Breaking Barriers in Medicine: Dr. Peter Bonutti on Blood-Brain Breakthroughs

Join us for an exciting conversation with Dr. Peter Bonutti, a leading figure in MedTech innovation! With over 500 patents and 700 FDA-approved products, Dr. Bonutti shares insights into his pioneering work. Discover his latest ventures with Relieve, tackling autonomic disorders and safely opening the blood-brain barrier, and UV C, an advanced disinfection platform that has potential to replace radiation in cancer treatment. Gain a unique perspective on how addressing patient needs drives his groundbreaking innovations. Don’t miss this inspiring episode!

00:00 Introduction to Medtech Innovation
00:09 Meet Dr. Peter Bonutti
01:16 Patient-Centric Approach to Innovation
04:04 Challenges in Modern Medicine
07:57 Introducing Relieve: A Breakthrough in CNS Treatment
12:57 Mechanisms and Benefits of SPG Stimulation
20:44 Potential Applications and Future Directions
23:29 Exploring UV-C Technology
24:25 The Power of Ultraviolet C in Pathogen Control
25:31 Innovative Disinfection Solutions for COVID-19
26:18 Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment with UVC
29:18 Personal Journey: From Orthopedics to Cutting-Edge Therapies
35:02 Future of Medical Documentation and Remote Patient Care
40:38 Closing Thoughts and Future Innovations

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Transcript

Chris Brandt: 0:00

Today, we're going to be talking about medtech innovation. So stay tuned. We have with us, Dr. Peter Benuti, inventor, author, professor, consultant, and entrepreneur and the heart of Benuti Technologies. He has over 500 patents, 700 FDA approved products, and has created medical technologies for nearly every part of the body. So we're going to talk with him about his latest venture, Relieve, a medical device company specializing in therapies for autonomic disorders that can open the blood brain barrier and UV Seed, an innovative UVC disinfection platform that can sterilize environments and can be used to treat infections. So let's talk with him about how his approach to innovation and how his inventions are changing the medical landscape. Welcome, Peter.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 0:54

Thanks. Thanks for having me, Chris. Appreciate your time.

Chris Brandt: 0:56

Well, thanks for being on. I mean, you've, you've got a, you know, an impressive, uh, list of accomplishments and, uh, technologies and patents and, and all this. I don't quite, uh, understand how you have time for all of it, but, you know, we'll, we'll, uh, we'll dig into that in a second. Um, but, you know, could you tell me as somebody who's, who's got so many patents, have so many FDA patents, approved devices. What is the key to innovation and innovating in the, in the med tech space? What have you, what have you discovered? What I've discovered is that

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 1:28

from, from my, in my opinion, I always look at medicine from the patient's perspective and I really revert it. When I started 35 years ago in my medical practice, I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I do hip and knee replacements, uh, as a subspecialty, but I always looked at care. And when I started, Everything was driven toward what was easiest or the best for the doctor, for the surgeon, for the hospital. And the patients were to follow what they were told. And when I started in residency and then fellowships, I traveled all over the world and I watched and listened to people. Medicine was not accomplishing patient's goals. It was accomplishing a surgeon's, a physician's goal. Oh, it's a pretty looking x ray. Your knee replacement looks great. And the patient goes, my knee still hurts. I don't feel good. And the doctor would go, well, you, the x rays look good. Everything's functioning that I can see. So you're fine. And I reverted this and I said, we really need to change medicine and look good. at things from patient's perspective and optimizing their part. And if we're, if we're, if we're, if we're trading a product, that product should be centered on what, what the individual who's buying the product wants. And I think that's been my goal since day one. And I, and I, and I've innovated around that because I listen to what people want. And I see them in my clinic every day. I see them and, and I look at their results and I want to see that I've made them happy. And if, and if I look at medicine like that, it changes the way you think and you innovate based upon that.

Chris Brandt: 3:05

Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I've asked the question about like what led to all this great innovation. And the answer was, I listened to the people who are going to be impacted by this. You know, I, I think that's, I think that is the universal strategy for being successful at innovation. Yeah. I

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 3:22

think, but it's, it is important. I mean, ultimately it doesn't matter really what I think. It matters if the patient is pleased with their results, with their, uh, with, with their, um, uh, follow up in their care and if they're happy, then I'm happy. And I also approach diagnostics and others saying, look at, we have, we have an obligation to treat patients and treating patients doesn't mean. that you look at it from your eyes. You have to include looking at it from their eyes. And as you give them, uh, an evaluation, treatment, therapeutic options, you always have to sit there and bring that to the top of the list. And so anyway, that's how I think about care.

