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The MTPConnect Podcast
The MTPConnect Podcast Series connects with the people and the issues behind Australia’s growing medical technologies, biotechnologies and pharmaceuticals sector.
The MTPConnect Podcast
Laronix Breakthrough Smart Wearable Voicebox is Changing Lives
Medical device innovator Laronix aims to give people who have had their larynx removed due to laryngeal cancer, their voice back. And not a robotic voice, but a natural sounding voice for both men and women where even laughing and singing is possible.
The pioneering company has worked with speech pathologists and surgeons around the world to develop the world’s first smart, wearable (non-invasive), electronic voice box - the first new voice technology in forty years! It uses the power of AI and a person’s respiration signals to generate a natural-sounding voice.
In this episode, we meet Laronix co-founder siblings, CEO Dr. Farzaneh Ahmadi and Chief Operating Officer Dr. Mousa Ahmadi, who share their success story, creating a Brisbane-based manufacturing site, expanding to New York, launching their voicing devices in Australia and the US, and changing the lives of those living with a voice disability and giving hope to cancer survivors (half a million people around the world live with this condition).
Tune into hear a Laronix voice in action!
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi, an expert in artificial voice research, was named as one of Australia’s top 100 Innovators in The Australian in 2024.
This is the MTP Connect podcast, connecting you with the people behind the life-saving innovations driving Australia's growing life sciences sector from bench to bedside for better health and well-being. MTP Connect acknowledges the traditional owners of country that this podcast is recorded on and recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are Australia's first storytellers and the holders of first science knowledge.
Caroline Duell:Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline Duell. For the past 40 years, people who have become voiceless, losing their larynx to cancer and surgery, have had to rely on an artificial voice box, surgically implanted that produces a very robotic sound. Now that's all changed with a new wearable bionic voicing device developed in Brisbane that requires no surgery, using AI, voice cloning software and a patient's respiration. It's helping people to find their voice again, to speak, laugh and even sing with a more natural sounding male or female voice, and it's manufactured here and available in Australia. Here to tell us more about this story of hope and joy are the co-founders of CEO, , and Chief Operating Dr Mousa Ahmadi. Welcome, Farzaneh, and Mousa. It's great to have you on the MTP Connect Podcast.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Thank you for having us Thank you so much for having us.
Caroline Duell:We've got up in Brisbane, Queensland, and Musa calling in from New York City in the US, which is fantastic. We've got a global link up to talk about pioneering the development of natural sounding and non-invasive voicing solutions for people with voice loss. can you tell us a bit more about voice loss and how does this happen and how many people are impacted by this problem?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Good morning to you and thank you for having us. Voice loss is a condition that happens to people who lost or damaged their vocal folds. In that sense, people that we're talking about are not paralyzed they can move their face and lip muscles. They just have lost this voice generation function of their larynx, and that's a condition that has been untreated for over 40 years without a modern solution or a remedy.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:150 million people globally struggle with their voice every year, which results to losing jobs, which, only in the? U, cost $13 billion to the economy. But voice loss becomes a disabling, major life problem for around 10 million people globally, including half a million people who we call permanent voice loss or laryngectomy people. People who have lost their larynx entirely because of throat cancer Around 2 million people every year in intensive care units. They lose their voice because of respiratory support that they receive, which makes ICU experience very painful for them, and people with neurological disorders around 7.5 million. They're also destined to lose their voice over time without any remedies. This was sort of a very pressing problem that sort of inspired us to step in and then find a better solution.
Caroline Duell:How many people in Australia might be impacted by this type of voice loss?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:In Australia, you will have around close to 100,000 people with neurological disorders, as well as ICU patients. Permanent voice loss has a smaller number around 2,000 people in Australia, and again, voice loss is a condition that can also affect healthy people, including teachers, that, when it happens, there is no remedy. So, yeah, that would be the population in Australia.
