It can take days to identify the cause of a microbial infection; Ed Goluch, PhD founded QSM Diagnostics to change that. QSM now has a device that can detect a microbe of interest in minutes. Ed updates us on the headway QSM has made since his first interview, Diagnosis in Minutes.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Ed Goluch
How QSM Diagnostics Came About
Quorum Sensing Molecules: What Are They?
Redirecting From Human To Animal Diagnostics
Getting the Product Off the Ground
Mail-in Test Kits Speeding Things Up at the Veterinary Offices
Academic Founder to Founding CEO
Persevering Through COVID Setbacks
Animal Data Will Eventually Lead to Human Based Devices
Greater Market in Animals Due to People Prioritizing Their Pets
"The other interesting thing, lot of our sales are actually going to mobile vets"
Getting the Word Out
QSM Diagnostics Receives Prestigious Award
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Transcript of “Diagnosis in minutes - 2”
Guest: Ed Goluch, PhD
Sal Daher Introduces Ed Goluch
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty; faculty of its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab, out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I am Sal Daher, an angel who is tremendously curious to find out how to best build really world-beating companies. Today, I am really proud to say that I have, with me, Ed Goluch. Welcome, Ed.
Ed Goluch: Oh, thanks for having me.
Sal Daher: Ed is an alumnus of the podcast. There is an earlier podcast that you will find. You should look for that because it's Ed's backstory. We are not going to go into all those details today, but you will discover really fascinating things about his entrepreneurial journey, how he became the founder that he is today. He is an academic, and this is the theme of these really brilliant academics, all of a sudden decide they want to create a company, and the world benefits so much from that. Do check it out. It's called Diagnosis in Minutes. I invested after I interviewed Ed the first time, they are in the veterinary space, QSM Diagnostics. Ed, tell us what problem you are solving with QSM Diagnostics.
How QSM Diagnostics Came About
Ed Goluch: Really what I started with and continues today, is that diagnostic testing takes too long, particularly looking at microbe infections. The results are almost never available during a visit for an examination. You're waiting for days to get those back, and really test results should be available to the doctor or veterinarian while they're examining their patients so that they can make the right decision on diagnosis and then determine the best treatment, and you can't do that if you don't have the information in hand. That's our goal.
Sal Daher: Particularly with antibiotic resistance, you don't want to be guessing what bug you're trying to kill by using broad-spectrum antibiotics. You want to have one that's targeted to the particular bug. An instant diagnostic instead of something-- What's the state of the art currently for diagnoses of microbial infections?
Ed Goluch: It continues to be sending up for cultures. You take a sample. You send it to a laboratory. They grow it on a plate for several days. Then, afterwards, they run it through some machines to get some results. You're generally waiting a minimum of 24, usually 48, 72 hours. These days, on the veterinary's side, that backlog is even greater, and you're waiting up to a week or more, sometimes, to get test results back.
Sal Daher: How are you short-circuiting this terribly long wait?
Ed Goluch: What I stumbled upon back in 2009 is this concept of quorum sensing molecules; and these are metabolites that microbe secrete out as part of their natural processes, and noticed that nobody had ever done a diagnostic with them. That's, kind of, the impetus behind it. As we started testing it at the university, we saw that, really, this concept holds up and that we can diagnose and detect infections with much lower levels of molecules very quickly. That spun QSM Diagnostics.
Quorum Sensing Molecules: What Are They?
Sal Daher: Let's unpack quorum sensing molecules a little bit. These are metabolites that microbe use to tell other of its type, in an environment, how many of them are present; and when enough of them are present, bingo, something happens, like, in the classic case of Aliivibrio fischeri.
Ed Goluch: Yes. In Vibrio, where they're sitting in the stomach of the squid, and once they find enough of each other around, they start making fluorescent proteins.
Sal Daher: I understand that they fluoresce when they are outside the gut so they get eaten by the squid or by the animal.
Ed Goluch: No, no, no. It's a little bit different. They don't fluoresce out in the ocean. They're just individual organisms. They only fluoresce when they congregate or form a quorum inside of the stomach of the squid.
Sal Daher: Oh my gosh. Why are they fluorescing in this dark space?
Ed Goluch: It's this symbiotic relationship. The squids that's fluorescing can gather food faster. It, actually, attracts food to it and consumes it, and it helps the microbe inside of it, as well.
Sal Daher: This is mind-bending. This is just too cool. These microbe get inside of the squid; and when enough of them are around, they glow, and the glow goes through the skin of the squid because they are kind of translucent, and then animals come close. I thought it was kind of like trying to get back inside the squid.
