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From Scientist to Entrepreneur: Transforming the Business of Skin Cancer Diagnostics with Mirianas Chachisvilis of Veriskin, Inc. 5-6-26
00:14:51
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- [00:00]
Announcer
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- [00:57]
Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant leader, scientist, entrepreneur. We're joined today by Marianas Chachas Villas and Marianas is a is a fascinating background. He grew up with Wayne, he spent some time in Sweden and and then came to the United States and went to one of the most esteemed educational institutions in the country, Caltech. He's been a scientist in biotech for many years and then not that long ago founded his own company. He's been involved in some other entrepreneurial efforts called Veriskin and Marianas is going to tell us today about Veriskin, about what he's doing, trends he's watching, what he's most excited about and hopefully a lot more. Marianas, can you take a second and introduce yourself and tell us about Veriskin and about your background?
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Marianas Chachas Villas
Hello Scott. Yes, thank you for having me. Yeah, so my background, as you mentioned, I'm coming from Lithuania after receiving a degree in physics over there. I went to do my PhD at in Sweden, Lund University, which I completed and then went for additional training, postdoctoral training at Caltech in Pasadena where I worked with a Nobel laureate Ahmed zieville until around 2000, after which actually I went back to Europe, to Sweden to become a faculty assistant professor, worked there for a few years and then came back to us because essentially I like California, I like this country. So I came to San Diego, joined the company called Genoptics where I worked for a few years until it was acquired by Novartis. After that I went back to academia doing research at La Jolla Bioengineering Institute. Mostly it's NIH funded a lot of NIH funded projects over there in the healthcare area. And after a few years over there, I decided I'd like to try on my own. So I found it very skin and Vera Skin is a medical device company dedicated to facilitating and improving accuracy of skin cancer, skin cancer diagnostics.
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Scott Becker
So tell us, how long ago did you start Vera Skin? How long ago was that founded?
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Marianas Chachas Villas
So it was. The idea itself originated around 2013. It wasn't a company, more like a partnership with a few of my colleagues from Genoptics. And then it evolved. So eventually the company itself was founded in 2016, basically right after we obtained our first NIH award to develop it.
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Scott Becker
Phenomenal. And talk a little bit about the skin cancer world is obviously, you know, skin cancer itself is exploding. Talk a little bit about what Vera Skin does and why it's so important to making progress in the skin cancer world.
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Marianas Chachas Villas
Yes. So this is. Yeah, as you pointed out, that's very correctly. Right. It's essentially the most common cancer in the US with over 5 million cases annually, unfortunately. Right. Skin cancers are very difficult to diagnose and distinguish from like non cancerous skin lesions. This problem is even further exaggerated when evaluation is performed by non expert clinicians, let's say primary care. At primary care level, what happens is then uncertainty. This initial assessment leads to failure to detect cancer at an early, very treatable stage. That leads to loss of around 27,000 lives in the US each year. Then it also leads to many unnecessary referrals and biopsies that cost us health care, you know, more than $9 billion a year. Essentially it takes somewhere between 20 to 50 biopsies to detect lung cancer, meaning majority of them, 99% come back as benign, meaning unnecessary. However, you know, you don't want to risk a life. So that's why physicians essentially biopsy everything that looks suspicious to their eye. Right. And third, it also leads to hundreds of malpractice claims due to false negative diagnosis. So they're essentially the problem with skin cancer is, right. That it's more like an iceberg. What you see on the top when you look and when you do visual inspection does not reflect what's underneath. Right. So you need technologies that can look at, you know, under the skin and detect something, detect a biomarker that allows you to, to identify, let's say, clinically significant skin cancers. So this is what, what Variskin is focusing at.
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Scott Becker
Amazing. And talk about the evolution of the company. How's it going and what are you most focused on and excited about? Currently Marianas.