Chris Brandt: 3:59

And that's how I think about innovation. One of the things I I've noticed in, in medicine over my, my years, you know, getting older as I am, um, is that medicine has become so specialized now. And like when you get outside of a specialty. Sometimes it's hard for, uh, some of these folks in the, in that space to, to look outside of their practice and, and see how other things could connect sometimes. And, you know, like having a more holistic approach to, you know, looking at what the patient is,

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 4:38

It's important because I think that many physicians get somewhat myopic. I studied this. I spent 10 years of my life, medical school, residency, fellowships. I'm really good at one thing. And if we get outside the sweet spot, they don't want to handle it because it takes time, takes effort. You have to explain things to patients. And it's, and sometimes the doctors even think, Oh, I'm not reimbursed enough for this. Why am I? I'll, I'll, I'll send you to somebody else. I'll send you another specialist. And that's, uh, we have to sit there. I, although I do, I do. But, you know, 8 to 10 knee replacements a day. I sit there and someone comes in, Oh, your back is still an issue. How do we assess this? How do we assess other medical? And give them the best you can. And you have to look at the patient as a, as a holistic, um, uh, um, consumer effectively. You can't just sit there and say, Oh, all I'm going to talk about your knee and I'm not going to talk about anything else. That's not, that's not helping the patient and that's not improving the quality of care. So, yes, we are providers of entire patient and even though we focus on a niche. Uh, physicians have lost, I think, some of that touch and that's just because it takes time. It's sometimes not worth their effort or it's easier, simply easier.

Chris Brandt: 5:47

The one thing I hear a lot from doctors too is that it's getting harder to make money. In in the field to because of the way insurance works and the amount of time that they have to spend on insurance and and uh, you know, like some some fields don't require as many, you know, specific procedure codes and so it's hard to build and things like that. So I hear from doctors a lot. That, you know, what you're saying is, is, is, you know, making it very complicated for a lot of them. Yeah.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 6:17

Unfortunately, uh, financials always come into the picture and obviously that's not, it should never be our primary direction. So we're challenged by it, but I, unfortunately I think that sometimes that comes a little bit too much into the equation. So I do apologize for physicians sometimes and patients perspective that they feel that, uh, that they're not cared for appropriately. How's that sound?

Chris Brandt: 6:40

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, but you know, I, I, I, feel for them because I think it's been, it's been harder for them and I think they've got bigger medical debts. I think there's, you know, there's a lot of things that are, are working against doctors. I don't blame doctors, I guess, you know, like, I don't know that you need to apologize for them. I don't blame doctors. I blame the system. Yeah.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 6:58

The system is problematic. The way reimbursements are set up and the way that the financial return occurs is completely dissociated to the quality of care that you bring the patient. And they're trying to bring quality metrics into this. But I can give you a lot of examples, but medicine has changed over my 35 years substantially. And it's turned into a, uh, on the financial side, the reimbursement side, the insurance side, it's turned into a real problem where we spend more time. Uh, focusing on how we can get the right billing codes in place and the right diagnostic codes instead of how we're taking care of the patient. And then electronic medical records is amplify that because you have to put all the right things in the right boxes. And that slowed our efficiencies down anywhere from 30 to 50%. So you go, Jesus, I'm not taking care of people anymore. I'm taking care of records and notes and numbers. And it becomes a problem. And the patients are caught in the middle of it, which, you

Chris Brandt: 7:52

Yeah, that's tough. That's tough. Well, so let's talk about, um, you know, the first, your, your most recent company, I believe is Relieve.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 8:01

Relieve is probably the most important, uh, and, uh, technology that we're developing and won by first and foremost in my mind. So I use the word we a lot because they have a team at Benuti Technologies where we have, uh, Uh, mechanical, electrical, computer engineers. We have FDA regulatory people. We have a, a lab that designs and develops. So I say we, um, yeah, I, I kind of drive a lot of the technologies, but as a team, we try to work together to look at some of these challenging problems. So the biggest issue that I have noticed in medicine today is the ability to treat central nervous system disorders, disorders of the brain, right? And that is, in my opinion, complicated. by what we call access to the brain. There are many pharmaceuticals, biologics, ways to treat the central nervous system, but because of something called the blood brain barrier, which has, uh, something called tight junctions that limit the size of the particles or molecules that can get across into the brain, this, uh, structure, the blood brain barrier, protects the brain from diseases, infections, viruses. On the other hand, that same protective mechanism also limits our ability to treat diseases. Treat the brain because we cannot get molecules, pharmaceuticals, biologics across into the brain to treat the brain. So that makes it very, very challenging for us as physicians because we see medications, we have medications, we can have therapies that can and might work, but if they can't be delivered via the access to the brain, then we have we're not being able to treat the patient. So we focused on a technology that I identified that allows us to potentially access the brain by what we call opening and closing this blood brain barrier. And that's the general principle behind relief.

Chris Brandt: 9:43

Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting work you're talking about. I mean, I, I think, you know, we've heard about a lot of really interesting advancements in like cancer research and things like that, you know, just, you know, like I just saw another thing the other day about the, the cancer pill that's going to be, you know, like it's going to cure all these cancers, whatever. But the reality is that when you you're talking about the brain, it becomes much, much, much more complicated. And we always hear about the inoperable brain tumors and this and that. And it's so, like you say, it's so hard to get treatment into the brain because we need to protect the body needs to protect the brain. But, um, but it's, we also need to sometimes get interventions in there. So. You know, you, you are taking a very, uh, different and really interesting approach to how you're opening the blood brain barrier. And I know there's others working on that problem, but you're doing it in a very non destructive sort of way. Could you speak to like how, how some of the approaches out there are going and like why you're, you're choosing the direction you're going in?

