Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York city, you're inside the Ice house, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's Exchanges and Clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE house, here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Speaker 2:
Our listeners may recall our conversation with Teladoc's Jason Gorevic back in episode 109, about how telemedicine was closing the medical care gap, improving healthcare and leveraging technology to effectively bring back the house call. As I talked with Jason, I couldn't escape my own memories of growing up with the phone ringing off the hook in our house as people were seeking the medical advice from my dad, who was the local pediatrician. As I heard Jason describe his business, telemedicine seems like a natural progression to me. Our topic today also intersect healthcare and technology. Let me set the scene for you. Your wearable around your wrist or on your phone alerts you of a problem with your heart rate. Depending on where you are, perhaps you need to transmit the data to a specialist across the globe, someone you will never meet, to diagnose your condition. You use your health insurer's app and its AI customer service bot to find the right place for the unexpected surgery that, unfortunately, you will need and quick, but there's work to be done there too.
Speaker 2:
The facility where you'll need life-saving attention has to be highly rated, using cutting edge technology and accepting your employers insurer. There's an app for that. The appointment is scheduled and pre-approved with the click of a button. The directions are automatically loaded into your phone's GPS and pre-care instructions are emailed to you. Your procedure is successfully and completed by a doctor assisting in the surgery, happily for you, are a couple of robots. One to provide imaging to chart the right path to the problem area and the other to maneuver a tiny catheter inside your body from near your legs to your heart. After a couple of hours, you head home with your condition, again monitored by technology.
Speaker 2:
Now this sequence of events sounds more like a scene from a science fiction movie, like Star Wars or Interstellar, but actually happens every day across the globe. In fact, most of the technology underpinning the entire experience that I've described has been in operation for years, albeit getting better with every technological advancement. It was back in 2003 that Stereotaxis, that's NYSE American ticker symbol STXS first introduced Niobe, a robotic system for operating surgical tools, that were inside the patient, using magnetic fields. Joining us today inside the ICE house is Stereotaxis' CEO, who is fresh offering in the opening belt to celebrate the company's recent successes and listing on the exchange. Our conversation with David on how Stereotaxis is improving healthcare across the world with a combination of innovation, partnership and making surgery safer for patients and providers, right after this.
Speaker 1:
And now a word from John van Siclen CEO of dynaTrace, NYSE ticker DT.
Speaker 3:
We're a software intelligence company for the Enterprisecloud. Software rules the world, and we bring performance and intelligence to those who develop, operate and drive business outcomes for the digital age. We sell our products in 70 different countries. Many of our customers trade on the NYSE. It is the enterprise class, customer base that we target, and we're thrilled to be part of the family. dynaTrace is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:
Our guest today, David Fischel joined the board of Stereotaxis in September 2016 and was named CEO and chairman of the board in February 2017. Previously he was principal and portfolio manager for medical device investments at DAFNA Capital Management, LLC. He received his bachelor of science and applied mathematics with a minor counting from University of California and received his MBA from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Welcome, David, to the New York Stock Exchange and inside the ICE house.
Speaker 4:
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2:
I saw a tweet, that you probably retweeted or quoted a couple days ago. You said it was Stereotaxis' raison d'etre, and I'm going to read the tweet from Dr. Aseem Desai, "Robotic ablation technology helped save a 67 year old father from sudden death." And you say very simply Stereotaxis' raison d'etre. Tell me about this.
Speaker 4:
It's exactly right. Our reason for existence is that if a patient has an arrhythmia, unfortunately, the therapeutic options that are out there today have limited efficacy, have safety risks and our goal is to improve that significantly with robotics. There are hundreds of physicians at over a hundred hospitals globally that use our technology on a daily basis. They treat almost 10000 patients a year. And this one, yesterday, just stood out when I saw the post by one of our physician partners, because it's exactly right. There are these patients that, without good therapies, would die. And they're the same patients who happen to be one of our family members or one of our friends and unfortunately medicine and kind of disease impacts all of us still in the world. And that's why we push hard to try to improve the technology and to try to make it to increase awareness of it. Because ultimately we're very confident that this is something good for patients and good for physicians and good for society.
Speaker 2:
Talk about out your physician partners, there was another tweet, I think that you retweeted back last summer from Saint Alphonsus Healthcare Facility or Hospital. They congratulate Doctor Margot Vloka of Saint Alphonsus. She has become the first female clinical electrophysiologist in the world to perform 1000 minimally invasive heart arrhythmia procedures using this Stereotaxis advanced robotic technology. I mean, that's an amazing story too. How long does it take to get to your 1000th treatment?
