Good morning, everyone. I'm very, very grateful that I'm joined by my good friend Jim and Tom from Lumen Astra, who's going to tell us how medical physical devices is impactful in the future of AI development as well.

So without further ado, I'm going to let Jim reintroduce himself, then Tom.

Okay, well, we're very, very excited to be here with you on a very emerging and important topic. And to give you a little overview of our company. So we founded the company just about five years ago, and we're very much a deep tech as a, as one of the terms is a company where we're using a technology that's actually very, it's very difficult. It's something that people have thought they could use to measure temperature of bodies for probably 30 or 40 years. When I first did due diligence on the technology itself, ran across some white papers and some investigations that had been done quite a few years ago. And what we're doing is we're building, we're a spin out from the University of Colorado from the microwave lab there. And we're building a small sensor, very small sensor that can be placed anywhere in your body and it measures internal body temperature. So for example, if I put it on the forehead, which is our first focus, we can actually measure brain temperature in real time, so isolate the brain, measure it. We could also place it over the liver, over kidneys, things that are very important organs in the body that typically aren't measured at all, just cause it's very invasive. So today, the only way to measure internal temperature during a surgery, during an ICU procedure, anytime in the hospital or out in the field, the only way to measure a temperature is very invasively. So bladder temperature, esophageal temperature up to the nose and down through the throat. There many ways to get some kind of an internal temperature. And basically it's only where it's convenient to get it as opposed to where you actually want it. And what we found is if you just look at cardiac surgeries and look at ICU trauma care, which Junaid is very, very involved with, we found there's about, just the US alone, there's about 2.1 million procedures every year performed that require managing brain temperature. And usually that's not in surgery, it's often cooling. You're having to cool the body or cool the brain in order to have enough time to lower the metabolism to shut the blood supply off, reduce the blood supply while a procedure is being done like aortic repair, for example. Over 60 % of the patients will have some amount of cognitive loss, neural damage during this time at cold. So the key thing is you gotta be cold in order to have the time to do the procedure but the longer your cold patch the threshold, there's a very much increased risk of neural damage, bleeding and other side effects, including death itself. So what we're doing is by having a sensor that actually measures brain temperature directly, we can knock that, now we see what the brain temperature is in real time. So we see changes in just a few milliseconds. And so that allows us to allows the surgeon to know exactly when the brain reaches the target temperature. And as we said, it's about 15 to 20 minutes sooner or then the bladder does. So they can go ahead and shut confidently, shut the blood supply off, make the procedure occur, and then get them warmed back up again. And also we've talked to perfusionists that actually do the cooling, the cooling system, the bypass cooling. They get excited about this and there's something we actually didn't anticipate. But what they get excited about is the ability to warm the patient up quicker and safer because you don't wanna go above 37 degrees. So typically what they do, again, since they're also looking at bladder temperature with a long delay, they set their final set temperature at 37. So the blood they're putting back in the body is 37, which means you're very slowly getting back to the actual temperature so that you don't go over 37. And the perfusionists tell us that, hey, if we knew, if I know brain temperature in real time, I wanna set my set point to like 37 and a half gets you up pretty darn close to 37 quickly, then hit my set point at 37 for the finish. And they think they can knock, we've heard up to almost 30 minutes, cutting off of the warming time. And overall, what that means is that by cutting this time down, the amount of time you're cold is reduced. We think we can reduce the mortality rate by over 20%. And the overall procedure time drops by easily half an hour or so, which means that the, and these are huge teams of people working you know, in the order to prepare. And it means that those people can get back to other procedures, other jobs, other things a lot faster. So there's a time savings, there's a safety savings. So there's just really a lot of interesting benefits by being able to measure that

Super fascinating and interesting. do have a question. My question is the technology itself. It sounds like it's been around a while. Why do you think why do you think it's just now that people are open to this and interested in it or what what is it in the marketplace that has suddenly created this opportunity for you to introduce this amazing technology.

So as a lot of things in science these days, I've had an interesting conversation with couple of MIT friends of mine recently, just talking about how do we, you're such a huge body of knowledge. There are so many PhDs out there. People have double PhDs. How do you actually learn enough in an area to actually make your contribution to it anymore? And the answer really is it's interdisciplinary. It's where you have several different technology areas coming together. I bringing in AI by itself, is just another computational science kind of thing, but it's when you combine it with bioscience, with life sciences, with mechanical engineering, you combine it with another discipline, that's when the real benefit and stuff happens. Now for us, the technology we're using is a thing called, we're taking advantage of black body radiation.

Yeah, so to give some background, I'd previously worked for BD in their targeted temperature management division, working with the Arctic sun. And one of the things that I would hear from doctors who were using this, it was primarily after a cardiac arrest, they were cooling their patients down to make sure that they were able to have the best chance of recovery. And they would be controlling using the bladder temperature but they really want to know the brain temperature. They're trying to control the brain. There's some controversy about targeted temperature management in terms of what is the right target temperature for these patients to reach. What's best for them is at 33 degrees, 36 degrees, 37 degrees, just making sure they're not getting a fever. But really they're looking at that with that surrogate measurement from the bladder. So it's an interesting thing for us to think about. Has that controversy really just been around? Are they measuring it the right way? So wherever you look at those models that you're showing at the start of this, Unite, it's a matter of are we making our decisions on the right information? And really that's where we think LumenAstra plays into a lot of this big data revolution that we have with AI and healthcare. If we're making decisions on data coming in on temperature,we wanna make sure we're making it on what we're actually trying to measure, not something that is similar, but can be different for different people. Someone that's a larger individual, their bladder temperature is going to change at a different rate than someone who's a smaller elderly person. So just thinking about all those other variables that come in, it's gonna have an impact on what that temperature is. So are we making decisions on this target temperature based on the right information coming in? So this is something that we can have that's going to be truly non-invasive, unlike what they're using today, is going to be, you know, they'd be able to control what they're actually trying to measure instead of something else here. Something that would have a big impact and could help to settle some of this information about what's the right dosage when we think about temperature as a therapy and treatment for cardiac arrest, for TBI, for stroke

