From Lab to Launch by Qualio

Taking Diagnostic to the Future with Mehdi Maghsoodnia CEO of 1Health

December 20, 2022 Qualio & Mehdi Maghsoodnia Episode 70
From Lab to Launch by Qualio
Taking Diagnostic to the Future with Mehdi Maghsoodnia CEO of 1Health
Show Notes Transcript

Today we’re talking to Mehdi Maghsoodnia, Co-founder of 1Health which is a personalized precision medicine powered by a lab testing platform that connects labs, clinicians and consumers. Listen to get more details about how 1Health is bringing diagnostic to the modern age. We love the mission of 1Health which is to bring advanced diagnostics to market faster and to make them more accessible, affordable and simple. Love that and it’s similar to our mission at Qualio.

About Mehdi Maghsoodnia
Mehdi is an industry fellow at UC Berkeley where he teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. He earned his Bachelor's at UC Berkeley and his MS from Stanford with an emphasis in AI and Machine learning.

https://1health.io/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmaghsoodnia/

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https://www.qualio.com/

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https://www.qualio.com/from-lab-to-launch-podcast

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Music by keldez

Kelly Stanton:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of From Lab to Launch by Qualio we're at almost 70 of these interviews now with the movers and shakers in life sciences. It's been a delight to share behind the scenes stories of some of the most innovative and advanced companies from around the world. I'm Kelly, your host. Before we jump in, just a reminder to please rate the show and share it with your friends who are science nerds just like us. We know you have some. Also, check out the show notes if you have a story or a product you want on the. All right, so today we're talking to Mehdi Maghsoodnia, co-founder of 1Health, which is a personalized precision medicine powered by lab testing platform that connects labs, clinicians, and consumers. We'll get more into the details later, but a little more about Medhi. He's an industry fellow at UC Berkeley, where he teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. He earned his bachelor's there and his master's from Stanford with an emphasis in AI and machine. We love the mission of 1Health, which is to bring advanced diagnostics to market faster and to make them more accessible, affordable, and simple. We love that, and it's very similar to our mission here at Qualio all right, let's jump in. Thanks for joining us today, Medhi appreciate your time.

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate, uh, you spending time with me.

Kelly Stanton:

Uh, so you've done just about all of it with your background, it sounds like, from computer systems in the early nineties to making education more accessible to health Tech. Walk us briefly through your path to founding 1Health.

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Sure. You know, I I was lucky enough to be At, uh, uc, Berkeley in the early days of computing I was one of those, you know, nerds that was interested in computing. So I got into it. You know, and, and had been part of a lot of different industries. I started, uh, spending more and more time on healthcare. Uh, about four or five years ago and got excited about, uh, what's happening in healthcare and really uh, you know, realized that one of the fundamental drivers of change, uh, in healthcare is that we are becoming, uh, you know, we are making more personalized decisions about the medication you should be taking, about the care pathway you should be on and, and, and started to learn how. Important is, uh, our genetics and, and how differentiate you are about how we interact with drugs and, and remedies and, and, uh, different sort of, uh, therapeutics out there. So that got me excited about, uh, you know, sort of building, uh, diagnostic platform. That allows for advanced testing to come into that decision cycle. So think of if you are a doctor, you need access to the latest test information to make those personalized care decisions. And, and unfortunately in the current healthcare market, uh, that information is very difficult to get to, so it's very difficult to get to people's testing results. It's very difficult to get test. Uh, that's how 1Health was born. We wanted to make sure that you know, everybody can access modern diagnostic testing seamlessly in an affordable fashion, but more importantly for that information to get to the right clinicians to make the right decision at the right time.

Kelly Stanton:

Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, it does, uh, definitely. In some of the conversations we've had, you know, we're hearing a lot about the variety of options, the different testing platforms, all those kinds of things. But, but you're absolutely right. The, uh, the connectivity of that information, how do you, how does it synthesize, how do we put the, pull that all together with, you know, the lab testing, that sort of thing, getting the doctors involved. Uh, how does your platform, uh, solve that problem?