Speaker 4:
So, it probably takes near a decade. We have several physicians that have treated over a thousand patients. What's beautiful is that kind of, we see physicians at hospitals in the middle of Idaho, not typically thought of as kind of a hotspot for new technology, and they use our technology on a daily basis because it is good for their patients. It allows them to have better outcomes for their patients. And it's good for the physicians. The physicians can now do the procedure outside of radiation exposure and kind of seated fully focused on the therapy aspects, rather than the mechanical aspects of navigating a catheter. And so we're grateful for physicians like Doctor Vloka for physicians like Doctor Desai, who you quoted previously, and the hundreds of others that really use our technology and work with us to advance the technology.
Speaker 4:
I was grateful that on the stage today at the NYSE, we had many of our New York based physicians who came to visit us. This is really... We're an underdog. Stereotaxis has a long history. Over the last few years, we've been working hard to reinvigorate the company. We're doing that because we saw in a technology that was very differentiated, that was very elegant, that allowed things that otherwise were impossible. And we saw clinical value that was as good as one could ever ask for. And so we're grateful to have kind of the physicians who work with us around the world, who actually allow us to progress and allow us to turn this dream into reality.
Speaker 2:
You talk about better outcomes for your patients through working with your physicians. I want to talk about a better outcome for Stereotaxis, David, because you joined the Stereotaxis board to help implement a turnaround. The company IPO'd in 2004, a year after introducing Niobe. Why had growth stalled? Why did they need you to come in and reinvigorate it?
Speaker 4:
In the early years, the company saw actually quite a lot of adoption, but the adoption was somewhat masking underlying issues. The technology was launched as somewhat prematurely. And so you had a significant latency in the system that didn't make it particularly usable in day-to-day practice. And when you launch things aggressively and prematurely, there's often times a backlash and the company suffered somewhat of a backlash in the 2010, 11, 12, and kind of subsequent years.
Speaker 2:
What do you mean by a backlash?
Speaker 4:
So if hospital B is looking to buy a system and it sees that hospital A bought a system and is not using it, hospital B is going to step back from kind of that signature page. And like most young companies Stereotaxis had invested for growth and had built a very significant sales team. And when suddenly faced with that dilemma of system sales stalling, and kind of declining and having a big expense, operating expense, it suddenly had to cut its team size. It had to do dilutive financing as its stock dropped. Each one of those service kind of a self-fueling negative circle. And so the company got stuck in that trap. At the same time it also lost its way, to some extent, in terms of being a leader in innovation. So while the underlying technology was highly innovative and highly differentiated, the company sat on its laurels.
Speaker 4:
And, as you know, in technology and in medicine you have to constantly push forward, you have to constantly make things better and fortunately there is still a lot of headroom to make technologies better. And so that's... When we joined over the last three years, we took this, what I consider a very solid foundation of a differentiated technology that works in the real world on a kind of robust basis and that has very, very good clinical data. And we've been building off of that with a significant innovation boost and with a significant focus on our existing hospital customers to make sure that they're successful and can showcase their success in the community.
Speaker 2:
So you are over at DAFNA before you come over to Stereotaxis. What are the tenets of the strategy that you and the team brought over from DAFNA to help reinvigorate the company?
Speaker 4:
At DAFNA Capital we are focused on identifying medical innovations that can address significant unmet clinical needs. And that's what we saw in Stereotaxis. I'm fortunate that at DAFNA Capital I was trained to think about the business. It's much smaller business than Stereotaxis, but I was fortunate to have an opportunity to be involved in every aspect of the business there. And one of the benefits of being an investor is that you, your role and a fundamental kind of an analyst of medical device companies is that I got to meet over the years there and interview hundreds of medical device CEOs. I got to listen to their earnings call. You have to analyze their businesses and understand why some of them go well, why some of them don't, and to some extent, you're... It's like a business school with hundreds of case studies, but you're intimately tied in those case studies because you're actually putting money on the line each time. And I think that kind of experience has fortunately served well at Stereotaxis.
Speaker 2:
Putting money on the line each time, talking about your training, David, you were about half the age of the average public company board director when you were named chairman of Stereotaxis, but already had years of experience in the field. So where did this focus come from? How did you end up being this analyst who heard these earnings calls and understood every aspect of what a medical device manufacturer needs to know?
