Biolinq Introduces New Silicon Tech Opens Next Chapter of Glucose and Analyte Detection
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome. This is The Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. I speak with people like Elon Musk. I think I've done enough. And Shonda Rhimes. That's so cute. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me, listen and subscribe to The Michelle Hussein Show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcasts. You certainly ask interesting questions.
Welcome to another exciting episode of the Vanguards of Healthcare series. My name is Matt Henriksen, the medical technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, which is the in-house equity research platform of Bloomberg LP. We are pleased to have BioLink with us today, including CEO Rich Yang and co-founder, president, and CTO Jared Tangney. BioLink is a privately held medical device company that is developing bio-wearables, including Shine, the first glucose sensor with no hypodermic needle for insertion. Rich and Jared, thank you both for joining us today. Glad to be here. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. And why don't we just start with both of your career paths? Jared, I might start with you first, because as a co-founder, you took the steps to see an unmet need in really a market that seems to be innovating very, very quickly.
So just curious your thoughts of how you came about founding this company.
Yeah, for sure. So the technology came out of UC San Diego, which is where I did a PhD in biomedical engineering. I met my co-founder Josh there, and we did see that diabetes was one of these markets, one of these industries that had just been transformed by technology. But if you kind of looked at the way sensing was being done up until this point in time, the actual mechanism of sensing hadn't changed much. The electronics were changing, the wearables were changing, but the actual way of getting that information hadn't changed. And we saw that glucose was a very valuable marker, but we also saw that there was probably dozens of other markers that could be very interesting to measure. So that's really what got us going on this pathway was
glucose is incredibly valuable for people with diabetes, but how can we expand that to other markers? And then also, how can we make it easier for people with diabetes and without diabetes to get access to their metabolic information? And so that's really what got us started on this journey.
Rich, you joined a little bit later, but your career was very well established in the diabetes space beforehand. Why don't you let the listeners know your career path that got you to BioLink?
Sure. I was one of the... early product managers for the very first CGM that was ever approved by the FDA. That was in 1999. So as an early product manager in a new category, in a new domain, it was a tough run, right? There was no reimbursement. The product was retrospective. It was not wireless at the time. So there was a lot of education, travel to 50 plus countries, educating doctors and endocrinologists on the technology and why it's meaningful. And did about eight years at Medtronic Diabetes and went on to spend nearly a decade at Dexcom in a strategy role. So that is where we saw the birth of reimbursement for this category. A lot of great work done by the JDRF. back then to help establish reimbursement for people on insulin and went on to see connectivity, interoperability.
So it started really becoming a gold standard for people on insulin. So nearly 20 years in the space, but 28 years as an operator. And about five years ago, Jared asked me to come join as CEO. And when I looked at the technology, I couldn't say no.
Yeah. And I mean, we will jump into the technology in a few minutes, but this is an interesting episode for me personally, because we're talking about, usually in these episodes, I talk about an antiquated technology that's being disrupted by new innovation. This episode has the potential to talk about a gold standard that has disrupted a previous standard of care with new technology. And so I think we just need to take a step back and walk through how CGMs disrupted the glucose monitor market in the first place over those 20 years and what you saw expand and how that technology expanded over those two decades.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:48
2
What innovative technology does Biolinq use for glucose monitoring?
6:48–8:37
3
How did Jared Tangney and Rich Yang come to found Biolinq?
8:37–14:28
4
What is the significance of FDA de Novo approval for Biolinq's technology?
14:28–25:07
5
How has continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) changed diabetes management?
25:07–26:10
6
What challenges did the founders face in developing their glucose sensor?
26:10–47:32
Speakers
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