Ed Goluch: No, no. This is purely inside. The other classic application, and very related to this, is when the microbe find a food source, they stop swimming around. They attach themselves to the surface of the food and start forming, what's known as, a biofilm. They're secreting this molecule to all their friends and tell them, "Hey, we have food over here, and let's come by and enjoy this food. We don't want other bacteria coming in and stealing it." They've evolved over millions of years so that every species has its own language of communication so that they don't interfere with each other, and they try to avoid crosstalk.
Sal Daher: Too cool. These quorum sensing molecules, or it's an amazing evolved mechanism that you are harnessing as an instant diagnostic. Please continue. You had this idea of using quorum sensing molecules, QSMs, as instant diagnostic. What was your first thought application for this?
Redirecting From Human To Animal Diagnostics
Ed Goluch: We initially started by looking at human applications. We thought this would be for surgical site infections. There's a lot of interest there, but as a first-time entrepreneur, and there's also a lot of competition in that space, it was difficult for us to get some traction there. As part of some of the processes and courses that I was doing at Northeastern, we were looking for doing customer discovery. One day, one of our mentors asked us if we have ever spoken to a veterinarian, and so I decided to call a few. That's, really, where we saw that this is the way to get started. People have been overlooking the veterinarian market, animal health market for new technologies. Usually, you get hand-me-downs from humans, and this could be a way to start on the animal side. It's not regulated. We pivoted toward animal diagnostics and, really, found traction and took off from there.
Sal Daher: Outstanding. Outstanding. What is the particular problem that you decided to address?
Ed Goluch: We were looking at microbial infections. You could have different sites, where the infections are happening. We had started by testing all of these bacteria in our lab, and we had a good sensor for detecting particular bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It turns out that it's one of the most serious bacteria in dog ear infections. It forms really bad biofilms that the antibiotics can't clear out well, difficult to treat and remove, and that allowed us to focus on dog ears as the initial product for the market.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Excellent. You raised some money. Tell us the story there. Where does the product stand today?
Getting the Product Off the Ground
Ed Goluch: We completed raising around. It took us a few years. We started in mid-2018. Then, interestingly, after COVID hit, people started to realize diagnostics in animal health is going to be an interesting field. We were able to close around in mid-2020. From that, we had, then, enough funds to actually start building the instruments and doing clinical tests on this first product and start on the roadmap on the pipeline toward getting the other tests out and other tests for other microbe that are going to work on our instrument. We were able to launch sales of the instrument with this Pseudomonas cartridge last June. We've been out on the market about closing in on 10 months now.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow. You actually have a product, you have revenue, customers.
Ed Goluch: Well, one of the interesting things is, now that we have a product, figuring out and learning the sales part of it, and that's been an interesting learning experience for us. One of the things we figured out pretty quickly is that veterinary clinics and selling instruments to them is a little bit of a tedious process. Partly, they're very understaffed these days and overworked. People have picked up COVID pets. Even a bigger thing is that demographics are changing. Millennials and Gen Zs treat their pets as fur babies. They want a human level of care for their pets, and so they're taking their pets to the veterinarian all the time. "Hey, my dog sneezed. Let's take him to the doctor." Just like you would for your kids. The veterinary clinics are overwhelmed with people making appointments.
Even though a veterinarian might like our products, them finding enough time to learn how it works and then getting it passed their practice managers and approval processes is somewhat challenging. You have to have a sales force that responds to that. We're figuring those things out, but we learned some new things along the way, that we can help these veterinary clinics out by taking some work off of their plate through other approaches and offering the tests for them. That's kind of spawned now a line of mail-in tests that we, actually, launched in November. Sales of those are going really well. The veterinarians are buying these mail-in kits from us because they don't want to be doing diagnostic testing. They don't have the staff to run all the tests in-house these days.
They buy the kit, they offer it to the pet owner. As soon as a visit is scheduled, the pet owner can collect the sample, send it to us at QSM. We run it through our lab and report all the results out to the veterinarian and the pet owner, and they have them ready to go before the visit.
Sal Daher: What's the usual turnaround from the time that they ship it out?
