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#128 | Multinational Diagnostics

Steve Becker is committed to improving human health by unlocking the power of molecular diagnostics. In the world of medical devices and diagnostics, you might think the latter falls under the purview of the former, says Steve, yet: “from a regulatory standpoint, diagnostics is covered by a lot of the medical device rules.” Unlike medical devices like implants, however, “diagnostics is really the ability to measure your body, whether you’re healthy or sick; and if you are sick, what’s making you sick. Helping to uncover your health status and what you can do to improve is really the heart of diagnostics.”

In this episode, Steve shares the lasting lessons learned during his stints at Thermo Fisher, Quest Diagnostics, Agilent, and GE Healthcare, where he directed sales, global marketing, business development, and licensing. Learn how to navigate within a constantly changing healthcare business landscape, from the first steps toward launch to the regulatory requirements and cultural differences that can affect development, distribution, and product adoption.

Going to market on one’s own is a big task, says Steve – find the right partners to mitigate the commercial regulatory tasks and technical risks. Ultimately, the company whose name is on the product assumes the liability – “they’re the ones on the hook” – but relying on specialists along the way improves your chances of a streamlined launch.

During his tenure at Quest Diagnostics, the company built a “global diagnostics network,” pooling the capabilities, diagnostics insights, samples, testing and sharing of leading companies into one place. In the end, Quest brought the first Zika test to market, reliant upon colleagues.

In fact, choosing your initial target audiences can come into play even during development, as “diseases become more localized and companies are made for those markets,” Steve adds. Pay attention to “how to get paid for what you do,” your reimbursement strategy. In diagnostics, for example, ask yourself:

  1. Is it going to measure what we say it’s going to measure? (Analytic or clinical validity)

  2. Can we do anything with the information? (Utility)

Interestingly, reimbursement can often become political; for example, in the US it’s widely accepted that breast cancer can come with a genetic indicator (the BRCA gene) – and the patient can take prophylactic steps or opt for watchful waiting. In contrast, Steve says that:

In a single-payer system, if you were 49 you could take the [BRCA] test; if 50, no test. The calculation includes risk, quality of life, total cost – someone makes a decision, snapped the line, and that’s where it landed.

Add to that differences stemming from culture and tradition, and it makes sense to work with local, in-country partners to navigate your go-to-market strategy, especially with regard to regulatory requirements.

To date, Steve says that European companies would often launch first domestically and then in the US because it was easier, but that’s starting to change as the EU changes its regulatory stance.

Regulations are stricter now in Europe, with liability going as far back as the manufacturer – for translation quality, for example. Diagnostic tests are now treated more like a medical device, including review by regulatory bodies, etc. – it’s a lot more work but it’s a good thing.

Think globally but act locally, Steve adds. You may use the same assay (investigative procedure for qualitatively or quantitatively measuring the presence, amount, or functional activity of an element) as in the US but a local company can handle the technology, packaging, regulatory requirements, approvals, and clinical evidence and market under THEIR brand, with their own branding and local language. This happens consistently, across IV diagnostic companies – Abbott, Siemens, Roche, Thermo Fisher – and all of them have to treat each of their launches “locally,” working with in-country regulatory bodies to get approvals.

And vice versa: one of the first Covid tests distributed in the US was manufactured by a Korean company but marketed as a known American brand. In fact, working with companies around the world has interesting and complex effects on branding – “you’ll get a multi-national brand but lose some efficiencies,” according to Steve.

In the end, Steve’s advice is ever so simple: “You don’t want to take risks in the healthcare world.”

Read Episode Transcript

ATTENTION: Below is a machine-generated transcription of the podcast. Yes, here at Rapport International we talk a lot about how machine translation lacks quality. Here you see an example of what a machine can do in your own language. This transcription is provided as a gist and to give time indicators to find a topic of interest.

 

[00:00:00]

Wendy Pease: Welcome back to another episode of The Global Marketing Show. I'm very excited today about the guest that we have to interview because he's actually a friend. He's somebody that I've known for years. But before we get to that in our introduction, I want to remind you that the podcast, The Global Marketing Show, is sponsored by Rapport International, the company that offers high [00:01:00] quality written translation and spoken interpretation services around the world.

Recently, I hear that they've been answering a lot of questions about AI and appropriate uses for it. And I can assure you that it is not replacing humans right now for anything that is important in growing your revenues or decreasing your liability. And I have a tidbit from Rapport International, this one is a Swedish word, it's ogooglebar, and it's Swedish that the Language Council of Sweden removed from its 2013 top 10 list of new words.

