Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pumas.ai CEO Joga Gobburu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to your precision medicine area. Take me through a case study.

Joga Gobburu: What we have is an advanced clinical decision support system. This system is integrated and sits within the hospital electronic health records. When a physician diagnoses a patient with a condition and is considering a treatment, let’s say for a very serious infection.

Let’s say the physician picks up a neonate who is 20 days old and has a very severe infection. Based upon the patient’s weight and kidney function, we would come up with a starting dose. Then the patient is monitored. As the data becomes available, it automatically updates the recommendations for this patient.

What is the value of that? The value is that one of the modules we have is the infectious disease module. The drug is called Vancomycin. It’s used to treat severe infections. However, it comes with a cost, which is toxicity that causes acute kidney injury. It compromises the kidney. They have to be taken off the treatment.

On top of it, the physicians now have to take care of the kidneys. That is a very drawn out process. That happens in 15% to 20% of patients. We can cut that down to at least 50%.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Do you go to market drug by drug or patient by patient? I’ll elaborate on the question. We are part of the Stanford hospital system. Stanford has everything digitized.

In an older patient, you have years of data. Do you take that whole range of data to be able to understand the interfaces and interplay of different drugs and diseases? If somebody has cancer already, what are the risks of other types of cancers?

Joga Gobburu: Absolutely. We talk about the product Live abut how is it built. Until seven years ago, this was not possible because of the lack of access to electronic health records. Electronic health records are now mandated. That has given us access to millions of patients.

Under the hood for Live is Pumas. The analytic engine is Pumas. You need three things for this. One is data. The second is data analytics. The third is the application itself – the workflow. The data and analytics is similar to what I explained to you earlier. As you get more and more experienced, your algorithm gets smarter and smarter over the years. Now imagine, it’s not just Stanford, but we’re also able to leverage knowledge.

Sramana Mitra: The model leverages hundreds of millions of records. You apply machine learning to extract models out of all this data. This is a goldmine of data.

Joga Gobburu: That’s where DPumas comes into the picture. As I said, there are certain aspects that we know through clinical experience, pharmacology, and physiology. We know some aspects of the underlying signs, but we don’t know several aspects.

The whole philosophy is taking the best of both worlds – empirical and scientific approach – and combining that. DPumas does exactly that. You can take scans from patients. Patients, after radiation, develop toxicity after six months. Some don’t, but we don’t know why and who. How are you going to manage that?

Sramana Mitra: How many hospitals are using your system?

Joga Gobburu: We have been testing this in about nine hospitals.

Sramana Mitra: Stanford is not part of it?

Joga Gobburu: We are slowly building up our clientele.

Sramana Mitra: You should talk to Stanford, because they are an early adopter of technology. We are friends with the former CIO of Stanford. I’m pretty sure Stanford will talk to you. They’re like the hotbed of technological innovation.

Joga Gobburu: We have been working with Maryland hospital system. Johns Hopkins is another one.

Sramana Mitra: What is the stage of your company? Are you venture-financed?

Joga Gobburu: No, we’ve bootstrapped it.

Sramana Mitra: You plan to continue bootstrapping it?

Joga Gobburu: For a little bit. We started about three years ago. We didn’t have to raise funds yet. The company has grown to 53 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Are you at about $10 million in revenue?

Joga Gobburu: I can tell you that we have been having higher double digit growth over the last three years.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic! I wish you all the best. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pumas.ai CEO Joga Gobburu
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