S2E6 | Knowing What “Good” Looks Like — Astrin Biosciences’ Jaime LaMontagne

Hi, my name is Kayleen Brown and I have bunions. But first, welcome back to another episode of DeviceTalks Women in MedTech podcast, where I try to reverse engineer the making of a MedTech leader. Wait, what? This is a Friday and I’m not listening to an episode of DeviceTalks Weekly. You’re not crazy. This is intentional. Tom and I decided this week to bring you an episode of the Women in MedTech podcast instead. We done so for two very good reasons. Reason one, it’s a fantastic conversation, so why wait? And two, the even better reason. This week, Tom was on a road trip with his eldest son, delivering him to his exciting summer internship. Just wanted to say from all of us at DeviceTalks, and for me personally, Theo, congratulations, you got this. And don’t worry to our audience, we’re going to bring you another episode of DeviceTalks Weekly next week. But until then, I know you’ll enjoy. So where have I been? I’ve been taking care of my embarrassing stigma filled condition bunion. Or, for us in industry, hallux valgus, commonly known as a bunion. Not only do I have one bunion, I have two bunions, one on each foot. So you get a bunion, you get a bunion. We all get bunions. Except for it’s not as fun as Oprah Winfrey and a car. Mind studio guest this time is my right foot bunion. Or should I say my former right foot bunion. That is because three months ago I got a bunionectomy and it was a fantastic experience. I’ve had a really great recovery, but that has meant that I have been out of the office. If you’re watching on YouTube, here is a picture of my X-ray so you can see what my foot looks like. Zoom out here. Okay. You can see she’s all twisted like a winding road. My foot on the outside is much cuter. But on the inside, not so much. And then this is what it looks like after. Look at that. So I actually have an implantable from Treace Medical Concepts. So if you’re ever interested in learning more about the implant, message me on LinkedIn or email me, and I would be happy to tell you all about it, but that’s not that. That bad boy right there, now, inside my body. Which I have to say, I’ve always said that I was MedTech, but now I’m actually MedTech. Not just saying I’m MedTech. I literally have MedTech in my body. So that’s where I’ve been. I am Kayleen Brown. I have bunion. Not bunions. And I will continue the journey. If you’re so interested in learning about the journey, reach out to me. I would love to tell you about it. And I have other people who maybe also have bunion join me. One of us. One of us. Bunion USA. One of us. So enough about my bunion. Let’s talk about DeviceTalks. So this November 30 - December 1, we will be holding DeviceTalks West. We are holding it in San Jose, California, a different time of year in a different location and we’re hoping a more intimate setting. So please go to West.DeviceTalks.com We’ve just opened up registration and we’re going to start dripping out that agenda here, soon. Now I get to tell you about the most exciting opportunity. I want to say the this year, but maybe even in my career. I mean, I am bursting at the seams with excitement. On September 15, MedTechWOMEN will be holding their annual MedTechVISION conference. It will be held at the Rosewood Sandhill in Menlo Park. They’ve had this event every single year. I’ve had the pleasure of attending for the last five years. And, and this year, that Tuesday, I have the opportunity of moderating the executive interview. I will be speaking with Martha Aronson, the new president and CEO for Merit Medical Systems. Ba boom! I know. I’m so excited. I have been attending that event for so long and I’ve had my eye on that seat for even longer. And the fact that I get to fill it this year and speak to somebody I admire so much, I mean, really, it’s beyond validating. It is just magic. And I am so very grateful. So if you are joining us, I can’t wait to see you. I’ll see you on that Tuesday. I’ll be joined by our associate editor for MDO and MassDevice, Skyler Rivera. So I hope that you join us. Say hi to both of us. Thank you so much to MedTechWOMEN for sponsoring this episode of the Women in MedTech podcast. Please go to medtechwomen.org to learn more about that event and come see me and Martha. It is going to be an absolute blast. Okay, so let’s talk about this episode. This episode’s theme is knowing what good looks like. It’s something that came right out of our guests mouth and I just thought it was perfect and it was applicable to so much of what we do in this industry and who we are as people. So if we are constantly chasing what good looks like, we’re gonna get there. I’m joined in the studio by Jaime LaMontagne, Chief Marketing Officer for Astrin Biosciences. Jaime started in the industry at Medtronic as an intern. That’s always a really fun origin story. In the episode, we talk about marketing as the other side of the MedTech coin, navigating the challenges of regulations and the innovative approaches that Astrin Biosciences is taking in cancer diagnostics. And of course, we talk about leadership, because how can you reverse engineer the making of a MedTech leader if you don’t talk about leadership? Really quickl, before we start my conversation with Jaime LaMontagne, I did want to make a really quick note. When I recorded this conversation with Jaime, the Certitude blood test was not launched. It is now, which is really exciting. So, to learn more about the Certitude blood Test, please visit www.certitudetest.com. that’s certitudetest.com. you can also follow Certitude test on Facebook or Instagram. So with that in mind, I’d love to introduce you to Jaime LaMontagne, the Chief Marketing Officer for Astrin Biosciences. Jaime LaMontagne, Chief Marketing Officer for Astrin Biosciences. