Omid Moghadam

Omid Moghadam's career began in corporate America, but below the surface, he has always been an inventor and entrepreneur. With almost thirty years of experience and eleven companies founded, Omid's inventions have helped solve considerable problems in the medical field. Throughout this episode, Omid and Rick discuss how he’s working to make cancer screening more accessible to the masses.

“Early detection is the key with cancer. Early detection means 99 percent survival and we see abnormalities at stage zero. At the very beginning of it we can detect things before you can even see it on an image. So that was the driving force behind [Ascendant Diagnostics].” - Omid Moghadam, (27:37)

Identifying Potential Markets

After being trained as an engineer and computer scientist throughout graduate school, Omid landed at Eastman Kodak, a photography company. He quickly realized he was a much better inventor than engineer, as he constantly tried to redesign projects from the ground up to be more functional. Thankfully, Kodak encouraged his passion for inventing, and he became a Kodak Distinguished Inventor during his seven years there. Subsequent to working at Kodak, Omid started a position as a management consultant at CGI, an IT services and consulting company, where he continued to innovate.

With two and a half years under his belt at CGI, Omid accepted a role at Intel, a technology corporation, in which he was hired to create an ecosystem that would bring down the cost of developing software. Omid successfully tackled the high production costs issues and soon became one of the first five executives Intel hired when it started branching out into digital healthcare technology. Eventually, Omid ended up spinning a company out of Intel called Dossia, which aims to develop innovative technology solutions that allow patients to control their personal health records. 

“The handshake between different big iron systems is legally questionable. We solved it very elegantly at a tenth of the cost because everyone can talk to you. You own the data and you give permission for it to change hands. That was Dossia’s business model. It wasn’t just a usability issue, it was a radical innovation around the problems the system had created for itself.” - Omid Moghadam, (12:54)

Omid worked on these solutions for three years before he felt like his portion of working to liberate healthcare data was complete. Moreover, the big up-and-coming concept at that time was next-gen sequencing. However, Omid identified a problem within the industry—there was no infrastructure to store the data received from the sequencing. As a result, Omid foresaw an opportunity for Intel to be a major player in that field.    

 

A Shot at Entrepreneurship

At the time, Intel’s CEO was voicing that Intel needed to expand its expertise, so Omid and a few of his partners created Intel Genomics, a subsidiary of Intel, to target the next-gen sequencing data market. They designed a mini supercomputer that would sit next to a gene sequencer and analyze all the data it received. Unfortunately, although successful, Intel Genomics was shut down a little over twelve months in. In the following years, Omid placed his hands in a variety of entrepreneurial projects until he found himself attending an incubator program in Fayetteville that was looking for early-stage research to form new companies.

 

Using Radical Innovation to Solve Massive Problems

Through the incubator in Fayetteville, Omid and his peers started around six companies, but the idea that captured Omid’s imagination was that breast cancer markers could potentially be found in tears. This concept developed because a prominent breast surgeon found cancer markers in the milk of lactating women. This begged the question, “If you can see it in milk, can you see it in tears?” 

 

Over the course of two years, a scientific team within the incubator program did some preliminary discovery work and found a pattern that supported their theory. Omid left the incubator and started Ascendant Diagnostics, which spent the next six years performing clinical trials and found proof the theory was plausible. Current guidelines say women forty years of age need to start screening annually for breast cancer. However, there are plenty of women younger than forty being diagnosed with aggressive forms of cancer. 

“Early detection is the key with cancer. Early detection means 99 percent survival and we see abnormalities at stage zero. At the very beginning of it we can detect things before you can even see it on an image. So that was the driving force behind [Ascendant Diagnostics].” - Omid Moghadam, (27:37)

To try and combat younger women not receiving cancer screenings, Omid established Namida, a company that works to make cancer screening available for everyone. Namida’s direct-to-consumer test allows women to check their tears for cancer markers. Their tears are analyzed in Namida’s laboratory in Fayetteville, and the results are sent to the women’s personal portals. From there, women can then schedule a consultation with one of the breast health specialists in Namida’s network if needed.

Omid’s story highlights how innovation can be utilized to solve daunting problems and how individuals brave enough to take on obstacles others say can’t be tackled are the ones who change the world.

Omid Moghadam:

... That, and I'm a bit of a contrarian. So when they tell me it can't be done, and I'm thinking, "I'm going to do it twice now that you told me."

