The Story Behind Vivos

Kirk Huntsman

The Story Behind Vivos Therapeutics

The origin story for Vivos Therapeutics, Inc. is a tale fueled by opportunity, expertise, and a patientcentered approach. Now a publicly traded medical technology company, Vivos is focused on developing and commercializing innovative diagnostic and treatment modalities for patients suffering from sleep-disordered breathing, including mild-to-moderate OSA.

According to Kirk Huntsman, co-founder and chairman, the foundational technology for the Highlands Ranch, Colo.-based company took shape a few years ago when G. Dave Singh, DMD, Ph.D., DDSc. was a professor and researcher at the University of Puerto Rico. Singh used oral appliances to treat children with cleft palates, and made several discoveries while helping his patients. Sleep & Wellness magazine (S&W) sat down with Huntsman to get a better understanding of Vivos and the current technology that is benefiting patients and piquing the interest of investors.

with Kirk Huntsman

What did Dr. Singh discover during his work at the University of Puerto Rico treating children with cleft palates? In the process of doing that work, he discovered that these oral appliances could actually restore, almost to near normal size and shape, the overarching morphology of the facial features of the child. In looking at the radiographs and other images, Dr. Singh noted that the airway had also changed, as did the size and shape of the oral cavity. In many of the children, their airways opened up and Dr. Singh postulated that perhaps something similar could be done in patients with OSA. From there, he thought about developing an oral appliance technology or treatment that would reshape the oral cavity and reshape the airway That sort of began the journey. In 2004, he published what he called the Spatial Matrix Hypothesis. That is the scientific underpinning of the whole technology; and he published that with Dr. James McNamara from the University of Michigan. By 2007-2008, Dr. Singh had settled in on some designs that he began to commercialize. That was in the early 2010-2011 time frame and Dr. Singh began lecturing and teaching doctors how to use this.

What was the situation when you met Dr. Singh? When I met him in 2015, he had already trained a fairly large number of doctors and certified them to use his technology. I was down a parallel track as a nonclinician. I had started a number of companies, but the main company that I had for most of my career was a company called Dental One partners and that was a dental services organization that I owned and operated. In the process, I had taken a lot of continuing education courses. It led me to understanding the technology as a businessman and through the clinical eyes when I met Dr. Singh and I heard his first presentation.

Sounds like you were well prepared to fully know the potential. I had the business acumen to really see what he had, and to see what he was bringing to market was a potentially gamechanging technology. By 2016, we had formed our company Vivos. We had agreed to purchase all the intellectual property rights, patents, and trademarks from Dr. Singh and his company, Bio Modeling Solutions.

What was your level of optimism at that point? From the very beginning, Dr. Singh and I believed it was going to be a game-changing company. We formed it so that we could eventually take it public and gain the resources that would be necessary to create an organization on that scale.

What is your business model? We go to independent practitioners and we teach and train them on the unique

aspects of what we do and why our technologies are different and how they work. We put that model together and launched it in 2018. By 2019, we came out with our full-fledged institute where our training takes place. We have Vivos Integrated Practices or VIPs. These offices have gone through the training, for both doctors and staff, and they basically have a very solid foundation and working knowledge of what sleep apnea is and how it comes into the population. We give them a comprehensive training program that is unlike anything else in the industry. This is not about hawking a dental appliance. It’s about way more than just the unique and proprietary designs that we have on our appliances. It’s about all the calls, all the training, all of the back-end support, the practice management, the medical billing.

We call our medical billing service the Billing Intelligence Service because there’s a lot of confusion out there in the marketplace around medical billing for dental offices and frankly, most medical billing agencies and companies don’t understand. We really wanted to create a safety net or a backstop behind the doctors so that so that they would have mentors, practice advisors, and doctors who they could call.

What types of results are you getting with patients? They’re being restored to a state of normal health and wellness. When they lay down at night, their airway doesn’t collapse and they can breathe normally without any appliance in the mouth. This is a technology that goes beyond mandibular advancement. This technology actually rebuilds the airway, just like Dr. Singh did with those cleft palate children. We actually do that for normally developed adults when a dentist works with our tools, technology, protocols, materials, and all of the resources that we bring to bear. The dentist knows exactly how to take a patient from their initial state of sleep apnea and/or sleep disordered breathing toward a state of wellness and full recovery. We are the only people who even claim to be able to do that. If patients go into CPAP, they have to wear the CPAP every night for the rest of their lives. The same is really true with the mandibular advancement device. been done, and that’s what’s so exciting about Vivos. We are actually facilitating a repositioning of the tissues in the oral cavity that make the airway more functional, more open, and less prone to collapse. That is the breakthrough that we have here. There is an end point to our treatment.

How do you help doctors deal with the many variables? Every patient presents with a different profile, a different set of needs, and a different set of facial conditions. We have a lot of doctors who have been there, done that, and seen it all. We have created a network of resources for the doctors, so that when a doctor sits down with a patient he or she can feel very confident that they have the clinical ability to get from the beginning stage of this case all the way through to the end. To do that, doctors need more than just a weekendtype course. They need to have a company with sufficient personnel, capital, and sustainability to make the doctors feel comfortable. We are bringing something to market that literally no one has done. We’re building a full-on ecosystem that goes beyond the oral appliances that we have, and it goes beyond even some of the treatment protocols.

What makes your company different? Every product on the market today, apart from Vivos, is a mechanical repositioning of the lower jaw. What we’re doing is something that’s never What are some additional examples? We just introduced a diagnostic technology and we have an exclusive license for it. We call it Vivo Score powered by Sleep Image. We learned of this technology and immediately saw the application for use with our doctors, so we negotiated a licensing agreement. We are making this available to the dental profession and it’s got many advantages over other screen devices. It’s easy to use, consumer friendly, and the reports are quick and easy to understand. The data has been shown to be comparable to a full-on in-lab polysomnogram or PSG. We are very excited about the ability that we have to give dentists the chance to have a conversation.

We now have in the hands of the dentist the ability to quickly, easily, and efficiently diagnose in close collaboration with medical colleagues. They can assist in establishing the presence of OSA in their patient population and then be able to work with medical colleagues to deliver a dental-centric solution. When we combine our appliance therapy, which we call biomimetic oral appliance therapy, and combine that with the myofunctional therapy, we get incredible results and we actually are able to help these patients.

Sleep Apnea Treatment

with a Beginning and an End

The typical dental practice has an estimated 500 existing patients who suffer from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Dentists are in a unique position to identify the warning signs of OSA. As a result, the ADA has adopted policies affirming the essential role of dentistry in the treatment of sleep-related breathing disorders.

To learn more about the leading cause of obstructive sleep apnea and what you can do about it, use the QR code or visit vivoslife.com/better-sleep/what-is-vivos/.