![Signals From [Space]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/e_trim:10:white/e_trim:10:transparent/h_72,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2efc1ef1-ba0b-4ca3-b9f6-a9a790da4b38_1344x256.png)
![Signals From [Space]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_36,h_36,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4736f49-6a20-4fd6-a3de-d48cb4b105f2_375x375.png)
Exploring Lung Health with Maria Artunduaga, Founder and CEO of Samay
A physician-scientist building the first AI-assisted platform that leverages the power of acoustic resonance to understand lung health
Explorers is the interview series that brings together the people leading bold missions to improve health, technology, and society. Let’s meet today’s Explorer.
Meet Maria
Tell us a little bit about you and your journey.
I am a physician-scientist, former plastic surgery trainee, and inventor with 60+ prizes, publications, and patents.
My grandmother’s passing motivated me to start Samay (“to breathe deeply” in Quechua). When her symptoms were exacerbated, she was unable to identify her deterioration. Although we come from a family of physicians, we lived six hours away. Despite calling her daily, we could not diagnose her decline on time. She deteriorated rapidly and had to be admitted to the ICU, where she died two weeks later from complications from invasive ventilation and hospital infections. I abandoned my medical career to devote myself to devising Sylvee— named after my grandmother— so that no one else would suffer as she did.
Meet Samay
Tell us about your mission and the people you serve.
Our mission is to allow patients, doctors, and therapeutic developers to understand how respiratory patients progress at home while improving respiratory care delivery and research/development. We are starting with COPD, a condition that remains underserved. People living in rural or poor areas have double the risk of having COPD compared to the overall U.S. population.
More importantly, 5.5M Americans live in counties without pulmonary care access. Although an estimated 80M are affected with chronic respiratory diseases post-pandemic, there are ~15K pulmonologists nationwide. Facilitating digital health experiences could help close the gap by enabling telehealth for established providers or by having us deliver it to the millions who have decided to forego care because they live too far from help.
Tell us a bit more about the problem you’re solving.
Today, questionnaires are the standard of at-home care for respiratory diagnosis and monitoring. As a result, half of exacerbations go undetected.1
Our hardware + software solution assesses pulmonary function metrics 24/7 (without asking patients to blow out forcefully) with a similar equivalence to the hospital gold standard (up to 98% of sensitivity and 90% in precision).2
No other product in the respiratory market has achieved these results with COPD. We also are the first to detect air trapping, an early predictor of COPD exacerbations. Undoubtedly, better metrics are crucial to predict, prevent, or treat respiratory diseases and facilitate public health delivery.
What trends and signals are top of mind in your space?
“AI is eating the device world.”
Today, there are 521 FDA-approved devices with AI components and an additional 84 in Europe, Japan, China, and other regions.3 The surge of AI/ML-enabled medical devices is just beginning, and thinking about leveraging AI/ML capabilities keeps you highly differentiated because it can significantly reduce errors and increase accuracy and precision.
The ability to analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and make predictions enhances care across the spectrum.
Any recent wins or milestones we should know about?
We secured our 7th patent and entered into a partnership to develop additional features and complete a proof-of-concept with a $30B respiratory strategy by Q3 2024.4
We are launching a raise this year to enable us to execute this partnership and expand our research and development services with pharmaceuticals and medical technology companies in the next 12-24 months. We are also improving our algorithms, with plans to submit our work to a high impact journal by the end of 2024.
We are looking for…
Expertise— Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in COPD
Capital— Early stage VCs focused on MedTech and Digital Health
Talent— DSP, wearables (hardware), AI/ML, data science
R&D— research support for grant funding from NIH, DoD, DARPA, ARPA-H
Final Frontier
Deep [Space], Deeper Questions — 5 Questions in 50 words or less
Q1: Top Opportunity in your space right now?
A: New payment paths (value-based models)
Q2: Top Challenge in your space right now?
A: Overcoming concerns over care quality and safety at home
Q3: Tech Trends you’re following?
A: Home hospital care and caregiving integration
Q4: Top Media recommendations?
A: Tim’s LinkedIn posts (not kidding)
Q5: Leaders you’re following?
A: Drs. Sachin Jain (SCAN Group), David Albert (AliveCor), Eric Topol (Scripps Research Institute), and Gianrico Farrugia (Mayo Clinic)
Connect and Follow
This Explorers series aims to elevate the stories of those building a better future in healthcare and technology. Meet the clinicians, scientists, technologists, and trailblazers driving positive change in healthcare, technology, and beyond. Let’s share their stories to amplify their signals to the right people.
NyquistAI Newsletter (August, 2023);
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)-Enabled Medical Devices (FDA, October, 2022)