Vaccines, Tests, and Life-saving Software: How Montana Biotech Firms are Fighting COVID-19 with Innovation
The MT High Tech Business Alliance, in partnership with MonTEC/Montana Bioscience Cluster Initiative and the Montana Bioscience Alliance, is hosting a free webinar Thursday, April 23, 2020, 4:00 to 4:45 pm. Vaccines, Tests, and Life-saving Software: How Montana Biotech Firms are Fighting COVID-19 with Innovation. This free webinar will highlight the life-saving work of Montana healthcare and biotech companies conducting R&D to meet vital needs during COVID-19. Speakers:
James T. Woodson: MD, FACEP, Founder and CEO, Pulsara
Jay Evans, Ph.D.: Cofounder and CEO, Inimmune
Jeff Fee: Cofounder and CEO, PatientOne
Sarj Patel: Ph.D, Cofounder and President, and Chris Booth, Ph.D., Cofounder and CEO, FYR Diagnostics
Full Transcript:
Christina: Welcome, everyone. I'm Christina Henderson, Executive Director of the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. Welcome to our webinar, Vaccines, Tests, and Life-saving Software: How Montana Biotech Firms are Fighting COVID-19 with Innovation. This event is part of a series of free webinars the Alliance is hosting in April in May, you can find the full schedule and recordings afterwards at mthightech.org/webinars. I would like to thank the board of the Alliance and our members for making this series possible. Today's webinar is co-hosted by the Montana Bioscience Cluster Initiative. Brigitta Miranda-Freer, Executive Director of the Montana World Trade Center, and Operations Director for MonTec at the University of Montana, is going to give an introduction to help frame our discussion, Brigitta?
Brigitta: Thanks, Christina. So, you know, bioscience is really about fueling, feeding, and healing the world. And Montana has a long-standing expertise in the first two categories. So if you couple that with the best in class technologies that are coming out of our university system and our incredibly high level of entrepreneurship statewide, it's really no surprise that Montana has been steadily increasing its presence in that latter category for a number of years now. In fact, it was at the tail end of 2019 when that phenomenon was recognized nationally. When the SBA made one of seven awards, to our state and specifically to the Montana Bioscience Cluster Initiative, with the aim of partnering with us to develop an even more robust bio science ecosystem. Now that initiative involves several key partners, including MonTec, Montana Bioscience Alliance, Missoula Economic Partnership, UM, Swan Valley, and Montana World Trade Center. So if anyone joining us today would like to find out more about this initiative, how we're messaging about bioscience in Montana, and how we might be able to help your firm, please visit our website at mtbioscience.com or montanabio.org. Thanks, Christina.
Christina: We will be conducting this webinar in a Q&A format today. I will serve as moderator. If you have questions, please type them in the chat box or in the Q&A tool in zoom. I also have a few questions that we collected from audience members in advance. And to kick things off, though, I would like to have each of our companies' CEOs take a few minutes to tell us what you do. And I will have you go in the order in which I say your names in a moment. So our speakers today are James T Woodson, MD, FACP, founder and CEO of Pulsara. Jay Evans, PhD, co founder and CEO of Inimmune; Jeff Fee, co founder and CEO of PatientOne and Sarj Patel, PhD, co founder and president of FYR Diagnostics, and I would now like to turn the floor over to Dr. Woodson to get us started.