Speaker 4:
I'm fortunate that I've had two parents who are both physician-scientists and in the nineties gradually merged their love of science and medicine with a love of finance. They founded DAFNA Capital in 1999 and I've been trained by the best.
Speaker 2:
I want to talk about the household that you grew up in because I think it's fascinating and mentioned during the introduction that my dad was the local pediatrician where I grew up, your dad was also a pediatrician, but on a much larger scale serving on the NIH Advisory Committee and professor of pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine before starting DAFNA. How did growing up in his house influence where you would all be after 1999?
Speaker 4:
My childhood was probably very similar to you. When you're a kid with physicians, they work hard and you see them and you look at them as your parents, you don't think of them as anything, particularly special beyond that. And it's great. What I'm kind of most grateful for is that they kind of ensured that we had a love of learning of continuous learning throughout your life and having a balance where on the one hand, you try to push and make the world a better place and you really kind of have a significant professional impact on the world. And on the other hand, you remain humble and you have a family life and you kind of behave like a decent human being. So I'm grateful I was raised with that and I try to follow that.
Speaker 2:
But no medical school for you?
Speaker 4:
No medical school for me. I love medicine. I love technology. And to some extent, perhaps watching my father, specifically, I kind of understood why he transitioned to the finance world also. When you're in medicine, you become extremely knowledgeable and extremely proficient in one niche of the world and medicine evolves gradually. It's just the nature of the medical system. And there's probably a healthy thing overall that it evolves gradually. So when you're in your own tiny niche, sometimes kind of, it can also become frustrating in some ways. And so the beauty of actually investing in medical devices in medicine, biotechnology more broadly, is that one day you can look at arrhythmias and the next day you can look at diabetes and the next day you can look at orthopedic surgery and the next day you can look at stroke.
Speaker 4:
And at each time you're looking at those clinical fields, you're trying to ask yourself, how will medicine look like in five years in this field in 10 years in this field? What going to actually have a positive impact and what's going to kind of fall by the wayside. And so it's actually, it's a beautiful job to be able to look at, kind of at medicine where the unmet needs are, what technologies are trying to address them, and then having to actually make a decision at the end of what do we think is going to be the future?
Speaker 2:
Is the rebuilding complete? What more work do you have to do, you think?
Speaker 4:
No, Stereotaxis is still a small, small company. We're in the earliest stages of our potential. If you, and it depends in many ways, if you look at it in terms of our commercial impact, we have less than 1% of just the cardiac ablation market to treat arrhythmias. And our technology is really a platform technology that should be applicable in many other clinical specialties in endovascular surgery. If you look at it from a technology perspective, we just announced a new robotic system. We'd announced that we're working on a next generation ablation catheter, but in reality, those are also just kind of the initial forays into what we can actually do. All of our technologies can be improved further, and we will improve them in the coming years further. And we're also just at the infancy of this whole concept of digital surgery, where if you look at most of the benefits of robotics, the safety benefits that we discussed previously, the precision, the stability, those are really mechanistic benefits of the technology. By navigating the catheter robotically, you have certain mechanistic benefits versus the human hand.
Speaker 4:
If you think about kind of one of the longer term, real promises of robotics is that you transition procedures, which are still to some extent, surgeons learn heuristically just by their own experience over time. And you move from that kind of world to a world of digital surgery, where you have the benefit of learning from data over thousands of patients, hundreds of thousands of patients using patient-specific data, diagnostic data, to really inform the therapy. And robotics serves as the platform where you can create this future of digital surgery.
Speaker 2:
So is this new system that you've talked about, this beautiful Genesis system?
Speaker 4:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So in a tweet, as it was coming out, it said "We're proud to present Stereotaxis' Genesis, the future of robotic electrophysiology. Smaller, lighter, faster, and more flexible." What's important about smaller, lighter, faster, and more flexible?
Speaker 4:
So when you have a technology that provides huge clinical benefits to patients and physicians, you want to make sure that the technology is as accessible as possible to hospitals, because one of the challenges of Stereotaxis is this is still a relatively large, relatively expensive system. And so one of our big efforts is also making the technology more accessible to hospitals. Genesis was one of the forays into that and making it smaller and lighter makes it easier for hospitals to adopt the technology, providing it integrated with a proprietary fluoroscopy system, makes it also less expensive for hospital to adopt. And so we're working in various ways. If you look at our innovation focus, we've kind of described the core technologies we're focused on, and we gave kind of four guiding goals to all of our innovations. And the first two are relatively obvious. It's improving patient care and it's improving the physician experience.