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 10:45

Alternative approaches that exist today are basically a basket of two. One is direct infusion into the brain, which means you have to put a tube into the central nervous system, into the brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, and then you have a delivery pump that will pump the specific pharmaceuticals in a section of the brain, hopefully it'll dissolve through the cerebrospinal fluid, the fluid coating of the brain, and hopefully hit that end target organ. There is a complication rate of up to 30 to 40%. Just using that basic technology, forget the pharmaceutical, just from the surgical approach. And the mechanism to deliver that. So you have to direct infusion. The second is an indirect approach where they're basically using ultrasound. Ultrasound is a high frequency vibration and you're putting the patients, um, and you're using ultrasound to basically vibrate and open the blood brain barrier. And, uh, but the problem with that is number one, it's a high thermal load. And so you have to do this in an MRI environment. The MRI is purely used to, uh, measure the temperature in the brain. So you don't put into the brain while you're treating it permanently damages. Yeah, no, no, no. It's a, you know, we don't need fried brain, but so then you, um, so then you open the blood brain barrier. Up, but it's a permanent, you're permanently damaging it these tight junctions. So then you, uh, and then you infuse either intravenously or intra artily the medication and then it can open in the blood brainin barrier. The problem though, is it has to heal. So you've permanently damage it. It takes 72 hours or more to heal. So during that 72 hours, number one, you have a risk of complications. We told you that's a protective amount. mechanism. Number two, the pressure called, uh, um, from the, uh, blood pressure is much higher than the cerebrospinal fluid pressure, blood pressure, about one 20 or 80 on the average patient. Cerebrospinal fluid, you know, you're talking eight to 10 millimeters of mercury. So it's, you're talking a factor of eight to 10 times greater. So you risk of significant swelling in the brain. Plus, if you're taking other medications or other issues, they can now go across this open blood brain barrier. So you risk a lot of complications. So yes, we can open it, but the ultrasound studies show that open blood brain barrier can get drugs across. The problem is. is the massive side effects from this, right? We instead of targeted the body's own mechanism, which is the sphenopalatine ganglion. Sphenopalatine ganglion sits outside the brain, but it's a nerve tissue that basically controls access to the brain by dilating the blood vessels or constricting them much like you would use, for example, a vagus nerve, which goes down to your heart and lungs and automatically pumps the heart, lungs, breathing. We have to think about it. The SPG is exactly the same, but goes to the brain and opens up half a hemisphere of the brain. We identified technology that was using this to treat cluster headaches, which are the most severe headaches where the entire side of your face turns swell and red, the blood vessels dilate. And when we use SPG stimulation and overstimulate the sphenal palatine ganglia electrically, Then this shuts down and cures the cluster headaches and you see the entire side of the face turn normal in terms of its complexion. The whole vascular side shrinks down. And so we identified that and we said, look at this, this is the body's own normal mechanism. Then we looked at other studies that were out and sphenopalatine ganglion, if you stimulate it at a different frequency. what that does is that vasodilates, it opens up the vessels to the brain and by mechanically stretching them up to 40%, it also opens up the tight junctions and opens the blood brain barrier. So we then did, uh, looked at research, a guy named Michael Lang, uh, and uh, Bye bye. neurovascular surgeon, uh, at University of Pittsburgh, he did a bunch of animal research where he showed that if you open the blood brain barrier 10 hertz, you can start to deliver small and even large molecules, molecules as large as stem cells into the brain in animal models. So we now said, look, we now have a mechanism that's outside the brain that has a simple 15 minute outpatient procedure. We can implant a neuromodulation device that has no battery, no power source, and we externally power it, turn it on and off by applying external device. And then that allows us to control the sphenopalatine ganglion precisely, so that when you infuse a medication, You open the blood brain barrier, and when the infusion stops, you time it, and you close the blood brain barrier and shut this down. So it eliminates the damage, and we're using the body's own biologic, normal biologic processes. We're simply stimulating those and overriding them at the right time. to allow access to brain without damaging it. So we think it's the most physiologic. We're following the body's own function. We're staying extracranial outside the brain to do these treatments. And the interesting part is there have been hundreds of patients treated by this. There's 700 patients that have already had this device implanted for cluster headaches with excellent clinical results, statistically significant. So we know the device is safe and effective for shutting it down. And then there's other studies that have been done about 330 patients were done looking at. vasodilatation, they found that it's safe and effective to open and dilate the blood vessels to the brain. So if we look at that, combine those with animal research, we believe there's an interesting approach, a novel approach to treating, uh, central nervous system disorders, whether large molecules, small molecules, even targeting neuro restoration. So what does that mean? That means once the tissues in the brain die. Nerve cells die. People think, well, the brain's dead. It's over you. You'll, they'll never grow again. Right? Well, part of that is because of the blood-brain barrier. So now we have a potential mechanism to start treating the central nervous system by delivering stem cells, by delivering biologics. So we now, not, not only, we don't assume anymore that once tissue's dead, it's permanently dead. We have a way now to kind of deliver neuro restorative biologics, uh, pharmacologics so we can treat and potentially manage central nervous systems disorder where they've already been damaged. So you take a company that, for example, looks at, uh, putting stimulators and or, uh, robotically inserting electrodes into the brain to try and stimulate the brain. Um, things like Neuralink, which have received a lot of press, well, they've accepted the fact that brain's damaged and we're gonna electrically. Try to bypass the damaged tissue. Well, We think that the biologic physiologic approach is much more effective and why deal with dead tissue? Why don't why can we try to restore it heal it? Yeah, and return the patients to their own mechanism. Sorry