James Woodson: So Pulsara is a communication and telehealth platform that connects teams. So telehealth is kind of a buzzword right now in the industry, but what really makes us unique is we are able to leverage our network to instantly unite people around unstable patients, patients that are in transition or moving between different organizations, and also for the providers that are in chaotic environments. So this can be applied to things that are as simple as a pre hospital patient delivering an ambulance to a hospital, all the way to mobilizing care teams for things like heart attacks, strokes, trauma victims, that can be incredibly complex and even moving across states. And then obviously all the way to helping regions as large as states manage the pandemic and mobilize appropriate resources. So instead of playing the telephone game that we often play, as you see in that top diagram, our clients are able to use mobile technology and specifically create a dedicated patient channel that they can use to improve patient outcomes and improve their operational efficiencies. So what we've been doing for COVID--we've got multiple clients that started even in ground zero there in Seattle. So we've been involved in the response since the very beginning. We recognize that there really wasn't time for many of our communities to prepare, both existing clients as well as regions that would be new to our solution. So our platform specifically for COVID, they leverage telehealth to do things like limit clinician exposure, they're using it to preserve the PPE that you hear about so much that protective gear, they can obviously use it to manage patients remotely and even communicate with family members that aren't allowed to the hospital, whether it's for COVID-related process or something else. So one of our more touching early stories was up in evergreen allowing family members to say goodbye to their loved one and at least they were able to do so with video. So we knew there was a need, we knew that people needed a platform that was flexible like this, so we actually decided to donate all COVID response packages for free. So the response to that was absolutely overwhelming. We've onboarded literally hundreds of clients from anywhere from rural communities in Alaska, all the way through to major metropolitan areas. And as I mentioned a little bit earlier, even states. So kind of where we are now in the response, we're kind of in a mixed state right now, there are some regions that are starting to come up for air. Others actually are still onboarding and are preparing for their kind of initial wave and apex there. But pretty much all systems now are kind of looking around, even ones in New York are starting to look around as to what's next. So most of us believe that Summer is going to be a summer of preparedness. We're basically focused on kind of figuring out what it's going to take to kind of keep this beat down, but if there is another surge coming in the in the fall, what are we going to do about that? And so we're committed to continue to help our communities rise up to that challenge. So with that, I'll pass it on to the next person.
Christina: Next up is Jay Evans.
Jay Evans: Hi, everybody. I'm going to try to share some quick slides as well about Inimmune. So thanks, everybody, for joining us today and thanks for the invitation. So, as was mentioned in the introduction, I'm the President and CEO of Inimmune. It's a company here in Missoula, Montana in the house out of the Montec Center. I'm also the Director for the Center for Translational Medicine here at the University of Montana. Inimmune was founded in 2016 by a group of scientists that came up here from GSK in Hamilton. I will tell you just a little overview of the company or business model. I'll focus most of my time on what we're doing on our battle against Coronavirus and a vaccine as well as the drug product that we're advancing. So like I said, Inimmune was founded in 2016 by a group of about 15 scientists that came up from GSK and Hamilton. Historically, we've had a lot of NIH funding for this team. Over the past 15 years, we've generated about 80 million dollars and NIH contracts and grants, and they're very active in the patenting space. Our team does everything from initial drug design to discovery, up through formulations and analytical drug delivery technologies, up through immunology and vaccine studies. We're pretty much right now spanning the space from discovery to IND but as you'll learn, we're soon going to move that into clinical human clinical trial testing as well. We have a pretty deep pipeline from an early stage by a tech company. Our lead products center read allergic rhinitis, cancer, and vaccines, which we're talking about today. We have strong programs in opioid and flu, and now and Coronavirus vaccine discovering development. Some of our early pipeline technologies, including our vaccine events. Our rapid acting antiviral is actually one that was an early pipeline that might move into a later pipeline stage because that's the one that will also have some advocacy against the Coronavirus. We're a small company that just started in 2016, but we have a lot of connections that are around the country and around the globe; we have a lot of collaborators. A couple of these are key in our Coronavirus response, including a group at Mount Sinai in New York, as well as at Boston Children's Hospital from Harvard, who are partners along with U of M and Inimmune in the Coronavirus vaccine development space. Our technology is based on finding things that stimulate the immune response in very specific ways. We do this through looking for patterns that happen naturally in nature, viruses and bacteria that stimulate the immune response. We then use those in combination with vaccines to boost the right kind of immune response or how to deliver the vaccine in a way to get a better and safer product. A lot of the technologies are based on clinical histories. For example, NPL which is an Agilent that is manufactured here in Hamilton, Montana, just down the road by GSK, is in to license products. So these types of adjuncts have demonstrated safety and efficacy profiles and current vaccines. Inimmune is mostly awarded through federal grants and contracts. Just within the last couple years, we've been awarded over $12 million in new NIH grants and contracts. We also have a healthy contract service business, which has allowed us to stay profitable from day one, which is very unusual for a biotech company and those on the call would know that. But we're now moving into a space where clearly we're going to need some other types of outside capital to help us move some of these lead projects and programs through clinical trials. Our Coronavirus related programs-- we have a vaccine program that we have partnered with the University of Montana. This started in February, there was a funding announcement today through the University of Montana for about two and a half million dollars that was awarded that's been applied to this program. Vaccine adverse events and deliver technologies that were discovered developed in immune are going into vaccines at the University of Montana, which are now being tested in animal models, lead vaccine candidates will then be sent out to Mount Sinai as well as our partners at Boston Children's Hospital for testing and virus challenge models. And then those lead vaccines will move towards phase one, and will seek additional funding support, either from capital investment from investors, or from you know, some part of the federal government to help move those forward.
