Ben Hwang
Injectable Biosensors – EP08: Ben Hwang (Profusa)
In this eighth episode, Ben Hwang, Chairman & CEO of Profusa, provides an overview of injectable biosensors. He explains that the technology enables a model akin to getting a blood test every few seconds of our life (rather than only every few years when sick).
He predicts that this “unlocked stream of biochemistry data” will become married to other data (e.g. our voice patterns) to provide a panoramic view of our health and wellbeing.
Topics we discussed in this episode
- Continuous, realtime measurement of an individual’s biochemistry
- Injectable biosensors
- Biosensor components
- Solving the ‘foreign-body response’
- Blood chemistries that can and can’t be measured in the interstitial fluid
- Three stages of the sensor
- Achieving calibration with heterogeneity of tissue
- Putting multiple chemistries on one single sensor (multiplexing)
- Episodic measurements taken by a clinician every few years vs realtime direct measurements
- Changing towards a proactive (forward looking) rather than rear-view looking measurement of blood chemistry
- Achieving a product cost similar to the price of a Netflix subscription
- Empowering individuals to be able to make healthcare decisions and decisions about their wellbeing
- Impacting how insurance companies, healthcare providers etc. think about keeping a population or individual healthy
- The extent to which today’s medical practitioner will remain as intermediaries
- The economic need to move to prevention
- Ambition to touch a billion people
- Marrying biochemical data to other data such as voice (tones, word pattern), pollen count, activity level etc.
- Being able to predict and monitor many more biomarkers than the ones we actually have to measure
- Forthcoming CE and FDA approval
- Multiyear measurement of glucose in realtime
- The majority of the population will one day have implantable biosensors for continuous long-term monitoring of blood chemistries