Zebra Medical Technologies: How a New Breed of Medical Device Companies Is Leveraging Technology

Zebra Medical Technologies is part of a new breed of medical device companies. They understand the reality that the funding market for truly novel, innovative devices is tight along with a host of other hurdles so they are always looking for advantageous ways to get more done with less resources. Based in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View and hatched out of work done in the Stanford PhD program, Zebra Medical is creating a novel imaging system to permit live cellular pathology with cutting tissue. Their aim is to transform patient care across multiple medical regimes, and their current focus is to improve the diagnostics and treatment of skin cancers. Today we’re join by Gabriel Sanchez, Zebra’s founder and CEO, and Kate Montgomery, their lead R&D scientist who both have quite the impressive backgrounds. Gabriel got his BS in Mechanical Engineering at MIT before getting both his MS and PhD in the same discipline at Stanford. Kate also received her PhD from Stanford, hers being in Bioengineering, and it was there at the Stanford PhD lab that they first met. Having spent the last two years developing their technology at the prestigious Fogarty Institute of Innovation, they’ve also discovered some great business insights, such as the importance of quality management, and how leveraging technology has enabled them to be more efficient and pass a quality audit with flying colors even though they were going through the process for their first time. Specifically, some of the topics you’ll hear about today include: ● Gabriel’s and Kate’s backgrounds that have led them to Zebra Medical Technologies. ● How greenlight.guru has helped Zebra Medical Technologies reach some of their milestones and put off hiring a consult or full time quality resource ● Kate’s experience during an audit: How she prepared, stayed confident and passed with flying colors even though it was their first time going through one ● What to expect to see and hear in the future from Zebra Medical Technologies. ● Some information about the company’s novel imaging system, which provides an alternative to the current method of surgical biopsies for live cellular pathology evaluation.