Since 2016, the Mass General Brigham MESH Incubator has been helping clinicians with ideas iteratively prototype and accelerate their idea towards licensable intellectual property and new companies. Alias Medical is a company formed out of the MESH Innovation Teams Program (2020 cohort), with technology developed at Mass General Brigham. You can find them in our MESH Incubator Portfolio Companies and Technology Directory.

We caught up with Min Lang, MD, co-founder of Alias Medical and MGH resident:

How did you come up with the idea?

Two years ago, my uncle from China had a fall. He took a picture of his shoulder X-ray on a computer monitor in the local emergency room in China and asked me if there was a fracture. The quality of the photo he took was very limited and I couldn’t be of help. I thought to myself, why is there no easier way for him to share his medical images with me over the cloud? My other co-founders also have family living in countries outside of the United States and have experienced instances where a family member would ask for medical advice that required access to their medical images.

As we looked at the medical image sharing landscape in the United States, we realized that there is an unmet need for easy and efficient image sharing and storage solution for the general patient population. Many hospitals today still give patients their medical images on fragile CDs, which the patients then need to bring with them when visiting another hospital. The whole process has not kept up with current technology.

In a nutshell, what does your product do?

We are developing a user-friendly cloud-based system that allows patients to see, store, and share their medical images.

How did you find and form your team?

We formed our initial team through the MESH Incubator Innovation Teams program. I then recruited our third co-founder, who was my classmate in medical school.

What progress have you made to date?

We have developed a cloud-based image sharing and storage solution and are currently undergoing updates to address the needs of the users. We also have developed a user-friendly DICOM viewer that is web and mobile compatible.

What advice do you have for aspiring innovators?

Don’t be afraid to fail. But with each failure, learn and improve.

What role did the MESH Incubator play in your project?

The MESH Incubator created an environment that helped us form a team to beginning solving the problems of medical image exchange. The MESH Incubator program also gave us the opportunity to practice our pitch in front of the local innovation and entrepreneur community. The experience allowed us to better identify our project goals and generate a blueprint that will guide us in the next few years of development.

The Alias Medical Team: Min Lang, Glenn Ko, Satyam Ghodasara

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About MESH Innovation Teams

The Medically Engineered Solutions in Healthcare, Innovation Teams Program is a collaborative year-long program connecting Mass General Brigham clinicians to engineers, MBA candidates, and entrepreneurs to solve critical clinical problems. Candidates join a MESH Team and obtain real world experience and first-hand exposure to generating healthcare innovations and creating companies in the complex medical environment throughout the academic year. MESH provides team members with access to MGH and Harvard physicians, residents, faculty, experienced entrepreneurs, venture capital networking, and Mass General Brigham Innovation along with formal training courses in healthcare entrepreneurship with the ultimate goal of patenting innovations and/or forming start-up companies.  To date, Innovation Teams has formed 9 companies and produced numerous intellectual property disclosures or patents.

For more information, contact: hello@meshincubator.org