Caroline Duell:You've spent well most of your career focusing on improving voice loss technology. You started studying artificial voice research and sort of voice cloning. What sort of drove you to up loronics and try to come up with a solution? Um?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:as a person, I'm very communicative and silence bothers me, right, and also I I always loved, uh, sort of humanitarian work, work that includes helping people.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:So in my PhD research I was assigned to this project, essentially by accident, and then when we were working on it, a voice loss.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:A person who was healthy but was about to lose their voice through the surgical procedure emailed our research group and he sent a beautiful documentary of his life and he said I'm a singer and my voice is my life and I'm gonna lose it, but can any of you guys help me with a solution? And our answer was like was like any research group? Our answer was like, maybe in 20 years? Right, but it bothered me at a very personal level because it was something that I was trained to do, but I had no way of helping him and maybe the way he described his problem sort of emotionally impacted me as well. Then it became sort of a life story and a career For my PhD research. I couldn't find a a solution because we were following what everyone else was doing for the last 40 years. But then when I came to Australia, I was senior enough to deviate from the mainstream and say I think there's time for a new approach, and that's how this solution was invented.
Caroline Duell:So, farzana, what was the old way of doing this? What's the thing that people got stuck on? Never moved beyond.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:So let's take one step back and have a look at how human larynx works in voice generation. Human larynx as I'm speaking now if I could hypothetically take my larynx out and listen to it it generates a buzz sound. So it doesn't generate speech, it just generates something like a buzz signal and then we shape that buzz signal into speech with moving face and lips muscles when larynx is gone. Larynx is such a complicated organ that we had no idea how to simplify it in the absence of it. Normal larynx works with a combination of vocal fold movement, which which gets a signal from the brain. So like guitar strings, it's, it's a. It's a very good analogy to look at guitars, for example, you put your fingers on the strings and then you start tapping, so the signal from the brain is like finger movement, finger placement, so it adjusts your vocal fold to whatever sound you want to get and then when you breathe out, it vibrates your vocal folds. Um, all of that was gone. So everyone was confused around restructuring that function.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:There was one solution which was called electoral larynx. Electoral larynx was like a robot playing that guitar. So always the same waveform and if, if you do that, yes, the speech is, you can always excite human vocal tract and then get something out. So there is an intelligible speech, but it sounds terribly robotic. Patients hated that. It was an engineering solution, it was out of the body, so engineers loved it. So they kept changing it.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:But the problem was electoral larynx required me, as the speaker, to control my voice all the time. But I am not aware of how I control my voice right. When we speak we don't decide micromanage our voice, like, for example, when we say Apple, we don't decide to turn our voice on in A, turn it off in P and then turn it on again in L. So asking the user to do that was pointless. And for the first four years in my PhD I also focused on electoral larynx, like everyone else, until I got so frustrated that when I came to Australia I said guys, I'm going to stop using electoral larynx, I'm going to look at whatever else has worked.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:And then we came up with another solution which was called pneumatic larynx. I'm going to look at whatever else has worked. And then we came up with another solution which was called pneumatic larynx. It was an old school solution that was driven only by respiration. The patient didn't need to do much, they just breathed through it, and it was essentially like a human larynx, with a fixed pair of vocal folds outside the body, without any nerves, and it sounded fantastic. So there was our clue. Okay, so there is a way to engage respiration, throw away the nerve signal and get a good quality voice out of it.
Caroline Duell:All we needed to do now was to develop a modern version of this and that is where you've come up with this bionic voice box, which you've called Ava.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Yeah, that was the birth of. That was actually a eureka moment when I when I saw that and it was the birth of what we call pneumatic bionic voice, which is again respiratory driven and then without any nerves. The first product that was born out of that concept was called Ava. Ava in Persian means singing voice. They came out of that for a reason, because it's actually the first device that people with voice loss can sing with. Ava uses synthetic models of vocal fold. These are through extensive R&D. These are designed in a way that the voice sounds exceptionally natural. So, to compare, this is a sample quality of how people with prior solutions sounded and this is the sample quality of Ava.