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Kayleen. It’s a pleasure to be here. I found your history leading up to MedTech and what you’ve done in MedTech to be really intriguing. And I love the commercial side of the business. And I always think about MedTech as having two sides of the same coin. And commercialization, marketing, branding, messaging is arguably as important as the technology. So to have both of that coming together is just like a win, win, win, win. So I want to unpack that. But before we get into that, I always want to understand what makes you, you. And one of my favorite questions, Jaime, to do that is, what was your very first job? That’s such a fun question. So it definitely speaks to me and my background. So I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and my dad worked for the USDA, so the Department of Agriculture in agricultural research and specifically sunflowers. He was a sunflower geneticist for the government. And so hence I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. So actually my first job was analyzing seed samples for oil content for my dad. So I had to stick some sunflower seeds in a beaker, and the beaker went into this machine and it spit out an oil content. So there you go. Fargo, North Dakota, working with sunflower seeds. How old were you, like, when you first started that? I think I was only about like 13. Oh, yeah. And I got paid per sample, so I, I really liked to do that job on the weekends for my dad. Cause I could, I could make some. I can make some serious coin. Yeah, that’s cash money, honey. Like hand over fist at 13. I love that. Two thoughts with that. One, any lessons that came out of that experience either having, like, leadership, being a family member, and having to adjust to your age, and maybe the second, was there a part of you that you didn’t know existed that you learned about yourself by doing that role? Yeah, I think for me, those early jobs, it gave me that kind of discipline, the time management skills. You know, when you’re a kid, there’s like, time is. Time is. There’s just so much of it, you know, available for whatever you want to do. But thinking about, okay, I need to go do this for a couple of hours and I need to do this and I need to do that. You know, kind of those early jobs and even going into my then kind of adult type career, it’s, you know, really thinking about how to maximize your time. How do you accomplish everything that you want to accomplish? And so I think that was what really taught me in those early, early years is, is how do I think about what I want to, what I want to accomplish? How do I have fun, but also get some, get some stuff done? It sounds to me like you really learned what time is and how to manage that time and find a balance between what you want to do and what your responsibilities are and getting used to the fact that your time isn’t really your time anymore. Yes. And it’s, you know, where do you get that? Where is there the short term benefit versus the long term benefit? And with marketing, you know, I think one of the things I, I learned and then realized as a people leader that I had to kind of coach and train on was the ability to do more than one thing at once. You know, when you think about like a project management course, it’s always just one project with multiple different work streams. But a marketer, at least in my career, kind of unlike pharma, I was working on, I had multiple products that were on market that I was managing. But then also I was usually sitting on one, if not two core teams for future product development. So every week it was, what am I doing to manage these current products on the market? What’s due for my marketing plan for this product? Okay, this product’s two years out, so we’re still doing Market research or having customer conversations. So really breaking down and thinking about how do I move all of my things forward? And some of them are, you know, you get an immediate, you know, immediate gratification because you complete something. And some things are longer term, more strategic, are going to take more time. So I think kind of those early, early roles, early jobs, even just you know, again managing school and sports and activities, I think that that skill set of that time management and kind of again where do I get that instant gratification versus longer term gratification really fed into how it is to be a MedTech marketer when we, we don’t just do one thing, we’re doing a lot of different things. It’s a really great point and I think it speaks to what drives us as leaders. You know, is it that instant gratification? Is it a long term gratification? Is it a balance of both? Because you can’t move forward unless you are getting that gratification in some way. When I did some research, I was really interest in your educational background. So as I understand that you studied international studies and you had a minor in French. I have to wonder did if you are exposed to the fact that we are a much larger community, a global community, do you see that changing the way that you thought about your career and approach to your career? Yeah, great question. And actually I was a