Mail-in Test Kits Speeding Things Up at the Veterinary Offices
Ed Goluch: With shipping, it's about five to six days to get results. The average wait time for a test at a veterinary visit these days is over two weeks. Plenty of time to get testing done. Also, the other use case that the veterinarians have are for follow-up visits. Best practice is when you do prescribe an antibiotic for a cat or dog, you want to see that animal three weeks later and make sure everything's cleared up and that you can stop the treatment. What we've seen, (as part of our sales now, we also have a lot of surveys) over 50% of the time, that follow-up visit doesn't happen, for a number of reasons. The most common one being that the animals look better and so the pet owners, "Why should I spend time and money and effort bringing my cat or dog back to the veterinarian?"
Sal Daher: It's the problem with antibiotics. It's always the problem. People stop taking the antibiotics when they get better. They don't finish the course.
Ed Goluch: Exactly. Our mail-in tests, actually, help with compliance because it's like giving an exam to the pet owner. Have you really completed it? If your pet fails, you got to go back and get more antibiotics and get seen again. The veterinarians really like this.
Sal Daher: Do they come out of the vet's office with two tests, one for the diagnosis and the other one for a follow-up?
Ed Goluch: They get split up. They'll use some tests before the initial visit. Then, at the visit, if it's determined that there's an infection, the doctor gives them an antibiotic, and they sell them the test along with the antibiotics. Then they say, depending on the course of treatments that they've prescribed at the end of that period, "Collect a sample, send it in and then we can schedule a follow-up if necessary." If not, the veterinarian's happy to move onto the next sick patients, and they'll have the peace of mind that that infection's cleared up, and they'll, actually, have some data supporting that.
Sal Daher: Right. It's interesting. Originally, your theory was that, instant tests would be of great value to veterinarians. Then you discover that the office of veterinarians are overwhelmed and the standard of care for veterinary diagnostics is two weeks to return a test, so the result within three minutes is not crucial there necessarily. You have enough time to get the whole thing mailed and sent around. Five days is a big improvement on the two weeks which is the existing situation. If ever the log jam clears up or whatever, then the veterinarians will see the logic of having the devices in their offices so they can offer instant gratification.
Ed Goluch: Exactly. There's, definitely, still a use case. You have larger animal hospitals that have enough staff and they might have a lab on-site, then our instruments make perfect sense there. That's where we're seeing sales. It's also for specialty. As I mentioned, our first cartridge is for dog ear infections. Turns out that there's a specialty of veterinary dermatology. They see all the worst dog ear cases. They're not under the same pressures as the general practices, so sales of instruments to those dermatologists are actually going fairly well. In the meantime, we have time to work on these additional cartridges. Our plan is still to add a urinary tract infection cartridge that's going to check for six different microbe simultaneously and provide those results out in minutes. There's still a lot of interest around that product, and we've had time to work on it. Actually, the mail-in tests give us fresh samples to test, so it doubles up is R&D for us.
Sal Daher: Oh, awesome. Awesome. That's great. You're testing them for UTIs?
Ed Goluch: Exactly. We've added now a urinary tract infection mail-in test ahead of the cartridges. As we're developing the sensors for the instrument, we can use part of the sample that comes in with the mail-in.
Academic Founder to Founding CEO
Sal Daher: Oh, that is brilliant. So you have a sample flow? You know, Ed, what got me over the edge of investing in QSM diagnostics? I saw your pitch sometime in 2019 at Walnut [Walnut Venture Associates, an angel group in Boston]. I was very impressed. You had an associate at the time who was thinking of coming in as a CEO, and I was kind of like, "Wow." Those days, I thought that this startup needed a CEO, and I was very dismissive of the idea of academic CEOs because no experience, blah blah blah, and blah blah blah. When I interviewed you, which was in late 2019, by that time, you had made this shift, from trying to do the six-sensor urinary tract infection for dogs to doing the one-sensor dog ear infection, the Pseudomonas test.
At that point, the guy who was thinking there was the one who raised money to hire this professional life science person and so forth, he wasn't in the picture, but he was in the picture as an investor. I said, "Well, this guy is investing. He's very smart." It's expensive for the company because it's an early-stage startup, but he's smart enough to see the potential. He wrote a check, and I said, "Yeah, this guy can do it." This has sort of helped me develop this thesis of the academic founder who grows into the role of founding CEO, Çağrı Savran, you, a bunch of other academic founders that I've invested in.
To me, what I like to see is-- Every academic is brilliant. Those are table stakes. What sets the potentially successful founder apart, is this ability to roll with the punches, to learn, to take advice and to listen and say, "Yes, I guess maybe I should try this or try that," and that when I see all the things that you've learned on this. It's really, really impressive in a business sense, not in academics because, academically, you know that you can do it, but in the business, in the idea of retooling, changing directions, and not just sort of banging your head against the wall trying to do the impossible.
