Laura Yecies | CEO, Bone Health Technologies | Osteoporosis, Fostering Better Patient Support, & Leadership Lessons

Laura Yecies, CEO of Bone Health Technologies, shares her journey from a tech and marketing background to leading a company that's revolutionizing the treatment of osteoporosis with Osteoboost, a wearable device using NASA-proven vibration technology. Laura's diverse professional experiences highlights her personal motivation to improve people's lives. Her story illustrates a passionate commitment to developing non-pharmacological treatments and fostering better patient support, emphasizing the significance of technology in advancing healthcare.

Guest links: www.bonehealthtech.com

Charity supported: Equal Justice Initiative

Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Host: Lindsey Dinneen
Editing: Marketing Wise
Producer: Velentium

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Episode 026 - Laura Yecies

[00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.

[00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.

[00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.

[00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.

[00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.

[00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.

[00:00:50] Hello, and welcome to The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I'm excited to introduce you to my guests today, Laura Yecies. Laura is the CEO of Bone Health Technologies, makers of Osteoboost, which is the first clinically proven, safe and effective non-pharmacological treatment for low bone density. Osteoboost puts NASA proven vibration in a wearable, comfortable, convenient belt form factor. Laura, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to chat with you.

[00:01:23] Laura Yecies: Me too. Really happy to be here.

[00:01:25] Lindsey Dinneen: Wonderful. I would love, if you wouldn't mind starting off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and maybe what led you to the medtech industry.

[00:01:35] Laura Yecies: Sure. My background's in business and tech primarily. I went to college on the east coast and after business school, in 1988, I came to California. I grew up in New York, but my husband was from California and so we decided to give it a shot out here for a little bit. And I started working in tech doing marketing, first in enterprise software, relational databases, and developer tools. And then I moved into consumer softwares, started off at Netscape. And when I was at Netscape, I took on larger roles and responsibilities. I was Vice President of the browser division, managing a group of over 200 engineers, and we were responsible for Netscape 6.1 and 7.0 and the Mozilla spin out. I then led the mail team at Yahoo, when we were sort of the number one email provider.

[00:02:30] And then I also worked at a tech startup and spent some time at Checkpoint, which is a large internet security company heading up marketing there as well. And then I was CEO of two different tech startups, Sugar Sink, which is a sink and share company, and that's now owned by J2 Global. And then I became CEO of a small company called Catch. We had a note taking app and we were able to sell that company to Apple and the Catch team became the core part of the Apple Watch team. So that was very exciting.

[00:03:03] And after that when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I worked on some ideas for my own startup with some colleagues and, some things that happened in my life that really drew my attention to healthcare. And also I grew up in a family of doctors, both my parents, two of my siblings. And then at that point, my two older sons were in medicine, and I'd always been interested in that and had a bit of flexibility because of this exit and decided that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a pivot. And so I switched and started looking for roles in the healthcare area.

[00:03:40] And everyone sort of wanted me to work in more of the pure software side of healthcare more of the billing and receiving and revenue cycle management and staffing and logistics. And that's interesting and important. But I found that I really wanted to work on something that had directly a health or therapeutic or diagnostic benefit for patients. And so I started consulting. I consulted with companies in the genomics field, MS. And then I was lucky to get my first CEO role at a concussion diagnostic company. And that company, now called NeuroSync had great science. I think they went on to get an FDA clearance for diagnosing concussions. But after a couple years, the board and I had different ideas of what to do. It sometimes happens.

[00:04:26] And so I left, I spent a year consulting at Achille Interactive and at Fabric Genomics and a couple of other companies while I was looking for my next CEO role, and I was really excited to have the opportunity, just over three years ago, to join Bone Health Technologies. I knew a marketing consultant that had been there and was connected to the company, and as soon as I saw what they were trying to work on and solve and have, frankly really make a dent in this issue of osteoporosis, I was interested.

[00:05:01] I mentioned that my parents were doctors. My dad had been Medical Director of a nursing home, and I worked a couple of summers during college as a nurse's assistant. And people seemed, my recollection was that they were in the nursing home typically for one of two reasons: Alzheimer's, or they broke their hip. And, my grandmother had osteoporosis. I'm a small person. It certainly runs in my family. And so I recognized that it was an important problem, a big problem, an unsolved problem.