The word translates as as unfindable on a search engine. Google wanted to brand it and change the definition to ungoogleable, but the council refused and expressed its displeasure with Google's attempt to control the language. So I thought that was fascinating good [00:02:00] representation of why humans are still involved in the translation process because, not everything can be answered by automation.

So let's get on to introducing Steve Becker. He is passionate about improving human health by unlocking power of molecular diagnostics. He's held senior positions at Thermo Fisher, Quest Diagnostics, Agilent, GE Healthcare. And I know him because our sons went to school together. And what I know is that he's in the industry and then he travels a lot.

He does something in sales, marketing, business development, and in licensing. So I figured he would be a great guest on the global marketing show. So welcome, Steve.

Steve Becker: Yeah. Thank you, Wendy. Great to talk to you here and looking forward to our chat.

Wendy Pease: Yeah, so you and I have had an interesting conversation about medical devices and diagnostics, because I would put diagnostics right in the [00:03:00] middle of being a medical device, but you had a different take on that.

Share that with me and our listeners.

Steve Becker: Yeah, I mean, generally. You know, from a regulatory standpoint, diagnostics is covered by a lot of the medical device rules, but, when you think about medical devices, or at least I do, I often think about things you get implanted with and the like, whereas diagnostics is really the ability to measure your body, whether or not you're healthy, whether or not you're, sick, and if you are sick, what's making you sick, right? And so, being able to help really uncover, your current health status and what you can do to improve is really the heart of diagnostics.

Wendy Pease: See my position is that diagnostics are a subset of medical devices , but I'm glad you clarified that because that makes a lot of sense.

Steve Becker: The interesting things about diagnostics, right? In the healthcare world, it's about 2 percent of the total spend.

But over, roughly 80 to 90 percent of what a doctor needs to be able to make a decision about what to do to treat you. [00:04:00] So, it's an incredibly important part of the diagnostic care continuum. And, , whether or not you're enabling it with research tools or whether or not you're providing, you know, advanced diagnostic technologies to hospitals and clinicians and ultimately patients, it's super important.

Wendy Pease: Right. As opposed to implant. Then talk a little bit about that.

Steve Becker: Well, I've never been in that part of the world. My son is right now working on a biomedical engineering degree, right? And he's designing medical devices. So right now he's working on a device in in his program at BU, Boston university for gallbladder surgery.

He's done some device work over the summer for working in dental surgery. Like at some point I'll have to get a new knee, you know, part of the aging process. So I'll probably have some metal parts put in me or titanium or whatever the good students of Boston use, , medical, engineering group comes up with.

We're becoming increasingly [00:05:00] bionic.

Wendy Pease: Okay. That's fascinating to me. So you've really stayed in the diagnostic areas, but you also have been a little bit in the biotech or have some insights into that industry.

Steve Becker: Yeah. So, I think that, you know, when I grew up in the Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, that was really where the coming of age of high tech, with computers and then ultimately various software, internet, and you mentioned AI earlier, right?

Silicon Valley is really still sort of a central point of where that kind of technology, progresses, but increasingly we're moving into what I'd call an age of biotechnology, where we can feed fuel and heal the world. If you think about things like biofuels, you think about things like, how do we make our feedstocks either more efficient with agriculture or safer with animal testing, or in human health, right.

with diagnostics, you know, obviously we just went through the pandemic of COVID and biotechnology was all over that, right? It started with, actually, one of my customers in China was the first [00:06:00] company to do DNA sequencing on the coronavirus. Then I had a customer in China place a mammoth order for reagents associated with making a molecular diagnostics, which ultimately was a COVID test.

And then obviously the rest of the world jumped on board and it was crazy building out the scale of COVID testing, which Thermo Fisher played a significant role on and my team did as well. Obviously then we needed to come out with a therapy for it, right? And miRNA which is the basis of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Those were all outcomes of what I'll call a biotechnology era. The fact that we could accelerate a vaccine development in a year or two versus what used to take better part of a decade to create a vaccine, super exciting, right? So that's why I say we're really in a world where a lot of our economy is driven by biology going forward.

Wendy Pease: Okay, so since it's a show about global marketing, and you just [00:07:00] brought in China and COVID and testing and DNA sequencing. During COVID, there was the vaccine from Moderna, Pfizer, and then the Chinese one that we heard about but we were dependent on China for the DNA sequencing to get the tests done.

