Roger Chylla and Thomas Mackie of HealthMyne

April 17, 2020March 2, 2021 thetechtribune

An exclusive Tech Tribune Q&A with Roger Chylla (co-founder and CTO) and Thomas Mackie (co-founder and chairman) of HealthMyne, which was honored in our:

Tell us the origin story of HealthMyne – what problem were you trying to solve and why?

HealthMyne is composed of founders who successfully worked together previously in radiology and radiotherapy startups. We were eager to come together again in a rapidly growing area of healthcare data analytics. Our first idea was to start a data warehousing company and get involved with data mining. We attended a workshop at a HIMSS (Healthcare Information Management Systems Society) meeting in 2013 that had 500 other attendees and were told “whatever you do, don’t work with medical images because it will trigger FDA 510(k) clearance”. Because all of us had experience with both medical images and FDA regulation, we interpreted this negative advice as revealing an unmet need for medical imaging data mining. That naturally lead to HealthMyne and its focus on quantitative imaging metrics.

What was the biggest hurdle you encountered in your journey?

Fundraising is always a hurdle for a technology startup, but one of our biggest hurdles comes back to solving a key technological and clinical problem. From the beginning, we have known that the speed and accuracy of defining the boundary of lesions, a process known as segmentation, is key to driving more efficient clinical workflow, like tumor response protocols and lung cancer screening. We discovered that clinicians have slightly different interpretations of a tumor boundary and expect the software to both give them more consistent results across the care team and respond in a rapid, smart way to their directives about the location of a boundary in complex cases. These needs are in tension with one another.

In cases where lesion measurements are required, they are used to just drawing a ruler across the lesion. In the end, we decided to use the intuition they have developed over the years in drawing line segments as an input to our rapid precise metrics (RPM) technology. These broad strokes were enough guidance to satisfy their need for a boundary to be reshaped by their directives but also coarse enough to take little time from the clinician and provide greater algorithmic consistency of results across the care team.

What does the future hold for HealthMyne?

HealthMyne is pioneering applied radiomics capabilities, generating novel imaging data and insights to enhance clinical decision making, treatment planning, research workflows, and ultimately patient outcomes. HealthMyne will be the first to help healthcare providers and industry partners understand how to apply radiomic information to improved disease detection, therapeutic decisions, and prediction of response to therapy, as well as disease recurrence. HealthMyne’s technology, team, and supporting resources have the potential to positively affect patient care and outcomes, which is really exciting.

What are your thoughts on the local tech startup scene in Madison?

Madison recently featured in a Brookings Institute study as the #1 next hotbed for high tech companies. The University of Wisconsin is a top 10 research university in terms of federal grants. WARF is the dean of technology transfer organization in the US. The UW has a robust entrepreneurial education infrastructure in the School of Business, Discover to Product, the Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic, the Isthmus Project, and the Center for Technology Commercialization. Madison is not just a university town but has a state capital with a responsive Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and a growing life sciences startup scene with companies like Epic, Promega, Accuray, and GE Medical leading the way. It has been growing its investor community steadily and has a nationally ranked accelerator (gener8tor) and angel network (Wisconsin Investment Partners). Also, Starting Block and the UW Research Park have new startup incubator space, and it is safe place to live, has good schools, and usually ranks in the top 20 most livable cities to live. Madison is ready to rock and roll.

What’s your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Our expertise is healthcare technology and so our advice will be specific to that area. One should be addressing an important and timely health care need that not only improves clinical outcomes, but makes the care provider run more profitably and/or efficiently. The number one reason startups fail is that they are addressing a problem no one cares about.

Repeating a theme from serial entrepreneur Peter Thiel, a technology startup should ideally have an insight, something that you think you know and understand that others don’t. Investors often talk about “sustainable competitive advantage”, something that does not literally exist but answers their question as to why this innovation will be quickly adopted and not immediately copied by someone else.

If the technology is coming out of academia, ensure that at least one member of your technology team is 100% committed to the company. For example, a professor who retains his tenured appointment is frequently a co-founder but there must be another co-founder immersed in the technology who works full time on commercializing it and nothing else. A common formula for success here is that a staff scientist who has been leading the project in that lab leaves academia and joins the founding team with another founder having startup commercial experience.