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Sure. It's actually very similar to the changes that are happening in healthcare are very similar to what happened in other industries, right? So, as industries go through technology transformation, uh, you need to upgrade the, the infrastructure that tends to be very legacy, very. Uh, fragmented and, and difficult and not flexible, right? So healthcare is going to that same transformation right now that, uh, finance went through. E-commerce went through and in healthcare, uh, today, if you wanna, for example, uh, as a cancer patient, you come into a local clinical hospital, uh, and the first thing they need to do is essentially test, uh, your tumor type, right? They need to. uh, have they seen this tumor type, uh, have they seen that genetic sequence, uh, that cell type and, and what has worked and what has not worked for a patient? And a lot of details get involved, right? Are you of the same ethnicity? Are, are you, you know, the, the same? as, as the other data sets they've seen. So, you know, your body, uh, as a, uh, you know, uh, Hispanic might react very differently than if you have Asian background or if you have other cultural and ethnic backgrounds. So, so the healthcare system needs to identify who you are, identify what has worked in that population, identify uh, your cancel cell types, and so on and so forth. All that information. uh, is difficult to access, but more importantly, to get you tested itself is difficult, right? The sample has to go to a lab, has to come back, has to be analyzed. Today, all of those steps are very disconnected and very difficult to manage. And what that results in is, is a lot of missed opportunities, right? So a lot of people don't get tested on. and unfortunately they get placed on, on therapeutic pathways that are wrong for them or not effective and they lose time. Right. So this is happening all the time in healthcare because of the complexity of managing these processes. So what we are trying to do is really marshal that process too. So if you join the 1Health Platform, We fundamentally understand when you say I'm about to test a patient for their tumor type, or I'm about to do a pharmacogenomic test, so I'm about to do, uh, you know, early cancer detection test. The platform is smart enough to know that that involves three or four different people across 12 or, you know, 16 different steps and then marshals you through those steps. So it, you know, it knows the platform knows that the doctor needs to approve something and the lab has to run a process and the, you know, the bioinformatic layer has to process the data and it's sort of keeping all of those, uh, workflows and processes in check to make sure that you get to higher rate of completion and you get there faster. So it's really a platform for making that modern testing. Manageable and, and easier to handle, if that makes sense.

Kelly Stanton:

Yeah, no, that sounds, that sounds amazing. And I'm sure a lot of doctors are really hungry for that kind of information. Tell us a little bit about how you got your first 20 customers. What, what was the early traction and, and you know, getting through that, that hump, if you will, as a startup. Share a little bit about that story for us.

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Yeah, actually you know, we all came from. Technology side. So most of my team has a background in, in, uh, you know, commerce or has a background in finance or, or mobile technologies. So we needed to learn the nuance, the detail of the healthcare market. And, and so the first couple years it was more about us, uh, you know, approaching the, the problem from the patient's perspective and then from the labs perspective and then from the clinical. Team's perspective, and then from the insurance perspective. So in healthcare, you have to understand each player in that system and what they need to see and, and what they need to do to make the process successful. And it is a team effort, right? Healthcare is a complicated, uh, all of these parts and components have to be in place. So if you don't handle the insurance, uh, you know, the, the process falls apart if you don't handle the clinician. So the way we got to our first customers is we started talking to all of these players within the ecosystem and we identified, uh, who has the biggest pain. And in our case, the biggest pain was on the part of the labs. Uh, the labs were getting a lot of paperwork coming at them, uh, with patient information on it and insurance information on it. So we started building software systems for labs. and, and our first customers were labs who started adopting our platform saying, oh, that makes my life easier. And then we started paying attention to what does the patient needs to see in this process and what does the doctor need to see in this process? So in the past couple of years, we've been building out the product so that it helps every one of those constituents in the, in the process of getting a test done, if that makes.

Kelly Stanton:

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, and then, you know, moving on to my next question. So now you're over 300 partners across healthcare, corporate education, government industries. You know, to your point of focusing in on a particular group and then expanding that area of the software how are you finding success with business development and partnerships then in that?

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Yeah, no, excellent question. So there, the, the healthcare market is so large that if you don't focus, you tend to get lost, right? Mm-hmm. there's like, mm-hmm. there's just too many parts of this system, right? They're urgent cares and nursing homes and hospitals and clinics and doctor's offices. So we tend to really right now, sell into a single segment. And then, uh, what happens in terms of partnerships is once we sign up a customer, that customer tend to bring their ecosystem onto our platform. So the way we run into these partnerships is mostly by us getting introduced to them. So when we sign up a lab partner, that lab partner will introduce us to a nursing home or to a urgent care or to a clinic. So partnerships right now for us are mostly. Driven by our customers asking us to integrate to their partners. Uh, so we don't seek out those partnerships. It's mostly. Coming to us because they need to be part of the ecosystem, if that makes sense. Otherwise it's, it is just too large a market if you wanted to knock on the door of every nursing home or urgent care, uh, in the US it's a, it is, it's a 3 trillion market and, and, and vast, right? It's a US is a continent in inside. So you have to be very focused on selling to your customer. and then working on, on partnerships that are important to those customers, if that makes sense.

