I was born in Iran, and when I was ten years old, the
Islamic Revolution happened, and that sort of turned the world upside down for us.
I came to the US when I was a teenager, and we lived
in New York, and I went to school at the University of Buffalo,
State University of New York at Buffalo studied car engineering and computer science, did
my undergrad and graduate work there, and later on I went to University of
Rochester and studied finance. You know, this is not going to surprise you.
In this feature we have of CEOs as you know, whether it's a
national one that we're doing today or one that I do locally for the Washington
d C in the DMV area. It is amazing how many immigrants have come
here at a young age and made so many wonderful things happen in our world
and are now entrepreneurs and investors and CEOs. And I'm very lucky to talk
to people like you, Omeed, because I love to see. You know
what, America was supposed to be a melting pot of everybody from all over
the world getting an opportunity and making something of those selves. We do want
to talk about the lab a lot today and cancer screening obviously is a big
deal. And I want to talk about technology, what the latest is,
and what you're doing with everybody domestically in the US, because I think cancer
and I know you would know this specifically, it's touched everybody either directly or
indirectly when it comes to cancer and our families or experiencing ourselves. But I
did want to talk about you before you came up with your company about five
years ago. I know you're an inventor, you're an entrepreneur, venture investor,
and also an educator. Tell us what you did before coming up with
this company. Oh, A whole bunch of different things, you know.
As I mentioned in my education, I started in engineering, and after graduate
school, I went to work for Eastman Kodak, which was a very large
company and working in many different fields at the time in Rochester, New York.
And I worked for them in medical imaging, and that was the work
that I was doing actually in graduate school with medical imaging, and I worked
for Kodak in cardiac imaging and beginnings of all the digital technologies that now we're
using every day in digital photography and imaging and all of those technologies were developed
over those years in the early nineties at Kodak, and I was very fortunate
to be working on a lot of those. I worked in different fields for
them, for Kodak and cardiology. I even went in the field worked for
them in Hollywood in sales and marketing and in anything from cell phone cameras to
printers to the various technologies that are now all over the place. After Kodak
went bankrupt and was licensed to everyone else. After that, I actually came
to your nekad was I was a management consultant in Washington, d C.
It was very based in fairfeare X. Was there for a few years,
and after my few years in DC, I was recruited by Intel to go
and run some special projects for them. And I was with the proper part
of Intel, which is the microprocessor groups, for five years, working on
a lot of different new technologies, anything from computer vision to face recognition to
what we call big data and AI pattern recognition and the technologies like that.
Worked on new microprocessor designs and circuit designs for those new chips. Around five
Intel was getting into back into healthcare, and it was one of the few
executives in the company that had any healthcare experience, and so I joined the
new division, which was Intel dig Digital Health, and I ended up spinning
out a company out of Intel called Dossia, the healthcare I T company,
and Intel was investor, and the ten very large companies ended up being investors
and supporters and customers companies like Walmart, ATNT, McKesson, and a whole
bunch of other ones. And that sort of introduced me to the whole to
the whole area of electronic medical records and sort of what was happening in the
larger, larger discussions in healthcare in the country. After a few years running
that company that was based in Boston, I went back to Intel starting a
new business for them around genomics. That was the area next gen sequencing.
And at that time I also started the research some research work at Harvard Medical
School as a part time, part time faculty member, and I was being
an entrepreneur on the site in the areas of diagnostics and genomics. And I
haven't stopped since. I've started six companies since then. Wow, And the
one they were talking about today in Ninidia is the sixth one. So I'm
going to stop you right there because I'm going to fanboy just for a second,
if you don't mind. So, between Kodak and all the other amazing
things you've done, and I'll give you an analogy. I work in radio,
but I played sports, and you know as well as I do that
when people in the media or celebrities meet sports people, they want to be
them, and the rock stars want to be the sports guys. You know,
It's just that thing that you always admire somebody's profession, right, So
I love photography and I also love just, you know, technology. Now
you're inside the looking glass. I'm outside of when I hear you talk about
all these amazing things that you've done over your career so far, and I
know you have so much more to go. Is it amazing to you between
the Kodak stuff and all the other things that you've done with genomes and sequencing
and all the new technologies that are coming up in front of you? Or
is it another day at the office. And I know I'm not being modeling
about that. I'm just curious because you're living inside it every day, so
it's different for you than it is for me. But is it still amazing
that you're coming up with incredible things every day of all the things you've done,
absolutely absolutely, and I feel very fortunate to have been to have been
able to do that. You know, that's part of it. You know.