[00:05:30] And so my really, my only question for the company was, does it work? We had this innovative treatment for osteoporosis and the founders shared the data with me. It was not a sure thing, but I found the data to be very compelling and so I joined and we're three years down the line from that point in time. And one of the most important things that's happened is we finished our pivotal trial and we got the results. Now it takes a while to do a trial for osteoporosis, but we had excellent results from the treatment.

[00:06:03] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for telling us a little bit about your background. You have such an incredibly diverse background. So many questions just emerge from that, but I would love to hear about your current device and the way that it works and whatnot.

[00:06:18] Laura Yecies: Sure. So it's a wearable treatment. It's a belt that has a vibration pack that you wear over your lumbar spine, specifically at the sacrum. And so we're applying vibration to the hips and lower back, and those are to the key areas that experience fractures from osteoporosis. So hip fractures are very life impacting, deadly for almost 30% of people. Spine fractures, you can imagine, are very painful and debilitating. And so we're focusing vibration, which has been proven to improve bone density on the vulnerable anatomy. And, there's a body of evidence from NASA where they did whole body vibration to try to reduce bone loss for astronauts.

[00:07:05] So when astronauts spend time in space, they lose bone. And what they proved was that standing on a whole body vibration platform can improve bone density. But those companies that make these platforms, they have very good products. I'm a believer in the science, but those products haven't gone mainstream. They're people that tend to not comply very well with them, and the good ones are expensive. And so we're aiming to take this proven science-- and by the way, before NASA did the whole body vibration studies, there's a lot of studies in animals and cellular research showing the same thing. There's really a lot of science to support this.

[00:07:45] But our device, we aim to solve the ease of use challenge by making it something wearable. And then most importantly, the vibration is applied locally to the vulnerable anatomy. So that's what we do. And what we showed in our pivotal trial is that we reduced bone loss by over 80%. So we measured the lumbar vertebra with a CT scan at baseline in one year. And the patients who were on the active treatment lost about a half a percent of their bone strength. And those on the placebo or sham treatment lost just under 3%. Our patients, we kept them clinically, essentially stable and slow this bone loss so you don't outlive your bones.

[00:08:29] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. That's incredible. I am. . I . I say this a lot and I know it's used as sort of a more tongue in cheek manner, but for real, what a time to be alive. That is so cool how so much innovation is just constantly coming through and the, there's this, people like you are doing this incredible work to bring new devices that are really impacting patients' lives. So that sounds like incredible results. You guys must have been thrilled with those numbers

[00:09:03] Laura Yecies: Yes. And this was really our first attempt. We had done a pilot study, but this was our first one year study and we just applied for a grant to do another study with in basically a longer treatment duration, essentially a higher dose of vibration. So from my point of view, this is a great result, but this is like the beginning.

[00:09:26] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yes, which is so exciting too, because it just leaves room for so much more as you continue to go down this path. So that is exciting. And so that's your next step. I'm imagining, is this, next level of treatment and what do you envision the company to, to do or be doing in say, three, five years from now?

[00:09:50] Laura Yecies: So in three to five years, my goal is first of all, that we have this device very widely used in the market or with patients. So there's 52 million patients with osteopenia and other 12 million with osteoporosis. Our trial was for patients with osteopenia, and so there are a lot of patients out there who I think would benefit from this device. We also want to start to develop a relationship with those patients. Not just sell them a device, but support them in their overall bone health optimization. So we today have created an OsteoBoost application. So we help patients remember and comply and we remind them and give them encouragement to use the device. We help them get the optimum amount of calcium by tracking that exercise.

[00:10:41] And then, our vision is to add community and other elements of optimizing bone health and potentially to have other services. We never wanna get in the way of a patient's relationship with their doctor. So if their personal physician is supporting their treatment of their bone density issues, that's great. But in many cases they're not. And so we wanna have services available for that as well. And it's interesting if you look in the app store or look at a lot of startup activity, there's many companies doing these kinds of solutions for diabetes or cardiovascular disease or asthma or depression, but there's really not much out there for bone health. And yet it's really a key part of staying well and independent and living, living healthily, and it's such a common problem. So we're excited, that we have something unique, yet very much needed and not in a, in a small group it's not a rare thing. It's very common.

[00:11:46] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And is your plan to sell directly to the consumers or will you be going through, insurance companies, doctors, whatnot, or do have you gotten that far yet?