The second product we're focused on is an inter nasal amino stimulant that provides broad protection against a number of viral and bacterial pathogens acquired via the intranasal route. It's very effective against flu and RSV. We're just now setting up testing it down at Rocky Mountain labs at Hamilton to see if it's also effective against SARS coronavirus. We expect it will be, and if it is that'll be another product that we can quickly move into phase one, as a treatment you would take inter-nasally for a number of weeks around the time when you might be exposed to a Coronavirus or any other upwards to attract infection. So kind of a summary, you know, we're a growing biotech company here in Missoula, a pretty good pipeline of products with profitable with steady revenue and job growth here in Missoula. And we look forward to continuing that.
Christina: Fantastic. Thank you, Jay. Next up is Jeff.
Jeff: Great. I'm going to move through this relatively quickly, but PatientOne is a remote monitoring platform and automated care management tool. We take manual care management processes and automate them and turn them into digital workflows, enable care managers to manage many more patients and they would be able to do so in a manual fashion, and we marry that with remote monitoring. Our platform, we're not, we're not device-dependent. We've tried to keep it as simple as possible because the proliferation of in-home monitoring devices is certainly exploding. But what exactly is remote patient monitoring? It's basically any technology that supports a monitoring of patients beyond the four walls of the traditional clinic. The goal of this is to enable early detection of preventable patient issues, complications, unnecessary ED visits and hospitalizations. It also increases efficiencies for the care management team because it gives you the ability to remotely educate, communicate, and monitor the patients and certainly in the era of the COVID response, one of the things we really haven't touched on yet today is if you look at the US in the lack of the really the slow adoption by the provider community of telemedicine solutions or virtual care models, has been very, very slow to this point. And I think one of the things we're going to see coming out of this crisis is mass adoption of telemedicine and telehealth and virtual care models that we haven't seen the date. The other thing that's important to point out in addition to providers all of a sudden recognizing the clinical and public health utility of being able to monitor patients in their homes that are certainly at risk. Just because COVID is obsolete, I mean, it's blotting out the sun as we currently speak, their current healthcare issues that are still going on. And so what our solution enables our provider community to do is to be able to tag and keep track of those at-risk patients whether they have congestive heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, in the midst of this In the midst of this crisis, as you can possibly imagine, primary care has been decimated during this period of time. Most primary care physician offices we've talked to are down 50%, people are simply not coming in. And I think one of the things that the public is going to start realizing is the majority of things that are done in a primary care office doesn't necessarily have to be done in person. And so I think that we assert that primary care physicians don't adopt some type of virtual care model into their practice going forward, they run the risk of losing patients, because I think patients are now going to demand this. Our basic platform--there's some new codes that CMS has released, and this is important because we assert that this is the largest incentive that CMS that's the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services out of DC--this is the largest incentive that Medicare has provided in the digital health space today. It is a game changer for physicians that manage chronic conditions and at-risk patients, whether their primary care specialists like cardiology or endocrinology. Our solution is a stable SaaS solution that is easy to set up. Our primary principle is to keep this as simple for the patient and the physicians offices as well. As I mentioned earlier, we transform manual care coordination into digital workflows. And we meet the commercial requirements for getting paid by these particular codes. There's three different ways that visit patients can get physiologic data into our system, they can do a manual entry and so we push notify patients when it's time for them to take their temperature. Certainly, we're live with Missoula County Public Health and they're using our solution to monitor patients that have been identified as COVID positive, so they can manually enter in their data if the data if the actual device in their home, like a pulse oximeter, has Bluetooth capable, we can sync that device with our solution every time they take their data. We automatically get that data into our system where we track and trend it. Over time, as this graphic depicts, we've got over 350 devices that we can pair our solution with, that we can get data out of. And as I mentioned earlier, we track and trend that data for the care team. And we create automatic rules and alerts around data points that are trending in the wrong direction, or if a data point falls outside of a predetermined range, which gives the care teams the ability to manage by exception. So instead of actually having to call every patient that counties monitoring, they're only having to call the patients they are interviewing with the patients that are getting off track. So that is at a very high level. That's what we do. And I think it's important to note that in the in the context of what's going on in primary care, and certainly with what's going on in hospitals, getting the physicians and the hospitals paid for some of this work is really important because as you can imagine the hospitals and the primary care physicians have been decimated it, can you imagine just shutting down 80% of your profit margin service lines at a hospital to brace yourself for a surge. And that's basically what the hospitals across the US have done. So it's also a tool for hospitals to be able to capture revenue for work that should be being done or is already being done, but they certainly in the past have not been able to get reimbursed for. So I'll stop there.
