In this segment of "Industry Focus" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Dec. 15, Fool Tech Host Dylan Lewis and Analyst Yasser El-Shimy discuss BICO Group's (BICO +1.01%) unique business model that is changing the medtech industry.
Dylan Lewis: We have seen health medtech companies take what would normally be a very high upfront cost for machinery, and flip the model on its head and say, "We're basically, compared to the standard cost, giving it away for free, or giving it away for very little to the providers with the hope that we could build a viable business with the usage-based model."
It's huge in terms of convincing people to try your technology because the barrier is a lot lower for something like that, Yasser.
Yasser El-Shimy: Absolutely. You just get a foot in the door and then you keep that subscription going, but that's a very lucrative business model.
Lewis: If you're looking at the website for this company, you're going to see a couple of buzz words, and I think it's worth us talking about what they are and how it comes together within the industry, that problem that it helps address.
The first one is bioconvergence. I'm going to take something straight from the company's website here, Yasser. Bioconvergence is an industry segment within healthcare and research in life science that emphasizes the synergy between engineering, technology, and computerized systems is based on the understanding that biology and tech, the two pillars of biotechnology, aren't as hard to reconcile as they appear.
In trying to define one buzzword, I might have brought some more in there. But really, what we're [laughs] trying to do here, it seems to me in an oversimplified way, Yasser, is basically take the best of what we're able to do with biology, the best of what we're [laughs] able to do with engineering methods and put them together to improve what happens in the life sciences and the healthcare space.
El-Shimy: That's right. I think this is what's so fascinating about this company taking a pioneering step in that field. The name BICO itself is in fact short for bioconvergence. That's why they named the company that recently, it renamed the company, which is Cellink in reference to the bioinks stuff they used to sell or that they still sell, but that's no longer the main part of the business.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. The founder of this company, Erik Gatenholm. He was thinking like, "How do we combine biology and biological matter with all the advancements that we're seeing on the technology field including in AI, genomics, mechanical engineering, optic sensors, nanotechnology, robotics," and the list goes on and on. How do we combine or how do we actually take advantage of all these technological advancements in order to bring the field of biology and the study of the human cells and tissues and organs forward? It's definitely a very interesting business model.
