00:03:56 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:03:56] S0: That's really interesting. So it's it's sort of like the the market has caught up with where you were in in many ways. Can you talk about, some some of the interesting stuff that's happened recently? Like, I... You know, there's an announcement in June this year about DermZero, which I think was, a real milestone for the company. Can you touch on that?
00:04:13 · Neil Daly
[00:04:13] S1: Yeah. There's been a couple of really big milestones for us in the last little while. I mean, firstly, if... Just to give a little bit of context, it'll make a little bit more sense if I explain. We started the business focusing using a dermoscopic image, it's called. And that's a relatively low cost lens, cross polarized lights, and a magnification that can clip onto a smartphone, and you can then capture a high quality image. And we focused on that because that was the gold standard of what dermatologists would be doing, and there's just more information in that image to be able to identify the difference between malignancy and and very complex benign lesions. And so that formed the basis of our business for for a good amount of time. But all the while we while we were doing this, we're also collecting images from just the smartphone and constantly comparing, can we get the performance from just a smartphone close to the dermatoscope or the dermatoscope depending on which part of the world you're in, and always finding that there was a a gap that was that was huge and not sort of acceptable in clinical practice. So the first thing that we achieved, was that we managed to get a European clearance for the dermoscopic version of what we have, which allowed us to be able to sell our technology into different European markets as a decision support tool. And that was something that we decided we weren't gonna prioritize as a business. We're gonna focus on on what we're doing in The UK. And then we got to an autonomous level where the AI was allowed to make the decision with the dermatoscope on its own without a clinician in the loop, and that really accelerated the things that we could do in The UK, and we started to look again at Europe. And then probably the most exciting step was one that happened just recently as you you mentioned. We we launched it in May, and that was that we were actually able to make a huge technical breakthrough to get the smart only version of the diagnostic tool to work at an incredibly high level. And so we now have regulatory clearance across the entirety of Europe to turn every single smartphone or the vast majority of smartphones into a diagnostic tool that's allowed to run autonomously without a clinician in the loop to try and find and rule out cancer across, the entire European population.
00:06:16 · Neil Daly, Sebastian Johnson
So it was a huge moment for us that really opened up both a large amount of opportunity, but also a lot of questions for us as a business to think through what do we want to or how do we wanna bring this technology into the market across Europe. And we can talk a little bit more about that, but we've, up until this point focused entirely on helping hospital systems solve their problems. And increasingly we're being approached by other care providers that operate around these markets to try and augment their offerings. [00:06:44] S0: I mean, it's amazing technology, right? To be able to get to that that breakthrough moment must have in itself been... I mean, you've been working in this business for, like, twelve years now or longer than that. Like, what was that moment like where where either you started to see the data or you you kind of crossed that threshold or approval? Like, what was that moment like?
00:07:02 · Neil Daly, Sebastian Johnson
[00:07:02] S1: Yeah. It was a super exciting moment. The thing was I had been going up to to the board who'd... It's a natural thing to ask. When can we just use the smartphone? When can we just use the smartphone? And and as I said, we've been collecting the data from the very first deployments to to show it. And I've been telling them for years, look. There's just not enough information in the... In those images to be able to make a a sophisticated decision at the level that we operate as as a business. It's just... There's not enough. I said it maybe, I don't know, a 100 times to them. And then Jack who leads my AI, team, the the behind all of this of innovation came to me one day and said, yeah. I think you should have a look at this data. I think I might have made a mistake, in some of the calculations, but I've checked it a couple of times. I just wanted to show it to you. And I was looking at it going, oh my goodness. Like, if this is right, the the the the potential for this this this technology is just phenomenally large. And it was a moment where it was both, hugely exciting, but also we were convinced for a long time we'd made some sort of mistake in the calculations. So it took us a while to unpick those before we we kinda got too excited, but it was a good moment. [00:08:07] S0: It's phenomenal. It's it's really cool. I think... And then, yeah, maybe talk about the deployment and, like, what does this actually unlock for the business and for people across Europe who are now... Yeah. And and how would they get access to this, I guess?
00:08:18 · Neil Daly
[00:08:18] S1: Yeah. So that's what's that's what's really exciting. I think that, one of the things that Europe is very strong in is that we have one regulatory regime that governs the entire European landmass. But we also have very different health care systems operating across these areas, and there are local market requirements. So it's probably not quite as simple as having one clearance and being able to turn on all these markets and and enter them at the same time. But I think that why this is so powerful is it does it does two things that I think are critical. One, it opens up a huge range of business models so that a lot of these complex health care systems that weren't as obvious for us to be able to support now become candidates. And what... Let me explain what I mean by that one. In The UK, because the health care system's all publicly funded, if your technology like ours is able to help identify cancers and in doing so, reduce the number of dermatology appointments it takes to find those cancers so those dermatology appointments can be reapplied to the wait list that exists, there's a significant benefit to the health system of doing that. One, you've got reduction in in sort of dermatology visits, which unlocks, costs. And then two, you can start to reduce a lot of the wait clearing initiatives that many, trusts are relying on, which are costing The UK somewhere around about £80,000,000 a year just in dermatology. And so there's an immediate unlock of value. When you get into other health care systems where you've got separation between primary care and secondary anything happening in primary care that reduces secondary care costs, the accounting starts to fall apart. And so by having this this new technology, you can take a lot of the cost of delivering our our system, our tests out of the system, and then you can change the sort of the way the economics work and be able to support more different business models. So that's the first thing. It it really does change, the way that we can sort of approach these different markets. The second thing is that it dramatically changes access because all of a sudden, you know, a little bit of hardware that costs 300 to out to someone doesn't sound like a huge problem.
00:10:19 · Neil Daly, Sebastian Johnson
And in fact, we run models in The UK where we hold that inventory and send it out to patients and get it back from them and help run these skin checks. But if you take that away and all of sudden you say, look, every Samsung phone, every iPhone, a whole bunch of other phones that are in operation across Europe, you download an app and all of sudden it's now a diagnostic tool. That is a real step change in how you can access people that previously just weren't accessible. And in the health care system, we've got two challenges. One, it's too expensive to service the people who are coming into the health care system, and two, we're not actually servicing all the people that need to be serviced. And so if we can change both those dynamics, reduce the cost so that we can make health care systems more effective and dramatically change access, that can really take us to that mission that we set ourselves at Skin Analytics in that we wanna make sure that no one dies from skin cancer. And those are the two levers that we need to pull to get to that point. So a huge, huge moment for us. [00:11:19] S0: Amazing. What's been the reaction, I guess, from both... I don't want call them consumers, but it's like end users or patients and then clinicians, you know? Can they quite believe this?