I said, "Wow, he really is a founder academic who's going to be a successful CEO, founding CEO." That is part of my screen now. I look for people who look like you, who look like Çağrı Savran, "Can they do it?" I'm planning to raise a fund to do nothing but invest in people like you and Çağrı and Alex and Laura and Amanda Drobnis.
Ed Goluch: I think that there's a growing number of people that fit this profile, I guess, where we're a little bit tired of coming up with all these technologies that either somebody else licenses and makes a lot of money, or even more of them just end up sitting on a shelf and collecting dust as a manuscript and not going anywhere.
Sal Daher: That's Çağrı's motivation. Çağrı wanted to see his technology, extremely rare cell technology, in the market, saving lives. He was like, "I want this thing to get out." I recently interviewed someone, Jeremy Wiygul, who is a practicing urologist. He has a connected device and telehealth service. What it does is it coordinates existing resources in terms of providers, in terms of types of treatment. The device is a sensor. It's non-invasive, so it's accessible. Because there are millions and millions of people who have pelvic bottom problems, it's frequently incontinence and things like that. They can be addressed with the right care, but they're just not there.
He discovered this because his wife had the problem. She gave birth and had this problem. She was struggling getting the right kind of care because it's not just the physician. There's a physical therapist, there's a device, there's a this and that. There's a lot of stuff to coordinate. When I see people who are very motivated to do this and who have the ability to learn, it's really inspiring. You mentioned that your roadmap includes the urinary tract infection that has six different sensors for six different microbe.
Persevering Through COVID Setbacks
Ed Goluch: With that last raise, we had enough funds there to get started on the development. One of the interesting things, and it's kind of expected in science, you run into some delays. We had contracted some companies to develop the chemistry for those sensors for us, and they ended up being delayed by several months, partly from COVID, partly from challenges for small businesses, but now, even though it's delayed, we're getting those chemistries in. We're just about ready to start testing those different sensors on our cartridges with samples, starting probably later this month, finally.
We were hoping to do this six months ago. There weren't any technical roadblocks. It was really more getting all the business things lined up and working with our vendors to get the materials in, but now we have those. Those are being tested or going to start getting tested. What we've done in the meantime, because we have the platform, and these companies that develop the chemistry. The chemistry I'm referring to, by the way, they're called aptamers. It's kind of a novel technology on its own. It's a DNA molecule, single-stranded, that forms a complicated 3D structure that can bind to things that are DNA. We're using these aptamers to bind to the QSMs, on our sensors.
You have to screen a library of billions of DNA sequences to find the one that binds to your target. We outsource that, but there's a lot of aptamers that have been developed for other targets, that are already out there that these companies have done either for another customer or as part of their own internal R&D. When they saw our platform, they've actually turned into our customers. They've sent us their aptamers for other targets for us to try out. Now, we have some data from one of the companies looking at a human drug molecule to check for compliance, to make sure that the patient is taking the medications daily. They just check their urine. If the levels drop, it means that they skipped a couple of doses, and their doctor and their insurance company wants to know about that. We're able to utilize our platform. We're checking that, we're looking at some herbicides and some nice OEM routes to use the hardware that we have for these other applications.
We were able to make progress on all of that while we were waiting. We're also looking to expand out. I think, really, the way the envelopes can be pushed in the future is that there's no reason why you couldn't have one of our instruments in your home and not even wait to go to the veterinarian. These are low-cost. We can manufacture these instruments for under a hundred dollars a piece. Really, it's getting the medical communities comfortable enough that these test results are going to be valid, that you can't mess up how you collect the samples that they're being applied correctly and run.
I think, once veterinarians and doctors see how the process works they're using the instruments, that'll get them more comfortable. In a few years, maybe everyone will have one of these in their home, and they'll just grab the right cartridge for whatever they want to test for. You can be testing for any number of different conditions. We're looking at monitoring tests. Things like cortisol levels where you would want to check. Again, cortisol is a great one because it crosses over between humans and animals. Cats and dogs get Addison's and Cushing's disease. You might hear my cat yelling in the background.
Sal Daher: The cat has the high cortisol level anxiety. He is feeling it.
Animal Data Will Eventually Lead to Human Based Devices
Ed Goluch: Yes, he's feeling stressed. You can check for those things quarterly. If they're on a medication, you might need to adjust it. This would work for both pets as well as humans, and you could just run it on our platform. I see that as the future, and we haven't given up all of these microbial sensors that we're making because it's the same bacteria continue to be applicable in the human market. A few years down the road, I'm hoping that we can use all of this animal data as part of our FDA filings for human instruments and devices.