Caroline Duell:Hello, my name is John and I'm from New York, and I hope you have a nice day. Bye-bye. It's hugely different. I can hear an accent in the second speaker and it sounds much more natural. Yeah.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Sounds like a real person and it's meant to be biologically relevant. So we are not asking the patient to do anything beyond what they did before, Because all of us, when we speak, we exhale. So that's what they need to do and the rest the device looks after.
Caroline Duell:And it's a device that you don't have to implant, so it sits on the outside of the person's throat area where the larynx would sit behind.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Yes, so AVA is specific to permanent voice loss. Permanent voice loss people breathe through their neck, through the opening in the neck called stoma. So AVA sits on this on this st and, like I said, it has a model of human vocal folds in it. It connects to the natural lung. The lung drives this new vocal fold, it's out of the body and the sound goes to the mouth via a tube. That's generation one. And then we went one step ahead because we were thinking how about people who have lost their voice but they don't have a hole in their neck? So we made another device called Mira. Mira has both a small version of human lungs and a small version of vocal folds in it, so it does both functions, so you don't need the patient to drive it with their lungs anymore and on that sense Mira has a much larger footprint to help anyone with voice problems.
Caroline Duell:Does it sit in the same area on the throat like on the neck?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:No, mira is a handheld device which essentially using a combination of those vocal, fold and lung models. It just needs a tube that goes to the mouth and the patient speaks with it.
Caroline Duell:And tell us about the tube itself. It's connected to the device, but it's like a straw, a plastic straw you just sit it in the side of your mouth.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Exactly. So when you want to generate voice for people, in the end of the day that voice has to go to the mouth because they want to speak with it. The beauty of a human mouth and in the oral system is that it doesn't matter where you excite it, as long as you pass the sound to the mouth. So our device has that sort of visible component to it. But we normally say if you have an eyesight problem, you wear glasses. If you have a voice problem.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:There is a small tube that it's a sort of small compensation for the fact that we don't want to make an invasive sort of like. We don't want to go through the throat. So, yes, there's a small tube that goes to the mouth.
Caroline Duell:This really sounds like a huge development for people with voice loss and no voice, with all sorts of voice problems, and the feedback you must have had from patients as we're developing this must be absolutely critical. Tell us a bit about that.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Pass on to Musa. One of the things that is that I'm actually very pleased to have is, I mean, in addition to fantastic co-founder, he's also a UX expert. I came to this sort of from a technology perspective and then he connected us to the user experience. So, passing on to you, musa, go ahead.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:So over the past two years we have done multiple trials of the devices with patients laryngectomy patients, tracheostomy patients, patients with neurological disorders and then the feedback is especially for the laryngectomy population. There's been such high levels of discretion for an effective solution that the first moments are just, you know, wow moments. A lot of the patients that we work with, first of all, 100% of the patients that we have trialed the device have spoke with our device, 100%. We haven't had any patient that was not able to speak with the device, which is very exciting to us. Voice loss is a very interesting condition because these are patients who didn't speak for 10, 20. We have had patients who didn't speak for 40 years and then now we are seeing these very, very first moments that these patients are speaking for the first time and they're very emotional moments. Uh, we have seen a lot of them. You know, in many cases the first thing that they say is how much they love their family members that are there with them, and you know how they like the opportunity to connect with others around them. Again, uh, we have had some cases that even you know people wanted. You know they wanted to say something for many, many years. It was like ball up and then now they were able to communicate that and then for the first time, all of those thoughts were coming through. Another feedback that we got, and that's my favorite, is that when the patients take the devices home so they go from someone who was not able to speak, or like had a very low volume voice, to someone who could talk back now, or like talk over people and then express their thoughts and opinions, you know, at a like, talk over people and then express their thoughts and opinions at a family dinner or something, and then you know that you know be part of that conversation again. So the feedback has been great. We've been very excited about that.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:Um, you know, over time we had one, you know, these patients are going back to their social, professional life that they have had. We had one patient very recently who was a veteran and then he was comparing, using our devices, to the moment that he came back from the war and how he turned, you know, went back to the society and was be able to, you know, feel that he was belonging again. And then you know he was saying that by, by him talking again, he feels like he's back again. He's back to the society, he's back with his friends and you know he was saying that by him talking again, he feels like he's back again. He's back to the society, he's back with his friends and, you know, family members, and you know he was really sharing that feeling with us.
