Eziah Syed MEND Founder & CEO | How MEND Is Transforming Surgical Recovery with Clinical Nutrition

Can nutrition be as important as medicine when it comes to surgery and recovery?

In this thought-provoking episode of Beyond the Scalpel with Dr. AlRashid, Dr. Mamun AlRashid sits down with Mr. Eziah Syed, Founder and CEO of MEND Nutrition, to explore how science-backed clinical nutrition is transforming modern healthcare. 

Drawing from his experience at Deloitte, Citibank, and the healthcare innovation sector, Eziah shares how personal family experiences inspired him to build a company dedicated to improving surgical recovery through evidence-based nutritional interventions.

Together, they discuss why nutrition should be treated as a clinical therapy rather than simply a wellness trend, the emergence of NutraPharma, and how Mend is bridging the gap between pharmaceutical-grade science and natural compounds. 

The conversation also explores randomized clinical trials, inflammation, perioperative care, digital health, artificial intelligence, and the future of personalized patient recovery.

Whether you're a surgeon, healthcare professional, patient preparing for surgery, or simply interested in the future of medicine, this episode offers valuable insights into how nutrition is reshaping healthcare.

In this episode:
00:00 – Introduction to Eziah Syed & Mend
01:08 – From Deloitte & Citibank to Healthcare Innovation
03:07 – Personal Experiences That Inspired Mend
06:52 – Why Nutrition Should Be a Clinical Intervention
08:04 – Why Mend Chose Clinical Science Over Consumer Wellness
10:39 – What Is Nutraceutical Pharma (NutraPharma)?
12:51 – How Mend Differs From Traditional Supplements
15:28 – Nutrition's Role in Surgical Recovery & Healing
18:13 – Nutrition, Inflammation & the Science Behind Healing
21:23 – Why Mend Invests in Randomized Clinical Trials
23:49 – Overcoming Barriers to Clinical Adoption
26:14 – Digital Health, Patient Navigation & Recovery Support
29:13 – The Economics of Nutrition in Healthcare
31:19 – AI, Digital Medicine & the Future of NutraPharma
33:15 – Mend's $20 Million Series A & Industry Growth
35:12 – The Future Vision for Mend
36:18 – Leadership Lessons from Building Mend
39:00 – Mend's Mission: Healing Beyond Medicine
40:20 – Final Advice for Patients Preparing for Surgery
41:27 – Closing Remarks

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to Like, Subscribe, and Share for more conversations with world-renowned physicians, innovators, and healthcare leaders on Beyond the Scalpel with Dr. Mamun AlRashid.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Beyond the Scalpel, Dr. Mamun AlRashid, or its affiliated organizations. This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice.

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Transcript

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (00:00)
Our guest today is Mr. Mr. Eziah Syed Saeed, co-founder and chief of growth and innovation, of a company that operates at the intersection of nutrition and pharma called Mend. The company focuses on science-backed clinical nutrition and telehealth patient engagement platforms designed to help people recover faster from surgery and accelerated recovery.

Improved performance. Mr. Eziah Syed is a corporate leader making waves in the world of Neutrapharma and the clinical nutrition space. His company develops pharmaceutical grade nutraceuticals. He has a distinguished career trajectory in innovation and strategy at global companies, including including Deloitte and City, as well as at several healthcare-focused ventures.

His focus now, though, has been to expand the use of targeted nutritional science to improve patient outcomes in mainstream medical care. Mr. Eziah Syed, welcome to the podcast Beyond the Scalpel. Thank you so much.

Mr. Eziah Syed (01:01)
Thank

you, Dr. Albershave. It's it's it's honor to be with you and I'm looking forward to our discussion and and sharing what what we've learned.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (01:08)
That's awesome. Thank you. Cesale, let's start at the beginning. your career has taken you through some of the world's most demanding institutions, Deloitte, Citibank, and various venture capital ventures that you've been involved in. Those environments shape a particular kind of thinker. How did that training ultimately prepare you for the very different challenge of building something in human health?

Mr. Eziah Syed (01:31)
Yeah, thank you for that question. It's a great question. I I I think when it comes to identifying gaps in market spaces and then understanding the the mechanics of how one goes about validating whether there's a there

the sets of steps that one needs to take to actually, you know, fully exploit if there is a there or there.

That ⁓ is a repeatable process, irrespective of what industry you're looking in. identifying gaps and then the typical flows that you know an entrepreneur typically goes through to validate early thesis, then to build a prototype and to validate that prototype, and to really assess whether the commercial and business model is valid by testing actually in market with with real clients. that is translation.

To really to any industry. So working at, you know, firms like Deloitte and Citibank, where I was in innovation and strategy, frameworks have become part of my DNA. I I think through frameworks. And certainly this the startup journey framework is one of those core things that I I live, live and breathe.