Sal Daher: Meanwhile, you pay the freight by testing animals and so forth? You pay the freight, plus you build your data set. No, but I'm intrigued by the application of using some of your aptamers for checking on compliance of people taking medication because that's already pointing towards the crossover to the human market. Of course, the threshold there is much lower because you're testing for compliance. It's not a diagnostic, it's just compliance. It's a lower hurdle but still it's in human use.
Ed Goluch: Exactly. Yes, it's part of learning the business side of things. How can we get into the human market faster. You can look at things like compliance. You can look at things like cortisol are even less regulated because it's purely for wellness and stress levels. There's mail-in testing for humans for those already. There's a number of mail-in testing companies, but you lose a lot of money or you spend a lot of money shipping boxes back and forth. Really, the Holy Grail is to have the instrument in the house.
Sal Daher: Well, cortisol, there's certain people who like to measure their sleep. They measure their walking and all the stuff. Cortisol is something which might be very interesting for people to measure because it's-
Ed Goluch: Oh, it is, for sure.
Sal Daher: -almost like in a biofeedback sense. You do exercises to try to calm yourself. Then you see if the cortisol levels do go down. Somebody who was concerned about that, a $100 device with a few consumables, that's well within the range. Very interesting. Very interesting. Ed, you've learned a lot about the veterinarian market, from being a professor at Northeastern University engineering field, and now you've been in this business now for three years. Tell us a little bit how the landscape has changed. We've had COVID. There's some moves afoot in the industry.
Ed Goluch: You mean within the academic side?
Sal Daher: Not the academic side. The industry side. What's happening in the veterinary here in the industry?
Greater Market in Animals Due to People Prioritizing Their Pets
Ed Goluch: This has started even prior to COVID, is that people, there's been a trend of spending more money on your pets. People had realized this, and that there's investors that had started coming in and trying to build out more and more clinics. Actually, one of the big in-vogue things is to have private equity firms come in and roll up clinics. There's a lot of veterinarians that are selling their practices to these clinics for pretty big multiples. They're trying to bring more efficiencies by having scale, but they're also launching new clinics, and building out new practices and animal hospitals.
The challenge has been that we're not graduating more veterinarians or vet techs. There's fewer people to go around to mann and staff all of these clinics. This is part of what's been leading to these kind of shortages and stress levels. Then COVID hit, and some states marked veterinarians as essential workers, others didn't, some of them had to close down. The veterinary field is predominantly female, and we know that they've been disproportionately affected by COVID. They have to be at home taking care of their kids, and so they dropped out of the workforce.
It's a very stressful career with long hours and doesn't pay that great. It's not like human medicine. There's almost no insurance. These clinics are very short-staffed. Opportunities for all sorts of new technologies are out there for these vet clinics to go through and to work with them. We've been partnering with more and more clinics, as we sell our products. We get feedback. One of the interesting ones is the emergence of veterinary telehealth.
Sal Daher: Oh, yes.
Ed Goluch: That's a far more complex system than on the human side. It's very bizarre. For humans, that pivot was very straightforward. You can get on a Zoom call with your doctor and they can prescribe medications and get feedback. For animals, actually, because they can't speak and tell you exactly what's wrong, there's only six states in the country that allow prescribing without seeing a pet or having an existing relationship. That means having seen the pet and laid hands on them in the last 12 months. Many of the states, all they can do is offer some advice and say, "Okay, you can go in and see your veterinarian and hope to do it that way." We see mail-in testing as a real entry there as well because now the pet owner can collect samples and get feedback to the veterinarian and really allow this kind of remote processing to happen and diagnostics and treatments.
That's been emerging out on the veterinary side as well. I think, on the diagnostic side, what's interesting-- I was talking to some veterinarians about this just last week. My doctor doesn't draw a blood or urine sample. They send me to a separate lab.
Sal Daher: A clinic. Right.
"The other interesting thing, lot of our sales are actually going to mobile vets"
Ed Goluch: Collects the sample and runs the tests there and gets the information back. Veterinary clinics don't do that. They house everything in-house, which is pretty inefficient. It would make much more sense that you would go to one location that collects all the specimens, does all the diagnostic testing, and gets that back out to the veterinarians. We think that might be a way for the future and another way how our technology can fit in and work there. The other interesting thing, lot of our sales are actually going to mobile vets.
Sal Daher: Oh, like the flying fur stylists, but they're vets in the van.