Rick West:

Welcome to Push Go, a podcast presented by Plum. We highlight the defining moments that impact how we live and work. Today I'm joined by Omid Moghadam. He's the CEO of Namida Labs. He's an inventor, an entrepreneur and investor and educator who has founded or co-founded 12 companies. Omid has inventions in the medical field, cryptography, microprocessor design, diagnostics, photography, science and communication. Today you'll hear how he's working to bring cancer screening to the masses. Omid, welcome to the Push Go podcast.

Omid Moghadam:

Thank you, Rick. Thank you for the invite. I'm happy to be here.

Rick West:

Well, I'm excited to have you here. I think you are the very first true inventor, entrepreneur type person we've ever had on the podcast. I'd love to go back to the early part of your career when you were working in corporate America. Were you always the closet inventor, entrepreneur working in the corporate world or did that happen a little bit later? So take us back early on in your corporate world as an engineer.

Omid Moghadam:

Okay. I was trained as an engineer and computer scientist and out of graduate school I ended up at Eastman Kodak. I was living in New York at the time. Interestingly, I realized that I'm a lousy engineer once I started working, because engineers in large teams are told to design something. I was always that one that would say, "We can do this better, we should do it the other way around." It turned out I'm a much better inventor than actually an engineer, and so I started inventing things. I started inventing things and I was given a chance to actually do new things at Kodak.

Kodak was a very interesting company at the time. Probably the closest thing to Kodak of the time, which is in the '90s is probably Google today. So you have one company with a product that makes a lot of money. At the time, it was film and paper, but they invested in other things, so we were allowed to do a lot of different things there. I was a digital imaging person, digital photography person. I was the chance to do new things for Kodak and I did a lot of inventions. I eventually became a Kodak distinguished inventor.

Rick West:

Oh, wow.

Omid Moghadam:

Got the plaque and you know [inaudible 00:02:33]

Rick West:

You got the plaque that's there, so that's with Kodak. That was eight, 10 years or so with Kodak?

Omid Moghadam:

I was there seven years.

Rick West:

Seven years. Okay. Seven years. From there, was that your foray into Intel?

Omid Moghadam:

No, I ended up being a management consultant in between.

Rick West:

Okay. Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

I moved from New York to D.C. and I became a partner in the company called American Management System, goes by acronym AMS, now it's AMS CGI. Again, there had a chance to do new things. Again, at Kodak, I was moving around and doing new things always, always trying to create some sort of a radical innovation field for myself. I did the same thing as a management consultant. We were mostly consulting to the government and healthcare and other fields, but it was always in something new.

Rick West:

So new was that mantra for you and continued to engage. So from there was the Intel ... 'Cause I know we had some fun stories about your Intel days back in the day-

Omid Moghadam:

Right. Right.

Rick West:

... early, early days. When you made that move, did it still allow you to be in an area that was creative and new and different?

Omid Moghadam:

I was brought in to do that-

Rick West:

To do just that, okay.

Omid Moghadam:

Interestingly, I had no intention of moving away from D.C. and I actually was moving to a new consulting firm. I was moving to McKinsey when I got the call from Intel. I told my wife at the time that I'm just going to go and collect some information. I'm just going to go for this interview. When I went for an interview and I came back, "We're moving."

Rick West:

So what was the tipping point? What said, "This is the right place for me?"

Omid Moghadam:

So what Kodak was going through, Kodak ... Intel was going through at the time was an inflection point for Intel, 'cause Intel had gone through this massive ... They won the wars. They won the cisk versus risk wars somewhat inside baseball, but it was the two different chip designs and Intel had won that, had won that. They had gone through three cycles of product, the so-called 886 products. When the 386 chip came out, people were lining up outside stores at midnight, like when they did for the new iPhones. 486 came out, same thing. Pentium came out, they lined up. Pentium 4 came out, nobody lined up, and they realized that something has happened. What had happened was that the hardware ecosystem that Intel was driving hard was improving, but the cost of developing software was not. So there wasn't enough software out there for this new powerful chip to run, so people weren't buying the new computers because they didn't need it.

Rick West:

They didn't need it. Yeah.

Omid Moghadam:

That was the job that I was hired in to do, to create that ecosystem, to bring down the cost of developing software. I did it through many different methods because what we needed more of was software that needed high power computing, so all the things that we take for granted today; video processing, image processing, photography, editing of video, editing of images, voice recognition, pattern recognition, face recognition.

Rick West:

So in those days, you would literally process, go to sleep, get up the next morning and you hope the video and things have been processed. You had not only the chip, but you needed the software to catch up-

Omid Moghadam:

Exactly.