And so the very early days when I had the concept, the first thing I did was, and that's what any business person is trained to do, is to go out and seek information and guidance from those who are ultimately the customer. So I started to speak to surgeons and dietitians, and I said, Look, I had this experience with delayed healing, and I thought nutrition might be the cause. Is that a real thing? And just as you're nodding, they were always nodding. So I got the early nuggets of validation.

And then from that is really about thinking through the complexity of how one actually builds something that might be one day embraced by mainstream medicine. And that's that's the journey I've on.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (03:07)
And there's also been a personal side to your mission, hasn't there been, in terms of where almost a story of where personal pain becomes professional purpose. You you've I think alluded various times in public your mother's personal cancer journey and your brother's near fatal injury that gave you almost a front re row seat to see how healthcare treats and sometimes fails for the people we love most.

So was there a specific moment when you realized the system is clinically advanced, but nutritionally and emotionally may still be incomplete?

Mr. Eziah Syed (03:41)
Yeah, I I think all of those cases that you've highlighted, and my mother's a two-time cancer survivor, two dopaminectomies. she's got you know, when when she went through that experience, I thought I was younger and I hadn't started to contemplate this thesis yet, and I saw a withered person at home, you know, shaven head and just kind of just really frail.

And I didn't really realize kind of the emotional toll she might have taken, you know, one day waking up as a as a woman without your breasts, what kind of psychological toll that might take and the impact of that ultimately on you know healing and recovery. And certainly hadn't starting to think about nutrition. And now in hindsight, when I look back at her situation, there was so much more that could have been done for her. Like clearly the surgeons did a good job of removing the tumor.

But that didn't do anything for the journey of her emotionally, physically, in terms of her, you know, her status. My brother had a near fatal fall from an 80-foot waterfall in upstate New York and had multiple surgeries to repair his his body. And all again, the the surgeons just did a brilliant job. I remember going to ER and the surgeon came out, the ER after like a you know, four or five hour procedure.

And said someone in the room said this guy's got physical therapy businesses in New York. And I thought if I amputate his arm, he's not gonna be able to practice anymore. So thank God, right? This guy did brilliant work and he saw a little bit of material  remaining in the elbow and he patched it together. And today, if you were to see my brother, he's living a full life. But it was an exquisitely painful journey when he was not in the hospital. I was treating his wounds at home. He had a wound vacuum on, and there was a lot of stuff going on in between the surgery.

And to your question, then what was the moment that was the aha for me? I I had a stress fracture from training for the near marathon. And I was delayed in my healing from that stress fracture, and I was just going bananas, you know, just trying to get back to normal living. Went back to my podiatrist and I asked a simple question. I'm feeling pain in my foot. Why isn't it healed yet? And he said, literally, he said, Go home and rest. There's nothing you can do. Healing is different for everybody. Which, in fairness, it is.

But it didn't contemplate me as an individual in that I'm South Asian and perhaps I was low on vitamin D, or there was something driving that, you know, delayed healing. And so I started to go pretty deep into that thesis and went home immediately and started to read about nutrition and healing. And lo and behold, the very first article is called Nutrition for Healing. It's on HSS's website.

And it talks about the body's energy demands and you know, not an earth-shattering thesis for anyone who's in medicine. Your body's working harder, it needs the core building blocks. So, the but the problem was these articles that I came across numerous on Oprah.com, on CNN, they're all talking about the same thing. These are the 15 foods you need to eat to optimize healing. Totally impractical.

Great advice, but totally impractical. So we really the the the the aha for me was there's an opportunity here and a gap in medicine. How do we build a product that has a relevant compound that someone like yourself who is growing up in Western medicine, who is

Who cares about evidence, you know, the gold standard double blind placebo controlled trials, unless there's enough body of evidence, you're not gonna take it seriously. So really that's the journey we've been on to build something that can be a new t new tool tool set, you know, in in the in the tool toolbox.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (06:52)
So Mr. Eziah Syed, what what made you believe that nutrition needs to be treated as a clinical intervention rather than a lifestyle add-on?

Mr. Eziah Syed (06:59)
Yeah, so I'll I'll just give you an example. And so in in the total joint world, that you know you you operate in ⁓ a hundred and eighty-pound person who's having a joint replaced. ⁓ the metabolic demands are so high that it's equivalent to running 10 marathons in the 12 weeks post off. So you're gonna burn an incremental 25,000 calories. And so there's a kind of a business lens and a clinical lens that I looked at this problem set with.

One is just purely clinical lens. There's a clear need. Body's working harder. Nobody's giving you adequate adequate targeted nutrition. We got to solve for that. The business lens that I looked through was when I looked at the prevention-oriented, wellness-oriented product segment, you look at the GNCs and the vitamin shops of the world, there's a sea of products in that world. I didn't want to compete in that. Where I wanted to compete was in the acute world where there was a gap.