Christina: Thank you, Jeff. And we'll turn it over to Sarj.
Sarj Patel: Thank you. Hi, my name is Sarj Patel, president of FYR Diagnostics. We're a Missoula, Montana based diagnostics development company. And we occupy laboratory space at MonTec. Here in Missoula, and the main focus of the company is developing and commercializing novel technologies for better and faster diagnostics and testing in human health and in life sciences and in agriculture. Currently, FYR diagnostics is developing diagnostic solutions for skin cancer, additional disorders, agricultural diseases, and we've just recently started working on neonatal associated syndromes like now. We were established in 2016. But R&D efforts really gathered pace in 2018. So we're still a fairly new game. We've developed what we believe are novel alternatives to traditional testing paradigms that are used currently like PCR in clinical settings and, obviously, with this current pandemic and the reliance on those kinds of tests to screen the population, it's really highlighted some of the bottlenecks associated with that kind of screening. And what we've done in the last month or so, is pivot our efforts to tackle the current COVID situation and use some of our novel isothermal amplification techniques. So these are easy diagnostic reactions that, you know, you just have to hold at a single temperature for a short period of time to get a result that does away with the need for complex and expensive instrumentation in a clinical setting. And so, we're hoping that we can take this particular technology and really apply to a really broad base of applications away from the clinic.
Okay, so this slide basically shows the technology that we're currently developing and evaluating as, as our answer to helping with the testing bottlenecks that we see occurring across the nation and around the world. And what we're doing here is basically taking this complex test and making it simple, very few reagents shorten time to result and a very obvious visual result that allows you to very easily for anybody to be able to say, where someone if somebody is infected with the Coronavirus, and if you look on the right side of that the test tubes that we have up there basically our reaction It's opposite control where it's just the reaction makes and the negative control and then various amounts of the virus in the tubes that are yellow. And that's basically the essence of our test. Basically, in the absence of virus, it's red, and it changes to yellow, in as little as 30 minutes in the presence of the virus, one of the other things that this test allows us to do is we've also removed some of the bottlenecks that we're seeing with acquiring samples. So nasal swabs of the virus transport media have all been in short supply and very hard to source for a lot of states. And so we're trying to develop this test in a manner that we can remove some of those steps with requirement for purification of the viral RNA, which is currently required for a lot of the current testing that's out there. A lot of the big units, the automated units, they perform that in one go but it's still the sourcing for the cartridges and things like that for the systems is still a bottleneck. So quite generally, this is the asset we're hoping that we can use within the state working with health care facilities like the hospitals around the say, obviously the two here in Missoula, up in Kalispell, over in Bozeman, we're going to try and see if we can help them out and get these tests together.
Christina: Fantastic. Thank you. So you all have a unique vantage point. As a doctor, your research scientists, entrepreneurs, could you maybe, for the benefit of our audience, describe for us what you are seeing is the wider impact of COVID-19. How has it impacted your company, your field and society? From your point of view? And maybe we'll start back through in the same order, starting with Dr. Woodson.
