Health Tech: Dr Salvatore Viscomi On How GoodCell’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact In Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Dave Philistin

Quality customer service: It sounds like a no-brainer, but customer service is highly undervalued, particularly when it comes to technology. If you want to make a positive social impact with technology, you can’t underestimate the importance of customer service. We are dealing with personal health information, so it’s essential for our members to feel they are in good hands, and we have their back at every step of the way. To meet this need at GoodCell, each member is assigned a dedicated Member Relationship Manager who is their resource for questions and guides them on the actions they can consider taking need to take.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Salvatore Viscomi, Chief Medical Officer at GoodCell.

Dr. Salvatore Viscomi leads the product line of genetic and biomarker testing at GoodCell, a universal biobanking platform that harnesses the power of blood for comprehensive and exclusive cell-based diagnostics and therapeutics to identify, track and help mitigate health risks — resulting in better health outcomes and life-saving therapies. Salvatore is a practicing physician, instructor and an entrepreneur.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I was born in Italy, and Italian was my primary language growing up. I consider myself bicultural. Beginning in grammar school my family moved back and forth between Italy and US several times. My parents wanted to establish better opportunities for my older sister and me, but we also had strong roots overseas.

My first anatomy lessons were in Italy with my grandparents who lived on a farm with pigs and chickens. When I was little, I remember going to the chicken coop and watching my grandmother slaughter the chickens. She would teach me about the different body parts and organs. I have been a vegetarian for several years in the past. Now, I’m more of a pescatarian who eats meat on occasion.

My father was a mason and I worked with him from age 9 through college. One day, I came home from school and told my father that another kid punched me. One of my dad’s workers was a black belt in karate so my dad decided to sign me up right away. Back then, there were no kids in the class, just adults. My first day happened to be when the Grand Master from Japan was visiting. I was terrified for the first two weeks, and after that, I became obsessed. I practiced martial arts on a daily basis, competing and going on to teach classes in New York. Through martial arts, I learned about meditation and discipline. I’ve visited Japan multiple times and have developed an appreciation for Eastern medicine practices that continues to influence some of my philosophies about health today.

Although he taught me several values, including hard work, my father discouraged me from following in his footsteps as a mason. Both of my parents were very traditional. Ultimately, it was my mother who helped me focus and pushed me towards a career in medicine.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

My career has been full of twists and turns that I believe is somewhat unusual in medicine. Most conventional doctors spend a lot of time and effort specializing in their chosen field. While specializing has benefits, it also makes it difficult to change paths or branch out. To learn a completely different type of medicine is pretty rare once you’re into your career. For me, diving into genetics with GoodCell was a big and unexpected step.

I first learned about GoodCell when I was hired to vet the company for an investment firm. After meeting the team, I became interested and decided to invest myself. I had experience in early medical device start-ups that led me to join GoodCell as an advisor. I still practice radiology, but I’ve learned a whole new area of medicine through genetics and cell therapy. I grew interested in CHIP (clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential) and wanted to contribute to the science — eventually working on GoodCell’s several4–5 CHIP-related patents.

The move to GoodCell was spontaneous. And then, the pandemic happened. More work needed to be done on CHIP in relation to Covid-19. I transitioned into a full-time position at GoodCell, which I never could have predicted in my early career.

When I worked in imaging, I was interested in screening for diseases. CHIP is also a progressive and impactful tool for screening for diseases on a microscopic vs. a macroscopic level. If a person has increased levels of the genetic changes that mark CHIP it can be predictive of increased risk for heart disease, certain cancers and various inflammatory conditions. There’s overlap between the two disciplines, and looking back I understand some of the factors that brought me here.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Watching my parents start a new life in America helped set the stage for my entrepreneurial drive and willingness to take risks. In addition to my work with GoodCell, I cofounded a nutrition bar company with no experience in the CPG (consumer packaged goods) world. I like to try new things and learn on the job.

Both of my parents played crucial roles in my development. My father taught me discipline, hard work, courage, and creativity. My mother brought structure to my education and goals. I was also very close with my grandmother who was like a second mom.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Einstein

Coming into the genetics world from the outside taught me to go beyond a narrow focus in life. I think it’s an asset to see something from an outsider’s perspective. I’ve noticed this even with the nutrition bar team. We have people who are experts, but sometimes the outsiders come up with an idea that blows them away. Shifting into multiple career paths means I’m always catching up on learning and bringing new ideas to the table. In addition to learning and understanding what’s there, fostering creativity makes the biggest difference in taking projects to the next level.