double major. I was international studies and communications with the minor. But it’s, it’s, but they were very complimentary. So yes, I knew going into college that I wanted to do something with people that I wanted to do something with, with, you know, being in the global kind of environment. So I went to McAllister which is a liberal arts school. And so really what I learned in that kind of early, early education was that critical thinking that the gray, like how do you operate in the gray? Because most of my classes were you know, like political science or international studies, you know, for like, you know, Asian history. So a lot of different kind of broad topics. But it taught me how to think critically and to be able to kind of work my way through the gray to get to, you know, to get to an idea or you know, an end thought on the communication side, you know, it was kind of the precursor to marketing. So it was like non verbal communication, organizational communication, argumentation and rhetoric, like very, you know, again theoretical topics. But it was super interesting how those, those things actually came forward with me into the workplace because you know, I really am astute to nonverbal communication. You know, when you see different, different things in the, in the meetings. Organizational communication. I still remember we actually had to do, like, fake meetings. And, and you had somebody like, recording what, you know, what you were doing, not what, not necessarily what you were saying. But the advice was always, you want to. If, if you’re not. If you need to be an active participant or you want to be an active participant in the meeting, you have to say something within the first five minutes of the meeting. If you, if you, if you go beyond five minutes, you, you, you. You tend to not actually engage in the conversation. So it was one of those little, like, little nuggets. So like, sometimes, you know, it doesn’t mean you have to say anything profound. It’s just, hi, everybody. You know, glad to be here, or, you know, I’m super excited about this topic. You just have to, you just have to open your mouth and engage. So I do think about that one sometimes too, when I’m. When I’m in my, in my work mode. I’m going to be using that. Yeah, yeah. I learned a lot in that kind of undergrad, but I knew that I wanted to do. So I kind of. Out of it, started doing market research as my first job out of college. And I really loved that. I loved finding out why customers either like something or don’t like something. What would make them want to buy more? What are those kind of, those really key insights. So I love doing that out of college. And then that’s what really brought me to do my master’s right away, because I wanted to do from there. I really wanted to get into marketing. And I knew I needed to have some stronger, like, hard skills to be able to kind of make that transition into marketing. So that’s really kind of what, you know, taking those critical thinking skills, those kind of, you know, just organizational communications type of, type of skills, plus the market research really kind of catapulted me into having a career in marketing. And from what I understand, just following your thread of thought here, you went to University of St. Thomas, which is right in the heart of MedTech in Minnesota. So I have to wonder, did MedTech come after your time at the university or before? Actually, it came after. Yeah. So it came after. But I fell in love with product marketing at St. Thomas. When I was doing my master’s, I had this one professor who, I can’t remember her name now, but she was a General Mills alum, and she made us do a product project. But she was telling us stories of refrigerator cookie dough and chocolate. Cool up and why was one a success and one a failure. And it just sparked my kind of desire to get into product marketing and bring kind of that, those analytics kind of insight skills from market research. And so that’s, that’s what I, what I wanted to do, you know, when I was done. But actually it was market research that got me to Medtronic. So I was close to being done with my master’s and they were hiring interns and I got my first job at Medtronic being a market research intern. Yeah, that’s the best. It’s almost like saying you started in the mail room like that is the best. Yeah. It was so fun because at that point in time market research was a central function at Medtronic. So I was working on all sorts of different projects across different businesses. So it, it was a great way to learn a little bit about Medtronics. I was doing a neuro project, a cardiac rhythm project, a urology product project. Excuse me. And so it was a great way to get a landscape of the organization, learn a little bit about the products and the people. And after that internship, I applied and got my first role as a product manager at Medtronic. So that’s what brought me to MedTech was that market research connection. And obviously I’ve never looked back. Once you get the bug of MedTech, it’s hard to think about going anywhere else. What’s interesting is your first real like full time role, not even talking about industry, but your first full time non internship role was in a space that’s very, very regulated. Yes. And it is unlike any other industry in the way that especially if you’re doing marketing or you’re approaching messaging, product marketing, there’s 19 reasons you can’t do something and one reason you can. How did that experience, how