Dr. Woodson: Sure, yeah, there were many different questions in that question. So, from a company standpoint, the way that it's affected us, it's been kind of business as usual on many fronts, in that we address a problem that is really highlighted now. And so we have been really undergoing massive growth in our company. We've had a few things where we responded and just kind of coincidence and time were able to roll out a specific feature where we're able to bring the patient on to our dedicated patient channel. And so we've seen massive uptake in that can help turn like 911 calls that are done by a phone into a video interaction. And so imagine next gen 911 is now being accelerated. So instead of always sending an ambulance, people are now able to do video interactions. You look at things like a change in the regulatory and reimbursement environment for telehealth, like Jeff was mentioning. And now we can turn those into billable encounters, but still not send a truck on scene. So imagine the operational efficiencies for things like that. There have been things in the works on the hospital side, things that are termed community paramedicine, mobile integrated health care, there's a new model called ET3. All these things are fancy buzzwords and initials that most of you guys don't know what it means, but the essence of it is decentralization of healthcare. And so everyone has their own solution or group of solutions for established patients. But everybody on this call has been in one of those situations where I just pick up a phone and I call 911. Or I want to go to an urgent care or I want to do blank. And because of the reimbursement is now there, one of the things Jeff was mentioning, was the problem of poor adoption of telehealth. It's not because patients didn't want it. It's not because providers didn't want it. It's because it wasn't reimbursed. And now the combination of the change in the regulatory environment and the change in the reimbursement environment, there is massive acceleration towards towards that. So in general, I see a decentralization of healthcare being accelerated. I think telehealth is going to be one of the major drivers for that, high level, there's a lot of opportunity there. A lot of opportunity and a lot of hope that I think is going to be coming out of the other side of this. I think obviously, the big problem we're all struggling with is uncertainty. People are very good, even if we don't like change, we're very good at adapting to change when we know what rules we're playing by. But everyone is scrambling to understand the current environment. And I think that understanding and that uncertainty is really fueled a lot of the fear that's out there. And that has to do with how our hospitals are going to be able to adopt, whether it's digital technology like Jeff and I have, or whether it's more what Jay and Sarge have on the on the therapeutic or diagnostic side. They just don't have any money. They are in dire financial straits. So I think understanding all of the different means of funding is going to be a key path to helping us navigate the next six to 12 months.
Christina: Thank you, Jay, what has been the impact of COVID on Inimmune and what have you seen in your field?
Jay: No, that's a great question. I'll take a little bit of a different spin on this and try to talk a little bit about just the day to day stuff that has changed at Inimmune and working through this. Our group is a very lab intensive, research intensive team, which means we have 20 people there at MonTec in the lab all the time, and not, you know, an office space. And so we've had to struggle with how to manage through as a company ensuring employees and their their family safety, while at the same time making sure the high priority programs move forward, which are the benefit of not only the company but also the community we live in because we're working on a Coronavirus vaccine. So we've really taken measures early to put company policies in place to allow people to work from home whenever possible on projects that would normally be done in the office. I think a lot of people have done that. We've also put together alternative work schedules, we have people working on weekends now. They're at MonTec, to try to make sure the labs are depopulated in a way that people can social distance. Now, it used to be if people had a cold or whatever, you know, they come into work, and now they stay home. We've learned how to use Zoom like this call today, and Skype, and other things that I think will stay with our business after this thing is done. I think there's more efficient ways to have meetings than always in person running back and forth between the university and MonTec all the time between our university roles and our company roles wasn't a very effective use of time. And I think a combination of in person meetings and zoom meetings when this thing is over, we'll actually find better ways to operate as a company. And so we've had some challenges to work through there. On the other side, I mean, you know, you would hate to see anybody to say that, you know, this is good for business. But when you're a vaccine company, you know, pandemics and outbreaks of new viruses and emerging diseases are good for business. That's what we do. There's a lot of money and resources coming through NIH, the Gates Foundation, through the DOD, through BARDA, lots of opportunities to apply for grants. And those will continue to cycle through the system over the next few years, with all the congressional appropriations. So there's a great opportunity for companies in this space, whether it's in immune, whether it's fire, I assume there's similar opportunities coming through for the computer and tech based companies and apps to deal with this different way of managing healthcare. So I think it's hard to figure out how to navigate businesses through these challenging times. There's also lots of opportunities that are presenting themselves for new funding opportunities for small biotech companies in Montana. As well as new and different ways to work that maybe we didn't think about until this was forced upon us.
Christina: Thank you, Jay. Jeff, what would you add to some of your previous insights?
