Len Liptak, Co-founder & CEO
By IPO Edge Editorial Staff
IPO Edge: Can you give me a short description of what ProSomnus does?
ProSomnus is a pioneer of precision intraoral medical devices that represent a new option for patients suffering from a chronic disease called obstructive sleep apnea.
IPO Edge: What is Obstructive Sleep Apnea?
Obstructive Sleep Apnea is the repeated blockage of the airway at night while people are sleeping. Snoring is the biggest indicator of a disease that can be most harmful for patients, where they literally stop breathing at night. People who stop breathing at night are deprived of oxygen, which in turn can lead to a whole series of systematic problems for the person with sleep apnea.
IPO Edge: How big a problem is Sleep Apnea?
Sleep Apnea or OSA (Obstructive Sleep Apnea) is a highly prevalent disease. A billion people worldwide have it. Seventy million people in North America are believed to have OSA with 90% being undiagnosed and left untreated. The big challenge for people with OSA is remaining undiagnosed. Left untreated, OSA is associated with very severe comorbidities, from cardiovascular disease to increased incidence of stroke.
IPO Edge: What is the ProSomnus solution to Sleep Apnea?
The ProSomnus device is an easy and simple noninvasive, and non-intrusive device, that somebody can slip into their mouth and hold their jaw forward in a very comfortable way. It precisely holds the jaw in a forward position that opens the airway and allows the patient to breathe throughout the night so they are not depriving the body of oxygen—it is a therapeutic solution that allows OSA patients to get a better night’s sleep.
IPO Edge: CPAP has been in the news a lot why do you offer a better solution?
CPAP is a device. It stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. As the name implies, whenever there’s a blockage or obstruction of the airway, CPAP uses just air to push it through the blockage and down the throat to ensure that the patient can get access to oxygen. CPAP has been shown to be highly efficacious at overcoming those blockages. But, we probably are all aware, that the big challenge with CPAP is a lot of people struggle to tolerate it, whether the pressure is too high or the mask does not fitting correctly. Or, maybe it’s too loud. It can often interfere with the patient’s bedtime routine and their bedtime hygiene. So, for all of those reasons, people have a hard time adapting to CPAP. That’s why we came up with ProSomnus. We wanted to have a solution that was easy and simple, noninvasive, non-intrusive, something that somebody could just slip in their mouth to hold their jaw forward in a very comfortable way, allowing them to have a conversation with their bed partner, drink a glass of water and pursue a normal bedtime routine.
IPO Edge: How does ProSomnus benefit from modern personalized/precision medicine?
Precision medicine is a concept that has revolutionized the standard of care across all fields of medicine, and is prevalent in what we do with sleep medicine. Our devices are designed to perfectly match the patient’s teeth as well as perfectly match the jaw prescription for the patient. We do this with less than 0.3 millimeters of precision, which allows us to put the jaw in the correct position to open the airway, but not over-advance the jaw so it’s uncomfortable or not under-advance the jaw so that the treatment isn’t as effective. We use milling robotics and AI-driven device design so that we can customize all of our devices. ProSomnus has built an entire digital manufacturing process around doing this. It allows us to take advantage of high-performance, medical-grade materials and produce a product that matches the prescription, treatment plan, and the anatomy for that patient with a high degree of precision. All of that has been associated in clinical studies with improved outcomes, fewer side effects, and greater patient preference.
IPO Edge: Does Medicare or Medicaid, insurance in general pick up the cost if someone has been properly diagnosed?
Yes, it a covered benefit through Medicare and the vast majority of major insurance providers.
IPO Edge: How big is your customer base?
We are focusing on a healthcare sector with high gross potential. We currently have thousands of providers who are actively prescribing our devices. But there is really no ceiling on the market. As a disruptive technology in North America, we see the market at a multi-billion dollar opportunity and on a global basis over 50 billion dollars.
IPO Edge: Why a SPAC?
ProSomnus chose to pursue the SPAC route because we had a very deliberate, multi-faced plan for how we wanted to commercialize the business and we felt that we’d achieved our goals for phase one, which were to validate our value proposition, validate our manufacturing approach, validate that our devices worked clinically, validate our business model and our commercial approach. Once we felt pretty confident that we had validated those, let’s say, phase one milestones for our company, then we knew that we wanted to scale up the business and invest in expanding our sales team, expanding internationally, investing in the technology we spoke about earlier to help expand our gross margin but scale up our manufacturing. Our combination with Lakeshore presented that opportunity, and today we are trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol OSA (Obstructive Sleep Apnea).
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