Caroline Duell:And so you can also laugh as well with this device we take for granted don't we?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:There are things that we do as part of normal speaking that was possible with our device but not with other solutions, like, for example, hums or pauses and then laughters, and then the possibility of showing emotions, and then the patient takes and runs with it. We have one lovely gentleman who actually started singing with it, so we provided singing lessons for him, and, given that this is a community with a lot of pain and depression, it's actually very admiring that they take that extra effort to see what is possible with this device really on this sort of technology, ai side of things, which is where you've been able to sort of really develop this device to something that's quite groundbreaking, can you explain how you've sort of designed the technology to produce a patient's voice?
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:Absolutely, and the career doesn't go to me specifically, it goes to the entire team who is really hardworking and works on this. So, with our devices, as Ferry mentioned, the plan has been to release multiple devices over the time and then not really wait for this ultimate technology. That could take many, many years. So we do have plans to have a device that has this state of artificial intelligence and the goal is to really really develop that original voice, the voice that the patient had there, you know, prior to the surgery, get a recording of that, resemble that and really recreate that. And that's a device that we call Bionic Voice, as you know, and it's something that we're planning to release in the future.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:In the meantime, with our devices, with AvaVoice and MiraVoice, what we have done is we designed customizable vocal folds in the device and those provide a high level degree of customization. So for right now, the patients could try you know three, four, you know we're trying to make that six voice profiles and then choose one that connects with them closely. There is a very significant group of this population that are female patients and then these patients have been stuck with a male sounding voice, with electrolarynx or with the other conventional treatment and with our devices and we're very excited that we're working on that so we now have vocal folds that create that feminine voice for these patients so that's a different tone, a different right, different octave higher lower exactly, exactly, yeah, and and, and you know we're finalizing our rnd with that and then you know, with those patients, you know it has it's a.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:Our voices are a very, a very huge part of our identity, and then being able to recreate that and make sure that the voice that is generated is matching the identity of the patients, the female patients, it's a very big, big quality of life improvement. So with that we have approached it very closely and what about things like different languages?
Caroline Duell:Is it adaptable for different types of languages?
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:That's a great question. So we primarily have tested the device with English and Spanish speakers, but we are working with other patients. We have had patients who are speaking Mandarin and there are some differences in terms of how the device is being used. So, for example, some of the patients need to adjust the tube a little bit differently to find the articulators that really create that speech, but primarily language independent. So in most cases we are able to recreate that voice, but then, with some different training, patients are able to speak the language that they have.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:As Musa said, yes, the device is language independent. It can actually generate, also generate Chinese language, so we can, for the first time, provide micro. As you know, chinese is a tonal language that you need to change intonation inside the board and this device has the capacity of doing that as well. If that's okay, I wanted to add, like a comparison of the quality of our voices this was what it was like, and I picked it up pretty quickly.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:Nothing will make you feel as out there as you need an ability to help somebody else when they really need it.