Clear gap, a clear need, much harder to play in because of the bar for scientific evidence. But if I I felt like if I could prove out the science, then that space would be really available to me to exploit versus going and competing with general products and GNC and vitamin shop.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (08:04)
That's awesome. And and it seems that men's you know, basics has been to focus on the clinical science rather than consumer wellness. Although that's a much more harder, often slower and more expensive pathway. I mean, what was the strategic reasoning do you think behind that choice? And do you think it's paid off?

Mr. Eziah Syed (08:22)
Well, I can tell you that, you know, just today I got a text message from one of our one of our practices that they said in the text message that we have gone to making men mandatory for all of our patients. one of the largest practices in in the country has been in a pilot for four months and they have indicated a very strong patient cash pay up rate uptake rate, 65% plus, and they're moving towards a rollout to a hundred plus surgeons.

⁓ so while it was grueling Dr. Al Rashid to get here to convince the skeptical surgeon and to get, you know, a very difficult healthcare world to embrace something new, when I get validation like that, clearly this practice is not rolling out after a year of using it unless you're seeing real outcomes. So, yes, I think I absolutely made the right decision going and playing in this space versus trying to compete in a D to C typically environment where

You're spending millions and you can be a fad. I didn't want to be a fad. I wanted to be something institutional, something that is a core part of medicine for decades to come. And I think we're going up that adoption curve. We went from the skeptics to the early adopters to the innovators to now. I think we're getting kind of at a point of scale where enough surgeons are using it. They're telling their buddies, hey, I've used nutrition.

And we're we're hearing about feedback. So, you know, Dr. Noble, who's in in Florida, texted me the other day and said, the PTs keep telling me the patients that are taking Mend are seeing a better healing trajectory. isn't that amazing? I said, Well, it's in the science. yes, it is amazing to hear that, but you know, the science has has shown that. And then there have been very large studies recently published by the American College of Surgeons, one in February of 2025.

We shipped at eight surgical indications, 4,000 patients, and concluded that pre-operative nutritional intervention alone reduced complications by 33%.

improved length of stay by 18% and save that health system, the Allegheny Health System, $7.8 million. They published again in April 29th of this year, showing the combination of prehab and nutrition reduced complications by 50%. So the data now has implied from beyond the men's studies to institutional level conclusions and impacts.

So yes, it was a very difficult journey to get here, but the the data now is so compelling that I believe standard of care is not that far away.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (10:39)
Excellent. So let's let's dive into a little bit about this neutropharmaceuticals and the sort of this new landscape that's emerging and you know you've been one of the pioneers in in this kind of opening up this space, and the mend model. Can you explain what are neutropharmaceuticals and why this category is emerging as important in healthcare right now?

Mr. Eziah Syed (10:58)
Sure. i it is not an existing category. It's a category we're trying to invent, along with I think, you know, a handful of other companies that are in this space. If you imagine pharma on one side and to traditional dietary supplement companies on the other side, we're in the middle in that

We behave like pharma in the science that we're developing. So we're doing gold standard double blind randomized specific focus control trials. We actually have done mechanistics, we have a mechanistic study live that I'll speak to. But we're living in the natural compound world. So we're using compounds that are considered by the FDA to be safe and well tested.

And companies can release products with these safe tested compounds in dietary supplements without going through an FDA approval for each product. So we're leveraging those compounds, but we're doing studies and science at a level of pharma. So we think this new class of what we call neutra pharma, where it's being used very specifically for medical indications, it's got the science. We'll get a new tier of recognition by the FDA and by the legal authorities and by the

the

market ultimately by the consumer and yourselves where you're like, no, this is medical grade stuff.

Being used very specifically for a specific indication. So we're not general wellness, even though we have products that we can graduate patients to after their recovery that are are designed for general wellness. really, the the desire is to create a completely new modality that surgeons can use, doctors can use, that are very efficacious. And the data is quite compelling. The Japanese study that was in our space in Total Joint.

showed a two-year follow-on with patients, 20% more muscle from those who took the accessional amino acids versus those who took placebo. That 24% 20% more muscle can have very significant implications for downstream, for independent living, for falls, for you know, those those types of ⁓ outcomes. So that the data's become quite established.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (12:51)
Awesome. And so I think you you you kinda touched on that, but just to the average consumer, how is men's products different from the traditional supp supplements that people have been taking for years?

Mr. Eziah Syed (13:02)
Yeah. a number of a number of factors that are different. So if you were to go into, you know, if you were to buy something on Amazon or you go into your Gancy or Vitamin shop, the first thing to be mindful of is those products, while they may say 500 milligrams of a certain nutrient, it may actually be 250.

