What if detecting cancer was as easy as a breath test? Well that’s the vision of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa. He joined TheStreet to discuss how Vionix Biosciences is leveraging AI to take medical diagnostics to the next level.
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Full Video Transcript Below:
VIVEK WADHWA: One of the biggest problems is that we don’t get diagnosed with disease. The entire U.S. medical system is geared towards keeping us sick and then pumping us with chemicals over our lifetime. What if we could diagnose disease at the earliest stages? What if we did frequent tests at home with our urine, with our breath, if necessary, with our blood, and we could know exactly what disease we’re about to get? Medical diagnostics to the next level. That’s what I’m trying to make possible with an entirely new set of technologies that converts biology into light and then uses artificial intelligence to analyze the light spectrum to tell us what’s in it.
CONWAY GITTENS: So what is the issue that your company is trying to address. Is it that diagnostics is takes too long, it’s too costly. It’s not friendly for the patient, not friendly for the doctor?
VIVEK WADHWA: All of the above that you know, how often do you get blood tests? How often do you do you get tested for any disease? It’s only when you’re, you know, really, really sick and you go to your doctor, your doctor orders a blood test and you get the results a couple of days later. What if you could go to the supermarket and do a breath test and have it diagnose all the diseases you might possibly have. That’s what I’m trying to make possible inexpensively. Get the cost down to almost 0 of medical diagnostics.
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CONWAY GITTENS: So do you think now is the right time. I mean, especially after covid, many people are just used to like, you know, spitting into the vial and twisting it and doing all that kind of stuff. Maybe pre-covid people don’t like that kind of stuff. Do you think that people will be more adaptable to your technology?
VIVEK WADHWA: Yes, you know, during covid, we realized that we needed to get, you know, tests to see what disease we have. Well, you know, we also we’ve had disease from the beginning of humanity, you know, all sorts of diseases, including cancer. The idea is to diagnose them and make the cost of diagnostics very low. And to make diagnostics universally available so that you can even do it at home. That’s what I’m working on, very ambitious project. And it seems like science fiction. I mean, you know, everyone reminds me of Theranos of all these promises that were made. Well, this is 10 times more ambitious than Theranos and what I’m doing is making all the technology available to researchers over the world, and we’re open sourcing everything. So no secrecy. You know, it’s not about money. It’s about helping humanity. And it’s technology that I know works because we already have a pilot units working and we’re already getting massive amounts of data and training our AI with it.
