Behind the vision with Thinh Tran

Welcome to the first episode of the TibaRay podcast. My name is Justin Starbird and today I am joined by CEO Thinh Tran of TibaRay. Thinh, Thanks for joining me today. This is so exciting.

Nice to meet you, Justin.

It's so cool because over the last couple of weeks we've gotten to know each other a little bit more. I've gotten to learn of course, a whole lot more about TibaRay and what you're doing. But. But take us back to the beginning and talk a little bit about your experience as an entrepreneur. You've done some pretty incredible things prior to coming to TibaRay.

Yeah. So I've been an entrepreneur for over 40 years now. But I think what especially reverend to TibaRay is I spent most of my career as a CEO of a public company that I founded. Actually I found Sigma Designs in 1982 and took it public on Nasdaq and I served as a chairman and CEO from the founding until when we sold the company at 2018. So that's 36 years, I believe probably one of the longest serving CEO on NASDAQ as far as I know. At the peak, Sigma Designs has a valuation over $2 billion.

Yeah.

And building Sigma from a small startup to a public company had teached me all the aspect of building and managing a technology business. I learned how to raise capital, you know, build a team from scratch, recruit, manage, expand the business and manage to run through all the difficult time and also the easy times.

I'm sure, I'm sure there was a lot, a lot of both over 36 years.

Yeah.

1982, Good year. You know, I'm, you know, all good. That was a good year for things to get started. So it's really interesting to hear about that and all the experiences that, that you mentioned to prepare you to, to join TibaRay. What made you first want to become involved and you know, what did you see that convinced you that you then want to take a leadership role? You'd proven yourself, you've done so much already.

Yeah, at the time I kind of almost retiring and actually I was introduced to TibaRay as I'm one of the investor these days. Very intrigued with the technology and the founding teams. I think they probably have one of the best people, you know, Bill Loo come from Stanford side, oncologist Sami Tantawi come from the astrophysics side at SLAC. So the two of them and two are more colleague that they have. I think that's how TibaRay was get started. So I was very intrigued and One thing that as investor it concerned me that with such a good technology they don't have the right management team in place or people who lead the company at a time that know how to take the technology and turn it into commercial product.

So they're really struggling. And some of the board member TibaRay approached me about taking maybe a more active leadership role. And at the time I didn't. I was involved with Vita Imaging, another medical imaging company that I started. So I was not really interested at the time. But the more I spent time with TibaRay I just look at that. God, this technology is so good. And it they really deserve to have somebody that can know how to take this and take to the market.

So I finally agreed to join as a CEO. That was May last year. So I've been with the company over a year now.

Oh wow. Well, let's take it a little bit of a step forward now for those folks that haven't heard of TibaRay or are listening to this, watching this for the first time, what problem in cancer treatment are you specifically trying to solve?

So as you know, radiation treatment is used in 60% of cancer treatment right now. So it's one of the most popular way to treat cancer use radiation treatment. But there are two problems that oncology is fighting. One is the problem is people move. So when you, you treat them with radiation, you treat both the, the bad cell, the tumor cell, but you also because the patient [unclear] moves, you also treat also radiate the good cell as well. So that's the problem.

You create a lot of collateral damage. Right when you instead of treating only the cancer cell, you also treat the non cancer cell. That's the problem. And the second thing it does is it creates a lot of collateral damage. So sometimes you get your cancer is cured but then you create so much damage surrounding it that the patients suffer more from those side effects than the cancer itself. So those are the problems that need to be colleges a long time may try and be to solve.

And what we do at TibaRay here is 10 years ago it was discovered that if you're able to send a very high dose radiation in a very short time, you solve two problems. It's much more accurate because the patient doesn't move, doesn't have time to move. Secondly, the cancer cell get irradiated and the good cell recover. So that's an incredible thing that biological effect that discovered a lot of research work has been done and that's what we call flash therapy.

But to be able to deliver FLASH, you need to have a very powerful X ray radiation system to be able to do that. And up to this point there's no, no linear accelerator that able deliver that kind of power that one need.

That's incredible. Yeah. You know, on the TibaRay site and everywhere that PR has picked it up, you mentioned curing cancer in a flash. What is that? Flash radiation therapy. Specifically you mentioned that it targets the bad cells. It targets the ones of course affected by cancer and leaves the other others alone. But how is that possible?

So we possible because I think with the team, Dr. Sami Tantawi 35 years working at SLAC, they understand how linear accelerator work. But the SLAC is 2 mile long. So when Bill Loo come to Sami and say hey, can you design me a smaller accelerator that very powerful, I don't want it to be 2 mile long, 2 foot long. And Sami said yes, it can be designed. From all what he learned during a SLAC. He know how to be able to reduce the size of the linear accelerator and also capable deliver a very high dose and very powerful dose.

And that's how now I think it's possible the linear accelerator that TibaRay invent. Actually there's no new design in linear accelerator for the last 60 years. This is the first new design linear accelerator in 60 years. And that's what what TibaRay is behind.