which is if you can't measure something, it changes your thinking about how you think about the problem. So for example, if I can't measure brain temperature, then there's really not too much need for just only, if I had a technology for just cooling the brain itself, you can't take advantage of that. And so by having something new, like if I could actually measure brain temperature in real time, measure liver temperature, kidney temperature, then all of sudden it just changes your thinking and all of a sudden we're going to have a lot of aha moments now where people say, okay, here's something I've thought about, but it just wasn't worthwhile. So I haven't thought about it for several years. Now we have a new opportunity to actually do and take an action because of one technology, you know, begets many other technologies very often in solutions.

I mean, I had to do CPR on patient for 40 minutes and I called my cardiologist, put an intra aortic balloon pump and in the aorta is pushing the blood, right? And then I'm taking the patient to the neuro to basically take off the pop of the skull or whatever the bleed is. And now I'm just sitting there and I'm not cooling the patient. Why not? This is stupid. The reason I'm not doing it because I don't know if the pneumonia is going to do it and all of this process. The minute I have this and the patient is already in triaortic. Just guide the whole catheter up a little more and cool it. By the time the patient gets to the surgery, it's because, again, I already have a femoral axis site. I already have an interrubic bulge. I can guide another catheter up slightly. And then just a little bit up. I you don't need a neurointensivist for it. The interventional cardiologist can do that. And then you can, and just not too much, cool it down enough. I mean. Honestly, I'm going tell you this story I never told anyone. So anyways, people don't realize in ICU there's one thing called compassion fatigue. The reason that I went out of in-person near ICU after being the director of ICU, director of stroke for three and a half years is that I lost a 24 year old. She was an amazing person. She had two twins, three years old, which was exactly the age of my daughter. And we did everything and unfortunately she passed. She was actually an organ donor as well. And I still remember everything because the grandmother came at the end and then actually thanked me that, Junaid, when you walked in, everything started happening. I know the result was not ideal, but then they just put me to tears because at that point she brought the twin daughters. And I just wanted to see how I could have changed anything. And maybe I could, maybe this may not have helped because of course I believe in the Lord and everything in any capacity, whatever that case, we call it the force. But at the end of the day, wish we had some of these technologies that we can just for some minutes, freeze the brain for 20, 30 minutes, literally not that. Because I was able to get her in the OR in less than 17 minutes. I'd still lost her.

Well, healthcare in general is an extremely personal experience beyond there's technologies, there's science, there's drugs, there's, you know, there's all kinds of things that get involved with healthcare and whatnot, but it's really a personal experience. just to mention something briefly, you know, the brain is the thing we've been focused on. But when we first started the company, first thing we did was we, and for any of you out there that are ever thinking about, you know, doing a startup company of your own. Number one thing to do is customer discovery. Go out and talk to customers. We learned so much the first time I met Junaid to talk to him about his job and how his perspective is on it that it illuminates a lot of things for us and it makes us understand how important things are and what things that aren't important we can skip on. But some of the, we did about 20, 25 interviews real quick just to see, was there any other technology out there we just weren't aware of? Is there really a need for a brain temperature or other parts of internal temperatures like that? And we just got a resounding response and we actually identified over about a dozen different applications.

Awesome, I love it. Thank you for sharing it. Guys, we're gonna put everything including their LinkedIn into the show notes, also into the newsletter that goes as 11,000 subscribers now. So the idea is that again, we wanna bring these technologies, help these companies who are bringing transformative stuff. And again, putting it back into the AI world with the measurements, we just garbage in, garbage out. We wanna make sure that I get this correct information that I can build more applications on, including physical devices for regional cooling and software medical devices to understand prediction modeling for the future. Again, very, very important. Once we have enough corpus of data, we can actually, even before the patient land into the ER, you will have a dashboard saying, is potentially how this is going to be. The outcome of the patient prediction, again, of course, but then the outcome can be adjusted just because now you know what the risk and benefits are already and you can talk more intelligently to the patient, the family that, hey, I'm doing this risky thing, but here's the outcome that I'm expecting. Can we do it? And therefore I need that measurements to do so. Tom, do you wanna add anything before we close?

No, just thank you for your time. I think this is something that, know, AI is impacting all areas of our life. You know, we use it a lot as a startup, just in terms of helping to identify opportunities. We've seen it improve and help us find some of these applications and ways to contact it. You know, I've thought of it like I've got a whole team of interns is kind of how I think about GPT, where, you you don't want to take it as gospel truth. But you've got all of this information that helps us take the small team that we've got and really use it to the best advantage we can. People with experience that Jim's brought together to form our team now has all of this additional power to help put everything that we put together in it. just one of the ways that we as a small startup have been able to get to where we are today and hopefully have some rapid acceleration of our growth. So I appreciate all you do, Junaid, help get the word out about this and help to accelerate it.

Currently small, we're going to see good things coming for Lumen Astra. Again, I'm always available. I just want to make sure because I do this, I don't like to get involved into officially advisory chairs, but you are always available. Let me know who you need from my contacts, anything that needs to support this mission. And again, this is both clinical and military application. So we're going to see a lot more success both in terms of clinical and. military and commercial success as we go along. Jim and Tom, thank you so much for coming on this. We'll bring you back sometime for five minutes just to give us, you know, six month update or 12 month update. So that way people are already know that how we are progressing in this process.