Chris Brandt: 17:00

It's great I mean, you know Neuralink scares the hell out of me because I wouldn't trust that company to put anything in my head, honestly um, but I I do want to like just go back and and um, You You know, like one, you mentioned the, uh, a couple methods and one, I had a friend who was had a brain tumor and, and, and she had to have that pump like you're, you're talking in injecting stuff into her cerebrospinal fluid and the thing that was really, Difficult. I know they had to take fluid out to put fluid in to keep the balance, like you said, the pressure, but they can never quite get the pressure exactly right. And she was in such tremendous pain from all of that, that then she was on so many opioids and that created all its own issues. And it, it was that pumping, you know, that you're talking about, it sounds very innocuous when, you know, it's like, well, let's stick something in there and pump something in there, but it really. Is not necessarily very innocuous. This could be very intense.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 18:00

No, you're affecting, basically you're artificially injecting things to the brain, but the brain's not designed for that. You need to look at the body physiologically and say, how can we modulate or treat the body using its own physiologic mechanisms? Anytime you're starting to stick electrodes and fusion pumps, you get through the blood brain barrier or you get through the cerebrospinal fluid by going into the dura, you're permanently damaging the brain and you have problems. All kinds of side effects, up to 50 percent of patients have massive side effects, and that's what we're trying to avoid. We think there's a better approach. We believe this is something that needs to be pursued, investigated further, and that's why we're, we're very involved in this.

Chris Brandt: 18:35

Well, and so, you know, I just want to also like, you know, focus a little bit on, on the, the device that you're, you're implanting. It, it's, it's really just the, the SPG cluster that you're talking about is really just kind of behind your face here, right? And it's something you just

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 18:51

below the orbit.

Chris Brandt: 18:52

Yeah. It's just something you insert right under the skin there. And it's why you say it's just a very, no, you go through inside the

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 18:57

mouth through the gun. So you don't even see the scar. It's a, it's a small half fish incision. We have minimally invasive instruments that deliver it. into the sphenopalatine ganglion. There's one on each side of the face and you deliver this microelectrode. And because it has no battery, it's passive. You don't have any of the risks of any neurologic function or people attacking it or hacking it or anything like this. And it can stay in the body forever. There's a small screw that fixes it to the calvaria skull. So it permanently stays there. It doesn't move around and risk losing its position. We tune the device and that takes a surgical implantation of 15 minutes. Uh, and then the patients can go wherever they want for treatment. So they can be treated at home, they can be treated in other hospital, they can go anywhere they want without any expensive costs. So it's a very mobile and and functional approach to allow patients to treat themselves or, and or have physicians to treat them wherever they want in the country. Yeah. So it's not something that's gonna limit their, uh, availability, accessibility, or change their lifestyle. So glioblastomas you mentioned that's a untreatable brain tumor. Yeah. They use immunoglobulins that are $150,000. They'll never get across the blood brain barrier. We can open it up and we have done animal work and then we're looking at human work to start to develop these so that we can treat glioblastomas, for example, with known and approved drugs that do work, but just allow us to access the brain with these.

Chris Brandt: 20:12

It's a two way street here, right? I mean, not only you can open it. And then you can close it using this technology, which is really interesting, because like what you're talking about is these other sort of methods of getting across the blood brain barrier, they damage tissue and then the tissue has to heal for it to, you know, to sort itself out. But this is something that you're not damaging the tissue, you're opening it and closing it within a window so that you don't have a lot of extraneous things that necessarily can get it, get across there. But the other thing that I, I, I know is interesting, besides the fact that like the enormous amount of things that you can deliver to the brain. Um, now that you can do this and saying, like, you can deliver something the size of a stem cell, that's, you know, quite a large molecule, right? Um, and so, uh, the thing that's also interesting about that is, you know, like, I got to imagine, like, I don't know exactly how the thing is working for cluster headaches. But I got to imagine that if it's closing it down, it's probably keeping, you know, like a constant blood brain pressure or something like fluid pressure in the brain or something like that. I would imagine. I don't know how that works. But But my point is, is that you can either use that to sort of drain things out of the brain. Because I know that like when you're doing these interventions, um, It can you're you're just you're killing tissue, and that all has to kind of come out of the brain at some point. And that can be, you know, you mentioned swelling and things like that. This could be a method of extracting some of that that fluid and extracting some of that that, you know, dead material out of the brain as well, right?