Jeff: Well, I think what's been said so far, I agree with everything. And I think James did a really nice job summarizing exactly what I was going to say. So thanks, James, for stealing all my thunder. But I would say just a little bit more nuance to it as it relates to we're still an early stage company. And when we originally started, we started around the surgical episode of care, trying to make navigating the complexities of the healthcare system easier. And we kind of fell into the remote patient monitoring when CMS released these new codes. And so one of the things that's happened with us is that we've had to spend a lot of time when we're pitching our products educating providers that these codes even existed. So one of the things that's happened with the COVID pandemic and crisis is that it created almost an overnight understanding of the clinical and public health benefits of remotely monitoring at risk patients in their home. It's better for the healthcare providers. And one of the things we found from the patient's perspective, because the testing has been obviously not very widespread, and a lot of people that have been showing up early on at the focus testing centers, may have had symptoms, but they didn't qualify for testing early on. Those patients that actually got put on a monitoring protocol. They felt better connected to a care team, which served to actually alleviate anxiety, which also when you when your anxiety is lower, you're less likely to get scared and leave your home and go seek care in a place where ultimately you might be exposing yourself or exposing the healthcare workers. So I think, and I said it earlier on in my initial comments, I think that it's created an awareness of the utility for what it is we're doing. And I think to James's point earlier, I think that I don't think the genie is going to go back in the bottle when it comes to virtual care models. I think that, you know, when I was at St. Pat's, one of the things that kept me up at night was just the sheer expense of the bricks and mortar. And you know, we're looking at them, St. Pat's is getting ready to go through a pretty significant expansion. And it's a needed expansion. I completely understand it. But one of the things that kept me up is I was already too expensive. Now, all of a sudden, if we can take their bricks and mortar and turn it into a click and mortar type of model, and where you're really truly moving away from having to go someplace, and to James's point, decentralizing it. I think my prediction is, I don't think that genies going back in the bottle and healthcare systems are going to have to figure out ways to aggressively adopt virtual care strategies, if they're going to stay relevant in their communities.
Christina: And Sarj, what would you say?
Sarj: Wow. And for us being an RND company, much like enemy, you know, I think Jay highlighted a lot of things that apply to FYR as well. Being a smaller company, you know, we had a very focused view on projects that we believed were important prior to the advent of the pandemic. And I think one thing we've learned as a team, it's been a learning curve for us for a young company, is how to, you know, assign work and focus and in this current time, you know, with the added pressures of, you know, we're asking our employees to come in, you know, they they've made the decision that they want to work on this project. And like Jay said, we're in a confined area, in the lab in the offices and so we have to be very much aware of, you know, our interactions. The one thing thats, you know, I think the real positive that's come out from my company, and I'm sort of proud of this, is how well, we sort of gel as a team and how we've sort of been able to lean on each other to really tackle a very difficult problem. You know, we see everybody is trying to work on this testing paradigm for this disease. And, you know, I think there's a lot of the same out there. And we've had to innovate. It's really brought out the creative juices in the team to figure out how we can tackle this in different ways and really look at the problem from a different point of view in terms of, especially the day obviously, I have a very focused view on the diagnostics side of things. It has affected the way we work our workflows in the lab. All of those kinds of things, but it's also showed us how we can actually perform at a really high level under difficult circumstances. And when things are limited to get creative. And so I think in the realm of our company, I think it's really shown us that we've got a really good team here that can tackle this problem in terms of what we might be able to actually, you know, our goal is to really help our community. And the development. This test is primarily driven by the current lack of testing that's being allocated to states like Montana. It's just hard to get the throughput and the numbers for screening, as we're seeing everywhere. But you know, we also have a rural environment here, there are people that are away from the Metropolitan centers that need testing to, and we're trying to develop something that is far reaching without the requirement for the highly technical kinds of tests. So, you know, I think this particular pandemic has really helped us hone our vision of how we can help.
Christina: Great, thank you. We have had some great questions submitted by our audience members. Some of them are for individual panelists. We'll cover as many of them as we can get through in the time remaining. And I will tell both the speakers and our audience that any questions we don't get to we will email to the speaker so that if they have answers that they can contribute in the follow up, we'll hopefully get you answers to your questions, even if we don't talk about them today. First question. Were there any effective antiviral drugs during either the SARS or the MERS epidemics? If so, are any of these effective against The current COVID-19 virus? So this might be for our viral biologists on the panel.
Jay Evans: I can partially answer that. I haven't read all of the literature about the previous SARS and MERS outbreaks. I don't believe there were any antivirals identified at that time that made it through clinical trials. And so the testing that's going on now you're hearing about some anti viruses might have some effect, those are some of the first ones. Partially, hopefully we can learn from that. I think I've heard it over and over again over the last couple of months. There were companies that had vaccines developed for the previous SARS outbreak. And when that outbreak went away, the funding went away. And they didn't move to phase one because they didn't have funding available. And what investor is going to put money into a vaccine where there's no active infection? So hopefully we can learn from that and let's all hope that this goes away and doesn't come back next fall, although I think we all understand that it probably will. Let's hope it doesn't. But if it goes away, and let's say it goes away for good, let's hope this doesn't stop the research that people like Sarj and other things that are going on to make sure that wouldn't happen again, which it will, we know more than we know today.