[00:12:00] Laura Yecies: We haven't finalized the details of that. So we're not ready to share them. But but what I will say that I think we are quite certain about is first of all, it is a prescription device, so there will be a doctor involved to write prescription and some of the details, and we will certainly have a way where the personal physician can write that prescription. We may have some other options for patients, but a doctor's involved, which is appropriate because they have a condition that puts them at risk of fractures and other health issues.

[00:12:34] But the other thing that I am confident about is that we are going to want to appeal to patients to generate interest. We have seen tremendous inbound interest into the company with not a lot of marketing. I mean, I've done things like this podcast and I speak at conferences, but we have not spent money on advertising or things like that because the product's not on the market yet. And I hear from patients all the time, they are searching for an innovative treatment. They're searching for ways safely to slow their bone loss. I, I'm a member of a number of Facebook groups for osteoporosis and hear how patients talk about this, and so I believe there's tremendous interest by patients and that we wanna tap into that to build the business.

[00:13:24] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yes. And part of the reason I brought it up, the question in the first place was exactly for that reason. I was thinking there's gotta be so many people who are searching for a solution and yours is so innovative and accessible. I'm so excited to see where it leads. Yeah, that's gonna be incredible. And it really struck me, you talked about your background being heavily in marketing back in the day and so obviously those skills are still very present today. So it's fun to see how, elements of things that you've done throughout your life will lead to this success, in this next endeavor.

[00:14:01] And I'm actually very curious also. yoU talked about some really amazing positions that you had, and then those led you to have these CEO roles. So I'm curious, how was that transition for you stepping into your first CEO opportunity? Was that exciting, daunting, energizing? How are you feeling in those moments?

[00:14:25] Laura Yecies: Those, you captured many of the feelings. So you know, a bit of context. So it was the very end of 2008. And so the world from a financial markets point of view was kind of falling apart. I had led large groups. I had been a general manager, but I'd not been CEO. I had never raised money before, and so I stepped into a company that had been through some trauma. They were supposed to be acquired. The acquisition, the plug got pulled out because of the markets collapsing. The founder had left before I got there. So it was, the company was really in a crisis, I would say. The employees were very afraid for their jobs. We didn't have money and, the financial markets were terrible. It was really challenging to go in and stabilize things and kind of pull the team together and then, build the business in a challenging environment.

[00:15:23] Existing investors gave us some runway, but it was limited. They had already kind of been in investing quite a while, and so I had to find outside money, which in 2009 was challenging. But it was exciting. I loved the product that I was working on. I had been a user of it. It was something that was in my wheelhouse of, I had worked quite a bit on productivity tools for workers and business people and consumers. And, and I, we had great technology. So it was exciting. But it was It was intense. But we built that business. When I joined we had essentially zero revenue and we got to essentially in the 20 million run rate in four years.

[00:16:07] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow.

[00:16:08] Laura Yecies: That was great.

[00:16:09] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. That is great. That is kudos to you and your leadership for being able to step into such a challenging situation and it around. Yeah.

[00:16:19] Laura Yecies: You know, one thing I learned then, because we did have all these challenges, but we also had a market where the latent demand and need was growing. It was a rising tide. Just to be specific a bit-- and then I'm gonna give an analogy to bone health technologies. So at that time we had a sink and share solution. We were a little bit more niche, but you could think of it as it was quite similar to a Dropbox or a box.box, what was then box.net, and that was also the time that iPhone sales, laptop, Netbook sales were growing very quickly, and so the need to get your data into the cloud was I mean, you could argue that it was always useful to be able to access your data remotely. And there, there were always kind of some niche solutions like, Go To My PC.

[00:17:12] But suddenly, because the environment was changing where people were having these devices the market demand and the market opportunity was growing. Okay, so fast forward, oh, 14 years, 13 years, and osteoporosis and osteopenia is growing. But the other thing that's growing is awareness. And our target demographic, postmenopausal women, I'd say our typical patients are in their sixties. I don't know, what's the joke? Sixties is the new fifties or the new forties. Like these are women who wanna stay active, right? They may be still working if they're not working. They're very involved in the community, they're very involved with their family. They may have, they may be at a point where they've educated their children, they've saved some money, so they have disposable income that they want to take care of their health. And so it's a demographic that spends money on their health. They also are very social and community minded.