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Marianas Chachas Villas
Yeah. So, I mean, we essentially, when we started, we have this idea that that was essentially triggered by my scientific background in a chemical dynamics where, you know, we look at the dynamics to identify in the dynamics of some system, some abstract system, whatever that means might be chemical system, while we look at the dynamics and try to see a response of that system in time, right? So evolution in time. And so this is like, in contrast, like say when you take an image of something, right? And then you look at the image and you try to identify what you see in it, right? When you use dynamics, you look at the evolution in time of a system and you deduce what that system is from, from the dynamics. So this was my background. I have a PhD in chemical dynamics. And so I saw that maybe perhaps we could look at the response of skin blood flow to like external perturbation. So imagine like if you apply a small force to your nail, right, and you'll notice you basically bleach your blood from it, right? And so when you release that force, you know, blood basically recovers. You see the, the skin becoming red again. And so there is a time scale associated with that, right? And that time scale is extremely sensitive to microvasculature in the tissue. And so this is what we do essentially. Then you compare a normal tissue response to a malignant. There is a huge difference because there is a process called pathological angiogenesis which happens when the scan grows it. Essentially a cancer develops its own abnormal vasculature that looks very different than the normal tissue vasculature and it functions differently. There's a much higher density of blood vessels. There's typically much more blood in it. And so its response and the dynamics of Butler is very different. This is our biomarker. So that was the original idea in around 2013. So what we did at the time, a couple of my colleagues, we essentially built a small prototype, not a small, it was huge on a card. And then we essentially ran our own clinical study here in San Diego and in Yuma, Arizona, where we got a few data points from a small number of patients which showed really good promise, high promise. So nh, or more precisely, National Cancer Institute of NH awarded a first grant. So this essentially allowed us to start the company in 2016. And since then we essentially got three NH awards that helped us to develop this technology, test it in a large scale clinical trials, clinical studies, I must say, over a thousand people or like 1500 lesions. And so that still showed a lot of promise. We got our first private investment in 2002 from a number of known angel groups in the US so we essentially the company took off and right now we just started our FDA pivotal clinical trial which is like in the middle, in the midsummer of it will continue until the end of this year, probably into next year a little bit. I must also say that we got a lot of support from the fda, especially when we received breakthrough device designation status a few years ago, which helps us with the regulatory process.
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Scott Becker
Yeah, that's fantastic. And where is it at in terms of commercialization? Where are you guys at in terms of that?
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Marianas Chachas Villas
Yeah, so. So we are operating in a very regulated industry. Right. Skin cancer. And so we need to receive FDA clearance to market. Right. So that requires perform a number of clinical studies, including the main standalone performance studies study which we, as I mentioned, are in the midst of it. Once that is completed, we'll file for clearance and we'll be able to market the product. Essentially we plan to market to primary care. Market to primary care physicians, physician assistants, nurses and the like to help them to basically screen the patients that come in and they have suspect lesion. And so it should be mentioned that as I mentioned ago, it takes a large number of referrals and biopsy until one catches a skin cancer. And unfortunately very often the skin lesion looks completely normal. Typically when physician evaluate skin lesions they use visual criteria called abcd and sometimes the lesions just look completely normal. Right. And what that leads to that if it's a cancer, right. It goes unchecked, it grows and in some cases it's too late once it's actually detected. So that's kind of the business model. We will essentially give device for free and then charge per use fee for each tested lesion. And overall it's. We anticipate it's both going to save lives and reduce cost to the healthcare.
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Scott Becker
Fantastic. And talk a little bit about you've had this. What was it like coming from Lithuania to Caltech? Was that scary? Exciting? How did you view that at the time?
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Marianas Chachas Villas
It was. No, it was. I mean amazing experience. I came to this country basically I came directly after graduating after receiving my PhD in Sweden. I came directly to Caltech in 97 and joined a group of professors. Evil. Yeah, Caltech is amazing place. There's not much to be said there. I really enjoyed my years over there. Towards the end of my stay there, my advisor, Professor Ziva received a Nobel Prize that was in 99. So it was a very exciting time for all of us in the group over there. And it's certainly you know, Well, I certainly enjoyed it quite a bit. Still. Very good memories. I learned a lot. And the people that I worked with were amazing. I mean, they all. Best and brightest from all over the world, actually. So it's. Yeah, it's a great school for sure.
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Scott Becker
That's fantastic. Amazing. And talk about just a couple of the lessons you've learned down this entrepreneurial path from scientists to science entrepreneur.
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Marianas Chachas Villas
So basically, you know, being entrepreneur, especially at that early stage, it's somewhat of a lonely business because, you know, you're basically on your own. I mean, you have. Sometimes you have a few partners, but a lot of time you basically work on your own. And so it's, you know, I mean, it's very different from when you work for a larger company, obviously. Right. And so you have to be persistent and, you know, you have to really believe in what you're doing, you know, to persevere. Right. And the setbacks happen all the time, but you really have to be focused and just be persistent. Right. And just keep going. And certainly, you know, listening and seeking advice, very important. But you don't always have to follow that. You don't have to follow, like a regular path. But yeah, you always have to bounce your ideas from someone and as much as possible to make sure you don't, you know, you don't get sidetracked. That's basically. Yeah, that's my experience. Yeah.
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Scott Becker
Literally. Remarkable. I want to. Marianas, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. CEO and founder of Vera Skin. It's remarkable the journey you're on and what you've accomplished. I am so inspired by you. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Becker Business and the Becker Private equity podcast.
- [15:16]
Marianas Chachas Villas
Thank you, Scott.