March 2023 Newsletter

MIHIR SHAH: FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF UE LIFESCIENCES

Hi Mihir.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me about the wonderful work you and your team are doing in saving lives from breast cancer.

What inspired you to go on this journey?

One could say entrepreneurship is in my DNA, my father, grandfather and uncles, as well as my father-in-law, are all entrepreneurs in various fields.

I moved from Mumbai to the US in 1996, and studied Computer Engineering at Drexel University. During my time there I took a class called Entrepreneurship 101. It was then that I formalized what I had learned at the knees of my father and my grandfather.

It pivoted me away from my plan, which was to join corporate America, and I began to look at entrepreneurship as a career path. My family, and especially my dad, was very supportive.

How did you come by iBreastExam?

At Drexel I won a business plan competition, which allowed me to have a business space to work from. In the same area were the offices of Drexel’s Tech Transfer lawyers who were licensing out innovation, especially technology, created within the university. Chatting with them around the water cooler was quite enlightening, I had not realized that people like myself, and not just large businesses, could license these innovations.

I reached out to my mentor, Dr. Banu Onaral, the dean of Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, and she gave me access to a machine that had been invented but not yet fully developed. I took the machine to India and with the help of cardiology colleagues, I saw it applied in the clinic in a clinical trial. I was amazed that a piece of code and some hardware could save lives.

In 2007, as I was getting married, my mother-in-law was undergoing breast cancer treatment. And I learned what a huge unmet medical need breast cancer screening was.

It’s the #1 cancer in women in so many countries. And almost 90% of women in the world, especially in developing countries, don’t have access to mammograms. And, the problem will only be exacerbated in the future as populations age. The sad thing is, if diagnosed early, most of these lives can be saved.

I began to look for tech that would work in this space. At Drexel, two colleagues, a husband and wife team, 23 East Main Str Mystic had developed a new sensor tech that used piezoelectric material, (which produces electric charge released from tissue in response to pressure) to measure tissue elasticity without radiation.

With co-founders Bhaumik Sanghvi and Matthew Campisi, this is the tech we licensed initially.

Where are you now in the development of iBreastExam?

After years of product engineering, multiple validation studies, regulatory approvals, various types of grants and investments, and with the support of an awesome team – today iBreastExam is reaching over 2 million women globally across 10 countries.

In the US, Siemens Healthineers USA is our distribution partner. We’re also collaborating with Pfizer to bring iBreastExam to 135,000 women across the Middle East and Latin America. These global giants are mutually aligned with us in making breast cancer early detection more accessible to women. With support of our distribution partners, iBreastExam is being adopted at large scale by several governmental health agencies, non-profit organizations and private sector health systems.

Earlier this year we celebrated screening 50,000 women with iBreastExam, in collaboration with Goa Health Department and YuWeCan Foundation (famous cricketer and cancer survivor Yuvraj Singh’s NGO). iBreastExam helped find 1250 women with lumps and 27 women with early-stage breast cancer are offered free treatment. 27 lives saved.

In another project iBreastExam is soon to reach 800,000 women in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh – a project we’re doing in collaboration with the National Health Mission UP and an NGO called India Turns Pink. We have similar projects underway in Malaysia, Philippines, Colombia, Chile, South Africa and Egypt.

Back in 2012 we received over $1M in grants from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, University City Science Center and Drexel University, that allowed us to develop first generation device. Since then we’ve received over $8m in funding, combining grant awards and capital investment from marquee investors like Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Dr. Ranjan Pai and others.

The newer iBreastExam no longer uses piezoelectric sensor, instead it uses dynamic co-planar capacitive sensors, technology similar to the one used in our mobile phones. It basically measures pressure applied to the skin and the resistance encountered. When used on breast tissue, the iBreastExam device is looking for a change in the resistance, that is stiffness, measured.