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 21:44

Yes, one of the other mechanisms, and this is still working, but we also open the blood brain barrier to drain some of these toxic byproducts. When tissue dies, when you have byproducts from this like amyloid, which causes Alzheimer's, as we know, One of the main issues is the failure or inability to drain these out because the blood brain barrier on the lymphatic and venous side also limits the drainage of these particles, so they build up in your brain over your lifetime. One of the things we're postulating, we're working on it, is that we can enhance, vascular drainage, lymphatic drainage out of the brain, then we'll be able to manage and treat many of these diseases like Alzheimer's in a different fashion. And certainly some of these worry about memory loss, cognitive disorders, other issues that happen over time or with aging, that's been build up of toxic byproducts in the brain. So yes, one is the infusion ability to get in. The other is the secondary drainage out and all that stuff, uh, is important to a normal healing central nervous system. And as we go into aging issues and other, and you see all this neurodegeneration, we need to look at new opportunities, mechanisms for enhancing the central nervous system. So as we age, our brain doesn't age and our brain functions better. And that's, those are, those are all big issues that we're working on downstream.

Chris Brandt: 22:59

Yeah, this is super cool. Cause I mean, I, I. I worry a lot about my brain, you know, so I, I'm appreciative that you're, you're doing something to help me out here. Um, but, but I do want to also talk about, I mean, cause, uh, you know, relief is, is, is, is doing incredible. Um, incredible work. And it's, it's super cool that, you know, you can, you can manipulate the blood brain barrier like that. And I know that's been such a big thing for so long. Uh, but you've got this other company that, you know, we talked about briefly before that, um, I think is really interesting because it's the UV seed one, and it's got a lot of like consumer, um, practical, uh, practical applications, right. But, um, But you've got some really interesting other ways to use it that, that, that are also, uh, really compelling that, that I don't think people realize yet. So, can you speak a little bit to, like, how the UV seed, UV seed is taking UVC radiation, right? for cleaning and sterilizing things, but how that you can take that into sort of like the cancer treatment realm.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 24:07

Ultraviolet C is a frequency of light of typically around 250 nanometers, 220, 320, but about typically it's used around 254 nanometers. And what that does is it breaks the thymine bonds in, uh, DNA and RNA. So basically it affects any type of pathogen or living tissue. And the faster that that replicates, the more, uh, so it divides, the more, the more effective or more aggressive the therapy is. So any type of pathogen, there are no such things as resistant bacteria or viruses or fungi or parasites. If you treat with this ultraviolet C, you damage the DNA. They cannot reproduce. They can't break proteins. So the cells will effectively, or will die. So it's very effective as a technology for disinfection sterilization. We've used this in, in surgery and it's, it's commonly used and we developed a commercial product that uses the, um, AI algorithms to protect the patients that if something moves in the way, a hand eye moves, it shuts the, shuts it down, but it allows you to control the dosage and the amount of. of UVC that's delivered and tells you exactly what was delivered to a specific site distance so that you know something is either sanitized, disinfected, or, or even sterilized. So since that breaks up and, and very effective treatment, we bought this out because of the, uh, challenges that came with COVID as we all know. And what people don't know is that many of these sanitizers and disinfectants that people use don't really, are really not effective and you don't know what you've treated. So the key is. Look at them. So if you leave like Clorox wipes or Lysol wipes or hand sanitizer, I don't know if people know, but it takes four minutes for those to be effective. And you don't know the dosage and you have to have the entire surface wet. And then if you try to put it on any food, you can't do it. And kids can't have it. So there were big challenges as we looked at, say, look at this COVID issue. How do we know we're treating this? How does it, and as a surgeon, we're not going to operate on something unless we know that it's disinfected and treated. So we created a system that uses horsepower to control the dosage. Now, coming back to medicine, this technology is much like radiation therapy. When Madame Curie identified radiation and they, they used this to, uh, for x rays, they also identified that it. cause cancer. And one of the main causes for cancer is excessive radiation where the dosage and the beams are not controlled. So we went and said, look at ultraviolet C is the same. It will affect rapidly growing body tissue as well as it will others. But the problem is no one's made any attempt at controlling the dosage and the application and being able to deliver that. So with our smart technology, we're able to control exactly where it's delivered, how much is delivered to that particular site and then set it off. So what we can do is, um, we can start to treat now cancers in the same way radiation was. So radiation used to cause cancers and can, but now is one of the mainstays of cancer therapy, which is radiation therapy. Right. And they're basically controlling the dosage and location. We believe the same thing can be done U. V. C. If you control this, so we have developed technology looking through endoscope. So if you see cancer cells rather than having to go in surgical, we can simply use the ultraviolet C understanding the depth location, the dosage and basically eliminate cancer cells or rapidly reproducing cells by using the ultraviolet C. wavelength through an endoscope or through any type of fiber optic device. And that could be used in pulmonary tumors, lung tumors, uh, uh, endoscopy for colon cancers. But anywhere you have a surface cancer, if you see it, you can treat it right away in a safe and effective way simply by controlling the dosage. And that can be, and that's the core basis for our technology saying, you know, it's dangerous. If you use it inappropriately, high dose is uncontrolled. We've developed a bunch of technologies that allow us to control dosage frequency and location. And that's, we think that's a game changing approach, not just for the consumer space, but also for the medical space.