Rick West:

... to make it quicker. Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So all the fundamental technologies in developing that and cost of developing software was huge. If you wanted to bring a new say, image processing software to market, you probably needed at least somewhere between 50 or to 100 engineers. You needed your own servers. You probably had to work on your own compilers-

Rick West:

And to think about your own servers, that's right. It was [inaudible 00:06:29] cloud. Right. Right.

Omid Moghadam:

Many different parts of the stack you had to develop yourself. So I had various teams around the world. We were just going around the world hiring the best people we could. So in Russia we hired a whole bunch of mathematicians to work on the video and photography portions of it. Face recognition we had done in California, some in Europe, some in Asia, in both in Shanghai and Beijing. So we were developing fundamental software libraries that we could open source-

Rick West:

At Intel.

Omid Moghadam:

At Intel.

Rick West:

Which was, no one would be thinking that today.

Omid Moghadam:

No. No. Out of 100,000 employees of Intel, most people don't know this, but a third of them are software engineers because you have to develop a lot of software to make that piece of metal run. So the strategic programs, which I was running, was doing just that, and we released all of these libraries. One of the most famous ones, Computer Vision, which is used everywhere now essentially probably is used in a lot of different machine learning and computer vision applications out there. It went all the way to the Space Station for docking-

Rick West:

Wow.

Omid Moghadam:

... it was used in the autonomous vehicle race across the Mojave Desert. These are just the headliner stuff, but it's used in a lot of everyday type of software. What it did was it fundamentally brought the cost of software development down. So all of those applications were developed at a third, a fourth of the cost that they were before, so that opened up the door for Intel to sell more high-powered chips.

Rick West:

So you're running that, having that role at Intel, living the dream. You've got amazing resources at your fingertip, 'cause everyone's funding this-

Omid Moghadam:

Right.

Rick West:

The funding's coming in, so why leave Intel? You've got a pocketbook, you've got a company, you've got the machine, they are the chip. Why leave? Why change?

Omid Moghadam:

Oh, I didn't leave Intel.

Rick West:

Yeah.

Omid Moghadam:

What Intel at that point decided that they wanted to get into healthcare, and they started scouring the company for anyone who has any healthcare background. One of the things I did at Kodak was in medical imaging. My graduate school work has always been in medical imaging in MRI, PETs, tomographic reconstruction, that type of work. The first product at Kodak was an all-digital angiography system. It was an FDA-cleared device and all that. So I had gone through all that process of development and bringing that thing to market, so I was probably one of the handful of people who had any healthcare experience.

Rick West:

So when they looked for that, you just raised your hand and said, they're like, "You're kidding?" "Oh no, I've done that."

Omid Moghadam:

"I've done this before." Yeah.

Rick West:

I've done this before, so you became one of a few-

Omid Moghadam:

I was one of the first five executives hired.

Rick West:

Did they treat that as a separate division or did that start to feel like a separate company? Did they spin that out?

Omid Moghadam:

No. No. It became a vertical. It became a vertical Intel digital health, and I actually ended up spinning a company out of Intel called Dossia. Dossia has weirdly introduced me to Northwest Arkansas, because Intel was the first investor, Walmart was the second investor and eventually became its largest customer so software company, healthcare IT based in Boston. It was a concept that we had developed, which was a personally-controlled health record. The idea here is that you as the individual customer, you actually own all of your own medical data. So the system that we built could talk to the doctor's office, to the insurance company, to the dentist's office, to your optometrist and all that information is owned by you and comes to your account. So that's essentially was dossier. That sounds like a simple thing, but in healthcare, nothing's simple.

Rick West:

It's like a blockchain type of thing where you want to be so precise though, the only I can uniquely-

Omid Moghadam:

Exactly.

Rick West:

... have access to that.

Omid Moghadam:

You have uniquely access to it. You own it all your life, so it starts with you at the beginning and moves with you from place to place. Even today, with all the money that we've spent in healthcare, digitizing everything, your data is still in silos. It doesn't move from place to place [inaudible 00:10:52] very difficult. Some places they still hand you that clipboard every time you go visit them.

Rick West:

What's funny is that I have a spreadsheet and I've got all my blood work up and everything I've done on the spreadsheet. So before I go in to see my doctor, I print out my spreadsheet and I've got almost 15 years of data-

Omid Moghadam:

Right.

Rick West:

They look at me, "How do you ... ?" I said, "Well, you can't do this." I would walk in with three folders of paper. So I've created my own Excel version of all this data and then I bring in some PDFs and give it to them. They're just shocked. I said, "Well, no one's created this."

Omid Moghadam:

Dossia could do that in ... By '06, we could do that.

Rick West:

Wow. Wow.

