Dean Kamen Digital Therapeutics - Bonus

Transcript

I have about 900 engineers in my day job at DEKA and most of them are sitting at a terminal.

The idea that coding is for software engineers is a little naive these days.

I mean, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, systems engineers, controls engineers, material sciences.

They're all using more and more sophisticated modeling and now AI and machine learning.

And as the hardware gets better and more accessible as the software gets better and more accessible,

all of engineering is becoming inextricably tied to the advances in electronics and hardware and software.

The first medical product I made that actually got to huge scale was drug delivery systems,

particularly insulin pumps, mostly for kids with diabetes.

But then we expanded to make lots more medical products.

Many of them dealing with fluid management, not the tiny amount that you need it for insulin.

But for instance, we build most of the world's home peritoneal dialysis machines.

We have posters of them out in our booth out there and we've worked with our partner and

they've shipped over a billion therapies for our dialysis machines.

And there's hundreds of thousands of machines out there giving people a quality of life that they couldn't have without it.

Even though they have end stage renal failure, their kidneys don't work.

We're also, now, I set up another not for profit,

It's bringing together all the technology companies and institutions and research labs

and med schools. I have 190 members now.

And our goal is to make it possible to manufacture replacement human organs like kidneys, like a pancreas.

I'd love to put myself out of the dialysis business by giving people a new kidney.

I'd love to put myself out of the insulin pump business by giving people a new pancreas.

I'd love to give people new corneas.

So that has as the generation that's now getting old,

uh starts to worry about macular degeneration and blindness.

We've got to solve that problem and the chronic treatment of dialysis or the chronic treatment

of insulin delivery will never be as good as "you got an organ that stopped working?,

replace it, put a new one in," and we are in the process of making that possible.