Chris Brandt: 27:59

Yeah. And I know that, you know, uh, my mother had radiation treatment for her. She had a bout of cancer. And one of the things that I don't know that a lot of people who have not been through it don't realize is that, um, when you use radiation, that radiation goes all the way through the body. So if you're treating like, say, breast cancer, that goes and creates damage to the lungs. And that can be permanent damage that, you know, you have to have to deal with. Whereas this is sort of limited by where you put it, right? You don't have that sort of splash damage, as I would say.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 28:30

depth of penetration. So you have to be able to locate and get light source to that region, which we can do now with many minimally invasive and endoscopic procedures. And we'll be able to locate, identify the tumor, and then we'll be able to treat it instantly while you're looking at that. So we now have raised the radio label tumors. We can sit there and do fluorescent dyes, other things. If you can see those tumors, Then you can go in and treat them at the same time using, uh, using this ultraviolet seed based approach. So we're in the process of developing these. Uh, we started in the consumer space and now we're bringing this into the medical space as well. We believe it's game changer for many types of technology. We also, or for cancers, but also for severe infections, untreatable infections. It started with my daughter. She had toxoplasmosis in her eyes and then it's untreatable. Many people die from it. Many people go blind and the problem is the toxoplasmosis, the parasite gets in a spore and locks itself and stays, you know, I developed this because I said, Hey, I can now sit there and protect the retina, treat the toxoplasmosis potentially. And I can now treat the very, very incurable type of diseases using this novel technology. So that was my impetus for doing this.

Chris Brandt: 29:36

Wow, man, everybody needs a dad like you. Well, you got this untreatable condition. Well, let's just, let's just find a, let's figure that out.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 29:43

That's good. Yeah. I think so. It's important. We have to improve medicine. We don't just practice medicine. If we're not improving it, we're not being good doctors. Yes.

Chris Brandt: 29:51

Yeah. No, I love that. But, but I, I think it, you know, what you're talking about is really interesting because you know, there's, there's things like MRSA out there where like, you know, people, that flesh eating bacteria and things like that, that's resistant to any antibiotics. I mean, this is an alternative treatment path for things like that. Um, I, I got to imagine

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 30:11

you can't be resistant. You cannot be resistant to these type of therapies. So when you use, for example, even, even toxic pharmaceuticals and chemicals, the bacteria, viruses, parasites can become and do become resistant over time. Whereas with this ultraviolet C technology, it cannot be resistant. If you read, for example, on labels, you know, Lysol, Clorox, they don't kill MRSA. You use any of these chemicals, they said their bacteria can become resistant. And, and people have all these constant significant infections. So number one, can we treat surfaces. Prevent this from happening number one and spreading. And then number two, if you actively have this, is there a new way to link this with pharmaceuticals or as a standalone treatment, but I look at, I look at joint therapies, how we can optimize therapy. So using antibiotics and resistant, even though bacteria resistant and combining them with other therapies, we believe that that's the optimal way device pharma combinations, and that's what we're exploring as well. So we now can, are looking at ways to take resistant diseases. and make them sensitive diseases and or find new cures for them. So yes, that's a, that's one of my goals. And my, my challenges are, I don't like to see problems that we can't fix. There's gotta be a way and just keep plugging, beating

Chris Brandt: 31:18

your head against the wall until you figure it out. Well, yeah, I mean, you're an interesting guy. Cause I mean, you started off in orthopedic surgery, right? And I mean, and you're talking about, you know, using UVC radiation to go after cancer tumors or infections and you're opening the blood brain barrier, which is, you know, Fairly far away from, you know, orthopedic surgery, I would imagine. Um, you know, what, what is it about you that, you know, like, you seem like a guy, the kind of guy who is, gets bored easily and you need to, you need to be constantly doing something, I gotta imagine. What, what, what is it about you that, that, that drives you to do all this? I don't know what