Caroline Duell:It's so different. It really is, and it's great to hear that difference and you really feel like you can hear the person behind the voice. This is a really interesting sort of partnership that you have as siblings Moosa you're in the US and Farzana out here in Australia, which is why you've got sort of a US-Australian base, and that's really also helped to shape your clinical trial program. Do you want to tell us about what that's involved and working with hospitals, clinicians, speech pathologists?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:so one of the things that differentiates Laronix against many medical companies is actually, we have a very active arm in engaging with the market, which is kudos to Musa and his sort of strategic thinking about connecting innovation to the user. Pass it on to him. He normally interrupts us in the middle of development. This is good enough, let's go. So okay, back to you, musa.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:So when we started the Laronix project, one of the things that we learned quickly was that, in addition to us being a technical team, there's also a group of very dedicated clinicians who really want to see a change in this domain, who know about the limitations of what's available and they want to see their patients, you know, being successful and then be able to thrive and speak to the devices. So what we did was we invited a lot of these clinicians to engage with us. We started with some of the clinics and then gradually developed that network. We started with five clinics and then now the network that we have is around 30 very active engagements that we have with these hospitals with around 70 clinicians. These are speech language pathologists and then ex-surgeons and also nurses. So with that we were able to get a lot of feedback about what these clinicians want, and then you know what the patients are saying about the devices.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:But every time, as Fahri mentioned, understand where the product should be to satisfy clinicians and patients, but also if they think you know that feedback about the product, about things that need to improve or things that need to change, we could quickly have a call with our team and then convey the message from the clinicians to them and then we could right away fix the product and then bring it back to them. So because there is, the ElectroLines was the technology from 40 years ago. That never changed. When clinicians these dedicated clinicians see that we are changing our product every day and every month and every you know a couple of weeks, they get very excited and they really believe in our mission. They understand that we are here to make a difference and we're not going to give up. We just keep innovating till we really get that, you know product market fits right and we're very on track to do that.
Caroline Duell:And how critical has that feedback from the, particularly that medical ecosystem being in the success of, you know, actually getting the product to market.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:Very, very critical.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:One of the things that we learned early on was that we really focus on the product and then how the product should perform, but at the same time, we learned that the product should really fit the clinical setting that these products are going to be used in terms of the patient experience, what they need when they come in or what happens when they take the devices home.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:So we change a lot of processes around that to make sure that, you know, clinicians are happy with the processes that we have, and we also had some of the clinicians join the team. We have some of our reps who have very in-depth clinical expertise and then now they tell us everything that we need to know, but then it's a little bit faster and then we understand the process a little bit better. So the feedback has been critical. A lot of the clinicians that we are working with they actually joined our clinical advisory board because they saw that we are making progress and we are, you know, getting closer and closer and closer to the goal, and now we have this like very close loop of the feedback that is coming in every day about everything that we need to change. Some of the clinicians have my number too, so I always get messages about everything that they like and they don't like about the product.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:But you know I love it and you know we always welcome that and you know it's a very good, you know dynamic.
Caroline Duell:So good news for people with voice loss is that your product is available in the US as well as Australia. Late last year you got TGA clearance, so this is amazing. Tell us about. You know what that part of the journey has been like.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:So we have so far. I always say what is your number? Our number is 147 people, daily users of evolve, uh, and if we might say, we pride our, we pride ourselves into changing 147 lives so far. Um, the, the mission is to get these to 300 000 uh in seven years. So that's what we are fighting for. Yeah, and, as you said, the product is commercially available in Australia and the US now for permanent voice loss people, which is actually, to our understanding, the most critical group of people. Sadly, before us, they had a high suicide rate as well. So we're very humbled, delighted and passionate about helping them. And with our second product, mira, we are providing early access to that too. So for people who we have teenagers, for example, who are trying it, for people who have other types of voice loss, we can also have considerations around enrolling them for the MIRA trial program.
Caroline Duell:And so you've set up a manufacturing site in Queensland. Is that correct?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Yeah, we have an ISOC certified manufacturing plant with a capacity of 1,000 units, 1,000 patients per year. It has been ISO audited twice, two subsequent years and last year we had zero non-conformities. Yeah, it has. We maintain a high quality of the product to ensure patients and clinician satisfaction. Very proud to be an Australian manufacturing site and we have expansion plans for up to 3000 patients per year with a similar sort of setup and after that we will expand to mass manufacturing.
Caroline Duell:That's really exciting. Australian made, that's wonderful. Is there a bit of word of mouth around this device for the speech pathology community and and the the oncology area as well?