I’ve had opportunities to be creative by taking a fairly new concept, CHIP, and being able to find clinical applications for it that aren’t established yet — discovering uses related to inflammation, autoimmune disease, traumatic brain injuries, and Covid-19. I try to stay open-minded about the areas where CHIP can be applied by not looking diseases within a single channel. With GoodCell, we’re building a comprehensive database that encapsulates every aspect of the genetics, biomarkers, cells, and germline markers. GoodCell allows us to put research into practice, delivering it the real world.

You are a successful business leader. Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Persistent — I faced a lot of resistance against the use of abbreviated MRIs in place of mammograms, but I knew it was a good idea so I continued to advocate and eventually it caught on.
2. Team-builder — Creating a team for my first business (radiology telehealth) and my nutrition bar company have taught me why team-building is essential.
3. Risk-taker — My first big risk was choosing to develop a start-up instead of pursuing a fellowship in radiology. I made this choice despite pushback from my mentors. After seeing its success, I became desensitized to the fear of risk which served to be an asset in future endeavors.

Firstly, hard work and perseverance are essential. Also, the ability to recruit, build, and reward a strong team. Learning to take risks as a physician entrepreneur moved me away from my comfort zone and brought me into the unknown:

When I was a third-year resident in radiology at Harvard my original plan was to do a fellowship treating aneurysms and cerebral vascular disease. That’s when I learned about the possibility of radiology telehealth. Instead of pursing a fellowship, I recruited two other students and started up a telehealth service.

When I initially pitched my plan to my mentors they told me it was a terrible idea. They didn’t think it made sense to outsource radiology. However, we saw potential, knowing the values of a younger generation of doctors that didn’t want to be on-call all the time. Instead of starting my fellowship, I went into Day 1 of a startup company. Brigham ultimately agreed to provide some minimal support, and I was able to become a faculty member immediately after graduation.

We didn’t have any expertise in starting a business. All of the marketing, recruiting, and relationship-building was done on our own. There was a lot of learning on the job and trial and error to make it work. Fortunately, it was successful early on. We were the first telehealth radiology network in the world. Eventually, telehealth became standard, growing into a multi-billion dollar industry. Had we done it externally, outside of academics, we would have been more successful with less limitations. The innovation was there but we weren’t able to scale the company. People who followed us and did it with venture capital instead, which had its advantages. This experience helped desensitize me to risk-taking, so other changes, like moving into genetics, weren’t as difficult for me.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

GoodCell bridges the gap to tomorrow’s advanced cell therapies. We allow consumers to take advantage of promising new therapies and provide preventive screenings. Our company is shaping the future of personalized health — the unique direct-to-consumer offering combines genetic testing (both inherited and dynamic acquired), health screening, diagnostics, data, and cell storage to empower individuals to live longer and healthier lives.

We want to solve a significant problem of modern medicine, which is treating diseases after-the-fact rather than preventing them or taking care of them before they become a burden. People should have control over their own healthcare rather than waiting for approval to get access to life-saving diagnostic testing and biobanking.

How do you think your technology can address this?

GoodCell is currently the only personal biobanking service for stem cells for adults. By providing this service, the company puts its users at the cutting edge of health innovation, enabling them with the capability to use their own younger, healthier cells for potential therapies as they emerge, such as blood stem cell transplants for bloodborne diseases like leukemias, lymphomas, some autoimmune diseases and sickle cell anemia. Clinical trials for stem cell use in issues like age-related macular degeneration and Parkinson’s disease, gives GoodCell’s users access to new therapies as they become available. Our technology platforms utilizes the banked biomaterials from blood, which also includes plasma and DNA, to conduct genetic testing and health screening from which medically actionable data is derived to inform health decisions and improve outcomes. We give people the information they need to direct the trajectory of their health and wellbeing.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

Earlier in my career, I was a big proponent of abbreviated MRIs for breast cancer screening. I believed this was a better way to detect early-stage tumors and reduce the need for drastic treatments like mastectomies and chemotherapy. The idea of replacing mammography with MRI technology wasn’t well-received at first. People said it would be too expensive and insurance companies wouldn’t cover it. There was a lot of politics involved, and it took a ton of work to get approval.

Eventually, we ran clinical trials where women could choose to pay for the screening based on the research we provided. Those who took advantage of the study benefitted from it and some gained lifesaving information that they used to arm themselves against breast cancer. Even changing one life is an amazing accomplishment. Today, this approach is no longer controversial, and I’m glad to see it being accepted and promoted as a better standard of care.

GoodCell is an innovative company. The power of diagnostics can be even more impactful with blood than imaging because we can catch the disease as it develops. Doing something for the first time has always appealed to me, and the potential with GoodCell is limitless.