did going into something so regulate regulated something so, for lack of a better word, controlled, how did that maybe impact the way that you think about marketing and you thought about your role? Great question. I mean I think that when you, you learn kind of basic product marketing, it’s, you know, what are the reasons to believe? Right? Those are your brand, your brand essence. What’s those, what are those reasons to believe? Which I think is just a fancy way of talking about the claims, right? What do we need to say to convince a physician to want to use our product? And so I think to me that was always the core essence of what a product manager is ultimately trying to do. You know, what can I say right now? What are those benefits to the physician? What’s going to make them believe in our product and want to continue to use that. So I think. But of course, in our world that’s highly regulated. You know, you learn that right away. My first role taught me that I can provide an example, but it was very much, I couldn’t just, you can’t just say what you want to say. It has to be backed up with clinical evidence. So, you know, that claims matrix was probably one of the first tools, you know, I had to learn how to use. You know, what do I want to say? Where do I? Where’s the source document for what I want to say? But I remember this. My first product at Medtronic was in the urology space, and it was for men with benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH. And ultimately a symptom of that. So it’s ultimately the prostate is growing and it’s squeezing the urethra. So men have difficulty going to the bathroom. So we had this fantastic marketing idea for direct to patient education at that time. And still to this day. But those bathroom advertisements would be a fantastic place to talk about our product because obviously they’re right there in that moment trying to go the bathroom. What a better product placement at that moment? So we were working on some ads to test in a couple of markets and we were using a waterfall and it was flowing water. Right. Again, you know, it’s. Of course, you’re like, you get it right away. Like, okay, I’m telling you, would you like to have some more flow? Anyway, the lawyer wouldn’t let me use the waterfall because she asked me if it was indicative of the benefit that our product would provide if they had the procedure. And I’m like, it’s theoretical. It’s metaphorical. Like, it’s not. Yeah. So I got it. In that moment, I’m like, oh, this is not Cheerios. Like, this is a medical process. Like, okay, we need to be creative. But how do we be creative within that regulated environment? You know, right away in that first job was. Was thrown. Thrown into that for sure. I have to imagine that it gave you like all of this experience, internship to the many roles you held at Medtronic had to have given you such an appreciation and a sensitivity to language. I love the phrase you were using. The was a matrix - What was that matrix?. Claims matrix? Thank you, Jaime. Using this as like, as a tool like helps inform your messaging later on and making legal say yes sooner because you’ve learned this past like waterfall experience. A year later, two years later, you forget the rationale for why you could say something or not say something. So having a document like that is, it becomes, you know, your, your guiding document because, or even your regulatory or legal people turn over, right? And a new person comes in and has a different opinion to their predecessor and it’s like, well, no, this was, this is, these were the claims that we agreed upon. Here is the source documentation. So it was also a way to kind of not have to relitigate kind of everything over and over again. That was very important. But, but to your point about language, that was a huge, that’s a huge part of a product manager’s role. One minute you’re with the sales reps, how do you translate what the brand is supposed to be, the customer experience that we’re trying to provide to the sales rep so that they can go out and do their job effectively? It’s talking to a physician, finding out what’s working, what’s not working, and how do you then ask them those questions and get to those deeper insights. And then it’s coming back and talking to the engineers and saying, well, this is what I heard from the sales reps, this is what I’ve heard from the customers. This is what I think we should be doing next. And language and interpretation and being able to take all those different insights from those different audiences, but also communicate kind of having that bidirectional. And I forget even executives, then how do you actually translate all of that to the, to the executive leaders to be able to, to be able to justify the project or, or you know, get them motivated and excited for, for a new product, for example. But you, you know, you definitely have to. It’s like that situational leadership is core to a product manager. And the best ones know how to navigate and ask different questions to different audiences, bring those things back, share them across all those different, those different stakeholders to be able to kind of shepherd that product through and, you know, get it through to whatever that that goal is for that product. So much about what you said, I love, but I’m going to touch on situational leadership. I think that that is such a terrific phrase. It really illustrates, I think what you’re trying to communicate here is packaging the messaging for