Speaker 4:
The third one is increasing accessibility and affordability of the technology, because again, at some point in the future, every single electrophysiology lab and every single interventional lab should have a robotic system. And I believe Stereotaxis' robotic system, we're by far the global leaders in robotics in that field, and it's for us to win that game to be the robotic system of the future there. And so increasing accessibility and affordability is important, and that's one of the main goals of Genesis. Increasing the speed, also the responsiveness to physician control is helpful, obviously in allowing for a better physician experience and allowing for more efficient procedures.
Speaker 2:
Where's Genesis manufactured?
Speaker 4:
We manufacture everything in St. Louis, Missouri.
Speaker 2:
So I want to get into this tech that's manufactured in St. Louis, Missouri. Our listeners may hear robotic surgery and think of, as we talked about a little earlier, some sort of Star Wars medical droid, what did robotic surgery technology look like in 2003 when Niobe was first introduced and how has Stereotaxis improved it over time?
Speaker 4:
So at its core Stereotaxis' technology takes a catheter that is typically navigated from the handle, three/four feet away from the tip. The tip is where the therapy is taking place. And instead we navigate the catheter now directly from the tip using magnetic fields. The magnetic fields can be thought of as invisible tweezers that to some extent are holding onto the tip of the catheter and now moving it directly from there. When you have control at the tip, you have much greater precision, you have much greater stability, and it allows for the design of a catheter that's much more gentle in the heart. That's kind of really our underlying technology and that's why we're able to provide these types of therapies. Over the years Stereotaxis has evolved from a fairly large, not particularly user-friendly, just in terms of the setup time, in terms of latency to physician control. We've evolved that technology to now be a much lighter system, a much more responsive one and again, I think there's kind of more that we'll be able to do in the future.
Speaker 2:
So I looked on your website and watched some of the videos of both Niobe and Genesis doing its work, and also just about the whole look and feel of the product that you provide to physicians. And I got to say, it's gorgeous. Why is the cosmetic look of the system so important?
Speaker 4:
You want to build great technologies that do good things, and you also want to make the world beautiful. It happened to be that while we were visiting a corporate partner with one of our R&D leaders in Switzerland, we were walking after the meeting. And we passed a Ferrari store and we walked inside and we're joking about bringing one back to St. Louis. And don't worry, we're far too frugal to do anything crazy like that. But this was while we were developing Genesis and while we were starting to think about the design and so kind of, we said, wow, you know what? Let's try to incorporate some of those design aspects into Genesis. When you work in anything in life, you want to make it good and you want to make it beautiful.
Speaker 2:
I mean, the seat itself looks like beautiful leather for the physician.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. One of the real benefits, actually, we've talked about the benefits for patients, but if you think about our technology, one of the big benefits is that when a physician does these procedures, typically in a manual fashion with their hands, they have to stand by the patient bedside. And the primary form of visualization in endovascular surgical procedures is x-ray. X-ray is not good for the patient, but the patient gets a few minutes worth. They get one procedure, a physician gets the cumulative dose of hundreds, thousands of procedures over their career.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
And, so they're getting huge amounts of radiation and they're getting... And they have to wear lead vests, dozens of 10-, 20-, 30 pound lead vests for hours and hours at a time every day as they're standing up. And so if you look at kind of the risk of cancer and the risk of orthopedic injury for these physicians, it's actually immense. And it's kind of, it's sad that that's kind of part of their career, is bearing those types of risks. In a robotic procedure, the physician can do the procedure seated unscrubbed outside of radiation entirely. And so there's kind of real clinical benefits for them as well.
Speaker 2:
After the break David Fischel and I turn our attention to how Stereotaxis is partnering across the biomedical field to improve patient care and provider safety. More on that, right after this.
Speaker 1:
And now a word from Leslie Stretch, CEO of Medallia, NYSE ticker MDLA.
Speaker 5:
Medallia is a company that applies machine learning to customer experience. Our is customers understand their customers in live time and change their experience for the better. The deep technology, deep machine learning the category leaders in all the major industries. And we operate our environment at scale. We have the most eminent minds in machine learning and customer experience in the world. It's all about the people. Medallia is listed on the NYSE.
