Entrepreneur Spotlight – RefleXion SBIR Innovation Lab

RefleXion Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Samuel Mazin, PhD, shares his journey from postdoc to startup and the NCI SBIR support that helped develop a biology-guided radiotherapy that provides treatment for metastatic cancer patients with limited options.
TRANSCRIPT
[music]
MICHAEL:          Hello and welcome to Innovation Lab, your go to resource for all things biotech startups, brought by the National Cancer Institute's Small Business Innovation Research, SBIR Development Center.
Our podcast hosts interviews with successful entrepreneurs and provides resources for small businesses looking to take their cutting-edge cancer solutions from lab to market. For more, check out our website at sbir.cancer.gov. I'm Michael Weingarten, the Director of NCIS SBIR and today's host.
[music]
In this episode, you will hear from a medical imaging company, funded by the NCI SBIR program, about the journey from post-doc to biotech startup. RefleXion Medical Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sam Mason will share how the company leveraged SBIR support on their way to receiving FDA clearance for their technology that revolutionizes radiotherapy for tackling metastatic disease.
Now, without any further ado, here's Sam Mason, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of RefleXion Medical.
[music]
MICHAEL:          I thought maybe a first good question would be if you can kind of tell us how you started your journey as an entrepreneur.
SAM: Well, I was trained in computer engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada, that's where I did my undergraduate, and then came to Stanford for graduate work in a field called medical imaging, so that's where I fell in love with medical imaging, by just taking a class and understanding how just with, you know, basic energy systems, we can see inside the body without touching the body, so I was just fascinated by that.
It was during a post-doc in the same program that I had this idea for RefleXion. I was pursuing an academic path, but I was struck by this idea because it was it was a natural marriage of the field I was in with a field that I was just recently exposed to, and that was radiation therapy. And so that's what kind of set me off on this entrepreneurial journey.
I was not planning to be an entrepreneur, but it was an idea that I guess wouldn't let go of me and so I just had to keep pursuing it and eventually I co-founded the company with a high school buddy of mine, Akchi Nanduri [phonetic], you know him as well of course, and the rest is history.
MICHAEL:          I think it would be really interesting for the audience just to learn a little bit more about the technology that you're developing now and kind of maybe a little bit more about the original idea and how you guys developed it.
SAM: This is a technology that is really meant to tackle, for the first time, stage 4 cancer with a machine. The idea germinated while I was a post-doc and I knew a lot about how medical imaging worked, how CT scans, MRI scans, PET scans worked, and particularly PET, which involves the administration of a radiopharmaceutical in the body that literally has cancer light up, so that a PET scanner can kind of see where cancer is, it's one of the best ways of actually visualizing cancer in the body.
You know, to my knowledge that had not been used at all in conjunction with radiation therapy, which is using high energy X-rays to treat cancer, at least at the time of treatment. So I thought, you know, wouldn't it be great if the machine that's being used to treat the cancer could also see it and not only see it, but see it live in real time?
So my idea was actually a way to circumvent the slow PET imaging process and instead of using a PET image, which is what how naturally people would think of a PET scan, the innovation was to use the actual emissions, the stream of signals that are literally coming out of cancer cells to the PET scanner, use those same signals, but