Because they haven't been third-party tested and verified. So the first thing to think about is efficacious dosing. Everything that we put in Mend is backed by a body of historical clinical data that shows that you need three three ⁓ mega you need three MG of HMB.

If you want to match the studies that were done historically, you need seven grams of you know leucine, sorry, three grams of HMP, seven grams of leucine if you wanna match the historical data. So every single nutrient that we select is at an efficacious dose.

We then, after we do our formulations, we actually do randomized trials. So for the for the consumer that might be listening, we actually test our product against placebo in a very rigorously designed study to see if the outcomes we're trying to drive are actually producible and they're repeatable. So we're not satisfied with one study we wanted.

Multiple studies. And so we've demonstrated through multiple randomized trials a bunch of outcomes: better wound healing, better muscle, better return to function, sustained function, etc. Furthermore, we go another step where we do third-party certification of our products. And what that means is there are certain labs out there like

Informed choice, Eurofin, NSF, that will randomly select product from each one of our batches, and then they'll test it. And they'll test it for two or three things. First is that that 500 milligrams that it says on our label is in fact what's in the product. So you know that you're getting the actual dose that's listed. The second is does it have anything adulterated in it? Is it contaminated with anything? And then the third is that it doesn't have any band.

substances in it. So when you get that stamp of approval from a third-party certified certification lab, you know you're getting something that has high integrity. And very few companies out there, I think it's less than 3%.

had these third party certifications. So there's a number of number of dimensions on which Mend is differentiating the science, the clinical data, the dosing, the third party certification that really makes us unique and different in in the world, in the sea of products out there.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (15:28)
Nice. And Mend has focused pretty heavily on acute care, as you mentioned, surgery, orthopedic recovery in particular, and perioperative care. Most people don't think about nutrition in that context. So what does the evidence actually show about how nutrition in that perioperative period can affect surgical outcome?

Mr. Eziah Syed (15:49)
Yeah, in fact

you'd be surprised. ⁓ you know, we did a survey of fourteen hundred patients about three, four years ago in across surgical indications. I think we surveyed two or three different surgical indications and ninety-three percent understood the relationship between nutrition and healing. They said yes, nutrition's important.

For my healing, and I think 92 or 93% said I want my doctor recommending solutions. So the body, ⁓ when when there's any type of trauma, small or big, the body's going into a catabolic state. it is working really hard to fuel the immune system, and it's got to get that energy somewhere. And so that energy is coming from your tissues and organs in the form of amino acids and other compounds that it utilizes to fuel the immune system. And if there's a deficiency, then it starts to actually.

actually eat away at your own tissue. You're actually gonna lose tissue in that process. And if there's not enough there, I guess what the immune system's not gonna work as well and the healing process is going to be delayed.

So ⁓ in my earlier example with a total joint surgery, it was the body burning on the first day of surgery post op. It's like running two marathons. So you know almost 5,000 incremental calories. That's how hard it's working. If it's a different type of surgery, if it's a burn or it's a cardiac surgery, it's even higher than that. It's quite significantly higher. So the concept is, you know, you wanna you wanna eat right. You wanna get a lot of your protein and the other, you know, micronutrients from what's on your plate.

But we have demonstrably shown that the general population is ⁓ malnourished or undernourished, getting way below the level of requirement. So if the average person, let's just say, needs, you know, one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, in a stress response, it goes up to two. You actually need double that. But in a total joint population, most patients are at 0.6%.

And then their appetite is suppressed. They don't feel like eating. So they're woefully deficient. So we can go down the nutrient list and say, you know, whether it's vitamin D, we have a systemic level of problem across the country where we're all deficient in vitamin D. You want to eat right, but you want to use targeted supplementation to fill the gaps on the things your body really needs. It is not going to get from your diet alone.

Just put that in perspective, to get the equivalent amino acids from one of our products, you would have to eat like six chicken breasts a day. It's just not feasible for the average person to be eating six chicken breasts a day. So you you fill that gap with products like mend that are very targeted and developed for that purpose.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (18:13)
Excellent. So touching on the on you know continuing on the science of nutrition, most people understand in the concept of inflammation ⁓ as a central mechanism behind many conditions from surgical recovery to chronic disease. How does in your opinion nutritional science approach inflammation at a mech mechanistic level and how is that fundamentally different from a pharmaceutical approach?

Mr. Eziah Syed (18:35)
Yeah, so we we have actually done mechanistic studies. That's another thing that kind of we've gone to a level where most diet what most most dietary supplement companies don't even do the randomized trials. We we've done the randomized trials and we've also done biopsy studies to really try to understand what's happening at a at a cellular level. And what we found, and there were two papers that we published in by you know our scientist, Dr. Erno and Dr. Hansdreyer. Dr. Hansdreier, muscle physiologist.

