is in settings where the likelihood of somebody testing positive is relatively low and you just want to be sure that they are in fact negative. Think about people going in flight, people going into an amusement park or even people walking into a school or a place of work. We want to make sure we're protecting everyone but no one should be walking into their place of work. Today's the symptoms. So the lack of anyone testing positive low and that's what Putin makes about USB devices built in the United States, which doesn't just mean that it's high quality. It also means that we have control of our own supply chain. We have control over the entire setting that allows us to scale up the production tremendously. This is important for today but think about what it means for the next endemic, next time there's a terrible respiratory virus that comes forward, we will not be able to respond to it a lot faster than we did before having control over your own supply chain means that you can quickly develop something and also deployed in very high volume very quickly. There are a number of service providers around the country that use this test today, whether that's an airport setting or pharmacy or doctor's office, we sell it to them and then they price it over today and user to the customer. We actually do not set the prices eventually to the end user. But the important thing is as we're scaling up the production, we can make the advice more and more affordable to our service providers that will then pass over those discounts over to the end user with the most recent announcement now of being able to pull five samples into the same device. You can now get literally five times almost five times cost efficiency on every time you run the task. Eventually we will be able to get to an over the counter products, which means that we'll be able to sell it directly to people on our website online or maybe a shock of pharmacy. At that point, we will be able to price the directed to users at this point. That is not allowing us of course to mention what are intended prices, but really the intention to make it affordable. When my daughter was 1.5 years old, she actually ended up in a hospital for really bad respiratory infection. Nobody knew she had a respiratory infection. Everybody in the emergency room thought that she inhaled the piece of toy into her lungs. They wanted to take her into real surgery just to do an exploratory scan and see where it is and take it out. It took more than 24 hours for them to realize that she has a really standard respiratory syndrome that she should have been treated for. Have you been able to diagnose it immediately when she got to the hospital? It is exactly because of stories like No and my daughter that we exist and we do what we do. We need to be able to allow physicians to have the tools that they need to have a word in each of it. And most importantly went initiative so they can actually treat the patient and treat them knowing what they have to supposed to train them in the plight mm.