Yair Ramot Podcast Transcript
Yair Ramot joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Yair Ramot. Yair Ramot is the CEO of Dimoveo Medical and has over 25 years of experience in the medical device industry. Biomedical engineering has rich experience in leading chief operating officer, VP, R& D and CEO positions and successfully led companies to strategic deals and exits like remote and ICU corporation.
Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Yair, You’re welcome to the show!
Yair Ramot: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Brian Thomas: You’re absolutely welcome. And I appreciate you making the time hailing out of the great country of Israel right now. Again, we appreciate you doing this, knowing that times are sometimes turbulent, but we do again, appreciate it.
And our thoughts and prayers are with you. So yeah, here we’re going to jump right into the questions here. You’ve got quite the career in engineering, in biomedical healthcare. You were a senior executive. Now you’re the CEO at Dimoveo medical. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
Yair Ramot: I would say two things, three things, main things are the driving forces for my entire career. The first one is the desire to have a positive impact on society to do something good for society. Basically, I started my career just to emphasize that. I started my career. In developing products for handicapped children for rehabilitation.
For the first years, we’ve made custom made products for special children. And that was the best time of my life. You know, at the end of the day, you really made something for somebody to improve his life. Okay, so this is something that really drives me to what, towards what I’m doing. And as we say, it’s not just making a living and making money, but making something good out of your profession.
This is the first thing. The second thing is the desire to save lives. I mean, when you’re doing, when you’re working with medical devices, you absolutely save lives. I mean, we’ve done projects for mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU. And there you see that you’re really saving lives of patients that without your product, they’re going to die.
And the last and not least one is curiosity. I mean, at the end of the day, you have to be, you have to have the drive for the curiosity to learn things about health, about health. Products about the science of health to get really enthusiastic and get problems solved. So, I would say, and to buy, I mean, the end of that, I mean, if I wasn’t.
Pursuing a career as a mechanical engineer and technical production, I would probably be a doctor because this is what is really driving me forward.
Brian Thomas: That is so awesome. I appreciate that. And at the end of the day, I’d say, gosh, it seems like 90 percent of the podcast talk about what we’re doing, what problems we’re solving to help others or help others lives with their health, save their lives.
And of course, curiosity plays a huge role in this, so I appreciate the share and yeah, your new medical technology harnesses the power of ultrasound and nanoparticles to create a safe and efficient method to clean an infected knee cavity and prevent full revision surgery. Can you explain why this cleaning procedure is so important?
Yair Ramot: I would start with the need, with the problem. The problem, I mean, is one of the biggest problem of healthcare though nowadays is infection. I mean, infection is the major cause of morbidity in hospitals. I mean, you can see it probably it is estimated that about 13 million or more than 50, 14 million infected infections related.
Death are recorded in 2019, 2020. Okay. And in the U. S. alone, about 100, 000 people die each year from infection caused by hospitals. And 80 percent of the infection is manifested with biofilm, which biofilm just to explain in one sentence is the layer that covers the. Bacteria or any organisms that create infection and protects us from antibiotics or any other chemicals that can kill those bacteria.
They’re bad guys. Okay. So, we came up with a totally different concept, a new different concept for fighting a infection. The idea is to dismantle, mechanically dismantle the biofilm and in that way enable the antibiotics or any other and other material to go to penetrate this biofilm and get to the bacteria and kill it.
Okay, so this is the, I mean, the novelty of our technology. What we’re doing basically, we’re creating. A small bath fully filling the cavity that we’re going to clean with liquid that we are developed with nanoparticles applying a ultrasonic energy onto that. liquid and creating cavitation. Cavitation is small bubbles, air bubbles that explode, transfer the energy to the nanoparticles, and the nanoparticles are acting like millions of small brushes within that cavity, dismantling any biofilm within the cavity.
That way we can fight a infection without using antibiotics or any other antiseptic material, which means, I mean, we’re not, I mean, we’re not contributing to the antibiotic immunity that are, that is created nowadays because people take too much antibiotics to treat infections. So, this is the main technology and the main breakthrough that we’re looking at.
