Lebanon’s Tripoli biomedical entrepreneur, Ziad Sankari recognized by President Obama
Alexis Lai/The Daily Star/ Jul. 06, 2015
BEIRUT: “We want to empower pioneers like Ziad Sankari,” U.S. President Obama said in a speech on global entrepreneurship in May. “Today he’s improving the way we respond to cardiac incidents, which will have enormous ramifications not just in places like Lebanon but potentially all around the world,” Obama continued. “So, thank you, Ziad, for helping to save lives.”The high-level shoutout was all the more impressive, as the Tripoli native, who will turn 30 this year, was one of just five entrepreneurs highlighted.
The core product of Sankari’s company, CardioDiagnostics, is a 120-gram device that offers real-time, continuous analysis of the wearer’s heart ECG to detect arrhythmias (irregular beatings). While CardioDiagnostics began operations two and half years ago, Sankari traces his inspiration to losing his father to a heart attack at age 17.
“I wanted to create a technology to monitor heart patients 24/7, [with] an alert system if something happens,” he told The Daily Star. “The vision was there after my father’s death, but I didn’t know how to get to it.” More pieces of the puzzle fell into place after he won a Fulbright scholarship to attend graduate school in the United States. Earning two master’s degrees in engineering at Ohio State University, Sankari researched signal processing; specifically, how to analyze the brain’s ECG signals to detect problems.
“It became clear that you can take an idea from just a concept … all the way to the market,” said Sankari, who got involved with the business school’s technology entrepreneurship institute.
His team won the institute’s business plan competition for their product measuring tissue oxygenation – useful in wound care diagnostics. Their venture went on to attract close to a $1 million in investment, though Sankari left early on due to conflicting visions.
“After I left, I was like, why don’t we start CardioDiagnostics with [signal processing applied to the heart] and put it into a device for everyone to be able to wear such a technology – portable, wireless, 24/7 ECG monitoring.” The device would be a diagnostic tool for doctors who suspected their patients suffered from arrhythmias. Having garnered the core technical and business skills for his idea, Sankari returned to Lebanon in 2011. “I was trying to … figure out how we can start the company from here.” The next step was to develop the hardware. He turned to the Qatar Foundation’s “Stars of Science,” a televised science innovation competition. The intensive five-month program “provided an incredible abundance of resources in terms of expertise, access to technology and manufacturing,” he recalled, crediting it for supporting his creation of a prototype. His second-place winnings of $150,000 were not enough to start his company though.
Sankari spent the next nine months refining his business plan and trying to raise funds to no avail. “It was a bit premature at that time in Qatar to raise technology venture capital,” he said. “I was so frustrated because I wanted to create something from the region.”
Meanwhile, he received a boost from another U.S. State Department program – winning first prize at the prestigious Global Innovation through Science and Technology entrepreneurship competition. “GIST was very credible … afterward, we got a lot of people potentially interested in funding us,” including one that would prove to be decisive. In late 2012, when Sankari was preparing to return to the U.S. to try raising funds, he was invited to meet with Lebanon’s Berytech Fund. “I was thinking, if I couldn’t raise equity in the wealthiest country by a GDP-per-capita standard, would it be possible in Lebanon?”
“The cardiologist [who helped Berytech evaluate his plan] was saying, ‘I always wondered why they didn’t have such a thing in the U.S.,’” Sankari recalled. “The next day, they called us to come take the check. We started with a bit more than half a million dollars in investment.”Funding woes solved, the venture, headquartered in Lebanon, was nonetheless “a very bumpy ride.”“When we started [in 2013], we had serious problems with the infrastructure, mainly the Internet … We had difficulty calling the U.S. [with Skype] and sustaining our relationship with potential customers and suppliers.”“But the biggest challenge has been talent acquisition,” Sankari said, citing great difficulty in finding talented engineers with a strong work ethic and sense of ambition. “The mentality [in Lebanon] is really geared toward safe employment that does not necessarily challenge you but is going to reward you sufficiently.” Even though CardioDiagnostics offered higher salaries, several candidates ultimately declined to join it because the work was much more demanding.
Sankari had set up his office in Tripoli, hoping to create job opportunities in his hometown. He “soon realized things [could not] scale up without moving to Beirut.” There, he finally found a few engineers up to his standards. Today he has around a dozen staff in Beirut, and contracts with 24/7 monitoring centers and business development professionals in the U.S – the key market for LifeSense Arrhythmia.
The pocket-sized box, which is wired to three electrodes on the chest, is continuously worn for up to 30 days, which is a sufficient period to detect most types of arrhythmias. The heart’s ECG data is analyzed 24/7 inside the device and any abnormalities trigger an alert at monitoring centers. The centers will also review the data and produce reports for cardiologists.While reading ECGs is nothing new, CardioDiagnostics’ intellectual property is “making sense of that data, creating easy monitoring techniques and continuous, real-time analysis,” through algorithms, analytics and signal processing techniques.
As with all cardiac-monitoring devices, LifeSense Arrhythmia is FDA-approved only for nonlethal arrhythmias, which do not require immediate medical attention, but can lead to fatal conditions if untreated. For example, atrial fibrillation may cause clots that could travel to the brain and result in a stroke.Patients do not purchase the device; they rent it from their doctor or a monitoring center upon professional recommendation, and pay for up to 30 days of a monitoring center’s services. In the U.S., this is fully insured, thanks to a well-established arrhythmia monitoring industry.
While the device has hundreds of users in the U.S., Sankari said it has just tens in Lebanon. The overall user fee for the device and monitoring services is a few hundred dollars, but only 48 hours of monitoring is covered by insurance. CardioDiagnostics, who runs its own day monitoring center in Beirut, will ramp up to 24/7 monitoring operations once the device gains traction in the Middle East. It recently signed distribution deals in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The company is “almost breaking even” and will soon seek to raise about $9-10 million through venture capital in Lebanon and the U.S. It is also readying a new device for release next year. LifeSense Ischemia is a wireless patch designed for extended monitoring of heart attack patients, who have a particularly high risk of a recurrent attack after hospital discharge. Sankari also has a third product in mind, after realizing that heart ECG monitoring data reveals users’ waking hours, stress levels and food consumption.
He envisions a device to help healthy people stay healthy; for example, through smartphone alerts about their real-time calorie consumption. He believes his startup was highlighted by Obama not only because of his involvement with U.S. State Department programs, but because “it was able to scale up very quickly, it has a very particular story, and … [I took my] words into action.”While LifeSense Arrhythmia isn’t intended to detect life-threatening conditions, he noted that U.S. monitoring centers reported three cases in which alerts led them to call for emergency services.“I come from one of the poorest cities on the Mediterranean … and I was able to turn [my father’s death] into drive and motivation to create a company that … can literally actually save lives.”