Is that even in seven days ⁓ of taking essential amino acids pre-op, it had a very quick immune response. So on day on the day of surgery where the biopsies were taken, IL6 was down, M1 macrophages were down, TNF alpha was down, so number of the key inflammatory markers were down, and muscle T cells were elevated. So we know, even though the FDA doesn't allow

Companies like ours to talk about inflammation, that nutrition can have a very significant impact on key inflammatory markers. Our product perform the underlying science and data on it, which is a daily use product, shows that we materially influence about eight biomarkers of inflammation. So very various and biomarkers of inflammation. So whereas in the pharma world, you have to go through a drug process, a four phase clinical trial.

and they usually look at individual compounds that are new to world. They want to invent and patent compounds. We want to use existing compounds that have a huge body of evidence through centuries of human use. For example, turmeric and curcuminoids, we know they're very potent for anti-inflammatories, ginger, ashwagandha, garlic.

These are compounds that are very effective, and then turn them into products where we have them at efficacious doses and that we actually measure the outcomes to show that it's really working. And so it's safe. One of the big differences, whenever you introduce an exogenous compound that's new to world, synthetic, your body responds to it in in ways that you don't anticipate. Even though they do large trials, we're seeing in the GLP one population, there are things happening now, now that we're well into the use of GLPs that weren't necessarily

Anticipated. It's blunting the person's response to all kinds of desires. There's a psychological impact to it. There's other things. It's catabolic for your muscle. But when you introduce natural compounds that humans have been using throughout our history, evolutionarily speaking.

The body tends to use those compounds without the side effects that you get with synthetic compounds. And so if we could develop natural medicines at the level of rigor and science that have, you know, the net impact, you know, clinically significant impact, scientifically valid impact, then we can open up a, I think, a smorge borg of of new solutions that can be very useful in medicine.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (21:23)
So just kind of honing in on that point, you know, you mentioned the the very scientific approach that men takes and men conducts randomized placebo controlled trials, which are really the gold standard of clinical research. Walk us through what that process actually looks like for a national compound and why so few companies in this space are willing to subject themselves to that level of scrutiny.

Mr. Eziah Syed (21:47)
Yeah.

Maybe let me start with that second question. there in the pharmaceutical model where you're inventing a single compound or coming up with a single compound and you can patent it, there's a commercial model there because what typically go happens is you have a patent, so they've got exclusivity on using that compound for more than a decade. And then there's usually a payer based, insurance based reimbursement model. So if you can patent it, you can own it and you can get it out to the masses and get reimbursed for it, there's a windfall of money to be made. When it's a natural compound,

You can't patent it, number one. And then there's no payer model. So insurances are not reimbursing for these products yet. Although I believe in the future they will start reimbursing. So the companies like Mend have lots of disincentives for doing studies because there isn't a clear payer path and we can't patent these compounds. the way we typically like to do studies is grant funded.

Because we know that that's that's respected more in the industry than studies that are funded by by the actual brand and the product. So I'll just give an example. We have a six-site multi-center, possibly seven-site multi-center site study going live in orthopedics. It's funded by the Department of Defense. It's being let out of the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Nate Hendrickson. It's looking at extremity trauma and how products like repair and recover amino acids can actually influence the healing trajectory of ⁓ of the traumas, reduce infection rates, increase the tissue healing time, et cetera, et cetera, improve the tissue healing time. So what we do in that type of a study is the the grant was obtained by University of Minnesota.

They identified mend as the product that they'd like to study. They then just buy product and placebo from us and we go silent. We have no hand in the design of that study and the execution of that study, and we wait for results. and so that's how a number of our studies have been done in IH can get funded grants or DOD funded grants where we're studied. There are some smaller studies where we are funding to get.

specific data that we need, but we we prefer to have grant funded studies done so that market respects it.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (23:49)
So you you're into precision, you're into evidence based, you're doing the high quality clinical research. So let's talk about well, the science is supporting the evidence for for targeted nutrition. Let's talk about clinical adoption. Changing clinical behavior is one of the hardest things in medicine. There's certain traditional paradigms and certain curriculums that

Operate and and teach.

And what have you learned about how real change actually happens inside these healthcare institutions?