Speaker 2:
Welcome back before the break, David Fischel, CEO of Stereotaxis, that's NYSE American ticker symbol STXS, and I were discussing how the company has evolved since introducing the Niobe system back in 2003. David, one of the main focuses of Stereotaxis' work is to improve the safety and experience of the physician. We were talking about that just before the break, are there other benefits beyond the safety from radiation?
Speaker 4:
If you want to be successful as a medical company, you need to think about all of your stakeholders, right? And our stakeholders of our product are the patients, the physicians, and the hospitals and the insurers. And so we develop a technology that we think can benefit all of them and that the clinical data shows can benefit all of them. And for the physician, specifically, the primary benefits are removing them from x-ray exposure. So reducing the risk of cancers and other kind of harm from radiation and allowing them to do the procedure seated, rather than standing wearing lead vests, which reduces orthopedic injury. If you look 49% of interventional cardiologists, and this is kind of data from actual published clinical literature, have orthopedic injury as a direct result of their time in the cath lab. So, kind of, the risks are real and kind of that's one of the things we're proud of.
Speaker 2:
One of the testimonials on the Stereotaxis website refers to the system as putting the doctor in the cockpit, where he can worry about the high level aspects of the surgery. And if you take that analogy to a broader extreme, robotic aircraft pilots are often thousands of miles away from the actual drone. Do you think there'll be a time where a room full of highly skilled surgeons are operating across the globe using your equipment?
Speaker 4:
So, that's actually... There's two beautiful kind of themes in the question you just asked. One is kind of this concept of focusing on the therapeutic aspect of the procedure. If you think a physician has to have two big skills. They have to be able to understand the disease and determine what's the best form of therapy. And then they have to have the mechanical hand skills to actually deliver the therapy that they want to deliver. Great physicians can have both skills, and there's great physicians that have more of the cognitive skill and others that have more of the mechanical skill. And one of the promises of robotics, one of the benefits of robotics, is reducing the mechanical complexity so that they can spend more of their time on the cognitive aspects. And that's really, as a patient, what you want. You want them to spend as much time as possible thinking about how to treat you well.
Speaker 4:
We have a physician in Europe, who's kind of internationally regarded as a maestro with his hands and can do... Can move a catheter every way he wants manually with his hands. And kind of, he explained to me once, when I went to visit him, he explained that when he sat down the first time behind our robot, he suddenly realized that there were parts of his brains that were always kind of, I guess, preoccupied when he was doing a manual procedure. And now we're open to think about the patient and to think about the therapy. That's kind of one of the real kind of benefits of our technology. The other kind of theme that you brought up in your question was about this whole concept of telesurgery. And we actually have had a few telesurgeries that have taken place.
Speaker 4:
Last in 2018 we had a physician at a conference in Dubai treat a patient in Finland. And we had a physician at a conference in Miami treat a patient in the Netherlands. And so the platform of robotics allows you to advance digital surgery, which includes things like telesurgery. I'm not sure kind of how that will evolve. I think that it'll be largely driven by the regulators, by insurers. There's kind of that ecosystem that has to advance and kind of learn how to incorporate telesurgery. I think that, kind of, one of the real promises in the newer term, is this whole concept of remote support and remote peer-to-peer support. Already in St. Louis we have multiple people on our team who provide remote technical and clinical support to physicians around the world, because we can see exactly what the physicians see and we can help them during the procedure.
Speaker 4:
I think kind of one of the things that will be more interesting. And one of the things that we're working on is a better IT network to allow for peer-to-peer support. So, if a physician has... They went to fellowship together and they worked together at some point, and now they're at different hospitals, but during a procedure, they come across really complicated parts of the procedure where they want a second opinion.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
In real time, they can get those second opinions. And the remote physicians can actually see everything that the physician on-site is seeing and can provide some guidance and kind of that commentary.
Speaker 2:
So, David, in November 2019, it was reported that patients were being successfully treated by the integration of Catheter Precisions' Vivo Arrhythmia Localization, and Stereotaxis' robotic magnetic navigation technologies. So what do partnerships like this mean for the company and also for how doctors are providing care?