that specific audience in that moment with the resources you have, the information you have at that time, and at that point just kind of hope it works. Could you think of any example of how had you not employed situational leadership, it just wouldn’t work. Can you reflect on that? Wow, that’s a great question. I mean, it’s one of those things, like it’s so a part of your DNA, like you don’t even know kind of how to shut it off. But I would say, I mean, I think one example that comes to mind, you know, my second role at Medtronic was in the spinal cord stimulation space. And I came over and was immediately charged with launching a product. And so I had about six months. So I, you know, head down, cranked, you know, to get this product ready for launch. And we launched it and it didn’t feel right. You know, the reaction wasn’t what we expected or anticipated. And so I started doing a lot of phone calls with the field and out, you know, traveling and finding out, okay, what, what was, what was going on here. And ultimately, the product had, was delayed a little bit, and a competitive product had launched about nine months prior to our launch. And that kind of reset the game, like, kind of reset customer expectations. And so the field was. Our plan was to phase in these new products and phase out the old products. And everybody was giving me a lot of resistance, like, no, please don’t get rid of the old products. Because unfortunately, the new products didn’t have a competitive feature set. And actually our older products were more competitive to those new products from the competition. Yeah, it was very weird. So kind of, you know, back to that situational leadership. You know, part of me, part of you just wants to be like we launched this thing, like, go, just do it. But part of me is also like, oh, we’re gonna actually set ourselves up for market share loss if we don’t kind of rethink the situation. And so I did a lot of listening and then having to bring that back to the organization was really tough. Right? And again, situational leadership going into the leadership team, the GM of the business, the head of R&D, and saying the market has shifted. We actually should phase out our new products and keep our old. But again, I had a plan, like an obsolescence plan. Like we’re, this is how we’re going to get, you know, we’re going to sell what we have in inventory. But I mean, it was, it was a, it was a big moment for me to have to like, think through how, how do I manage this, but also really talk about how it was a market shift. It wasn’t failure or, or just, you know, lack of doing the right, we needed to do the right thing. So rather than, you know, kind of place blame, let’s move forward and figure out how we’re gonna, how we’re gonna win. So that, you know, that’s an example of kind of situational leadership. Never had I not had that ability again, it probably would have resulted in market share loss and some scrambling for sure. That’s no easy task. So it was a perfect example. I want to take us to Astrin Biosciences but before we, I know you had some really great experience leading up to that. So just at a high level, can you unpack? From Medtronic to Astrin Biosciences, where were you? What were you doing, what were your roles? Sure. Yeah. So all in, I was at medtronic for about 18 years. My first stint was 11 years and I did different marketing roles within urology, neuro, you know, kind of the spinal cord stimulation space and then arrhythmia with cardiac surgery and then perfusion. And then I left Medtronic the first time to go to a critical care company that was a British company. Now it’s ICU Medical. But that was really interesting because it wasn’t like implantable. We’re, you’re talking, you know, epidurals, infusion pumps. So really different products kind of used throughout the hospital. So I versus like very therapy based, you know, Medtronics, very therapy specific. So that I learned a ton when I did that stint. Then I wasn’t planning on coming back to Medtronic but I was recruited to come back to lead the Brady marketing team, the Brady arrhythmia or the pacemaker marketing team. And at that point we were launching Micra, the transcatheter pacemaker. And talk about fun. Ultimately completely disrupting a 70 year old market with pacemakers was so much fun. And that was a blast. And then I kind of ultimately was leading our cardiac rhythm marketing organization. But then I that was a pivot moment for me from a career perspective. Really kind of the next opportunity for me at Medtronic would be to be to be a general manager. And I had to really do a lot of reflection around why would I want that role, what would be the kind of the impetus for it. And of course why I was excited about general management was, you know, setting the vision and strategy, driving growth, innovation. But those were all really marketing aspects, right, Things that I already was doing in a marketing role. And so I ultimately decided not to pursue general management. And really focus on functional leadership and stay true to my passion and marketing. So that’s actually what kind of set me on a path of becoming a chief marketing officer. So I joined Exact Sciences which is a about two and a half billion dollar business that’s around cancer diagnostics. And most people know Exact for Cologuard, which is their main signature product for kind of the general population. And then they’re also really known for a product called Oncotype DX which is used for, for breast