Then the other thing, I mean, we decided to. Concentrate on the first application within the orthopedic sector. Okay. And with that doing TKA, which is the joint knee joint replacement procedure, where we have about 2 percent infections that cannot be treated be treated with standard of care, which is antibiotics, IV antibiotics.
Okay. And that’s what we do with, and how can. Last month, I did a surgery with one of our senior surgeons here in Israel, replacing a implant for an older lady, about 75 years old. Okay, and she got infected and the procedure that they’ve done is replacing revision surgery, which is replacing the whole implant.
And this is a major and brutal surgery for a lady like that. And hopefully she’ll come over that, but 50 percent don’t. And those older people are left in wheelchairs at that end of the day. So this is what we want to save. I mean, this is the impact that we want to make. Without technology,
Brian Thomas: thank you for sharing. That’s amazing. You’re absolutely right. Antibiotics plays a big part of that. You’re reducing the resilience of this, these viruses and bacteria when you limit that. Antibiotic, but also the fact that you’re not allowing any other materials into the wound doing this through your patented technology.
So, I appreciate that. That’s amazing. And I just love these things because I was in healthcare for many years. So, let’s jump into the next question here. And I wanted to ask you really, what are the major benefits that come with using nanoparticle or animal material technology?
Yair Ramot: The main benefits of nanoparticles are the size. I mean, nanoparticles come in different shapes, different sizes and different materials. So, you can produce different nanoparticles with different technologies. To get exactly what you need with your technology and your application, what we’ve done is we developed with the company that develops nanoparticles.
There are a few methods of producing those nanoparticles. We developed a nanopart, a metal nanoparticle that we’re going to use in the right size that we wanted it, which is about 20 microns, 20 to 40 microns and. With the right weight, of course, and the idea is because the nanoparticles are so small, they can easily penetrate.
Any small cavity, any small breakage in the biofilm that can enter the biofilm much more easily than you can enter with bigger brushes or any other element. Okay. And then they can break it up mechanically. Okay. There are other elements of the nanoparticles we can use later on is by because they have a very small size and quite a big surface area.
You can cover those with antibiotics. And once you’re penetrating the biofilm, they can penetrate with the antibiotic on it. So that’s another benefit, an additional benefit to the nanoparticle technician technology. So, and on the other hand, because it’s a nanoscale because they’re so small and so small in weight, So lightweight, they do not affect healthy tissue, or they do not have any effect on the implant itself.
So, they don’t have any that do not do any damage to these elements like healthy tissue. The implant itself, bone cement that holds the implant in place, and that’s a very safe feature.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you. And for our audience, we like to explore some of these new technologies and some of us have not been maybe exposed to the medical or health tech and industry and some of the solutions that are coming out today.
So, appreciate diving into that a little bit. And then, yeah, your last question of the day, we’d like to ask if you’re leveraging any specific new or emerging tech in your business, is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
Yair Ramot: The new technologies that we’re engaging in and emerging, emerging technologies that we’re using is the technology of nanoparticles.
The technology of manufacturing nanoparticles. To exact spec that we want to, that we need for our application. So, we designed the nanoparticles in shape. We can have nanoparticles that are shaped like small balls, like small round balls. We can shape them as spears as well, and they’ll have a bigger effect while they’re hitting the biofilm.
Okay, we can use different combinations of material. You can use silver. You can use gold. You can use iron. I mean, there’s a lot of materials out there that you can use. So, these are the things I would say. Emerging technologies that we are using with our startup and our technology.
Brian Thomas: Thank you again, appreciate you unpacking some of that with the nanotech nanotechnology and some of those nanoparticles that obviously there is an art and a science to doing that manufacturing.
So, I appreciate the share and Yair, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Yair Ramot: Thank you so much. As I said, thank you for having me. It’s a real pleasure to share our technology with others and explain our technologies. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Yair Ramot Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