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:yes, very, very much so. So, um, sometimes we see a new wave of clinicians and patients approaching us and when that happens, we understand there was a word of mouth, like you know, clinicians speaking to each other and telling each other about engaging with us. So we have had a very consistent track record of being available for clinicians and providing product trials and that consistency have. You know, we created a good reputation and good trust among clinicians in the company and we see some you know screenshots of them that clinicians share that, like you know, them posting on their Facebook groups about their experiences, you know, and then the other clinicians getting encouraged to, you know, engage with us and do that, yeah, how long does it take a new patient to learn how to use the technology?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Depending on the patient, sometimes two hours, sometimes up to eight hours of speech pathology sessions In the US, because we have a smaller number of sort of Medicare paid sessions, people are more agile to learn. Our Australian sort of friends take their time. They essentially can speak from day one. They can speak words. It's a matter of learning to speak with the tube in their mouth and learning to manage their respiration so that they have enough airflow for a sort of full conversation. But yeah, it's relatively again, because it's very close to the body works anyway. So a lot of our training is about taking the patient out of too much focus on it. We say this is what you need.
Caroline Duell:You used to do, so just get back to that mode, yeah do you feel as if it's like the next cochlear?
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:oh, we admire cochlear and, yeah, we, we would love to follow the legacy of Cochlear. So, essentially, at the moment, whatever the Cochlear is and I just want to sort of the Cochlear has helped 700,000 people with their technology, and that's an Australian dream. Like I said, we are projecting 300,000 in seven years. So that's the plan. That's the plan and we would love to actually step in there. But our technology is non-invasive, which essentially grows much faster, and yet we have just started.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:So, as we sort of showed you like, at the moment we have generic male and female voices. Sometimes we get completely natural, depending on the patient use of the device. But we want to do a lot more. We want to bring soprano alto, like a wide range of voices, similar to wide range, range of eyeglasses, because in the end of the day the vocal fold has to match the person and that gives them a wider range of speech, wider range of singing.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:But our mission has been enabling anyone who doesn't have a voice to to sort of get back to to life. And we started with the with the focus on delivering something early because the condition was dire. So one thing that I normally realize is that the way healthy people think about voice loss is very different than the way that a person actually without a voice thinks about it. Healthy people want a sort of an AI enabled hands-free headset version mode of the device, and that's something that we generally like organically get towards, but for voice loss people it's a necessity. It's something that needed to be there as early as possible. So we strategised around addressing this dire need as early as possible and then we continue our R&D to develop the next version.
Caroline Duell:Yeah, which is fantastic. So you know, people don't have to wait another 10 years. They've got something to get on living with and you're just refining it through that patient experience and with new technology and it's really exciting and that's a very ambitious target. But also, because it's non-invasive, you don't have to have it implanted. That's reducing the cost, like it's a much more cost-e efficient medical device, which is very appealing.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:That's a great point. So we actually did a recent analysis on the cost that could be reduced by our device being adopted in hospitals in Australia and US being adopted in hospitals in Australia and US and the analysis showed that, you know, with the devices like AvaVoice, the price could be brought down by up to 87%, which is quite significant. And we're talking also about the huge burden in terms of amount of work for clinicians but also for patients to, you know, maintain some of the solutions and you know, maintain some of the solutions and you know, overall, like a better experience with you know, this journey and also that better outcome on the other side.