Ed Goluch: Exactly. Really popular with Millennials and Gen Zs. We thought initially in cities, so there's a lot of mobile vets popping up in cities where people don't have cars necessarily and have multiple pets. It's really challenging to bring your pet to the veterinarian. Instead, you're willing to pay a premium and have them come to your home. Those veterinarians don't have labs or clinics. They can collect the sample and send it to us. They don't want to drive back out for a follow-up visit. They can sell and drop off a kit during the first visit.
They're gaining popularity, similarly in rural areas, where there aren't a lot of veterinarians and you might have to drive an hour to see an animal. They don't want to make the drive back out, so they're using a lot of our mail-in products. They also like the instruments because they're small and they can bring it with them and get results right away. That makes it quite interesting as a format. Then, even with puppy daycares, you can have them mobile vet come in and visit and do the exam on your animal while they are at the puppy daycare.
Sal Daher: At the puppy daycare. All the puppies are there. The vet comes in and she does all 12 puppies at the same time.
Ed Goluch: Exactly. Gets all the vaccinations, exams done, follow-ups. I think there's a lot of changing demographics, and industries just evolving. We're hopefully well-positioned ourselves to really take advantage with some of these changes and drive some of these changes to make things more efficient.
Getting the Word Out
Sal Daher: Awesome. Awesome. Ed, what kind of help would you need right now to get to the next step with QSM Diagnostics?
Ed Goluch: Outside of the obvious one of raising more funds, which we're doing, the next highest priority for us is educating veterinarians and pet owners, just getting the word out there about our brands. With the mail-in testing, we wanted to have a more pet-friendly name. We came up with the FetchDx as our mail-in brand.
Sal Daher: [laughs] I saw that. I like that in the box. FetchDx.
Ed Goluch: FetchDx. It has the information there that pet owners want to know about. Really on a more intro level, what do the test results mean? Whereas, QSM Diagnostics is geared toward the veterinarian.
Sal Daher: Very abstract.
Ed Goluch: Getting into all the details of what everything means and have bulk products people are for their home. Maybe a few of them will buy 10 or 20 kits at a time, but generally not. We have it structured that way. We're trying to build out and get the word out about QSM Diagnostics to everyone as a pet owner and to the veterinary community to learn about our products.
Sal Daher: Well, I'm really grateful for you to take the time. It's very busy. I can see, in your office there, you've got lots of stuff going on. I'm very gratified to see how you guys have evolved, that you really are following your roadmap, and that you've developed a better approach if you go to market in refining that, taking advantage of a space that is just booming, and you have a technology that will create a lot of value in that space. That is tremendous. Ed, are there any other thoughts that you want to leave our audience with? These are founders, angel investors, people who work at startups, many of them pet owners.
QSM Diagnostics Receives Prestigious Award
Ed Goluch: I will say, I didn't get a chance to mention earlier, but we received the Purina Pet Care Innovation Prize this year.
Sal Daher: Congratulations. Tell us what that means in the industry.
Ed Goluch: It's very prestigious. They have five winners each year. This is the seventh year that they did it, and they look for innovative products, and it's a very extensive vetting process. Over 150 companies applied this year, and it goes through extensive diligence, not just on the technology side but on the financial and the business side as well, multiple interviews. Then, the five winners get to go to Purina headquarters. We got to meet with their executives, see all of their interesting R&D that they're working on and how they're looking to innovate and expand beyond food into pet wellness and pet health in general.
Sal Daher: Interesting.
Ed Goluch: We got to meet the four other companies that spans really across the entire space of the animal care market. There were phone apps, there were a couple of food companies, but then even toys, how to teach your dog how to talk, and things like that. We got to experience that and see how all those things are going and potentially build a relationship with Purina and see how our products might tie in with what they're developing and have on their horizon.
We're seeing a lot of innovation happening in this space and a lot of room to expand into veterinary. There's more companies that I've come across now in life sciences that are looking at animal first and part of this concept of one health across animals and humans. There's some new investors out there that now have added more animal to their portfolio and pet to their portfolios. That is great, I think, for anyone in this space.
Sal Daher: Very interesting area because the new technologies are tremendously applicable, and yet you don't have a lot of the regulatory hurdles, so you can get to market faster and then it has the advantage of building a foundation for the human market. That's tremendous. Ed Goluch, PhD, Founder of QSM Diagnostics, thanks for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Ed Goluch: Thanks for having me. Appreciate being invited back.
Sal Daher: Tremendous. Anytime, if there's something that you want to get across to the audience. Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
Host: I'm Glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.