Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.
Running a business means juggling a lot of moving parts. And when your communication tools can't keep up, things start to slip. Missed calls, slow replies, scattered conversations, they're not just frustrating, they're lost opportunities and revenue left on the table. That's where Quo comes in. Spelled Quo, Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2. Trusted by over 90,000 businesses. One shared business number for calls and texts, so every conversation stays visible, organized, and accountable. It works from an app or computer. You can keep your existing number, add teammates, and sync your CRM, letting you scale without adding complexity. And with built-in AI, Quo logs calls, summarizes conversations, and flags next steps even after hours. Stop missing customers. Stop leaving revenue on the table. Try Quo free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/tech. That's quo.com/tech. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers.
Hi everyone, I'm Emily Church back again for the latest Future Positive podcast. If you've been listening to our first episodes, then you know that each time we speak to some of the visionaries that have set their sights making the future we've seen in movies a reality within our lifetime. Today, XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis is joined by two of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, both who are now working on medical revolutions that have the potential to solve issues ranging from Alzheimer's and diabetes to organ failure. Our guests are Dean Kamen, engineer, innovator, founder of FIRST Robotics, and famously known for creating the Segway. Dean is joined by entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, who co-founded satellite radio Sirius XM before turning her attention to the medical world and is now exploring 3D printing of human tissue. So strap in and get ready for the latest episode of the XPRIZE Future Positive Podcast.
My first introduction, an American lawyer, an author, an entrepreneur, a founder, the chairwoman on the board, United Therapeutics, a former CEO of Geostar, creator of Sirius XM satellite radio, helicopter pilot, G6 pilot, a woman working on her sixth moonshot. Please welcome to the stage Dr. Martine Rothblatt.
Now another friend, a man who is, you know, one of the most extraordinary engineers and inventors with over a thousand patents to his name, the founder of some of the most important organizations, most importantly FIRST, which is powering our young innovators camp here, the creator of the infusion pump, the iBot, the Slingshot, the Segway, and so much more. Recognized by half a dozen presidents, please welcome one of our trustees, a dear friend, Dean Kamen.
Here's my challenge. I'm going to let you guys chat for a bit and then I want to invite the crowd to jump in.
Well, Dean, it's an amazing pleasure to be here with you and with the iBot. The iBot is such an amazing invention. Could you share with us a little bit about what you expect to occur between your invention of the Luke arm and the iBot at the upcoming Tokyo Olympics?
So, we've had a very good year. We've also had so many people ask us to help make sure that the public understands that you may have a physical disability in terms of getting around, but what most people don't understand is that's only a small part of the problem for people that can no longer walk. Yes, we supply mobility and independence. And yes, a curb is no longer like the bars on a cell, and a set of stairs is not no longer a parallel universe. But by being able to stand up, we also give people back dignity. And the folks have now said to us between our prosthetic arm and this device, we are in the process of possibly opening the next Olympics by having somebody climb in that Olympic stadium in one of these devices and with that arm light the torch, which I think could be a very wow thing.
Dean epitomizes to me and I think to the entire world the mantra for all of the coolest inventions of the 21st century, which is that biology is technology. And one of the really great questions that was asked during the previous session was that what are we doing to, you know, support our squishy bodies going into space. And I think that question raises this great idea of looking at biology as technology. Now a squishy body is made of water and Peter just mentioned that, you know, the whole planet's made of water. We're water people. The salinity of our bodies is exactly the same salinity as the oceans. So there's a oneness. And what does water need to do? It needs to be pumped. For all of the 20th century and up until now, there was only one very basic way of pumping fluids that made it very difficult to integrate pumps with the human body. But starting a few years ago, Dean invented a revolutionary new pump. It's the first new pump that has literally been invented in over a century. It is as accurate as the body constantly squirts its enzymes and hormones and all the different things that we need, the endocrines need to make a body operate. This pump can do. And maybe Dean, if you could share a little bit with us the breakthrough, the conceptual breakthrough that let you come up with acoustic volume sensing, merging the worlds of sound and the worlds of liquid to come up with biology as technology.
Thank you for that. Martine is holding a little device. I didn't know she'd want the public to see it yet. We're expecting the FDA to bless this thing very soon in its newest form. They blessed a simpler version of it a few months ago, but that device is essentially solid state. It has no motors, no gears, no transmissions.
I call it the Tesla of pumps.
It has a couple of little nitinol actuators that can move tens of nanoliters. That's a thousandth of a thousandth of a thousandth of a liter plus or minus a couple of percent accuracy. And at those very high accuracies, it's a closed loop control system that you can put very concentrated drugs or hormones or other things as Martine pointed out and still make it small enough to wear it like a patch. 40 years ago, I made the first insulin pumps and they have motors and gears. And today, 40 years later, most of the companies that make stuff for delivering drugs essentially use that technology. It hasn't changed. This device has the capability to do that as again Martine said because at those scales you can't measure accurately by weighing something that's a thousandth of a millionth of a gram. You can't do it especially on a moving body. But we use the fundamental laws of physics, a Helmholtz oscillator and PV equals NRT. And for anybody that wants to know, we'll talk about it later. But basically we send an acoustic signature across the volume that has these critical delivery elements in it. In the case of insulin, and by looking at the differences in acoustic signature coming off this tuned cavity we can measure one part or a couple of parts in a billion the volume and then the actuator just proceeds to deliver it according to whatever schedule we put into the software. And we've now proven it out and as I said we have approval from it in this format but we're making a new simpler to use device that I hope we will deliver an approved product in scale to you in the next few months.