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 31:58

drives me, but I believe that if I see a problem and I struggle with any type of solutions that we have, I believe it's important for us to spend some time and energy to try to figure out potential options. As physicians, for example, I deal in orthopedics with many resistant infections. That, uh, you have to rip joint replacements, I'll put them back in. I looked at this whole infection area and started saying, Hey, you know, there's gotta be other ways to do this. We don't treat, uh, infections like cancers. So this, this stimulates me to say, I, there's gotta be a better way. And then the second is always have to look at a problem and, and sit there and try to think about the least common denominator. What's the simplest, easiest approach? Look at a number of solutions, but try to come up with the simplest, easiest solution. So for example, treating infection using a simple light source that's focused that you can, and it's not that complicated. You just have to sit there and read, constantly study, you know, and identify where's the problem, try to study what potential solutions are. And then you have to sit there and put your time and your money and your effort to. Think about, uh, think about the actual solution and I like to call it the least common denominator. What's the simplest solution? And those are the ones we should look at for therapeutic options. And that's where ultraviolet C is one. You look at, like, uh, we look at the blood brain barrier. We're talking about, there's lots of drugs out there. How do you get them in? And you can use a crowbar to put them in, or you can think about little ways to use the body's own mechanisms. I guess that's the stuff that I look at. I look at what patients want and again, coming back full circle, what we started with, what are the patients want? How do we help them achieve their goals for their quality of care? And we need to fashion medical therapeutics around that. So that's, that's what I dreams.

Chris Brandt: 33:38

And I like your approach when you said, you know, let the, let the body heal itself, you know, to some extent too, because I mean, Hey, the body built itself, right? I mean, it has the tools and mechanisms at some level to. To create every organ and piece of tissue and bone in the body, right? You know, just unlocking that is very difficult and how you go about that. But, you know, there's a lot of, you know, by using those, the body's own mechanisms, you know, the amount of, yeah, and enhancing them. The, the, the possibilities that that creates is amazing to me. So that's very exciting stuff,

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 34:15

very exciting. And if we can add value, it's important. I think it's the best is to improve the quality of care. And if I can do a little bit, I'm happy. Obviously, you know, that we take it and we reinvest our and put it in the new projects. And we've continued, we've done this over 35 years with over 700 technology. And we've done work on robotics and joint replacements. We've done all kinds of stuff with minimally invasive procedures. We enjoy the fact that there's challenges and how we can offer potential solutions. Many, you know, many don't work sometimes, but keep plugging away till you have something

Chris Brandt: 34:42

that adds value. Yeah. Well, and so, so like, you know, your, your, your company is Benuti Technologies. Can you, uh, what do you, what's next for Benuti Technologies? Where do you go from here?

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 34:54

What we're looking at is some of the biggest frontiers, as I told you, the central nervous system is really the single biggest frontier that we're looking at now, how we can treat, restore function, and then obviously with the neurodegenerative issues, can we add value in those areas? We think that the idea of personalizing health care, so again, coming back to where, how we optimize patient's care is important. I think another area for me that's always been the biggest challenge is, uh, believe it or not, how we document medical care. One of the biggest issues is I sit there and when I see you as a patient and I look at your head, your neck, your knee, whatever, I have to document by words after the fact of what your body's function was, your activities were, what you're doing. So we're looking at a whole novel system of just saying, look, if we want to treat patients, we have to know where they are. where they're going. And so we do that now through a lot of, uh, the video approaches called human pose estimation, where you can take a simple cell phone, take videos of yourself through activities in four dimensions. And we can sit there and document where you were, where you are in four dimensions, which includes acceleration, motion, speed, which you cannot verbalize. And as I, as a physician say, are you getting better? Are you getting worse? It's hard to look at a note or record, so we believe just, just the concept of communication and documentation has to be changed, so that's one of the other big areas that we're pursuing because we think that there's a better way to care for patients, and one of them is, can you document it. And look for changes and sometimes I'm document your neck, but I might see your hip or your back and your face so I can use that same video clip and using AI algorithms and human pose estimation, I can sit there six months from now, search it and say, Oh, your hip was bad and this is what you need to look for and basically decrease the cost of the cost of medicine by focusing on better diagnostics and all that relates to can we document it. What the patient's real function is, and how do we sit there and say if it's changed, how it's changed, and where we focus our care on, does that make sense? Yeah, no, it

Chris Brandt: 36:56

totally makes sense. I mean, I think that's, I mean, it's such a, it's such a basic concept, but it's so, so, communication is so important. But we're, we're stone ages in

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 37:07

our, in our medical care. It just comes, so we can do better, we should do better. And so we're exploring ways, and it would be faster, more efficient. And the other. That drew me to this is because we could do remote patient care so much easier because what do we see when we see the patient? You get video, but I can, I can document these changes. I may be wiggling my head around, but I can look in my eyes, my neck next time I come back and I can look at any angle with a remote mobile phone. And I can now sit there and look at those changes as AI algorithms are changing. I can see that person. Has something wrong here. They're responding to pain, stress. Do they have a little bit of Parkinson's? Do they have twitch tremors? And then you can sit there and use these notes and compare the, the, not the written record, which doesn't encapture what the patient is. The patient is everything. And you can pick this up with video. So I'm, that's one of my goals is to change electronic medical records and find ways to really. Treat patients by understanding where they were, where they're going, and then what do they need to, what needs to be treated.

Chris Brandt: 38:07

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, you know, already we're seeing, you know, like, I, you know, I can take my EKG on my watch. I've got a continuous, over here now, a continuous glucose monitor that's, you know, and that's reporting directly to my doctor. I've got a blood pressure, you know, sleeve that, You know, reports all that information back to the doctor. So like having that level of communication, but they're extra devices, right?