I sort of choose to go into it because I'm endlessly curious about new
things, but just having had the opportunity to be at the ground floor a
lot of these things, I feel very fortunate. Well, that's great,
Listen. I'm always intrigued by names of companies, especially when I'm not sure
what exactly it means, but it catches my attention. Can you tell me
the origin of the name of the company. Namida is Japanese for tears okay,
and there is there is, there's more meaning behind it. So during
the Edo period, which was sort of like this, you know, the
Samurai, the last Samurai period in Japan. In Tokyo U, there is
a bridge called Namida Bashi with the bridge of tiars Okay and it's the bridge
that linked the prison to the execution ground, and that's where the condemned were
allowed to say goodbye to their loved ones. Hence the name Bridge of tears.
To me, cancer is similar to that bridge of tiers. It's what
gets takes our loved ones away from us, and the mission of Namida is
to end those tiers, to end cancer by finding it, by finding it
early. Boy, I love that that all comes together, and that's really
well thought of. That that's very cool. I'm glad that you shared that
with us. All right, let's do it thirty dollars. Yes, we
work in tiers. Tiers is our medium of testing exactly, so it has
a double meaning, the double entendre. I really do like that a lot.
That's very witty, So thank you for that. Okay, let's do
this. There's going to be a lot of people that are listening to this
interview, Omita about what exactly you do, So if you could give us
a thirty thousand foot view about what you and your step from the company does.
What is that we run. Essentially, we run two companies here under
one roof. One of them is an R and D biotech company discovering new
buyer markers to develop assays for early detection of cancers. And we also run
a second company, which is a you know, it's a licensed laboratory to
actually run those tests and and uh, early cancer detection is really the easiest
way of cutting back a number of depths and cancer and cutting the cost of
of of treatment of cancer and so early cancer detection is the goal of our
company. And we want to bring tests that are reasonably priced so they can
be available to everyone. And uh and that's one of the reasons that we
are working in the medium of tiers is because tears are the shadow of blood,
but they're all They're also highly concentrated. So if you're looking for low
abundance, it's small molecules that that can that that can denote presence of cancer
in your body. You can find them much easier, which means a much
less expensive test in tears than you can say in blood. All right,
so I'm fascinated and got me hooked. And I'm sure O listeners are now
about a little specificity about what you do. So before you started this company,
what was available for cancer screening and how have you changed the industry with
this new company in Namida. So for cancer screening depends what type of cancer.
So we have one product not called Aria and it's been in the market
for by nine months as a direct to consumer test, and ARIA is a
breast cancer screening test. So you so breast cancer screening is probably one of
the most well publicized cancers. And you know, in the October everyone where's
pink, there's there's you know, there's a there's a lot of not for
profits that sort of like remind people that this is the month that you should
go get you get a mammogram. So mimmography is a technology that sort of
established itself in mid nineteen eighties. And I can give you a little historical
you know, actually probably the best, the best historically documented cancer is breast
cancer. The very first breast cancer was a Tusa, daughter of Cyrus,
Cyrus the liberator of Jews from Babylon. This was recorded in Herodotus histories that
she had a lump in her breast and the Greek surgeon removed the lump and
saved her life. So that is the very first case of breast cancer that
was recorded in history. So from that fifth century BC to about nineteen eighty
five, there was really nothing other than waiting for that lump to appear something
that you could feel with your finger doing a self exam or a doctor doing
an exam. And in nineteen eighties Kodak invented a much higher resolution X ray
film and that was the birth of mimmography. So we had nothing to about
mid nineteen eighties, and then this new X ray film gave us a tool
that was better than nothing. It wasn't perfect, and it's still not perfect,
but it was better than nothing. So from that mid nineteen eighties to
today, that is pretty much the tool that we're using, and then we
have added other imaging tests for it. Now, the problem with just using
imaging as your first line of screening is that you've got to see a lot
of things that are not cancer, and you're going to miss a lot of
cancers because imaging depends on the physiology of the body. So women fifty percent
of women in the US have what's called dense breasts, and those dense breasts
show as white in x RA, and that that hides the calcifications that denote
presence of breast cancer, for example. So a lot of those cancers are
missed in women with dance press and that is a really real, big problem,
one that has been publicized in the media, and it's been it's been
it's been the subject of conversations in among lawmakers at the state level, at
the federal level. But what to do about that, and so fifty percent
of women that have dance rests are served poorly with this. Another thing that's
been happening in the last thirty years is that we have focused screening in the
US on women between the ages of fifty and seventy, and today, you
know, there's a there's a proposal that's that we want to bring it down
to forty. A lot of insurance companies already cover screening at forty. But
what has happened is that that window of cancers in the last thirty years have
move to younger and younger populations. So today half the mortality of breast cancer
is in women under the age of forty five. Wow, And many of
those women do not screen at all. Women in their thirties don't screen at
all, so there is no tool available for them. If you're a woman
age thirty five and you go to a doctor and say I want to ammagram,
they will not give it to you. There's nothing available for them.