Now Dean, one of the largest health care problems that we face not only in the United States but increasingly throughout the world is diabetes and many people worry that diabetes is actually going to gobble up a significant portion of our entire health care budget. I know that Decca and Lilly have been working together with this device to literally transform the entire not only the treatment of diabetes but also the economics. And a lot of cool invention right now is going on on how can we get all of this enormous waste out of the health care system and people are inventing new apps that will allow patients and people to keep control over their medical records. People will be able to access their medical to allow other pharmaceutical companies to access anonymized forms of their medical records to mine all of this vast biomedical data for new breakthroughs. But maybe if you could talk a little bit about how you envision this tiny tiny pump that your brilliantly creative mind merged, you know, Helmholtz and pressure equations to come up with. How can this transform diabetes from something that right now costs, you know, tens of thousands of dollars per person to treat to something that could cost literally just tens of dollars per patient to treat?
Well, since it's solid state and it doesn't have expensive motors and gear boxes and all that, we can make those in very large volumes and it's small enough and lightweight enough that you can wear it like a patch. But it already has a bunch of different radios in it. It will talk to your phone. It will talk to the cloud and it will talk to a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor that a patient can wear so that it can in real time import information about what your current state is in terms of your blood glucose and modify the control algorithm to optimize. And particularly for kids, you know, that 5-year-old little kid goes to the birthday party and wants some of the ice cream cake like every other little kid. And right now, unless they adjust the rate at which their pumps are delivering or take shots that have been properly determined to be the right amount based on how much sugar they're going to take in, that's a hard thing to ask a kid to do. So we think that by making closed loop control systems between the sensors and this device and other things we're doing, we will give a much better outcome and to your point the comorbidities associated with diabetes which itself is a pretty expensive situation but the comorbidities, I mean when you look at a person with diabetes compared to somebody of the same age in our population that doesn't have diabetes the numbers are stacked. It's a 17 times higher rate in adults of end-stage renal failure, more than a factor of two higher in, sorry, an order of magnitude of two higher in cardiovascular conditions. It's blindness. So we can lower the overall cost because it's much better to prevent a problem than cure it or than to maintain somebody with chronic treatment. And finally, since it can be made the way we're making it, and since we're partnering now with a big pharmaceutical giant, getting it to people more efficiently, is going to even incentivize more people to have closed loop control. And we hope overall dramatically lower not just the financial cost but the emotional cost and the human, the human, when you see kids with diabetes, you know, but we're going to lower the misery factor.
Well, that's beautiful Dean and I envision that a lot of those astronauts flying on the rockets both to space and ultimately especially to Mars will be able to address some of Gwynne's point about hardening our bodies by having one of the Dean Kamen patch pumps on their arm and closed circuiting for controlling their conditions.
So first of all thank you for the work that both of you do. I want to make sure we touch a little bit on your vision for electric transportation.
Absolutely. TransMedics went public just last month.
So things are really happening and all of this 3D organ printing and manufacturing is going on throughout the country. But the epicenter is thanks to Dean, this place called the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, ARMI, funded by the Army or the DoD in Manchester, New Hampshire. And we have literally dozens of startup companies, students there as incubators creating all of the different bolts and screws and widgets necessary to manufacture an unlimited supply.
I saw you holding a photo of a collagen 3D printed lung structure.
It was amazing holding, you know, we printed the scaffold that you saw there in the video. One of the most astonishing things is we print that scaffold from human collagen that's grown in a tobacco plant. So human collagen is regularly very expensive and, you know, hard to get. Most people use bovine collagen or porcine collagen but the tobacco plant is pretty easy to genetically modify. So we genetically modified it to spit out human collagen. We do this in College Station, Texas. And Secretary Perry of Department of Energy is a great supporter of the effort. And then we digest the tobacco plants, get the collagen, ship it to New Hampshire, put it in the 3D Systems 3D printers, which Peter, you introduced me to those folks a few years ago. And now we're actually printing the whole scaffold for the lungs while in North Carolina we're growing cells by the trillions now. And my advice to new entrepreneurs out there is, you know, back in the day it would be like, you know, make nails, make wires, make plastic from the 60s. The thing to make in the 21st century are cells. Cells are like the most awesome tool. That's why I keep saying biology is technology and we're now growing trillions of cells and anybody here in this audience can start up doing that as well.
Let's hear it for this amazing entrepreneur Martine and Dean. You make my heart sing.
