On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Jane Zhang, CEO and Founder of Remmie Health about Scalable AI in Pediatrics. Jane progressed through her professional career as Biomedical Engineer, PhD Adjunct Professor, Big Pharma and it was upon living a very personal situation that she wanted be become a “builder": entrepreneurship was calling her.

Listen to Jane’s podcast, as she shares where this whole idea of building something for the people at home to be able to examine, share, and, in the future - get assistance in identifying ENT diseases- became very important to her. Jane shares how she has built a product and services for at home examinations of the ear, nose, and throat and her real experience of developing a FDA approved Class 1 device, now in clinical trials.

Remmie 3 is a FDA-registered and CE Marked next generation intelligent otoscope designed for patients of all ages.

You can find out more about Jane and Remmie Health at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/janeyzhang

https://medium.com/@janeyqz/my-experience-with-my-sons-recurring-ear-infections-a-3-part-story-fdbc4ea0016e

https://remmiehealth.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/remmiehealth/

Remmie was present at MEDICA 2024, the most important international fair dedicated to medicine and hospital technology. The event will took place in Düsseldorf, Germany, from 11 to 14 November 2024.

https://www.ca-mi.eu/en/germany/01/2024/medica-dusseldorf-11-14-november-2024/

and at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 2024 ASHA Convention from December 5-7 in Seattle, Washington.

https://convention.asha.org/

Transcript:

00:04 Hi, I'm pleased to announce something very special to me, a new subscription-based service through Next Act Advisors that allows members exclusive access to personal industry insights and bespoke

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01:01 As a thank you to Founders Sandbox listeners, you can use code SANDBOX25 at checkout to enjoy 25% off your membership costs. Thank you.

01:18 Welcome back to the Founders Sandbox. I am Brenda McCabe, your host. This is a monthly podcast in which I reach entrepreneurs, business owners, and I have as my guest, entrepreneurs and business owners, professional service providers, and corporate board directors who bring their own stories about building resilient, purpose-driven, and sustainable businesses with great corporate governance.

01:47 I want to assist entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in building those scalable, well-governed and resilient businesses. And by bringing my guests to the podcast, they too want to use the power of the enterprise, small, medium and large to create change for a better world. We're going to tell stories in this podcast today. And my guest is Jane Zhang. She's CEO of Remmie and she's joining us here from the state of Washington.

02:17 Jane and I go back almost, I don't know, four or five years now. Jane was at the UCLA MedTech competition. She had just founded Remmie in 2018 and then actually put some bones around it and financing into 2020 was actually seeking external investment dilutive type. And I couldn't help.

02:46 but remember Jane's origin story of why she started Remmie. And we're gonna start with that. So Jane, I would love for you to walk down memory lane with me and go back to when we met in the campus at the UCLA MedTech. And what was your origin story? Yeah, Brenda, I really appreciate this opportunity and thank you for the great intro. It was.

03:14 It was unforgettable why I, every day I'm reminded of why I'm on this mission because my own son, who was a preschooler back then, had recurring ear, nose and throat issues, especially ear infections. It was basically nonstop. A lot of the weekends, my colleagues would ask me, what are you doing on the weekend? I'd be like,

03:43 My son is having a fever I'm taking next week off. So it happened four times. In the first year he went to childcare. And one of the times he had a high fever, we went to the ER and it took us four hours sitting there nonstop with his crying and screaming. And the other times we were referred to an ENT specialist who was about to put in ear tubes in his ears. And other times we were

04:12 misdiagnosed because he had air nose and hands with mouse disease where we were given antibiotics. I give him 10 days and he's still spiking a fever. It keeps on coming back. And the doctor said there was a it was a moment of revelation where this physician, my pediatrician told me, come, come take a look by yourself. I was like, what? Why? And he said the throat or the back of his throat was all white blisters. So this was not an air infection.

04:43 um who gave you antibiotics that was the question he asked me he said you should be able to look by yourself and why weren't you doing that i was like what really i'm a bio medical engineer by training by the way um especially in low resource setting diagnostics or like basically home home diagnostic kits um he asked me why aren't you looking by yourself i was like what am i supposed to look uh and with what

05:11 So that's where this whole idea of building something for the people at home to be able to examine, share, and in the future getting assistance in identifying ENT diseases became very important to me. Wow. So you had at that time been working

05:36 for a large pharmaceutical company. As you said, you are a biomedical engineer by training, and you just completed your executive MBA, I think at UCLA. So what made you make the jump? One thing is going to the emergency room with your child time and time again. You talked about your aha moment and how can I in a low resource, right? At home.

06:03 be able to actually diagnose and actually treat my child. What happened that made you want to actually become an entrepreneur, Jane? One thing is working on the research side, but becoming an entrepreneur, what made you do that? It was very, so it was like everything kind of lined up in a way, and it just, my background, I was an engineer by training.

06:32 I worked as a scientist, you know, like in all the way up to postdoctoral level research. And then I took a turn into getting more into product development, business development, and commercial operations, because I thought that was really going to help me broaden my vision of the my view of how things work, you know, that I'm basically a curiosity driven person.

06:57 And at that point, while I was working in a big corporate, in a pharmaceutical company, I was sort of getting more experienced in a commercial side of things. I figured I had two choices, probably one, two, actually three choices I was considering, right? Like one is to go back to research and become a faculty member. In fact, I did, you know, that was kind of my way of rethinking my whole, reorienting my whole career path.

07:25 Um, the other one was going to become an investor. Um, the third was to fund my own company and just go on this path of building things. Um, I, I thought, uh, this issue of my child's problem just really was hitting at home that this is, because it's after I talked to many people, I was not alone. I'm not the only person who's going through this. Everyone I talked to said, Oh my gosh, that was me. Um,

07:54 I was like, this is a big deal. It not only impacts your child's health, it impacts your productivity at the prime time of your life when you just had the child. And it was just like really hitting a home. I had to do this after a couple of years of hiatus in academics, in academia, as a faculty member of engineering in University of Washington. After completing my MBA, in the meantime, I decided being a builder.

08:24 an entrepreneur is the calling for me. Is the path, is the path to shift. Amazing. Talk to me about the number of ENT cases that you are addressing with Remy today. Talk to me about that. I guess a striking number was 70 million in the US, both adults and children. A year, right? And it's really fast. A year. Yeah.

08:53 suffering from some ENT diseases. And this is not just specialty disease that I'm talking about, it's every day. Like anything that you have when you have a sore throat, a painful nose or ear infection or cold and flu, it impacts these organs. The first line organs being impacted are your ENT, but it doesn't stop there, right? For children, it is very highly occurring. Like if you look at the number of children who go see ENT issues, ear infections alone is...

09:22 about 24 million a year, that's 80% of any children before the age of eight or three, they've already had one ear infection, not to mention 30% have more than three a year. And adults, like when you're thinking about, sinusitis, sore throat, ...

Jane Zhang: Scalable AI in Pediatrics