cancer patients. I totally got the diagnostic cancer bug in that role. I really enjoyed that kind of how do you drive big change for so many people? You know, 60 million people for colon cancer for example, learned a lot about direct to consumer that, you know, hadn’t been in that, in that environment before. So that was a blast. And so that brings me to Astrin Biosciences, a Minnesota based startup. And it’s kind of doing things a little differently in the diagnostic space. You know, most of the liquid biopsy companies are looking at circulating tumor DNA which works really well for cancers like colon, but for breast cancer, which is what we’re focusing on for our first product. Breast tumors don’t shed DNA until later stages so it’s really not an early detection option. The amazing technology and science team at Astrin have actually discovered a way to use proteomics so looking for protein signatures in plasma to be able to identify if a patient has breast cancer. So really excited about the potential that proteomics and AI machine learning have to bring towards something like breast cancer because it’s the biggest impact cancer and then for women it’s the second killer cancer killer and so definitely need innovation there and so you know, really excited about, about bringing that to market. You had shared kind of the origin story of Astrin Biosciences and I thought it was so intriguing. Would you share that again or I guess share it for the first time for the audience? I got the skinny, but how did that come to be? I know you high leveled it, but the actual origin story I find fascinating. Yeah, so it’s a Minnesota based team. JP, our CEO, comes from UnitedHealth Group and I think it’s a culmination of amazing experts across different fields that he brought together to ultimately look at cancer differently and try to use kind of AI machine intelligence to again come at solving for cancer a little bit differently. And everybody at the organization has a cancer story. You know, JP has his kind of reason for starting the company and that’s ultimately what brought us to bear. We’ve, you know, definitely lots of starts and stops, you know, trying to figure out how to do this. So at first we were looking at holograms and still do to some extent, looking at cancer cells. And then we quickly realized that these protein signatures, the abundance of proteins, was actually providing a breakthrough on us being able to see even stage zero breast cancer. So, yeah, it’s been a typical startup journey. We’re about 28 people strong right now and growing, growing very, very quickly as we get ready for launch. So I have a couple of questions about Astrin Biosciences that came to the top of my head. And then I want to circle back to lessons in leadership here. As I understand it, one of the challenges when it comes to detecting breast cancer that I didn’t know about until you and I met was dense tissue. Yes. Can you explain what that means and why everybody listening should be aware of it? Yes. So the guidelines have every woman over the age of, once you reach 40, starting to screen for breast cancer. And the guidelines, you know, very much are mammograms. I think everybody knows you have to have a mammogram now. There’s 2D mammograms and 3D mammograms, but they’re relatively similar as far as their accuracy and results. I mean, 3D is slightly better, but ultimately for women that have regular breast tissue, you know, it shows up dark, so you can quickly see a white, any sort of white spot, which would ultimately indicate the potential of cancer. When a woman has dense breasts, it’s super fibrotic, and that tissue is very white. So women with dense breasts, it’s really hard to see on mammogram any sort of potential cancer when the breasts are already really lit up and very white. So when you hear there’s a masking effect, that’s what the radiologist or your physician is talking about. And unfortunately, then because of that, mammograms for regular breasted women are about 88, 89% sensitive. But for women with dense tissue, it actually drops like 30, 40%. And so you hear these stories of women that are like, I was doing my annuals and it was, you know, clear, clear, clear, clear. And some other reason, whether they felt a lump or, you know, one woman I just heard of recently had to go in and do a baseline bone density, and they find out they have cancer. And it’s usually later stages, stage three, you know, and it’s tragic because they’re doing everything they’re supposed to do, right? So a little over a year ago, there was a national law passed that now radiologists have to tell women in their mammogram report what is their level of density. And so there’s four levels, A, B, C and D. They may not say that, but ultimately, A is fatty. B is, oh, gosh, I forget B now, but again, not dense. C is heterogene. Oh, my gosh, I can’t say that. Partially dense. And then lastly is extremely dense, heterogeneously dense. That’s what I meant. But ultimately they need to tell you now on your your mammogram report the level of density of your breasts. So, but unfortunately, the guidelines don’t really have clear guidance for physicians on what to do for a woman that is low risk, meaning they don’t have family history or any other of the other risk factors. If they don’t have that, there really isn’t a protocol for incremental screening. So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to fit in with Certitude, which is our breast cancer blood test. We’re looking at using this