9.12.24: MIT STEX Demo Day -Triangulate Labs

BILL HALL: Good afternoon, and thanks for having Triangulate Labs here.

Yeah, as you said, I'm Bill Hall, cofounder and CEO of Triangulate Labs. I have three degrees from MIT and served as a lecturer for a few years.

So I'm excited to tell you about our product Skinmap and explore how it might be useful. The backstory of this-- I founded Triangulate Labs after I lost my little sister to a rare cancer. That was not on the skin, but that made me focus on cancer, and I realized there was a need to document the skin accurately for skin cancer and, it turns out, for many other things. So first I'll just say a quick bit about skin cancer and then go on to some of the other follow-ons.

Someone dies from skin cancer every 4.5 minutes, and they don't really have to. It's easy to cure when it's found early, and it's right here on our skin where we should be able to find it early, but we don't because to catch skin cancer in the 110 million Americans at high risk and many more around the world, we need an accurate test, and people need to take that test.

Our best test is a total body skin exam by a dermatologist, which hasn't been found sufficiently accurate for screening by the US Preventive Services Task Force or many other bodies around the world. But it has been shown that if a dermatologist can see how the skin is changing that they're more accurate.

There are some approaches to doing this called total-body photography, but the existing systems for total-body photography are too cost prohibitive or slow for the clinic.

So we built Skinmap, which is being used by dermatologists now. There are 10 million dermatologists in the US-- or 10 million patients who see dermatologists in the US every year, but that's only about 10% of the at-risk population. So for them, we're developing AI.

But let me just show you how the basic skin-documentation piece works. This is what's in the clinics now. Currently, it's an iOS device, and it's an app that runs on an iOS device with an AWS back end. So you capture images by just passing the smartphone over the skin. Our patented software then recognizes where each pixel belongs on the body so that then you can compare and look at how the skin looks now compared to how it was before. The software can automatically reproject the 3D information it's capturing into the same perspective that you're looking at. So, for instance, if something's changed, it seems to blink at you, which is why we call this a blink detector.

So the dermatologists who like this, the thing that really makes it work for them is that it's fast. It takes us 60 seconds to capture about 500 images in a scan, and that works in the clinic. They can fit it in. A typical dermatologist sees seven or eight patients per hour. The competition is usually a 10- or 15-minute process, and to take that long, they would need three times as many exam rooms and space in their clinics.

A second direction we're looking is remote clinical studies and general skin documentation. You probably all understand in-person studies are expensive. It limits the enrollment to the catchment area of the imaging center. And so we're beginning with one consumer-goods company to look at product testing, enabling going out to remote studies and allowing the participants to capture the information better. It also, because we're capturing in 3D, we can measure without the 2D effects of traditional photography.

More broadly, we see the potential to extend this to other areas, such as diagnosing rare diseases with cutaneous presentation.

So we're interested in collaboration and pilots in any of those areas I've discussed. So related to catching skin cancer, deployment to dermatologists and other providers, helping with research that would benefit from the ability to build large skin data sets, for use in accurately measuring skin evolution, such as decentralized studies, and expanding internationally. We're currently in the US, and we're very interested in going internationally where we see the bigger market for us.

So thank you. My contact info is there, and look forward to talking to you.

SPEAKER: Bill, thank you so much. Talking about the geographies and all that, what's the timeline that you could share? And also what costs could be associated with this for companies to work with you?

BILL HALL: So for geographies, we're early in the stage, and so understanding the regulatory effects if it's being deployed in health care, and so looking for partners who have gone there.

The costs to use our system are really pretty minimal. It's an app. It's scalable. The main costs are cloud-type costs. So it's pretty reasonable.

SPEAKER: And I guess it is fit for telemedicine, but can you expand a little more on that?

BILL HALL: Sure. Yeah, that's a great observation. Telemedicine-- in fact, we've got a study kicking off with a collaborating group in Mayo in Minnesota where we're evaluating the ability of dermatologists to recognize skin cancers from Skinmap scans. So you could technically reach-- in the US, there are 50 million Americans who don't have a dermatologist in the area, and they're at double the risk of death from melanoma. So we want to reach out to them, and right now, there's no good way to do that. We think Skinmap is going to work for that.