Omid Moghadam:

So we started working through large employers because we felt that if you want to change anything in healthcare, it has to come from people who have a financial interest in changing it. Employers are number one because they spend more than 50% of U.S. healthcare spend comes from large employers. So we had-

Rick West:

Then there's politics involved and there's other things involved. So what stopped that from being an everyday occurrence today? What stopped it?

Omid Moghadam:

There were two camps. One camp is like the big iron of healthcare data, which is the likes of GE and Cerner up in KC and Epic. These are the big EMR vendors that deal with big hospitals and doctor's offices and big systems. Their version of healthcare IT is that all your data sits in these big vendors' systems, but they don't talk to one another because the business models of systems, they do not want data transportability. Part of it is their business model because your data within a system makes you sticky to that system. You don't leave. The other part of it is that every time data moves from one system to another, somebody has to take responsibility for it. What if your lab data was incorrectly tabulated and sent to another system?

Rick West:

Who's liable?

Omid Moghadam:

They treat you, who's liable? So that handshake between the different big iron systems is always legally questionable. We solved this very elegantly at a tenth of the cost because everyone can talk to you, you own the data and you give permission for it to change hands, and that was Dossia's business model. It was a very elegant IT solution. It wasn't just a usability issue, it was a radical innovation around all of these problems that the system had created for itself.

Rick West:

So that's a great cadence. So now we're in healthcare, you're still within this world. You've got a taste of this. You're going to invent some things. Now you had a couple other career moves, but I want to fast forward into this thing called an incubator. You ended in up in an incubator here in northwest Arkansas-

Omid Moghadam:

I did.

Rick West:

... that got you involved in something that eventually led to the company we're going to talk about in a second. So how did you end up with the incubator? How did you end up engaging there?

Omid Moghadam:

I ran Dossia from '05 to '08 and took leave of absence from Intel. So I was there with three years and I felt that portion of my work was done. I wanted to liberate healthcare data and I felt that it had gotten to a point that it's going to be liberated. The next thing that was coming out at that time was NextGen sequencing. That was the human genome project, that print, they had published the first genome. All these new machines were delivered [inaudible 00:14:23]

Rick West:

There's all kinds of things, right?

Omid Moghadam:

...'08, yeah. So it's '08 at the beginning of the NextGen sequencing dom. The biggest problem at that point was that there are all these machines, million-dollar machines that people are buying. And every night these things are dropping a terabyte of data and there is no infrastructure to do anything with that data. There's no code, there's no servers. So I saw an opportunity for Intel here to be able to own that field. At the time the CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini was saying that we need to be in more than chips and hardware. We need to have some services.

Rick West:

So he saw, he realized it's coming.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that they wanted. Me and a couple of other partners in crime that we usually did things together at Intel, we put this plan together of creating a subsidiary of Intel called Intel Genomics and go after that market, a business model that was very much like a cable set-top box. So we made this mini super computer that would sit next to a gene sequencer and it would analyze. It would only have software in it that was designed to work with gene data and it would analyze that data, do all the reads, and that box would always have updated data. So we had a team of mathematicians, again, in Intel Russia sitting and reading the papers, because at the time all these algorithms were only published in papers. There was no code for it.

Rick West:

That's crazy. That's crazy.

Omid Moghadam:

So that code every night would get updated, so the latest algorithms were always in that box and that was the model. The box was free, service was 10 grand a month. It was a huge, huge success in terms of financially it was a huge success because if you were a major research laboratory, a university, and you had two or three sequencers, you needed somewhere around 10 to 15 million of upgrades to IT infrastructure to be able to handle the data that comes out of this-

Rick West:

That was significant.

Omid Moghadam:

Plus you needed a couple of PhD computer scientists to read those papers and write algorithms for them, so you had to do your code in-house. We went around all of that, so that was a good proof of concept that we did. We had a few units installed and we started negotiating with Illumina, which is the largest manufacturers of NextGen sequencing machines. They saw that this lack of infrastructure is hindering them from selling more sequencers, so the deal was they would buy the service from us, give it to their customers for a year for free.

Rick West:

Get them hooked?

Omid Moghadam:

Get them hooked, and then we will sign them up after a year.

Rick West:

Right.

Omid Moghadam:

We thought that it's time for some Series A money from Intel.

Rick West:

Which makes sense, right?

Omid Moghadam:

Yep. Yep, because we had gone through the original money that we had. We had a great team put together, our mathematicians in Russia, were doing the codes, our units in the field were working fine. So we go back to Intel and they're like, "No, we've been receiving some complaints about you guys." Turned out that Intel's biggest customers, people who buy chips to make servers, were counting on those 10 to $15 million worth of upgrades to everyone who was doing genomic research.