kind of post mammogram for those women, I mean, really can be used across regular and dense breast women, but particularly for those women with dense breasts to be able to give them that peace of mind that they can, you know, kind of see through their tissue, but also identify those patients who may actually have underlying cancer that is just not visible on a mammogram, but could be visible on an MRI, which would be kind of where they would go next after our test. So, yeah, lots of room for improvement. I mean, first, driving a lot of awareness for women with dense breasts and helping them get to supplemental screening is going to be a big part of my job here in the next couple of years. The responsibility in MedTech is unparalleled. So I think that we have a responsibility to. Got a little choked up. I think we have a responsibility to patients and their families and their advocates, their friends, and then we have a responsibility to industry as well. I said that I’d like to circle back to leadership, and I do. But for our audience, where can they go? To learn more about Astrid Biosciences and do you have any supplemental information about the technology that you are able to share? If so, let us know where to go for that. Yes. Please head to Astrinbio.com that’s our company website. We do have a way to sign up for our newsletter and information, so please do that and I’ll keep you posted withour developments. But, I hear you on cancer. It’s personal. It is. Especially for women. You know, breast cancer is really hard to detect in the blood, and I’m just so excited and proud of the team that we figured out a way to do this. Many companies have tried and just haven’t been able to really figure out how to find it. If you think about the multicancer early detection tests that are on the market right now, they’re trying to find 30 different cancers and looking at their breast results again. They’re seeing the late stage threes and fours, but they’re not seeing the early stage. So just really excited about the potential that this test has to give women an alternative to imaging that can provide that, you know, accuracy and make it really easy to do so. Very, very excited to bring that forward. Yeah. Because you’re right, it’s personal. And I think a lot of women are going to be really, I mean, everyone I talk to is like, I want this test or I know somebody who wants this test. So it’s, it’s going to be, it’s going to be fun when we hit the market to help all those women. Coming from this large MedTech mentality, especially after 18 years and then going into really start up, what experiences, lessons, strategies did you bring with you from that larger organization mentality that has helped you at Astrin Biosciences and what have you had to unlearn? Great question. I think the biggest thing that you bring forward is you know what good looks like. And so, you know, you know what you want to build and so, or you know, what you want when it’s like fully operational. So, kind of that’s what I bring forward is this how I, you know, in a couple years, this is how I want the machine to look and to operate. How do I then break it down into small pieces and try to build it? And, it’s also, it’s really exciting because I, you know, I’m total in like 25 years. So, yes, it’s been a while since I’ve actually been an individual contributor building it myself. And so it’s actually given me kind of a youthful energy. It’s fun just to actually like get back into it and roll up your sleeves and try to figure it out yourself. So, I would say I would, I bring forward that, you know, what good looks like. You know what that needs to be. But I would say the thing I had to leave behind, I mean, you know, when you have a team of 150, right, you’re leading leaders, I think the leaving behind is a little bit also the same. There’s nobody to delegate to. Like it’s okay. It kind of goes back to my first job. How do I get up, how do I get everything done? And there’s things I really want to do and there’s things I don’t really want to do but I have to do. So like how do I, how do I manage my, my energy? And you know, I’ll ultimately get it all done because I have to delegate to myself. So I guess you have to kind of leave that at the door too. But, it’s been really, really fun to take the 25 years of learning and start building it from scratch, which is actually really fun because after like to your point, being in really big organizations, you somewhat take for granted all of the infrastructure, all of the operating mechanisms, all of the ways that things get done and being on the other end where, you know, none of that set up yet, you know, we’re building it all right now. It’s fun to actually again, I know what good looks like, but how, I mean I have no idea how they built it, you know, because it was 30 years ago when they built something or that type of thing. So it’s, it’s fun to now think about, okay, if I know what the end game needs to look like, how do I work, work my way backwards. It’s almost like building the plane while you’re flying it, you know what it’s supposed to look like. You’re just kind of piecing it together. Definitely, definitely. That is very, very true. Especially in the world of the lab developed tests where things are kind of, there’s a lot of movement versus on the device side where you lock a lot earlier and kind of know what you’re building. So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of flying the plane and building at the same time. Exhilarating