[00:18:16] Let's imagine a six year old woman with osteopenia and she's going on a hike or a walk with her girlfriends. What are the chances that her female friends also have osteopenia That's probably 80%, right? If similar in age, and so I see this set of patients and who we're going after as being very interested in safe non-pharmacological solutions that are easy to access. You can call it the Amazon effect. They're used to things being convenient and seamless. And they, they want this type of solution to help them stay kind of active and healthy and be in a way preventative of the need for medication. So I see this as in a very different way than Sugar Sink, still a rising tide market.

[00:19:08] And oh, by the way, at the same time talking about health concerns related to menopause is suddenly, and as it should be not just socially acceptable. It's a hot topic, right? Oprah, Michelle Obama, Gwyneth Paltrow, they're all talking about menopause symptoms. And by the way, osteopenia is very much a result of menopause. You're losing bone density slowly typically starting your thirties, but in the five years after menopause, there's rapid bone loss, and that's typically when women get into that osteopenia stage.

[00:19:44] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:19:46] Laura Yecies: Oh, by the way the women who are in their sixties today, when they were going through menopause 10 years ago, or 12 years ago, or 15 years ago, they were told no. Hormone replacement therapy unless you're completely miserable because of findings in the Women's Health Initiative. And that pendulum has now swung back to a more moderate position. But today's 60 somethings are less likely to be on HRT or to have even been on HRT, so they're more likely to have bone loss.

[00:20:21] Lindsey Dinneen: . Yeah. And. Speaking of this, and you were talking about thankfully, there's much more awareness, there's much more conversation happening about women and menopause and going through symptoms and whatnot. I've just been reading lately how much it is still a struggle despite that for women founders, especially of medtech companies to get the funding that they need. And I'm curious, what was your experience when you were fundraising, what were your challenges? What were your triumphs and maybe even suggestions for other women founders who are gonna be going through this soon too?

[00:21:01] Laura Yecies: There's no controlled experiments on these questions, right? So if my fundraise on a difficulty from zero to 10 was a seven. Right? Would it have been easier or harder if I were a man? I really don't know. I know that women, there's less funding going to women, but I have felt that, at least for this company, I don't have any reason to assume that to be the case. If anything. I believe that investors, many of them, they even talk about this, they're looking for founder product or founder market fit. And I'm not the founder of the company. I was brought in as CEO after it started, but I feel like a founder. I operate that way. This is my adopted child. And I love it no less than if...

[00:21:56] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, of course.

[00:21:58] Laura Yecies: ...if I gave birth to it.

[00:21:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Right, right.

[00:22:00] Laura Yecies: I am a user of our product, right? And I empathize with very deeply and connect with our patients. And I think if a, a 25 year old man were sitting in my shoes trying to raise money, maybe he would've even had a harder time. So I, I know. I don't know. Women's health has been under invested in, I believe it still is under invested in. And why is that? It's very hard to tell. I will also say that devices are a harder field to raise money for, independent of gender. There's more investors investing in digital solutions or pharma than devices for a variety of reasons. The size of the device investor market has shrunk.

[00:22:51] And I think that's unfortunate and because I think there are a lot of solutions that are less invasive, less systemically invasive. Osteoporosis or osteopenia is one example. But we see devices for other women's health areas like pelvic prolapse or stress urinary incontinence, or a number of things that are of concern to women, but also things that affect everyone like migraine and these device solutions are very safe. They don't completely replace pharmacological solutions, but I think it's really important to have other options and so I do think it has been challenging, especially in the early stages in that field.

[00:23:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, exactly. Yeah. But I thank you for your perspective too. It is, I think quite refreshing to hear from somebody who was a woman who went through this raising capital and actually did have a really good experience, 'cause you hear so many of the opposite, so sometimes it's easy to go, "oh gosh, it's not changing fast enough." But it is so encouraging to hear from somebody who has had a really good experience, so I appreciate your telling me about that.

[00:24:03] Laura Yecies: Yeah. And for women's health if most of the investors are men, a good investor should be able to appreciate concerns outside of their personal experience. But I think human nature is such that we tend to connect with problems that we've had. And so the fact that most of the VCs and investors are men makes the whole women's health field, I think, more challenging for fundraising. But we'll see. That's changing too.

[00:24:35] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. . So what are some things that you are excited about, either personally or professionally in the coming, coming couple of years? What are, what's gonna, what's gonna get you up and ready to just tackle the day?