Rick West:

So that's upsetting to us; therefore, you would do us a favor if you would maybe slow down or eliminate funding for a thing that's going to put us out of business.

Omid Moghadam:

Right, so that's what happened.

Rick West:

Oh.

Omid Moghadam:

They closed us down. That was my-

Rick West:

That's the story of tech. The story of healthcare, just-

Omid Moghadam:

It is, yeah.

Rick West:

Person A has a money stream. I'm concerned that you're going to eliminate X and I'm going to come in and use my lobbyist or in engagement to make that happen, so that's heartbreaking. That's heartbreaking.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah.

Rick West:

Okay. So at the point-

Omid Moghadam:

Interestingly, years after I left Intel, the presentations that I had made at that point would make it back to me with someone else's name on it as a new business. It's like, "What do you think of this?" And like, "It was a great idea five years ago when I presented it. By the way, those are my slides."

Rick West:

Oh, that's so good.

Omid Moghadam:

So it's life in a large company.

Rick West:

It is. It's life in a large company. But now you're part of this incubator and you've got this same cohort of guys around you. Are you trying to look for the next big thing?

Omid Moghadam:

No, we're talking three years in there.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So when they shut down Intel Genomics, I got an appointment at Harvard Med School, because now I'm thinking, "You liberated the health data. NextGen sequencing would give you the genomic signature of a human." The third look at the stool is environmental data. So there's a data fusion project and the work that I did there was essentially combining three sets of data, trying to see can we find patterns in diseases.

Rick West:

So they funded a chair or funded the research there?

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah. Well, I was a

Rick West:

Like an adjunct?

Omid Moghadam:

As an adjunct.

Rick West:

Okay, but they funded the research.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

I was doing that work there and I was doing entrepreneurial things on the side too. I joined an oil and gas exploration company in Canada-

Rick West:

Why not?

Omid Moghadam:

... looking for gold up in ... so I did a lot of different things for a few years until I came to Northwest Arkansas and joined an incubator in Fayetteville that looked for very early stage research, result of early stage research universities to start new companies. They wanted to get into life sciences and create a vertical in med devices and life sciences.

When I was with Dossia in Boston, I got to know this company called Allied Minds, which does that. Allied Minds was doing very well at the time. So I thought, "Well, these guys are allied minds. Let's take a look." I've never lived in the middle of the country. I've lived on the coasts, and it was interesting. I came and met some of the people here, met some very good entrepreneurial people, some of our mutual friends. I thought, "I'll take a risk and see if we can do this in the middle of the country.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

My friends back on both coasts thought I was absolutely crazy.

Rick West:

You're out of your mind because they can't find Arkansas on the map. They definitely can't find Fayetteville, Arkansas on the map.

Omid Moghadam:

Right. Right.

Rick West:

And why would you do this? Then you're saying, "You don't understand." "I see something," again, you're a pattern guy. You see something that they didn't see.

Omid Moghadam:

That, and I'm a bit of a contrarian. So when they tell me it can't be done, and I'm thinking, "I'm going to do it twice now that you told me."

Rick West:

That's good.

Omid Moghadam:

That's been partly driving force of my career, 'cause-

Rick West:

Oh, that's fun.

Omid Moghadam:

Interestingly, most of those people who said it can't be done, once it's done, they show up again to tell you, so not that you did it, "It has to be done from this point on this way."

Rick West:

Okay. Yeah.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah. You've worked in Fortune 50, you know the pattern.

Rick West:

I totally do. Yes, I understand exactly where you're going. Well, so you're in the incubator, you're looking for really the next opportunity that you're going to spend time on.

Omid Moghadam:

Right. Right.

Rick West:

Let's jump fast forward to this concept working with tears because this is going to be the next little bit we're going to talk through is that you found a bit of research that someone in Little Rock had been doing.

Omid Moghadam:

Right.

Rick West:

So speak to that a little bit because that's going to get us into what you're working on today.