Speaker 4:
If you think about it, there's many good technologies out there in the world. And what you want is for physicians to be able to use the best mix of technologies that are best suited for any individual patient, that's best for patient care, that's the right thing for physicians and it's the right thing for technological progress. We committed to building an open ecosystem where our technology, the benefits of robotics, could be paired with any other technologies out there. And what you saw over the last year and a half is that we announced integrations with a well-funded private company based in San Diego called Acutus Medical. They developed a highly innovative mapping technology used in these procedures. And then late last year, we announced integrations with three preoperative imaging companies, inHEART, ADAS, and Vivo. And so those integrations allow physicians to bring in diagnostic information from the patient, specifically, and to combine it and to integrate that data into our system. And having that data side-by-side together in an integrated form allows physicians to make better decisions during the surgery.
Speaker 2:
We had this sort of image of what might be happening at a hospital in Idaho at the beginning of our conversation, what are the economics of the healthcare system to get into Stereotaxis and get a system like Genesis?
Speaker 4:
So robotics, generally, if you look at other robotic companies in other clinical fields, like Intuitive Surgical, like MECO or Mazor, they are, they've all been robotic leaders in other types of surgeries. Robotic systems are typically over a million dollars. And ours kind of has similar economics to those. One of the big benefits of our technology from a financial perspective for the hospital is that we reduce risk, both patient risk, risk of adverse events during the procedure and risk of the staff, of the physician staff, of the nursing staff. And that we allow physic... We allow hospitals to treat many patients who otherwise would not be treated. And so that's kind of, that's the financial rationales, two of the primary financial rationales for a hospital in adopting our technology.
Speaker 2:
As we wrap up, David, there are a number of robotic surgery companies that are competing with Stereotaxis. How are you seeking to differentiate your company? And do you feel well positioned to compete against the market?
Speaker 4:
So there's actually no real robotic competitor in our clinical field, you see many robotic companies out there, robotic surgery companies, and they have really done a fantastic job at transforming laparoscopic surgery and at transforming various types of open surgeries, primarily orthopedic and spine surgery towards robotics. If you look at endovascular surgery, the use of catheters navigated through the body's blood vessels to treat disease, that's kind of a big class of surgeries that is actually the largest growing class, because it's the least invasive. So you've seen over time, this transition from open surgery to laparoscopic surgery, to minimally invasive surgery, endovascular surgery. If you look at endovascular surgery, Stereotaxis is by far the global leader, and really we have no competitors at all from a robotic perspective in the cardiac ablation field to treat arrhythmias. Our competition is the fact that 99% of procedures still get done the traditional manual handheld way. And we're a small company. And so that's the challenge, but it's a good challenge.
Speaker 2:
If you could sort of take a step back and talk about the medical device industry as a whole, what innovation in the coming years do you think will be most transformative as we go forward?
Speaker 4:
So it's a nice question and maybe my answer won't be satisfactory, but the way I think about medicine is that there's still huge unmet medical needs across a very long front. You can think about kind of this front spanning out into the horizon. And even when you look at certain diseases, like, I'll make it up, lung cancer, there's not actually one lung cancer. It's actually a subset of many, there's many, many sub-diseases within that. And the way medicine works, is typically small progress on every little front individually. Sometimes you have large class of drugs, like beta blockers, and they kind of move a whole large front a little bit forward. Sometimes you have great... A drug that cures a very specific type of cancer, and it moves one little point in that front all the way forward, but medicine moves kind of in fits and starts along this entire front. And usually generally in a gradual fashion.
Speaker 4:
What's beautiful is that the amount of innovation and the amount of activity across the entire front by hundreds and hundreds of companies, and there's probably nearly a thousand publicly traded biotechnology, medical device, diagnostic companies, just in the US. And then there's obviously many, many more private companies and startup companies in the US and abroad. The amount of innovation across every type of disease on that front is overall great. So we live kind of in this golden period where on the one hand, we all suffer from disease and that's kind of, that's just a reality of life. On the other hand, you can kind of foresee a situation where perhaps our grandchildren really kind of all the diseases that we think about and that kind of pain us, or that kind of cause us to die prematurely. In reality, we will be able to cure them and we will be able to solve them. And the entire kind of healthcare process will be done in a much more pleasant way. And again, we're all little soldiers in that effort to improve the world.
Speaker 2:
Little soldiers in the effort to improve the world. David Fischel, here we are at the beginning of the 2020s and maybe at the beginning of a golden period of medical innovation. Thank you so much for joining us inside the ICE house and for coming to the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 4:
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was David Fischel, chairman and CEO of Stereotaxis. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 6:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part are from publicly available sources and not independently verified, neither ICE, nor its affiliates, make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitution offered to sell, a solicitation of an offered to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