Mr. Eziah Syed (24:20)
Yeah, Dr. Wicklon said something to me yeah, maybe it was six, four ⁓ five, six months ago that has kind of stuck with me that I didn't know and and I don't know because I haven't gone to validate this on online, but he said to get a new approach into medicine typically takes about ten years.

ten years or more. Had I known that, I'm I'm not sure that I would have gone on on this journey. because Venture Capital is not waiting for 10 years for for an intervention to get into medicine. look I I've learned that your your cohort, your constituent, the surgeons are

Are are very, very rigorous as it relates to the level of evidence that satisfies them. and even when there is some evidence, ⁓ they want more evidence to to be fully satisfied. And even when that that evidence is really strong, they want to know what's in it for me, what impact is it really gonna have in terms of my, you know, my practice, whether it's financial or other. And then finally, is like, can I actually get this into my workflows and do it in a way that

doesn't interfere with because you're all operating at 110% efficiency. And anything that takes cognitive load from that is is a perhaps time not well spent because you want to get a lot of surgeries done, surgeries done effectively. So there's a there's a huge number of barriers from the the the

bar and threshold you have to cross to convince surgeons that the science is really strong in merits and then the what's in it for me and what impact is this gonna have to how do I deploy this in a way that makes my life easy and doesn't make my staff, you know, have to do more work. So we had to really think through all all of those pieces ⁓ on how how to get this deployed effectively. And it that's why it took, you know, as long as it took. But I'm thrilled that I think the entire profession now has recognized the merit of this.

And now the last piece for us is to deploy efficiently into workflows. And if we can do that, I think we're we're marching down the path of standard of care.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (26:14)
And and just to add, I mean, Mint isn't just a product company, right? You built also a digital platform ⁓ that supports care navigation, behavioral coaching and remote monitoring. So what does that layer add to the healing journey and why is you know, why is it important or human behavior such an important part of that outcome?

Mr. Eziah Syed (26:34)
Yeah, it looks scary. It surgery is a very scary event for for most people. And I I I know with my mother it was very much, you know, she kind of show up for your surgery date. And yet the actual process of ⁓ going through the surgery was was was was frightening. She had no information really on how to optimize herself for the outcomes. And I mentioned the

The American College of Surgeons paper that was just published showing that prehab, I think it was forty-five percent reduction in complications. There's a whole bunch of things going on. It's it's stressful period. You gotta optimize yourself preoperatively. It's like going into a

a marathon race and you know nobody would go into a marathon race without training and and preparation. We really need to think about surgery in the same way. When you have a compromised person typically in in you know the elective surgery population that in the in the in the the total joint population that has comorbidities, they're perhaps obese, they perhaps have

mental health challenges, which most of society is facing, all those things have been shown that if you can address them through various studies, you can address them effectively, they will have an impact on outcomes. And certainly they will have have an impact on patient satisfaction with the experience that they got.

So the the opportunity we offer rather than just telling a patient to show up for surgery and maybe giving them a booklet is to be handheld through that entire process with a clinical team of dietitians and nurses and health coaches that are interfacing with the patient on a daily basis to provide that.

emotional support, psychological support, the right information at the right time to answer their questions. And in fact, Orthopedics Today just published, I think just went live, a paper called Patient Navigation Platforms The Way of the Future. ⁓ this is another area that we think we've been on the forefront of all the design elements that they argue for in that in that paper, which is you can't put administrative burden on the practice. Do you're dead on arrival.

We intentionally designed it so that it's just a referral to us and you know you're not changing any of your workflows. so there's a number of things that I could kind of list out on how we designed that. But I think ⁓ the impact that we're seeing on the patient experience, and we're getting better and better and better at it. We're learning how to deliver in a more and more effective way.

is a real game changer. Now we can think about this distributed model where you know Dr. Al Rashid can focus on a very efficient surgery and do the best surgery possible and outsource all this other stuff that we know is important, but there's no way that you have bandwidth to do that within the clinic, nor should you, and use technology to our advantage advantage. So we've got this distributed hub and spoke model of distributed care that I think can really change the paradigm on how we're we're caring for patients.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (29:13)
And I think the other factor in the mix that we can't really ignore is the economics of healthcare. I mean, how do you make the case to health systems that, you know, nutritional intervention is worth investing in even when it's not consistently reimbursable?

Mr. Eziah Syed (29:28)
Yeah, ⁓ so I don't think he'll mind me saying this. Dr. Paul Wishmar of Duke recently emailed me and said his C-suite has said nutrition is the number one priority, patient-facing priority for the health system this year. and that's because they've seen all the actuarial models, they've seen the data, the American College of Surgeons study that showed the Allegheny Health System saved $7.8 million by utilizing a nutrition bundle.

The economics, this is this is a payback. This is an ROI. This is not a cost center. This is something that you're actually gonna make money on and improve your profitability. And I know in healthcare, every dollar matters. This is a profit center, ⁓ and patients are willing to fully embrace it. So in a major orthopedic practice that we're deployed in on the East Coast, that is gonna go into a rollout, patients are paying out of pocket. It's in a very r fairly rural community.