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 38:27

This is something you carry with you everywhere. I could sit there in a three to four second clip, download it, load it to the cloud, get your whole body in four dimensions, and I could sit there with algorithms, even though you're different angle, different device, it's. Just using your mobile phone, I can look at so many body functions and activities. I can see pain, stress, how hard, how easy is it to get out of a chair? Do I have to use my arms, legs, acceleration, motion patterns, that musculoskeletal care, neurologic care, psychiatry, all these you can start, you cannot describe by words and it's all documented and it's, it's, it goes in the cloud store and then I have these algorithms to compare them. And. That's going to enhance medicine almost as much as anything I've talked about. Because we can sit there and sit there and really look at patients and see if they're improving, digressing, deteriorating, and how they're doing that. And I think that's, that's going to be one game changing. Uh, and I think it's the single most important thing we, we can do is how do we, how do we, Actually assess a patient and can that be done remotely at home? Why do they have to come to your office? You can do all that stuff this way.

Chris Brandt: 39:34

I love the idea of a home visit. I mean, this is literally what you're creating is a home visit,

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 39:39

you know? Yes. You can have these answer device, but EKG does just the heart. I've always other things that are missing.

Chris Brandt: 39:45

I need the video. And lifestyle too. I mean, like looking at a person's. House in their, their, their world that they exist in can give you clues as to, you know, what's causing issues with their health. I got to imagine too, right? Sure.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 39:58

All, all effective. And we've done that with our UVC device coming full circle. We take the power of a mobile device, strap it on, use the, use, and that's how we make it expensive and affordable for patients. We use the camera, we use the processors in the camera, we use the cloud from the camera and we sit there and then we add the ultraviolet C disinfection systems to it. And what was once would have been thousands of dollars. We're now, you know, 150 bucks. You can sit there and put it and use the technology and link that to what you're doing on your phone. I think that's amazing. These, these are the things that we need to look at. Sorry.

Chris Brandt: 40:27

Yeah, no, no, no, no. Don't be sorry. I mean, that's awesome. I mean, like quite, quite honestly, if I went through the list of things that you've worked on, created and accomplished, we would never, podcast. But, um, but if somebody wanted to find Benuti technologies, where, where should they go,

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 40:45

Well, we're on the internet. Obviously we, we, we keep a very low profile. We don't stick our names typically on products, but we have, so the Vanity Research or Vanity Technologies website, uh, you can come there. And then obviously we're happy to chat with you, myself and my team. And if you have ideas, technologies, issues, we were always open. We like to learn, we listen and, uh, and hopefully come up with some good solutions. Yeah. Well, I got one for you. Dupuytren's contracture. We know about that one. I, I have a little bit of it as well early. And yes, I know how there's treatments, collagenase, one is an enzyme. There's risk with the enzyme. And there are some other treatments now with simple injections. You can break that down without any surgeries. In the old days, when I started 35 years ago, I'd cut the whole palm of your hand out, rip it out and take now simple injection. Yeah. Now there's even some others that are based off of saline and other that you can simply inject and stop that. So, uh, I, I have ideas for you.

Chris Brandt: 41:33

Yeah, I know. I, I like it. But you know what, a lot of the treatments that you mentioned that, you know, they're very painful and it's multiple treatments and it's just, you know, I kinda went with the, the, you know, stick my hand in a laser or in a light and, and you know, fix it kind of treatment. So, Dr. Peter Bonutti: we, we might be able to do that as well because it's rapidly growing tissue. If we can stop that from growing. We may have a whole new therapy. I haven't explored Dupuytren specifically, but they're, they're promising for any rapidly, um, uh, rapidly growing tissue or to any tissue that you want to treat and you stop the DNA and RNA, you stop the protein production. You may very well be able to start treating that. Oh, I love it. I mean, and the fact that you've, you've got a little bit of it started up on, on your end too, that, that, that gives me, I'm defective too. That gives me hope for a treatment.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 42:18

We'll get you there.

Chris Brandt: 42:19

Well, I, I want to say that, um, You know, it's amazing all the things you've done, you know, thank you for all your contributions to the the field of medical technology and I really appreciate you coming on and and just informing us all about all this stuff because this is super cool stuff and, um, I want to keep keep an eye on all the cool things you're doing because I think this is really, really interesting space. So thanks so much for being on. Really appreciate it.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 42:45

Thanks, Chris. Thanks for your time. And again, I hope I didn't drive you crazy. Sometimes too many ideas get people scared, but it's important. No, I love

Chris Brandt: 42:52

it.

Dr. Peter Bonutti: 42:53

Thank you.

Chris Brandt: 42:54

Appreciate it. Love it. Love the, love the ideas. Love the innovation. Keep it up. Keep it up. Thanks for watching. I would love to hear from you in the comments. And if you could give us a like, subscribe, and I will see you in the next one.