Omid Moghadam:

Yes. Yes. So I think we started about half a dozen companies when I was with the incubator in Fayetteville and in all different things. So it was medical imaging. There was some cardiac imaging in there. There was some hardware for spinal cord surgery, so there was a lot of different things across the med device spectrum. But the one that captured my imagination was this concept that a prominent breast surgeon, name was Suzanne Klimberg, who at the time, she was the head of breast and ovarian cancer program at UAMS.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

In '06, she had this idea that perhaps there could be breast cancer markers in tears. She did that after she attended a conference, and another prominent breast surgeon named Susan Love, another Suzanne. At UCLA, she had found breast cancer markers in milk of lactating women who happened to have breast scans. Suzanne thought that, "Well, if you can see it in milk, can you see it in tears?" So she got a grant and she did some work and she saw something there. She saw some sort of pattern there. But the work was never finished to the point we can actually see what markers are there. That was the work that we brought into the incubator. So we had a scientific team there and we did some preliminary discovery work there for two years and we found a pattern. We found a pattern. Then in 2013, I left the incubator and that company spun out of the incubator and became a full-time job. The company was called Ascendant Diagnostics. For the next six years, essentially, we did clinical trials, validation, looked for those markers and found them, and found them.

Rick West:

Wow. That's really one of the first times that I was aware of this. My wife's a breast cancer survivor and when she was going through chemotherapy or just prior to that and going through with her doctor, she saw a notice or something on a board somewhere that said, "Hey, would you like to participate in a study?"

Omid Moghadam:

Yes.

Rick West:

So my wife was like, "Sure." I was standing there with her. She's like, "Well, what do I have to do?" "Well, it's simple. We do this, this. We're going to take your tear," and sure enough, she was part of the early on testing of that that showed where she had the marker there, which was pretty cool for me to see that come through. Now, by the grace of God-

Omid Moghadam:

We're very grateful to all the participants.

Rick West:

By the frae of God, she is six years cancer-free, so it's fantastic. So that was my first foray to seeing that come around. But when you were going through the research of that, you said it's about five, six years of going to the clinical trial or gets us the research of the tier.

Omid Moghadam:

Yes.

Rick West:

But when did you know? You saw the pattern 'cause you're a pattern guy-

Omid Moghadam:

Right.

Rick West:

... but when did you know it's like, "This is going to work? I've seen enough for the pattern. I know now that it's time for me to go to the next step, which is trying to understand how could I commercialize, or how could I make this available to the mass population of women that need a better way to at least predict, or not predict, to let them know that they could have breast cancer?"

Omid Moghadam:

Breast cancer is an interesting field. It's funny because it goes back to my first employer, Kodak. Kodak is really the company that made mammography, which is the-

Rick West:

Oh wow, okay.

Omid Moghadam:

... made it possible because, okay, let's take a step back in time. The first documented case of breast cancer is about 4,000 years ago in an Egyptian queen.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So imagine 4,000 years ago to 1985, the way to find breast cancer was essentially by touching. Now women will find a lump in their breast, and for about 4,000 years, that was the method.

Rick West:

That was it.

Omid Moghadam:

In 1985, Kodak invented a new silver haylide crystal that was T-shaped, which meant when you coded a piece of x-ray film with it, the resolution was much higher. That was the first time you could actually see calcifications in an image. Even though the sensitivity, the effectiveness of the mammogram is not 100%, you went from having zero-

Rick West:

To something.

Omid Moghadam:

... to something, 50 to 70% depending on the physiology of the breast.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So that established it and then this monopoly formed around it.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So now we've had two generations of breast radiologists that are trained to do nothing but imaging for breast screening.

Rick West:

And the hardware and the infrastructure and the business model around-

Omid Moghadam:

Absolutely.

Rick West:

Imaging is-

Omid Moghadam:

80,000-

Rick West:

... everywhere.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah. It's everywhere, and it's reimbursed by insurance. Every October, everyone's in pink. "Get a mammogram. Get a mammogram. Get a mammogram." But the better way of doing it is that you need a biological test that just says something's going in your body. Then you go look and image it. If you're old enough to remember the Cold War, you can image as much as you want the East German forests, a lot of stuff are going to look like Russian tanks in there.

Rick West:

Right.

Omid Moghadam:

But eventually, you have to send someone in to take a look and see what it is.

Rick West:

You got to confirm it.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah, and that's where we are with mammography. Everything looks like cancer until we have to go in and look at it. In some cases, nothing looks like cancer because half the women have dense breasts-

Rick West:

And you can't really see-

Omid Moghadam:

No, it's like finding a polar bear in the snowstorm.

Rick West:

That was my wife's issue is that they told her is that she just luckily found through touch, this is what's going on that when she went in, he said, "Your tissue is so dense, we would've never seen this," even if he had gone through the process because she was about a month out from having a mammogram. He said, "We would've missed this."

Omid Moghadam:

Exactly.

Rick West:

It would've been a year later, and she had a stage two. It was aggressive growth. He said, "If this has waited another year, totally different prognosis."

Omid Moghadam:

Absolutely.

Rick West:

Yeah. Yeah.