[00:24:52] Laura Yecies: Yeah. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about before that most of my career I've spent more on the commercial and marketing and sales side. And since I've been at BHT, we've been very much in sort of science and research mode, which has been very interesting, fascinating. I've enjoyed it, but I'm really looking forward to this next phase where we can get the product on the market. I mean, I hear from patients multiple times per week. "When is this gonna be available?" And I don't like saying "it's not available today."

[00:25:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. . Yeah.

[00:25:29] Laura Yecies: I wanna say today, and that feels tantalizingly close. I'm very much looking forward to that. And, first doing it at a small scale, we have a waiting list of patients. And I wanna, kind of put a shout out on that. We will first go to the waiting list. To make the product available and people can sign up at bonehealthtech.com and the front of the line are the patients who, the citizen scientists who participated in our pivotal trial, and they're, we have another trial going on. They're first in line. They have contributed so much and did it really out of a total generosity of spirit. They had minimal compensation. And then of course to get to the next level of, hitting the gas and growing the availability and distribution of the product. I'm imagining, I talked about hiking before and that's because I love to hike and I'm imagining, osteo boosting hiking groups or something like that. I know that sounded corny, but.

[00:26:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love it. . No, it's fun. And that is so exciting. I am really cheering you on as this next phase comes to reality. That's, yeah. That's incredible. Pivoting just for fun, imagine you were to be offered an opportunity to teach a masterclass on any subject you want. It doesn't have to be in your industry, but it can be, and you'd get a million dollars for doing so. What would you choose to teach and why?

[00:27:00] Laura Yecies: I think I would want to teach around marketing and commercialization, sort of product management, and then really the full life cycle of bringing products to market. I've been doing it for 35 years. I hate to say that. Sounds like a long time in various formats. I mean, I've, some of it has leaned heavily on the digital marketing. Some of it has been more B2B sales, business development. So I feel like I've spent a lot of time in that area and I have lessons learned to share. I actually enjoy teaching. I spent some time, when I first came out to the Bay Area, I taught marketing at Santa Clara Business School. I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed working in the marketing field more, and I had young kids, and so between a full-time job and kids, there wasn't also time for teaching. But I would love to get back and do more teaching. And I do executive coaching and I informally coach and that's a very rewarding part of my job.

[00:28:07] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. That sounds like a great masterclass and very needed. So we would sign up for that one.

[00:28:13] Laura Yecies: Thank you.

[00:28:15] Lindsey Dinneen: And how do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world?

[00:28:22] Laura Yecies: Oh I mean, I'm a family first person and I am lucky to have great husband, four kids and today's six grandchildren. And the first thing that goes through my mind when you ask that question is, to have had just a really positive impact on them and the other family members and friends in my life. And then, work-wise if this device or our solution is effective it provoke small changes, but in our field, small changes over time can have big results. And, if we've prevented fractures and help people, I would be really honored to be able to be known for that.

[00:29:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, of course. And final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?

[00:29:10] Laura Yecies: My grandchildren getting to play with 'em when they want, when they come through the door every Friday.

[00:29:16] Lindsey Dinneen: Aw.

[00:29:17] Laura Yecies: We have a family dinner almost every Friday night. And I look forward to it all week and when they walk through the door. So that's my mental image and I for sure smile with that one.

[00:29:29] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that . What a great tradition. And I, it's so lovely that all your families, or at least some of your family, is close enough to be able to do that. How fun.

[00:29:40] Laura Yecies: Yes, it's really fun. It's fun. And I grew up with that so I'm trying to continue, with the next generation.

[00:29:47] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yes. That's fantastic. Laura, thank you so much for joining us and sharing about yourself, your background, and the incredible work that you and your company are doing. I'm so excited to see it come to market and just really impact lives. Thank you for the work you're doing.

[00:30:06] Laura Yecies: Oh, my pleasure. And thanks for the chance to share it with people and for inviting me onto your show.

[00:30:11] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course, and we're so honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to the Equal Justice Initiative, which provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongfully convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial. So thank you so much for choosing that charity to support. We just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.

[00:30:40] Laura Yecies: Thank you very much.

[00:30:41] Lindsey Dinneen: Thank you, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.

[00:30:55] Ben Trombold: ​ The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.