Talk to me about what you've seen in the interrelationship between the global companies are the countries around the world and how they're working together or in competition to develop diagnostics.

Steve Becker: Yeah, it was super interesting. You've got a mix of, sort of the scientific world, which is apolitical in many regards, right?

So when the world was trying to figure out what was going on, there was a fair amount of free sharing of information, as I mentioned, one of the very first sequences was done by a group in China. The molecular structure was found by some group in Texas, right, where they did atomic force microscopy reviews of [00:08:00] the coronavirus to actually show it was a coronavirus.

Then you have groups in Italy doing further sequencing and the work around really uncovering the basis of what was getting us sick was really global in nature. As we move towards the concepts of vaccines, that you started seeing a bit more localization. Russia, for example, put out a vaccine pretty quickly.

China did as well, or tried to. And in fact, what's interesting is China actually had licensed in, or several pharma companies had licensed in the right to buy, or make locally the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, but they chose not to, they wanted to do it with a Chinese made vaccine. Obviously, US got into the act, right? We supported a lot of the research. We scaled up production quite a bit. from an IP perspective, we were able as a country to encourage licensing into emerging markets like India and Africa and the like, which maybe didn't have the infrastructure to build themselves.

So, all of this gets global, very quickly, very fast. Right. And that's just [00:09:00] sort of an example of just one disease, one condition. Obviously we face similar things with ongoing medical conditions such as cancer, or various other diseases that need to be taken care of.

And by the way, you may not know that during all of this, there were some significant, won't call them pandemics, but viruses raging through the food stocks, right? Things like swine flu and bird flu and all the basics of some of the testing that was done for humans. A lot of that same technology applied into keeping our food stock safe.

Wendy Pease: Okay, so the scientists work together, so it's more collaborative across country. Yet, when it comes to commercialization, it goes more local and competitive?

Steve Becker: Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right.

There's a couple of things there, right? A lot of it is cultural, a lot of it is economic.

Wendy Pease: Say more about that.

Steve Becker: Well, culturally, it was important, for example, for the Chinese government to have a Chinese solution. Same for Russia. The cultural thing [00:10:00] was how were different cultures you know, taking on different types of care treatments, right?

In fact, in China, for example, if you ever traveled over there, they were often wearing masks, if you go through a Japanese subway, you'll see people with masks, right? They've been doing this for quite some time, and then we come over to America, and just the concept of wearing a mask for many was something they couldn't get their minds wrapped around, right?

So, different cultures have different ways of approaching the way we take care of ourselves and frankly, our communities.

Wendy Pease: Right. So it's a real cultural thing. Yeah. We're in the US we're very individualistic. You can't tell me to wear a mask. But if you're in a collective society where Asia is more that way, I'm going to wear a mask for the good of the community to not endanger myself or others.

Steve Becker: Right. Exactly.

Wendy Pease: What is it about the culture? And wouldn't you say the Chinese government, the Russian government, and the US wanted to have their own? Like, I [00:11:00] only saw the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in the US I don't remember even seeing the Chinese or Russian.

Steve Becker: No, you didn't see those imported here

but we had other ones, right? Johnson & Johnson had a vaccine as well based on more traditional technologies, not necessarily miRNa. Similarly, those more traditional vaccines were stood up in other parts of the world as well, right? We just happen to have access to technology that was leading edge in the western world,

Europe with Moderna or with Pfizer and BioNTech. And then, you know, here in the US with Moderna.

Wendy Pease: So it was the access to technology that allowed the US to develop it, which then ended up being sold around the world.

Steve Becker: Correct.

Wendy Pease: Talk to me about how much the US has the technology and can sell things internationally, and how did the licensing play out? And you work for a large company that had the [00:12:00] resources to go out and look for that. So if you could answer that from a large company, but then also a small company, how you compete.

Steve Becker: Well, first off, healthcare is a team sport.

To vertically integrate all of the things that somebody would need to say, for example, bring a diagnostic to market, that's a tough ask. Some people are great at making instrumentation, some people are great at chemistries, some people are great at informatics, And then actually being able to run all of that in a laboratory that's got strong quality capabilities.

There's really no one group that does it all. So that's why I say that healthcare really starts off as a team sport. It also becomes, as we mentioned, localized. So the standard of care in one country might be different than the standard of care in another, right? And so we see that play out really with two big factors.