Patients are paying 200 bucks at the clip of a 65% uptake rate. So at minimum, it costs nothing and makes money for the health systems because we have a fully compliant revenue share model that we deploy in that type of a situation. There is a very large academic institution, a medical institution that is looking at paying for it because they see the ROI. Geisinger has had men on standard of care now for

good five years. So if you go into their health system, you have a total joint surgery, a spine, or trauma surgery, the health system pays for you to have mend because they are a payer, as you know, and also a provider. And so they run their own models. So I think the data around ROI is becoming quite compelling. And ⁓ you're gonna see either

a wholesale model where the health system is selling it perhaps at cost or making a margin on these products with patients, ⁓ or a model in which ⁓ they're realizing that even if they buy it, they're they're getting significant savings at the end of end of that.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (31:19)
So let's talk about the future trends. You're at a very interesting junction, you know, we're at a convergence points of nutritional science, clinical medicine, digital health, and now artificial intelligence all are evolving at a pretty quick pace at the same time. In the broad scheme of things, how do you see these forces shaping your space and the field and in impacting, you know, neutropharma?

Mr. Eziah Syed (31:43)
Yeah, so so on the nutripharma side of things, certainly we have started to use AI for thinking through formulations. you know, there's one of our clients is is the Department of Defense and they they they think long and hard about traumatic brain injury and and concussions. And so that's where you can put AI to work to look at the most rigorous, you know, data out there.

that is available on compounds to really think through initial concepts on formulations. That's just one example. On the care delivery side of things, there's so much that AAI can do to help augment the efficiency of how our our care team is delivering care. Not as

relevant in a physical context where you're actually you know physically seeing the patient and doing things, but in a remote context, there's a lot that AI can augment and support and automate, you know, note-taking to actually messaging the patient. You have to be careful and we're we're we're very thoughtful about making sure the human is at the center of care. I think if the pendulum tried to swing too far, try to displace human beings, that's the wrong direction to go in.

Compassionate care is always gonna be the center of how we have to care for human beings when they're not well. And that needs to be a human-to-human interaction. But how AI can support that to make it more efficient, to make it more effective, to give our care team more information. That's really how we're thinking about it. So we've got a bunch of different AI work streams that we've identified and we're we're deploying them, but it's always a message around enabling the caregiver and care provider and not displacing the caregiver and care provider.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (33:15)
Mend recently completed a a twenty million Series A by S two G investments, a significant milestone. What does that investment make possible and what does it tell you about the broader investment communities beginning to view the space?

Mr. Eziah Syed (33:28)
Yeah, well, it enables us to build really complicated products and infrastructure and technology and you know, the care delivery team. So we've got a we've got a unique company in that we're we're care delivery, we are technology, we have technology platform, and then we've got these nutritional products, and and building all of that requires significant capital. So you know huge thank you to S2G for having the confidence and the vision.

We have had we have a number of organizations that have taken note of us that are strategics that are really interested in our go-to-market approach and going through medicine rather than going through a direct-to-consumer or retail strategy that we have been able to convince you know.

very demanding set of clientele, professional sports, medicine, military, on the efficacy and our approach to how we build things. So ⁓ look, I I think this space of ⁓ really medically focused neutra pharma products is really at an inception and it's gonna grow. It's gonna it's gonna require more from Capitol Hill in terms of the stuff we spoke about, payer models and higher set of claims.

And a different lane and pathway that we can play in. It's not a drug, so we don't want to go through drug pathways. That's just gonna create burden on us. But it's also not a traditional dietary supplement. And when those start that things start to happen, I think you're gonna have a lot more companies doing the science and research that Mend is doing because that opens up a commercial model that becomes much more ⁓ viable. for us, it's been

We've been ⁓ you know, trailblazers in many respects in the cliff that we jumped off of to say, no, we're gonna do something that is very medicine like in the natural compounds world. but I think soon you're you're gonna have to start to see commercial models become more viable.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (35:12)
So in your view, what what's the future trajectory for Mend?

Mr. Eziah Syed (35:15)
Well, we're we're really focused on having an impact on our clients. we've got a large pipeline of folks that are looking to lift our digital platform. I've seen a real inflection in the last handful of months on interest in our nutrition, a lot of inbound interest from large incumbents that are saying, Hey, we've been thinking about this space and we're ready to move on it.

⁓ so I think, look, I think in the next twelve to twenty-four months ⁓ in orthopedics, it'll be very rare to talk to an orthopedic surgeon that's not using nutrition. and then we're working hard on pair-based models so we can get some of this stuff reimbursed. and then a ubiquitous approach to how we care for the patient in between the visits to the doctor's office. So letting the surgeons be very efficient in clinic and then a distributed care model that really enables

care for all this complexity that we have with chronic conditions and obesity and all this stuff that really should be pushed pushed into another into another care model. And we hope to be at the center of all that all that really ⁓ compelling change that's gonna have an impact on healthcare.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (36:18)
Awesome. No, is that let's focus on your personal leadership journey. I mean, you are managing scientists, clinicians, technologists, and commercial teams all at once. How have you grown as a leader through that process and what has building mend demanded of you personally that you didn't anticipate?