Our tool area uses protein biomarkers found in tears and it screens for breast cancer.
And our screening starts at age thirty because when we developed our tests,
the data set that we use the women that we use to develop the test
started at age thirty, so we can offer our test to women starting at
age thirty. Now, well you mentioned this, but I know that nothing
is perfect, but this seems like amazing revolutionary technology that you also want to
make affordable and that healthcare covers as well. With that said, with your
researchers and scientists and then all the doctors that you work with, I imagine
that the medical industry is just giddy with this new technology that is starting to
become widely available in the United States. It's it must be just wonderful that,
you know, to make the doctors happy that they have something new that
they can work with it to take something very quickly. Well, the small
group of physicians that we're working with, of course they're very happy with it.
But we're new, we're new in the market, and it takes a
lot of I mean, the US healthcare system is very slow to adopt new
things, right and partially because it's it's it's not centralized at all. I
mean, you're dealing with many, many different entities, and so we're working
our way through that through this large effort. Look with the efforts like what
we're doing today, you know, talking talking to you, hopefully we can
reach a few people. But who's really happy with the introduction of this this
this tool right now it's offered as a direct to consumer test. Are women,
women who were poorly served before who are looking for yet you know,
they're looking for another tool and what's available to them for screening. And those
are the ones who are happy, I imagine. So you know the other
thing with what you do, I mean with your great staff that you have
here and coming up with this new technology that I know, it's always fluid
and new things are happening, and I imagine you being a visionary and an
entrepreneur and an invenor, you're always looking down the road. I know some
things you can predict. But what's the plan for you and the company over
the next five years in your growth. Where we want to be is that
we can actually take one test for many cancers. So we have six other
R and D projects in the pipeline. So we're working on a second version
of our breast cancer test that's a diagnostic and a diagnostic test and screening test
for five other cancers. We've taken the biggest you know, the biggest ones
collorectal cancer, prostate melanoma, ovarian, and pancreatic, and we have we
have R and D projects in those five developing those five other tests. So
five years down the road, we're hoping that we can offer suites of tests
that are easily, easily accessible and inexpensive to everyone. Wow, I got
to tell you the extraordinary that you're doing this, you know, because as
I mentioned off the top of our interview, everybody's been touched by cancer,
UH in a very poor way, whether it's yourself or a family member or
a friend or somebody that you know, including you know, my dad died
of lung cancer, and my mother in law has had breast cancer, and
I've had friends that have gone through some rough outs with cancer. I luckily
have not lost anybody for a very long long time. UH. Medical scientists
getting better. But thanks to you and your team and companies, this just
seems revolutionary, very exciting. So let's this media as we kind of wrap
up, maybe i'd like to have you give our listener just one more takeaway
about your company, the things you're doing, and just maybe some final thoughts
from you about what you want them to know about when it comes to NEMIDA.
What's unique about NEMIDA is that we use tiers as our medium of testing,
and and tiars being a shadow of blood. There are it's they're full
of bar markers. There are protein bar markers, RNA, DNA, misoblomic
data. There's a lot of data in there. And and because they're so
easily accessible that you can you can collect tiers within three minutes at home or
in the doctor's office or any other place, and you can you can make
inexpensive tests that is accessible to everyone. And and going down the road,
there's going to be so many of these new sensors and new ways of detecting
things that hopefully we can make cancer not the death sentence that it was that
it is today for for a percentage of people get it, but actually can
make it something like that's easily treatable and found in very early stages. I
I mean, if somebody wants to just get educated a little bit more on
what exactly you do with the media lab and your staff and all the things
that are coming up, which is just terribly exciting. This has just been
thrilling to talk about. What's the website that they can check out namedia lab
N A M I D A L A b dot com is our website and
our product. If you want to learn more about our breast cancer products,
you can find that at ari EA dot care au r I A dot C
A R E. Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your
time. I could talk to hours about this because I've just as I said
earlier, I'm fanboing out with all the incredible things you've done over your lifetime,
and I know there's more work to done to do, but you know,
making a difference in people's lives and keeping them alive for a lot longer
than they have in the past is just an extraordinary gift that I know.
This is something that I'm sure you and your staff cherish, but just hearing
about it and listening to all the amazing things you're doing, I'm just thrilled
that you came up with this company five years ago you're executing it. I
know it's you have to be patient, but it's just incredible what you do,
and I just want to watch you continue success and thank you so much
for joining us on CEOs. You should know thank you, Dennis, appreciate it.