One being the regulatory environment in various countries or regions. And then the other is the payer environment. You know, who's to be accountable to pay. So all [00:13:00] these things play out to make, healthcare local. I spent a lot of time in India, for example, and they face cancer just like we do in any other parts of the world.

But the reality is with 1. 4 billion people and growing, with an economy that has, I'll call it poor for lack of a better term, people without access or means to, to advance technologies, right? They'll, they'll take more simple solutions to testing and then say in the US where we may have our major medical centers, like we have here in Boston or New York, San Francisco, Texas, we may go for more advanced and more comprehensive testing solutions, right?

Said another way, India will buy all the genomics testing it can afford, other markets will maybe over provide, you know, to advance the field.

Wendy Pease: So when you've worked in the sales and marketing side, how do you change your marketing to adapt for that internationally?

Steve Becker: Yeah. Well, first off, what [00:14:00] is the right solution? Right. And what is the right solution for each market? So we have to localize that. I'm involved with this technology called DNA sequencing, where we would say, if we're looking for a cancer, we may want to sequence a number of genes associated with typing a specific cancer, which would then correlate to what specific drug would be most efficient for treating that cancer. Whereas in India, they just may be able to do two or three genes, as opposed to a panel of up to 50 or even 500 genes, just because of the access and cost of doing something more comprehensive. Now, in many regards, they're providing quality care, but they're not providing the most comprehensive care.

And so we have to tailor the solution, and based on that, The scale of the technology that can be brought into to play, the complexity of the technology. If you think about DNA sequencing today, it's really played out at some of the major academic [00:15:00] medical centers of the major labs because it requires some skill processing, lots of compute horsepower and strong technical capabilities on the part of the staff, you go to some other markets, they just don't have those folks trained up and able to not only do the work, but actually interpret and analyze the data and correlate it to what they should do to provide treatment. So even if they could do it, you may still want to provide a more simpler solution that's scalable and accessible.

Wendy Pease: So that means you're really developing multiple diagnostic technologies.

Correct. Yeah. So tell me how you do the strategy for that.

Steve Becker: Very simple tenant is you should get paid for the work you do. So it starts off with what is the analytical validity or clinical validity of the test, right? Is it going to measure what we say it's going to measure. And then is there a utility? Are we going to be able to do anything with the information that we [00:16:00] got? So that's sort of the first starting point. Making an assumption that you've got a good test that's useful. Now you've got to go back and say, is it going to be reimbursable?

Right, and is somebody going to pay you for that work? And that gets pretty political. I'll give you an example of that in breast cancer. Here in the US, if we have suspected breast cancer, you'd be able to likely go get a test for the BRCA gene. And then you can make an informed decision whether or not just based on the genetic information, if you want to take a prophylactic stuff like a prophylactic mastectomy or something like that, or just go to more watchful waiting and observation. If you're in a single payer market like Canada, which is more of a government sponsored type program, and I may have my facts wrong, but it used to be that if you were 49, you could likely get the test.

If you Sure. Turned 50, the health economics meant that the test wasn't gonna be available to you. Wow. Right. And [00:17:00] basically the thought was from a risk and a quality of life and a total cost. They had to make a decision. They snapped the line and they said, okay, that's where we draw it.

And you can obviously pay out of pocket, but as you know, in Canada, most people tend to expect their health care to be paid for by the government.

Wendy Pease: Right? Right.

Steve Becker: So again, you see this cultural difference that's driving a lot of , the decision making and access.

In India, for example, though, for the same situation, there is no commercial insurance or government insurance for a lot of health care. And so people actually pay out of pocket. If they can't do it themselves, they'll reach out to family members and often pool the money together to get the funds to pay for the test.

Wendy Pease: So when you're developing a diagnostic, is there pretty much a list of countries that you'd always go to because of the culture and the reimbursement, or can it vary by disease state?

Steve Becker: Definitely varies by disease state. It varies based [00:18:00] on lots of factors. I mean, let's take for example, disease associated with say environment.

So Zika, for example, is much more pronounced in chikungunya and some of these other more diseases associated with weather and hot environments like India, Brazil, et cetera, right? These tropical related diseases, that's what I was looking for. It's super important in those markets to be able to have access to these kind of testings.