Mr. Eziah Syed (36:37)
well it's been humbling. It certainly challenged me on an emotional level, it's challeng challenged me on a mental level, it's challenged me physically. You know, I had my labs done and I'm not ashamed to talk about this. Recently I signed on with a a a very notable ⁓

doctor who's in the longevity space and he had me do and do my blood labs. And some of my numbers weren't so great. So my hormones, excuse me, my hormones were suppressed. And that is a cause of systemic ⁓ systemically being under stress. and so the the journey has been ⁓ first of all learning is an extraordinary any startup environment. You're you're we I've literally built every every function from ground up. And so I had to learn for example something is even as simple as how to

a barcode end up on a bottle? I had to learn I had to learn that little nuance.

So I have to learn every part of the business. And I realized about a year, year and a half ago that the job had kind of become too big for me to do to do it alone as a CEO, all those functions, even though I had really great senior executives. So I decided that ⁓ I would bring in a senior leader to kind of be at the helm of running the company to really drive our digital health strategy. And someone that was senior, myself and the board decided this.

While I really focused on the market and the messaging and the science and the neutral pharma products. So that has made a big difference. you know, it takes some humility to recognize that when something's reached a level of complexity, that you can't do it alone. and so I've gone through enormous learning on the health side of things. I realize that when you're taking on something like this, it's like being an elite athlete. So I go to bed by 9, 9:30 every single day. My nutrition regimen is ⁓ is very

Very, very, very disciplined. And now I did my labs again just a week ago, and all my numbers have improved across the board. My numbers have improved. In a short period of six weeks of time, my hormone levels are up at optimal levels, my you know, cholesterol's down, the sugars balance, and so on and so forth. So

you know, data is empowering and so I'm gonna continue to using this data to inform you know, how I'm doing through these very difficult journeys. Am I am I taking care of myself mentally? Am I taking care of myself physically? Because

Burnout and feeling exhaustion is is is something that, you know, comes with this job. and so I encourage everyone who's who's leading a startup or doing doing something demanding like yourself as a as a surgeon, you're running your own practice, really gotta take care of yourself. Sleep is paramount, nutrition is paramount.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (39:00)
That's a great point. Zai, after everything you've built and seen, what does men's mission mean to you at the most human level?

Mr. Eziah Syed (39:07)
Yeah, look, I I I so we we have articulated our

Overarching mission is ⁓ the the healing company, or you know, our aspiration is to become the world's most recognized evidence-based healing company. I always say that healing is not just physical, it's emotional, it's spiritual, it's psychological, and most most often all of those intertwined. And human suffering is not something that I like to see, and there's a lot of people suffering in various different ways. And ⁓ there's a lot of

Tools that are unused that we can bring to bear to help ⁓ employ a more holistic model to how we think about healing biopsychosocial. and so, you know, I'd like to see more modalities. Like I I we haven't we haven't fully taken advantage of nature and what nature does for the healing cascade and the healing response. so there's a lot more that we can do and invent. and so I I want us to play a profound role in how humans recover from any type of a trauma.

And help that journey so that a patient is back to being their absolute best self. And use that trauma as a learning moment that, hey, this happened, but you can use that as a type stepping off point ⁓ for much better things. And so that's really our mission and aspiration.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (40:20)
Wonderful. And as we round up this discussion, what would you be your closing

summary or statement to anyone who's listening, who's facing surgery, recovering, or caring for someone who is, and has never been told that nutrition matters in that process, what do you want them to understand more clearly?

Mr. Eziah Syed (40:37)
Yeah, I d and Dr. Wishmeer, who I've I've referenced before, has said to me that when he sees patients at Duke, when he hands them that bottle of nutrition, his words to them are

There's nothing more important that I'm going to do for you in this hospital. Think of this as your medicine and nothing less than your medicine. Take it and you must take it. And so you need to take nutrition that seriously that it is going to not just have consequences for your immediate recovery, which it will. We've shown that unequivocally through the data. But if you take the right nutrients, it can have significant long-term implications for your well-being. It's amazing what the body can do in three to four weeks of the right nutrition.

nutrition during a traumatic event. And if you nourish it and take care of it, it will have a long-term consequence for you. So put it at the top of your list of priorities. It is it is really that important.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (41:27)
Mr. Eziah Syed, thank you so much. It was a really wonderful, insightful conversation and a timely one on the role of nutrition, nutritional science in in human healing and how important it is. And we really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and your journey with us and ⁓ the time you've given and I wish the men team continued success and thanks again.

Mr. Eziah Syed (41:49)
Well, thank you for having me and for for taking on this topic. as you know it's an important one and having thought leaders like yourself giving this era time ⁓ couldn't be more important. So enjoy the discussion and and again, thank you for having me.

Dr. Mamun AlRashid (42:02)
Thanks