Omid Moghadam:

So early detection is the key with cancer. Early detection means 99% survival, and we see abnormalities at stage zero. So at the very beginning of it, we can detect things before you can even see it on image, and so that was a driving force behind it. It's that there's something there that's not good. We can radically change it, bring radical innovation into a field that is serving only really half the population and even the half that they're serving are being served poorly.

Rick West:

Wow. So it's interesting 'cause when you look at solving a problem, you've got half the population that might even have access and within that half that even has access, many of them, the technology's not going to work. Even then you don't start doing that until age-

Omid Moghadam:

40.

Rick West:

40, so you're able to say, "Hey, what if I could create something that could do 100%, well not 100, 90 plus whatever percent-

Omid Moghadam:

Right.

Rick West:

... a massive percentage and possibly even start younger?" So you're solving a massive problem here.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah. Well, current guidelines say 40 to 70 is when you were supposed to be screening annually for breast cancer, but there are plenty of women who get cancers between the ages of 30 and 40-

Rick West:

Right.

Omid Moghadam:

... and those cancers are typically very aggressive in younger women, and there is no guidelines for screening them. Nobody covers it. There's no way for them to go and get screened. We can do that.

Rick West:

So you've got the technology where you're starting to see the patterns. You're seeing the numbers coming in, you're feeling good about that. So at that point in time, you're ready to go to market. But I love the name of the company and don't you walk us through how that's tied to tears and where you came up with the name of the company itself.

Omid Moghadam:

Right. Right. So the company is called Namida. Namida in Japanese means tears. There is a bridge today still there, but it's been there forever. Namida Bashi is a bridge. In the old days it used to link the prison to the execution yards and the bridge is where the families of the condemned were allowed to meet the person on their way to the execution yard for the last time, so it's a bridge of tears. In our parlance, bridge of tears is cancer. It's really what rips you away from your loved ones. I lost my mom to cancer.

Rick West:

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Omid Moghadam:

Yeah, thank you. So we named it Namida because we want to end that bridge of tears.

Rick West:

Fantastic. So the bridge of tears, I love that. So now you have this technology, it's proven. Again, we're not going to get into the details of percentages, but it's proven. It's the right type of technology. Now it's ready to go to market. So everyone welcomed you with open arms, right? "This is a great technology, so we should put this in every doctor's office, in every location." It should be that simple, not really.

Omid Moghadam:

Nothing is simple in U-

Rick West:

Nothing is simple in medical.

Omid Moghadam:

Nothing's simple in-

Rick West:

In healthcare.

Omid Moghadam:

... U.S. healthcare systems, in the U.S. Healthcare system. Other healthcare systems, things are a little bit easier, but not in the U.S. healthcare system. Incentives are different here than there are in other places. Not unless insurance companies reimburse it, nothing gets into the doctor's offices, and so we decided that we're going to go direct-to-consumer.

Rick West:

Okay. Wow-

Omid Moghadam:

Because-

Rick West:

... that's crazy.

Omid Moghadam:

... all those years of clinical trials, when we went to clinics, women who had just had their mammogram done, everyone said, "I wish this was available, I would've done this today."

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

COVID actually gave us an opening for that too, because what happened was during COVID there was all of these small fledgling companies that were doing at-home testing. Then COVID allowed them to send COVID test home so you could collect your sample and then mail it in, companies like Everlywell and all those. So collecting tears at home, it's very easy. Schirmer strip, takes three to five minutes, so we decided that we have something here. We decided to actually make a version of our test direct-to-consumer on our own eCommerce platform and have it sent to people's homes.

Rick West:

Let me get this right. So if you're a woman today, between the ages of-

Omid Moghadam:

30 to 80+.

Rick West:

If you're older than 30-

Omid Moghadam:

Yes.

Rick West:

If you're older than 30 today, and especially if you have any even remote history in your background, but still even any woman so that's 30, they can actually order a test. That test via checking the tears in their eyes could tell them if they have the beginning stages of breast cancer and they could do that today.

Omid Moghadam:

Well, we call it the breast abnormality.

Rick West:

Okay, breast. Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So we're following the tests like Cologuard. Cologuard doesn't tell you if you have colorectal cancer, Cologuard tells you whether you need to go get him a colonoscopy or not.

Rick West:

Okay.

Omid Moghadam:

So our direct-to-consumer test puts you in three different categories: Low risk, that means that if you're going to get a mammogram, 12 to 18 months. Medium risk, and medium means 12 months. High risk, high risk means that three to six months where you should go get a mammogram. So essentially the follow-up to our test is imaging, like the Russian tanks and East German forest-

Rick West:

Right. Right.