Kelly Stanton:

That does make sense. Yeah, I can, I can definitely see the, the scope of this getting outta hand very quickly It sounds like. So pivoting a little bit to, uh, raising capital. Obviously this is one of the biggest challenges, uh, for entrepreneurs life science startups are no exception to that rule. You're a founder, an investor, and a board member. What advice would you give to younger founders who listen to us and you know, how to navigate getting funding for their startups?

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

that's a very, uh, complicated question and, and depends on so many factors, right? The, the first factor is, uh, what stage of the company are you in? Are you raising a seed round or are you raising A, A or B? Uh, so, uh, the stage of funding you're in, uh, the requirements are very different. So, when you go after your sea ground, the investors are taking a lot more. and they don't, uh, certainly need you to have all the answers to all the questions. But they're mostly looking at the team and they're looking at the market, right? So in the seed stage, it's more about do, do they like you as a and, and the team you have assembled, and do they like the problem space, the, the market space. As you, as you grow to be a more, uh, mature company, the requirements get. Refined, right In Series A, uh, they want to make sure that you have a, uh, product market fit. What that means is that you've identified the beachhead, you're attacking the customers you're going after, uh, and that those customers actually do want your product. So you have to show sales momentum. And then in the growth stage, it's very different, right? They're not looking for scale. They're saying, okay, you, you did really well in this segment. But can you actually expand beyond this segment so it gets as, as you become more mature, the requirements, uh, get more refined and also get more measurable. Right there, there's, there are metrics now in terms of, you know, you only sold to nursing homes and, and there's no indication that he can go beyond nursing homes. And then now the investors in a later stage want actual data. Show us. Urgent care centers want your software or hospitals want your software. So you have to show expansion beyond those segments. So, so my advice is, you know, first decide what stage you're in and, and by far the easiest. You seed mm-hmm. And it gets harder as you go along, right? So if you look at the funnel of investments, a lot of seed companies get funded, and a lot of them don't make it to stage A and stage B because like any. Uh, natural competitive market, uh, you know, very few succeed, right? Very few companies can go from a concept to a product, to a market. And, and I'm sure you know, this percentages are well published out there in terms of, you know, failure rates. So, yeah, I hope that answers your question,

Kelly Stanton:

Yeah, no, that's definitely helpful. pivoting, uh, to you. Uh, if you could go back to the start of your career, what would you tell yourself based on what you know now?

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Be, uh, more humble, uh, be more patient and you know, sort of, trust. So identify. uh, mentors that, that are very good at what they do and sort of really use them as, as mentors, like listen to them deeply and, and trust in their advice. So I, I, you know, I came out of the, you know, Berkeley, Stanford mindset and, and. by training, they make you a bit confident and and arrogant maybe. So when I graduated, we all thought that we knew what the market was was about and how to create products. And if anything, in the past couple of decades, I've been humbled as to how much we don't know, right? Mm-hmm. we realize how complicated industries are, how complicated products are, how complicated managing people is. And, and there are a lot of good people in our industry who you can learn. So choosing those mentors around you is very, very important at the early stage. Definitely.

Kelly Stanton:

Definitely. Okay, awesome. Fun question. Had another, uh, folk person bring this up along the way? And it's been a fun question ever since. So if I walked into Barnes and Noble and was looking for you amongst the stacks and the sections of books, where would I find you?

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

you would find me in, uh, non-fiction, uh, you know, sort of, uh, uh, non-fiction, uh, science section. So I'm very, uh, you know, I'm very interested in facts. I'm very interested in systems. and I'm very interested in understanding the world and then, uh, may maybe making it a bit better over time. Right. So it would be, uh, it would definitely not be in the fun section. It would be the nonfiction science, uh, You have, you have to be a nerd geek to engage that section of the books

Kelly Stanton:

Well, that's fine. I would be right there with you. I love reading about science as well, so,

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

not, not, not romance, not comedy.

Kelly Stanton:

No, definitely, definitely. No, it is fascinating to see how some of those things have evolved over time as well. You know, with, with science and it always learning and, and that sort of thing. So, so I'll join you there. That's a good place to sit and read. That's a good place to meet. Yeah, indeed. Great. Well, where can folks go to connect with you and follow along with your company's?

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

Probably on the website one help io. We do have, uh, frequent updates to the website, uh, blog postings and, and obviously on LinkedIn. The team updates as to what we up to. Great.

Kelly Stanton:

All right. Well, we'll look for you there. Thank you so much for your time today, Maria. I really appreciate it. Thank

Mehdi Maghsoodnia:

you, Kelly. Appreciate it too.