Caroline Duell:Well, what a fantastic place to be sitting in the start of the next phase of the company. Do you have any tips that you'd like to share with anyone who's kind of you know in the flow of getting their medical device prototype ready for clinical trials or taking into clinical trials? I think your journey is quite unique and you've obviously been very persistent in believing that you could come up with a better solution.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Well, every journey is different, obviously, but my biggest learning through this experience, thanks to Musa, is get to market as quickly as possible, get to use it as quickly as possible. There is no point being idealistic about your product. Everyone wants to be idealistic, always right, and the better is the enemy of good, you know. So if we restarted this journey, we would have released our beta version much quicker. Journey, we would have released our beta version much quicker. And the Silicon Valley sort of mantra is that if you release your MVP by the time that you are not embarrassed by it, you have released it late. Yeah, so it has to be as quick as possible. Get to the user and start capturing user feedback. Establish product market fit, and then again we can be perfectionist about product market fit, and then again we can be perfectionist about product market fit. But again, if there is a possibility of early release and then get a better market share, build a user case, that's the best opportunity to go for.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:We went for a sort of while to raise funding for it and our messaging was, like you know, amazing take, do you want to invest or not? And and then we went to an accelerator program in New York and the first thing they said, which was a huge mental shift for us, was stop talking to investors and start talking to your users. It was, it was sort of turning point for us and that was the point that we actually shifted our direction, went to hospitals and and then investments came. Because when you are having actually that active dialogue, then things fall in place. I sometimes regret to see so some of our folks in in australian may take take a lot of time sort of perfecting a product on the bench while the use case is not yet there. So the sooner they can get it to I I mean pending regulatories, of course, because that's a big hurdle but the sooner they can get it to user change the life of the company.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:Definitely echoing everything that Larry said.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:On top of that, you know, medical device innovation domain is filled with experts who really have gone through similar experiences, have done similar products if not exactly the same product but then, for example, work in the same domain, work with the same clinicians, with the same hospitals, and I highly recommend seeking input from these experts who, a lot of them, provide this expertise for free because they really care about patient health and, you know, improving healthcare.
Dr Mousa Ahmadi:One of the things that we do in the beginning, you know, was that we try to, you know, figure everything out from scratch ourselves by really sit down and thinking and, you know, putting a full, you know roadmap together. But then we realized that by talking to someone who has done this and then has gone through this, we could save significant amounts of time and really, you know, connect with the patients and the clinicians and then, you know, work on the product. So I recommend seeking advice and then not being ashamed for it and understand that there are people who are really, really willing to provide that and be part of the journey of the, you know ventures who are innovating in this domain.
Caroline Duell:When did you realize that pretty much this was your journey to take with developing this product? Like you couldn't find anyone interested in helping commercialise it, you just decided we've got to go for it.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:Oh yeah, that's a very good question. So yeah, when this was invented in uni in Australia Western Sydney University at the time and at the time Musa was a PhD student in UX as well, so we were going different, like separate lives, but we talked a lot about it and we approached a lot of big names Google was one particularly, because I spent like about six months talking to Google and in the end they said, look, big companies do not develop technologies from scratch because unless it gets to a certain point, so you go develop it and then come and talk to us. So over time and the university was giving me the option of going to the teaching life, so we realized that if that would be the case, then no one actually conversed with this technology and we get quite genuinely, we got waves and waves of people emailing and trying to have it. That was the time that the the story of the invention was getting out, because western sydney university had put a story called this discovery. That has changed one, of course, research worldwide, um, so it became sort of a choice, whether is it us or not, and then we decided, and then Musa coined the word Laronix, and then we decided that if there's one thing that we want to do in a lifetime. That's going to be it, and we stepped to this. We step into this journey very positively and and then we we've solved the problems that happened over the journey.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi:But yeah, that was the intention and so it became a mandate. And the more we talked to voiceless people, the more we saw the case of depression, the more personal this problem became for us, because, literally, they don't have any voice to defend themselves. That's the reality of it voice to defend themselves. That that's the reality of it, alongside all the learnings of converting a good technology to an excellent business case, which you should learn as co-founders. But what happened in the back of our mind and inside our heart is any patient that gets their voice back. It's sort of like a huge fuel to this engine for us and we get inspired to continue that well.
Caroline Duell:I can see and hear the passion that is driving um loronics, and congratulations to your teams in the us and in australia. It's a very exciting stage for the company and we really wish you all the best for your continued product development and the work that you're doing to help people with voice loss, which will hopefully take this medical device around the world. That was Leronix co-founders, dr Farzana Ahmadi and Dr Musa Ahmadi, a dynamic sister and brother duo, talking about how they have developed the world's first smart wearable electronic voice box, giving people who have lost their larynx their natural sounding voice back. You've been listening to the MTP Connect podcast. This podcast is produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri people here in Narm, melbourne. Thanks for listening to the show. If you love what you heard, share our podcast and follow us for more Until next time.
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