Christina: All right, thank you. The next question, this is a pretty specific question. It comes from Jeff Piece at Rocky Mountain Biologicals in Missoula. He says, "We currently produce viral transfer media, which I continue to hear is a critical bottleneck for testing COVID-19. Is there a US or global focus group I can contact to reduce time and speed up distribution of VTM to those in need? I don't know if anybody has an answer, but could help out a member of our network."
Sarj: Yeah, no, I think we're trying. I mean, a lot especially within the state. I mean, I know hospitals are starting to reach out, potentially to source and I think their product is being used extensively across the state. I don't know, if there's like a central hub, though, that people are starting to work through to try and find sources where people can actually source the material and send it out to where it actually needs to go the most, but we haven't really looked at that,
Brigitta: Well, I think Bio International might have sort of a platform on its website, kind of matching the need with the supply. That's what I hear. And probably, Sharon Peterson with Montana Bio Science Alliance could address that question a little further with Jeff.
Christina: And this one is for Jeff Fee. How can we build the remote model around patient outcomes as opposed to existing code reimbursements? How can we turn the focus of healthcare to wellness and early intervention instead of sick reimbursements?
Jeff: Well, I could spend the rest of the afternoon talking about that. But one of the things that interests me so much and what we're currently doing, and the reason we like these new code sets coming out of CMS, it's the first time CMS has actually incentivized physicians to think about their patient panel proactively. If you think about what happens in a physician office, and I started employing physicians back in the mid 90s, I'm dating myself now. And in the economic model that the current healthcare system is in, the providers get paid to take care of sick people, the more sick people they take care of the better they do financially. And what this particular code set does is it incentivizes the physicians to think about their patient panel the same way a payer would. The payers are financially responsible for their patients. And so by thinking about their patient panel differently, they're identifying their patients that are the most at risk. And the code set incentivizes us physicians to manage those patients aggressively. And our solution can also be used for wellness reminders as well. I spent 10 years trying to figure out a way to change the way health care was delivered in the communities we served, to your very point, changing the paradigm from a sick care model to more of a proactive wellcare model. And we believe that these new code set is a significant enough of an incentive to actually start breaking the cycle of the way physicians think about their patients to be more proactive versus just reactive when they're coming out of so it's a great step towards your very question.
Christina: Thank you, Jeff. So we're running out of time, we will take the remaining questions that haven't been answered and send them via email in this last minute. Brigitta, would you take one minute and just share your final thoughts on this industry and the moment we're in?
Brigitta: There are some industries that are tied to geography. But when we're talking about bio science, it's not necessarily in that bucket, you know, monumental scientific discoveries and cognitive leap forward. Those things are not as much tied to geography as they are tied to intellectual capital. And it's individual people that have the presence of mind and maybe even the audacity of spirits to think that they are the ones responsible for making a difference and making that next leap forward. So I just want to say that I'm grateful to the folks on the call today for being a part of the solution to the COVID-19 crisis and the ones that will inevitably follow. Thanks.
Christina: Thank you, Brigitta. And I would like to echo our thanks to all four of our panelists today, you could not ask for a busier time for us to take your time. But I think it's a real gift to us in Montana to get to hear about the amazing work that you're doing, and the impact that you're having, not just on our state, but on our country and potentially the globe. So we're so proud that your work is happening right here in Montana. And please let us know if there are specific ways that that we can help all of you or for folks who are on the line that are also in in this field working on the frontlines, please reach out if there are ways that we can connect you to resources or opportunities or if you have jobs available now that business is is going well, we'd love to post those as well. So thank you all. There will be a recording and a transcript available to our audience members and the public after this call. So thank you again for your time and your knowledge today.
Additional Question: Sarj, can you talk more about how a patient sample would need to be prepared before use in your diagnostic?
Sarj: We are trying to develop our test to utilize as a very small sample. One of our main goals is to remove the need to process the sample once collected prior to performing the test. We are trialing approaches to take samples from nasal swabs or saliva directly into our test.