though I do love the startup ecosystem. It’s so addictive. I want you to take a second and not worry about ego, don’t worry about how you sound and just sit into that bad ass seat. What makes you who you are and to be the person to lead the way that you lead. What are some of those skills, personality traits, moments? Be unabashedly just honest with us. Why are you so badass? That’s super funny. All right, I’ll put on like my Wonder Woman, you know. Wow, that’s a great question. I mean, I think that ultimately I’m a people connector person. I get energy from people around me. I get energy from being, you know, around that kind of innovative kind of energy. And so it’s usually like, I almost think about it in the inverse, like where do I not want to be around? And it’s usually like bad energy. Right. You know, people that are, you know, just, there’s just a lot of negativity and all the no’s, like not trying to figure out, okay, yes, I know it’s challenging, but how do we, how do we move forward? I’m a, you know, I’m a solution kind of result type of a person. So yeah, I think to me that’s what really drives my passion and kind of, I think, makes me a good people leader because I am always kind of trying to bring everybody together and get everybody on the same page. How do we move forward, how do we assume positive intent and go. So hopefully that answers your question. But I think I just, I get my energy from the people around me. And you know, again, seeing the impact of your products, I just, I love it and it’s so much fun to kind of see that impact both organizationally and in the patients and markets we serve. One of my challenges in MedTech media is I only know who I know. So who should I know who? Are there other female MedTech leaders that you can raise attention and awareness to? Yeah. The first woman I want to give a shout out to is Naira Istephanous. She is the woman who brought me to Medtronic. She’s the one that gave me my internship and started my career path. So without her and her support as I shifted into a full time role, I wouldn’t be here today. Who knows where I would be? So first off, Naira Istephanous, she’s amazing, amazing marketer. Then I would also say, I mean, many women at Medtronic or former Medtronic, so I would say Moj DePool, a huge mentor of mine. Julie Foster, great mentor of mine. Nina Goodheart, amazing mentor of mine. And then probably one that you don’t. So I mean, obviously those are people that are really well known within the, within the MedTech space. One you may or may not know is Rena Bradham. She is the woman who brought me over to Smiths when I went to the British kind of critical care company. She was out of the Medfusion organization, which is an infusion pump that Smiths had out in California. She’s worked for BD and some other organizations. But what I learned from Rena was the ability to storytell and I am just so appreciate appreciative of her because that we were in a, it was a conglomerate ,and so we had a medical division, but we were constantly presenting to the corporate leadership and they were oil and gas or automotive or food and beverage people. They were not, you know, what you learn when you’re at a Medtronic or something where like everybody kind of speaks the same language. They didn’t know medical at all. And so her ability to kind of simplify and storytell to an audience that was not kind of, again, speaking the same language. I learned so much from her about how to really craft and simplify my story. So I want to call out Rena as well. Those are some great call outs, about 50% of them for the audience that’s watching. I was like, yeah, Nina Goodhart, actually she kicked off our season two of the Women in MedTech podcast. So we love Nina here. But thank you some of the new names as well and sharing your experiences and your time and your energy. Jaime LaMontagne, Chief Marketing Officer for Astrin Biosciences, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. This hour flew by and I just, I want more time. Agree, Kayleen. Next time we see each other, we’ll have to keep the conversation going. But thank you so much for having me. That was such a good conversation. I told you at the beginning you’d love it and I know that you did. Jaime is incredible and we had a ton of fun together. So once again, I want to say huge thank you to MedTechWOMEN for supporting this episode of the Women in MedTech podcast by DeviceTalks. And let MedTechWOMEN know that I will see them September 15th for the 2026 MedTechVISION Conference. I can’t wait to sit down with Martha Aronson, the president and CEO of Merit Medical Systems. Also, if you haven’t got a chance to check out the agenda and see what MedTechVISION’s in store for you this year, go to MedtechWomen.org and check out the event there. This year’s theme is The Breakthrough Imperative, Winning in an Ever Changing Landscape. I will see you on Tuesday. I will see you at the end of this year for DeviceTalks West. You will see me all over video now that I’ve recovered, or semi-recovered, from my bunionectomy. So soon I’ll be able to say that I am Kayleen Brown and I have no bunion. Won’t that be nice? But until then, thank you again for listening to the Women in MedTech podcast. Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn. Kayleen Brown, managing Editor for DeviceTalks. Make sure to follow our Editorial Director, Tom Salemi and of course, follow DeviceTalks. It is always a pleasure bringing these conversations to you. Thanks so much.