More than 1.5 billion will experience some kind of hearing loss in their lifetime, and about a third of them will suffer from disabling hearing loss that requires intervention.
Brent Lucas, CEO of Envoy Medical, joined TheStreet to discuss how his company is disrupting an industry that has become complacent when it comes to how we care for those suffering from hearing loss.
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Full Video Transcript Below:
BRENT LUCAS: Envoy Medical is a hearing health company and really what separates us from everything else that’s currently on the market, is that we have devices that are fully implanted and we use the ear to pick up sound. We don’t use an artificial microphone. So when you think about Envoy, you really can break us down and differentiate us from the rest of the market in that fully implanted devices. So nothing on the outside of your head whatsoever, nothing on the side of your head or in your ear behind your ear. And we use the ear to pick up sound versus an artificial microphone.
And we have two devices. We have one that is called the Esteem. That is a fully implanted, active middle ear device. That one received FDA approval and is currently on the market. And then we have an investigational device, which is the Acclaim. That device is what I believe will be the first fully implanted cochlear implant to use the ear to pick up sound and the benefits of using your ear to pick up sound are sort of self-evident in that our ears were designed or evolved in a certain way to allow us to hear human speech differently. It allows us to localize sound, reduce background noise and things of that nature.
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CONWAY GITTENS: So I’ve seen in my research that some people are calling you a disrupter. I’m wondering, do you consider yourself a medical device company or a medical tech company?
BRENT LUCAS: That’s a great question, and I absolutely think we’re going to disrupt the hearing industry, specifically the hearing implant industry, which I believe has been rather complacent for quite a period of time. I’m not making a lot of friends in the industry by saying we are going to disrupt the current cochlear implant space for sure with our fully implanted cochlear implant. We are changing the game. So I think we’re probably both. We are a technology company. Hearing is different than your traditional medical devices in that there’s a lot of direct to consumer considerations. It’s not just you’re not just selling to the physician, you’re selling to the patient, to the patient’s family. So in that regard, we’re probably a little bit more of a technology company than we are a traditional medical device company. But we definitely cross both categories.
CONWAY GITTENS: So when we talk about this industry and implanted hearing devices, how are you disrupting the price?
BRENT LUCAS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question because if you compare us to hearing aids, which I would not do, we are not a hearing aid. We are not a hearing aid company. In fact, we have there’s a bill being introduced in Congress right now that’s trying to make that very clear, that fully implanted, active middle ear implants are not hearing aids. And so we are not competing with hearing aids on the price factor. That is something that Apple and Google and Samsung, I expect to be doing in the future as over-the-counter becomes much more accessible to more people.
For the Esteem device, which is the fully implanted, active middle ear device that’s currently on the market. That device all in. So we’re talking about the surgery and the device is about $25,000 to $30,000 depending on where you get the surgery in the United States. So while that might seem like a big number at first, I would suggest that there are hearing aids as well, set of hearing aids might cost you 6, $7,000. Right and those are something that are external that they can break and over time will need to be changed.
If you look at cochlear implants on the other side, Medicare pays on average about for the device and the surgery about $42,000 to $45,000 for a cochlear implant. And then the externals for a cochlear implant need to be replaced at a tune of about $7,000 to $10,000 about every four to five years. So if you look at the lifetime of a person’s hearing loss, again, we think the Esteem provides an opportunity for people to save costs if they’re willing to invest in that upfront.
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