|
Video interview with Dr Jay Wohlgemuth, Co-Founder and Vice-President, Clinical Development
 Interview with Pierre Cassigneul, President and Chief Executive Officer, XDx
1) Briefly tell us what it is about your company/project that makes it so special?
XDx is one of the first companies to create a molecular monitoring technology that will have a major impact on patients and clinical practice. The technology distills complex genomic data into information with significant clinical value. Our technology allows for proactive and personalized management of patients with heart transplants, with the potential to address a wide range of prevalent immune system conditions.
2) What country best facilitates starting a tech company? What single thing can a government do to encourage Technology Pioneers?
XDx was established in California, where interactions and collaborations between academia, entrepreneurs and the financial community are commonplace. Silicon Valley has several Venture Capital firms that seek out innovative ideas, and entrepreneurs to fund their projects. The culture in California attracts individuals from a variety of key disciplines and interests, which makes for an employee pool that is intellectual and creative.
It would be helpful if governments could place some focus on ensuring that regulations, policies and procedures impacting their primary industries are innovative and nimble, like these industries must be to succeed. Since our company operates in a regulated industry, having regulatory authorities that can acknowledge, embrace and make changes to foster rather than inhibit progress are critical.
3) What makes an innovator?
Most importantly an innovator has to have a desire to change things and the creativity and perseverance to see it through. Given the many advancements in biomedical technologies and science over the last decade, innovation in molecular diagnostics has a lot to do with finding the right way to combine existing technologies to answer novel and clinically meaningful questions. An innovator changes people’s lives.
4) How does your company directly contribute to improving the state of the world?
The health care system in the U.S. and around the world tends to focus on clinical intervention at the late stages of disease, where costs, complications and patient suffering are high. Our company is creating tools that will enable clinicians to measure the activity of each individual patient’s immune system activity. This metric will revolutionize the treatments of all patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases and organ transplant recipients. It will enable earlier intervention and prevention of costs, complications and poor outcomes associated with later stages of disease.
5) What value do you hope to gain from being a Technology Pioneer?
Being a technology pioneer will provide XDx with a higher level of visibility and credibility that is directly attributable to the advancements we are making in molecular diagnostics and for patients and clinical practice. This visibility and credibility should help our audience take notice of these achievements thus, helping us reach our goals for success.
This recognition will also help our company understand how our vision and accomplishments have impact globally.
6) What do you think the role of technology should be in society?
Technology in the healthcare industry should drive improvements in longevity and quality of life for patients, not one versus the other. Longevity without quality is not as meaningful.
7) What is the right balance in society between scientific interest and ethical concerns?
Ethical concerns should always be kept in mind as we develop new technologies. The only sensible way to find the right balance is to involve people from various backgrounds to evaluate the risk/benefit ratio and to ponder the ethical challenges. There are few black and white answers to the question of ethics.
|