Why? Why not? It seems as though this is is one of the, I don't want to say last frontier of innovation. But why has this not been touched over 60 years? That seems crazy.

That seems crazy. But it takes, you know, I think we're lucky to have Dr. Sami Tantawi working at SLAC and all the knowledge that he Learned over the 35 years because. And people have the old technology that was invented in the 1960s and it seemed to work, but it does, you know, radiation a certain way, but it's not able to. To develop to have the dose rate required to do this kind of treatment. Yeah, until now. And that TibaRay we finally were able to do that.

And another way you cannot just do with one beam to deliver flash you need to have to get that amount of dose. You need to have multiple like an array of linear accelerator together to be able to deliver in a very short time, short pulse deliver that kind of dose rate. So.

That dose rate is less than a second. Correct. Like how, how fast does that flash?

Right now we seem, we think about less than a second. 0.3 Second or something like that will be, you know, or even less A normal radiation treatment take minutes because to minimize radiation on patient, they rotate the patient at different angle and they start treating. The idea behind is you treat the cancer cell multiple times at different angle. Where the good cell, you only hit it once basically. And it will take maybe three minutes to do the full cycle. You have the patient sit on the bed and then they have a gantry system that go around with a single oscillator that keep shooting at different angle.

And the whole treatment can take up to three minutes. And sometime now patient had to come back, maybe even up to 30 more treatment to be able to complete the entire sequence. So the idea we have with flash therapy is when this thing get more mature, the whole idea is eventually you can do the entire treatment in one session because you're able to deliver all the dose required to kill the cancer in just one session. And that's what we're all working towards.

Well, that's where the confidence in the team comes from. Right. Is that they're the best of the best in this space. In order to solve that, man, that must make it really exciting to come to work every day.

Yes.

You're surrounded by other brilliant people. I mean that is humbling.

I have more PhD in the same roof than per capita anywhere else.

So talk a little bit about the milestones that have been achieved so far. You mentioned that the company was started in I think 2014, maybe even earlier than that. And it's been coming along like every, you know, there, there continue to be milestones to, to get this treatment in place. You know, what are some of the, of the really important ones that TibaRay has hit recently?

Yeah, TibaRay is lucky. I think early on we're able to get, we have $13 million grant from the government over you know, the 10 year period. And with that initial money we are able to develop all the technology that we are able to use today. All the linac technology development are done with that grant. So that probably one of the key milestone that the company has. The second thing that I think is very important too is we've been a research and development company all along where academic company.

You know, we, we do a lot of grant and we write a lot of papers but we're not set up to be able to take a product on a commercial basis. So after, you know, I think now I can say that, you know that we are ready now to transition the company from R and D phase into more commercial printing company. So we're happy that that's probably the second big milestone that you see. And the third one is we now have a partnership with Leo Cancer care, this company that has a very creative way of treating cancer.

They provide a chair. So the patient sit on the chair in the vertical position instead of lying horizontally like the traditional treatment. So the industry now start really taking attention, pay attention to this new way of doing and we partner with them. Actually we have initial order to Leo Cancer Care to provide them our linear accelerator into their system, the vertical chair system they call GRACE, which constitute with the chair and also a CT scanner. And we will be the provider of the linear accelerator.

What does that chair do that's different than being laying prone?

I think study has shown that the patient are much more comfortable in a standing position versus on the horizontal position. And the way we design accelerator, we have the linac surrounding the patient. This is open. You don't have to go inside enclosed system like, you know, inside a gantry system and things like that. Patients are much more comfortable and treatment is done much better that way.

Yeah. What makes the mission so important for you for you to come out of retirement to some degree dividing some time between TibaRay and Vita imaging? What makes this so important to you personally?

So my, you know, in this late my career now I'm my. I'm not. So, you know, I was fortunate to be able to involve and, you know, start and make very successful companies in the past. But to me now it's much more important that I spend in the time that I have in doing something really useful that good for the society. And cancer treatment is very intriguing because it touch everybody. Two in five who have cancer in their lifetime. So it will touch everybody. You will have family, relatives that will have some kind of cancer.

So to me, if we can do something, and I was drawn to TibaRay with the tagline that they have is curing cancer in a flash. So our mission is not just to treat cancer, but to actually cure cancer. I think the flash technology that TibaRay working on has a very, very good possibility that that day will come where you can actually cure cancer instead of treating. Meaning you don't have to five years later, you don't have to come back because the cancer start again.

That's what happened a lot now. So hopefully with our new cancer treatment, you do once and that's it, you don't have to come back.

Right. That would be incredible, truly. So what stands in the way today from it being adopted from, you know, broader clinical use or, you know, is there a particular moment that's coming up that's important for TibaRay to have this be part of clinical use.

