Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you talk about timing, what year are we talking about?

Emily Hamilton: Back in mid-1990s.

Sramana Mitra: So you got a bunch of grants to get this thing off the ground.

Emily Hamilton: It wasn’t exactly a grant in the traditional sense. This was money which was intended to foster research, which would have commercial potential. If, at the end of the research period, it appeared to have commercial potential, the university would help secure venture capital or financing to help to bring it to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: When you started in 1995, how much capital were you able to access in this mode?

Emily Hamilton: The first funding was about $2 million.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do with that funding? What were you able to pull together with that?

Emily Hamilton: The first thing that we did was, put together a team of mathematicians and engineers to look at this problem. We already had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to do based on what we had tried before. We had to equip that team. Part of that $2 million was to buy back the intellectual properties. It was really about $1 million to support the research. That took about two years to do that. By the end of that two years, we certainly had a proof of concept that was very convincing to go to the next stage.

Sramana Mitra: In that proof of concept, what problem were you solving and how?

Emily Hamilton: The problem was labor. How do you assess whether a woman’s progress in labor is normal or sufficiently abnormal? Can you do that better than the rough rules of thumb that we were using as clinicians? It was a very imprecise and highly variable system. There was tremendous amount of biological variations. We ended up with a mathematical model that was quite precise. It was dramatically better than any method that had been created to date.

Sramana Mitra: You said it took you a couple of years to develop a prototype. Were you going after hospitals who would then test your technology? What was the path of going to market?

Emily Hamilton: Hospitals were the prime target because they provided the infrastructure for physicians and nurses to care for patients. This would be a tool which the hospitals would be interested in.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of traction did you receive? When you went out to sell to hospitals, where did you gain your first adoption?

Emily Hamilton: First adoption was in our backyard because being a professor here and having colleagues over a number of years, I was a known entity. It certainly was harder when I stepped outside of my backyard. With novel ideas, there’s a fair bit of skepticism as well. Obstetrics have a lot of medico-legal pressures so there’s a lot of fear of doing anything that is new. It’s hard enough with the existing medico-legal pressure. If I introduce another variable, perhaps I’ll be even more culpable. It was a difficulty that was greater than I had ever anticipated.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen
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