Omid Moghadam:

... because you still have to look and see what's there, and that's the logical steps that should be taken. There should be a biological test that says that there's some abnormality going on in your body and then an imaging test that tells you where it is, and that's the test. So our product is not just the test. So we have put together a 50- state physician network that reviews your order, writes the prescription, the box goes to your home. The sample comes back to us, we run it in our laboratory, our high complexity laboratory here in Fayetteville. The results go back to the portal, to your own account. Then you schedule a consultation with one of our breast health specialists. These are nurses, nurse practitioners, with at least 20 years of experience in the field. They will help you with your plan of what you're going to do. They explain the results to you and tell you what you need to do next.

Rick West:

For most people listening to something like this, especially as for someone that's younger or someone that's pushed this off, this is a non-invasive, relatively straightforward way to at least give you an idea of whether you should stop procrastinating-

Omid Moghadam:

Correct.

Rick West:

... go forward, and if so, how soon you should really make that happen. So if someone wanted to buy such test and make that happen today, how would they do that? Is there a website that they go to? Do they go to Nambida? How do they ... ?

Omid Moghadam:

So the product is called Auria.

Rick West:

Auria, okay.

Omid Moghadam:

A-U-R-I-A, and the website is auria.care, that's C-A-R-E

Rick West:

auria.care. Okay. Go there. Anyone here could just go purchase, it's going to come into their home, collect some tears, send it back-

Omid Moghadam:

Yes. Yes. Until the end of the year, there's a 30% off holiday-

Rick West:

Oh, look at you, holiday-

Omid Moghadam:

... Holiday 30-

Rick West:

... discount. That's a beautiful thing.

Omid Moghadam:

There's a discount code Holiday 30.

Rick West:

Wow. Wow.

Omid Moghadam:

It's FSA, HSA eligible. So if there's any funds left in there, you can use it there.

Rick West:

Okay, before the end of the year. That would be a great gift, especially if you're thinking about a gift for someone, it'd be a great gift of healthcare in a cool way to make that happen. So I got the website there, but what if someone wanted to have coffee with you just to hang out and talk more about being an inventor or healthcare in general. How would they contact you?

Omid Moghadam:

LinkedIn.

Rick West:

You're a LinkedIn guy. I like that.

Omid Moghadam:

I am.

Rick West:

I like that. That's just really, really cool. So if I look at what's next, real quickly, what is next for Auria?

Omid Moghadam:

We have a whole pipeline of other tests in the making. We have at least two more versions of the breast cancer test, one for clinics and then a diagnostic one that can actually not send you to a mammogram, just say whether you have cancer or not.

Rick West:

Wow.

Omid Moghadam:

We've been working with a company called Pattern Computer. It's a machine learning company that was founded by veterans of Microsoft. Full disclosure, I'm on their scientific advisory board, but we've been working with them on analyzing our data and we have some targets there for an actual diagnostic. Then we have five other cancers that we're working on: pancreatic, ovarian, colorectal, prostate, and I said pancreas-

Rick West:

Right. Right.

Omid Moghadam:

... ovarian.

Rick West:

Yeah. Yeah.

Omid Moghadam:

Ovarian.

Rick West:

Okay. Okay. So here's the commitment I'm looking for is when the next one is ready, you'll come back in, we'll have another conversation. I'd love to learn more and see, really just follow this journey that you're taking us in healthcare.

Omid Moghadam:

Our goal is to democratize cancer screening, bring it to the masses. You can look at the naming of our products, musical themes. They're not a difficult medical or drug name, Auria, Melody, and because we see healthcare as a consumer product. It really should be a consumer product.

Rick West:

I love that. Listen, Omid, thank you for coming in. I love what you're doing. I can't wait to talk to you again.

Omid Moghadam:

Thank you. Thank you, Rick.

Rick West:

Thanks for listening to Push Go, a podcast highlighting the defining moments that impact how we live and work. It was great to have Omid on the show today. If you like what you heard, you can find more stories just like this on listen.plumshop.com. Hey, we wouldn't be mad if you left us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Now we have new episodes dropping every Wednesday, and if you're watching on YouTube, feel free to like and subscribe. A quick PS, the weekly segment where I give you a brief update on something happening at Plum, today's update comes from Plum Provider, Field Agent. Now, Field Agent recently acquired SimpliField, a mobile platform for retail operations, internal communications and analytics. The SimpliField product is now available on our Plum marketplace, creating the first end-to-end retail operations experience for brands, wholesalers, retailers, and restaurants. Use the code Push Go, that's P-U-S-H G-O at checkout for $100 off any project.