Yeah. So there's still a lot of work to be done. I believe that we have pretty much de risk how to implement linear accelerator. We know how to do it but we still have to really scale the company. We have a very small team now. So to be able to take this product into market we need to really ramp up hiring more people, enhance our manufacturing capacity. Does all those be able to produce this in volume? So those are the things that. But it's more execution than having to try to solve a technical problem.

I think I'm pretty convinced now that all the technology hurdle has been resolved. So right now it's just measure of scaling up and execution. And once you have that we need to provide, we like to be able to provide a platform to all these doctors and things like that for them to start doing more clinical trial on real patients. You know, so before you can really deploy this, you need to go through a whole clinical phase. We like to be able to develop, you know, provide all the platform for us to do there and hopefully a year, two years from now there's enough study done that you know, flash can be done on real patient once they pass clinical validation.

That's, that's inspiring. It's incredible to, to hear, you know, how far you've come so far and the team and what they've done and it's so exciting to hear about the next steps and stages. Albeit it's going like you mentioned, take work. It's also going to take capital. And you mentioned previously that TibaRay has raised over $30 million from both other non dilutive funds and grants as well as previous investments like yours personally. Recently you also decided to open an opportunity to give the community the chance to invest in TibaRay and, and go through a regulation crowdfunding.

What was the thought process behind that? And you know, you know, maybe a little bit more detail about what those funds would be used for.

Yeah. So currently we raising, we hope to raise around this round about 10 million. So we do parallel, we do both in regular series a, you know, Reg D and also we also have crowdfunding in parallel. The idea behind crowdfunding we want to create a new community, smaller investors but people who are more not so much interested in return investment but they also be part of something to help how cancer will be treated acute in the future. So we hope to start that, you know, create this whole community that will be, you know, participate with us in this Whole mission of curing cancer in a flash.

So, so that's the idea behind what.

Is the feedback been like so far.

From investors been very positive. I mean, people really like what we do.

Curing cancer. Yes. That is, they, they love that. I'm sure that's wonderful. Yeah. The other investors too. Do they relate it to personal experience? Do they share, you know, what's happened to them, you know, talk a little bit about how that's made the team, you know, feel as they are all pulling in the same direction and working towards this cure?

Yeah. So we, you know, our co founder like Bill Loo and Peter Maxim, they, you know, they treat cancer patients every day and they see the pain or suffering that everyone do. So their entire mission is how to be able to cure it. So it's really, you know, very important to the founding team at TibaRay. And we have a lot of, we are lucky at TibaRay. We have a lot of angel investors that really believe in the company and in some way they want to help cure cancer and they also have family who are affected by it.

So to them it's something that help participate in helping the cause and doing better. So very happy to have this sort of investor in the early days of TibaRay and hopefully we build this whole new community and together as a whole community, we'll be able to resolve and give a better treatment of cancer in the future.

Yeah, I love the idea of the community rounds because it really does tap into the idea that folks that are affected by the mission can also participate in the success. And there's so much opportunity there because often they're the ones that are asked to do so much because they've been affected by some, by, by cancer in some way, either personally or close family or friend, and they're out there doing a lot of support for those individuals. And this, this is so exciting because there just are not many opportunities to look at it from a positive and what good can be done.

And so this is, this is really exciting to be part of and I'm, I'm so thankful.

So I, I look at, you know, I look at you and now I'm, I'm asking what does it look like as this comes together? You know, what does the road ahead look like and what does success look like for TibaRay?

I think success, I think come in many forms. To me from the technology point of view, success is able to take such a compelling idea and turn into a product, go through all the things, mature enough, able to build in volume and turn into a product that's from the technology viewpoint, from the business viewpoint is once you have that, how can you build a very successful medical device company out of this? So those are the two things I think is, you know, how we judge how good we are doing and what success look like.

But, but I think the most important thing is at the end is the patient. The patient I think will be the most important thing to measure success. My dream is that one day you can work in cancer treatment that powered by TibaRay FLASH, you can go in and get your cancer cure in one session, don't have to go back. And it will be a very precise, high dose, accurate conformal treatment of your cancer. We treat it and there's no side effect [unclear: please verify this statement against the recording].

So in one treatment, that's my dream. In one treatment, you walk in, you get taken care of and that cancer that you have, that you cure will never come back. And that's here. We want to get to that day, hopefully not too far away.

That's incredible and I'm so thankful to have you on today to share your personal story, the journey that you, you know, you've taken to get here and introduce us to TibaRay for the podcast. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to have some of the folks on that you mentioned, like Bill Loo and you know, and Peter as well as, as some of the others. So it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to this journey and, and not just me personally learning more about it, but sharing it with our community because this is such a, an incredible mission and something that, you know, we're thankful to be a part of.

So, you know, congratulations on all the success, Thinh and thank you so much for joining me today.

Okay, thanks Justin. Yeah, thank you. Bye bye.

On behalf of my guest today, Thinh Tran, the CEO of TibaRay, you've been watching our show and we look forward to you seeing us in the future. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Bye Bye.