Faculty Feature: Dr. anais rameau

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, Francis He and Nick Bartelo had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Anaïs Rameau, MD MPhil MS. Dr. Rameau received her MD from McGill University Faculty of Medicine and her residency at Stanford University. She completed her MPhil at Cambridge University in 2017 and her MS from Weill Cornell in 2022. She is currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of New Technologies in the Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at Weill. Her research lab, the Laryngology Innovation Lab, aims to disrupt and innovate the fields of voice, deglutition and airway science, via transdisciplinary collaborations with engineers, bio-acousticians, designers, and social scientists. She is also medical advisor to Perceptron Health, Inc. Dr. Rameau is founder of MyophonX, a company built around a novel medical device which gives a voice to people with limited phonation capacity. Dr. Rameau is pioneering the future of care for patients losing the ability to communicate through speech by developing novel machine learning methods. 

SVG: How did you become interested in entrepreneurship and what was the initial growth trajectory of your company?
 
Dr. Rameau: When I joined Cornell, I explored areas outside of clinical care such as the Red Bear Angels, an angel group that funds startups out of Cornell. This helped me develop an understanding of entrepreneurship at Cornell. I had autonomy as a faculty member, and this allowed me to pursue an invention which we are working on developing and ultimately commercializing.
Our device works by applying machine learning to surface Electromyography (EMG) signal for recognition of speech. COVID paused the company since we could not collect data. Fortunately, graduate students took over the project during the Accelerating Bioventure Innovation (ABI) course, won the pitch competition, and one became full time CEO. She was even accepted into the Cornell Tech Runway Startup Postdoc Program!

SVG: What was your experience securing funding without giving up too much equity when you started MyophonX? What will some of the income sources look like for the company in the relative short-term?

Dr. Rameau: In early stages, you seek non-dilutive funding so that you don’t have a major commitment to a funder. This allows you to invest your time developing the product without external pressure. BioVenture eLab provides free resources for companies which help you understand the legal structure of startups and how to divide your equity. Another free program that we used was ELab NYC, a six month training which concludes with pitching your company in front of investors from the city. A lot of people in our cohort have been extremely successful. 
We received a grant from the Clinical and Translational Science Center to pursue the early stage of the company, and we are currently applying for STTR funding. STTR or SBIR are similar to NIH grants given to small businesses. To write for these grants, free resources such as webinars can help, and it is even possible to hire consultants to help write them. Once we have a working prototype, our strategies for gaining funding might include going to patient groups for crowdfunding, or approaching angel investors or venture capital. In NYC, raising funding may be difficult because many investors are from finance and like to see a working product, but this is not always realistic in the life sciences.

SVG: How have new members joining the startup changed the trajectory of the company? How is equity dispersed throughout the company?

Dr. Rameau: A postdoc who was part of the ABI team, Monica Gertz, is now the CEO and has the energy and grit to make the product successful. She had the vision to see military applications for the technology. It takes time to build a team for a startup and it is important to partner with people you trust and have the same work ethic. 
There is equity that comes if you are a co-founder of a company using technology licensed at Cornell. When bringing in new co-founders, discussions about equity are important because you do not want people to feel they are not getting rewarded enough or others are getting over rewarded. For example, being a CEO is a full time job, and I am personally very happy to give substantial equity to this person even if they are a non-inventor to move the company forward.

SVG: MyophonX targets a relatively low price point for a medical device and it probably falls under the class I medical device which is less invasive and involves a shorter approval process. With this feature in mind, who are your target customers for this device?

Dr. Rameau: Our target consumer will depend on the final product because we are still exploring both the medical device and the consumer commercial pathways. For the medical pathway, the low hanging fruit would be patients who are incubated in the ICU. Initially, we aimed for patients who had a laryngectomy, but laryngectomy is performed infrequently because it’s directly related to smoking, making it a very small market nowadays. Another idea was to focus on intubated patients. We saw many people during COVID experience this and they could not communicate with their loved ones. However, the market still remained small. For the consumer pathway, we thought about combining our product with VR or AR to help with communication. I am interested in obtaining FDA approval because our technology would be more attractive to investors.

SVG: What would be your advice for graduate students and post-docs who want to start a company?

Dr. Rameau: The best time to pursue entrepreneurship is probably when you're right out of training. The freedom and time you have allow you to pursue experience in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a learning experience in failure, so focus on learning rather than stressing on being successful. You have to take this first year or two to learn about the environment, the different actors, and how to talk the talk. Also, do not be focused on one path towards success. You must be persistent but also flexible such that you can pivot the company to be tailored to the right market.