How do you think this might change the world?

Instead of living in fear of disease, GoodCell’s technology enables anyone to use their owns cells for therapy. Today’s science is tomorrow’s medicine. GoodCell can directly impact the lives of people around the world.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Data security and privacy are paramount for consumers. We are very conscious of how that might be a concern to prospective members. Unlike other platforms, we put the member fully in control of their data, so they are the sole decision-maker on how their data gets used and who they want to share it with (whether it’s their physician or for research or neither). The bio material that people store with GoodCell belongs to them. For instance, if the member tells us to destroy it, we do.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. “Simplexity” is a term we use a lot. It means delivering complex information in a user-friendly format. One of the biggest challenges for GoodCell is that we’re doing so much and it’s complicated. For instance, CHIP is incredibly complicated, but we need to break it down so the public can understand our work. We’re doing this through some of our blogs and media articles. I’ve learned from my own experiences and watching others that it’s so important to know your audience. You need to tailor your message to speak to different groups in a way that resonates with them.
2. Transparency — Clear communication on how the platform works and how it is managed builds trust with our members. People are worried about data, and they need to understand that GoodCell is not going to sell their data like many other companies do. We work hard to stand out by giving customers control over their data and biomaterials.
3. Quality customer service: It sounds like a no-brainer, but customer service is highly undervalued, particularly when it comes to technology. If you want to make a positive social impact with technology, you can’t underestimate the importance of customer service. We are dealing with personal health information, so it’s essential for our members to feel they are in good hands, and we have their back at every step of the way. To meet this need at GoodCell, each member is assigned a dedicated Member Relationship Manager who is their resource for questions and guides them on the actions they can consider taking need to take.
   — When I was the chairman of the radiology department there were patients who had bad experiences at times with the machines or the staff. I managed these complaints personally and was amazed by the ripple effect of my efforts. I think talking to people directly despite my high-level position really meant something to the patients. I would win what were considered “battles” simply by giving a bit of my time and listening. I think a lot of people assume that if they make a complaint, it won’t go anywhere. I learned early on that customers service pays off in dividends. There were a lot of positives that came out of it. You never knew who you were dealing with- some people had family members on the board, or they were donors. My approach to customer service was one of my most effective contributions. I think it’s short-sighted to avoid using expensive resources in customer service. There were not only rewards for the department but also rewards for me personally. People are shocked when they get good customer service. It also sets a good example for the rest of department that no one is above customer service.
4. Empowering people — We’re dealing with large scale data sets. The key is to ensure that this information translates into actionable insights that give value to our members by increasing their personal health agency and ability to make meaningful changes. That’s what we’re working towards.
5. Universality (maybe “Accessibility” instead?)– We believe in the democratization of data. That’s why we designed our platform to be universally applicable to all people. The more diverse our data sets are, the more insights we can deliver to populations with unmet needs (disease-specific or ethnicity-based). GoodCell’s platform is designed so it’s not skewed towards a certain race and doesn’t require an established database for comparison. For instance, CHIP is unique to the individual. It’s comparing you to you.

We see ourselves trailblazing avenues to make this service accessible worldwide. If we learned one thing from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that there’s no point in protecting a small segment of the population. We can’t succeed in the fight against viruses or other health threats without reaching everyone. If you want to make a dent in diabetes, heart disease, and other major healthcare costs, you need to be able to impact all subsets of the population. Developing expensive tools for VIPs won’t be enough to change healthcare in the U.S. or the world. GoodCell wants to store cells for everyone.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

There’s no better satisfaction or feeling of success than impacting other people’s lives in a positive way. It’s a privilege to being in that position. Changing the trajectory of someone’s life by your actions provides the ultimate reward.

Also, good work comes back to you. There are times when I’ve done favors, such as serving as an advisor for things for free, and it’s always come back. You may think you’ll never need anything from those you helped, but you may end up reaching out to them in the future. For example, I’ve mentored medical students who have become entrepreneurs, and now, we’re looking to become business partners on certain projects. I have a different relationship with them than others who want to partner with them.

There are some students that I’ve convinced to become entrepreneurs in the first place. When I was the director of admissions at Harvard, there was a student who I accepted into a highly competitive program who decided to leave. He told me he wanted to become an entrepreneur, and I encouraged him to do so. These days, my talks to residents at medical schools are always about entrepreneurship: how to escape the confines of the medical system. I don’t give any more talks on clinical work or technologies. I want others to hear about the different ways they can contribute while earning a living in medicine.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Elon Musk: pushes the envelope, has a vision of something impossible and makes it work, doesn’t let anything get in his way. He’s able to see beyond doubt.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.