Whereas in the US, we don't see those kind of diseases that often, right? We don't get dengue fever, we don't get chikungunya, we had a Zika scare, but, you know, it got tamped down pretty quick. We watch for things like West Nile virus. The disease has become more localized in some regards.

And so, the companies make for those markets. One of the exciting things I got to do when I was at Quest Diagnostics is we created a group of, labs and network called the Global Diagnostics Network. And the [00:19:00] intent there was to actually bring leading companies from around the world to pool their capabilities, their diagnostic insights and help share samples that we could use for different labs to set up testing.

So, for example, when Zika broke, one of our customers in Brazil actually had seen Zika patients first. They had developed a test, but more importantly, they actually had the actual samples that were characterized as true Zika samples. They shipped that to our group in the US at Quest, and then we were able to design our own test.

And, in fact, Quest brought the first Zika test to market. We wouldn't have gotten the ability to do that and validate those assays in our own hands if we hadn't first gotten samples from our colleagues in various parts of the world.

Wendy Pease: And so they weren't Quest colleagues, they were other companies.

Steve Becker: Yeah, it was a totally different company.

Wendy Pease: That's a great example of the globe working together. So working across all the different countries, you know, I've gotta ask about language. How did you go to market across all these different [00:20:00] languages and cultures so you could make sure that the products were adopted?

Steve Becker: Yeah, well, so in large part, I've been associated with the provision of technologies. So, being able to then work with local partners who would then either localize the product, localize the go to market strategy, which again gets in the language, it may be the same assay in the US versus say Brazil or Spain or Russia. But a local company would actually take our technology, package it up, take it through their local regulatory environment, get all of the associated approvals to market, to do our own clinical evidence and studies and the like, and then they would market it under their brand. And of course, from a language perspective, Wendy, they would do that under their brand with all their marketing in their own local languages.

Wendy Pease: Wow. And that was pretty consistent across all the companies that you work for?

Steve Becker: Yeah. So, in large part, there are obviously global in [00:21:00] vitro diagnostic companies.

Companies like Abbott, Siemens, Roche, Thermo Fisher, right? But they have to treat each of their launches locally. They have to get the approvals in those markets. They have to work with the various regulatory bodies or partners to get the clinical evidence for the submission of the regulatory documentation.

So in large part, they have to think globally, but act locally.

Wendy Pease: Right. Which is interesting for a brand then, because If you're working with partners all over the world and trusting them to do the study and the regulatory and the messaging around that, you're going to get a multinational brand as opposed to a global brand and you lose the efficiencies of that.

Steve Becker: To some extent I think that's true. I would say that it's a mix. There's, without getting too [00:22:00] technical, diagnostic tests and provide it to populations. They call that research use only. If you were, say, a quest or a lab core here in the US or a CIN labs in Europe, at DASA or Pardini in Bordeaux.

Brazil, you know, they would run a lot of their tests that they designed themselves and provided their populations. And they have to stand behind their work using our technology or technologies that companies like I've been associated with. However, when the. Company wants to have like a provider of technology like a Thermo Fisher or an Illumina, who's a DNA sequencing company, wants to have a kit that they can sell to a hospital and that hospital could just run it locally without having to do their own development and validation work.

That has to go through an FDA or equivalent type process in the various regions. And that's a big expense. And so that is the expense to go do that. And frankly, the time it takes to get it done, is a measured decision on the part of the [00:23:00] marketers in those companies.

Wendy Pease: Both in the U. S. and in the country.

Steve Becker: Yeah, correct. Right, so a lot of European companies will decide to launch their products in the US second because previously it was easier to launch in Europe first.

Now, that's starting to change as Europe is changing its regulatory stance. Different markets had different hurdles to climb and hence.

You know, changing the access to technologies from around the world.

Wendy Pease: So if you were a medical device company with a product that you wanted to take international, what would be the first steps that you'd do?

Steve Becker: Yeah, great question. First off, it's got to prove that it does what it says on the tin, followed by, I would look for the right partners to help us go into market.

If we were going to do it ourselves, that's a big, expense. And so if we were going to be a company doing it [00:24:00] ourselves, we'd have to create a really strong business case. We'd have to have a clear path to commercialization, including reimbursement, have a pretty rock solid regulatory path. So that's why often you see companies move that commercial regulatory or technical risk to partners.

And so, you know, there's really sort of the two approaches, right? Do it yourself or do it with partners.

Wendy Pease: Right, right. working with partners, do they take all the regulatory and liability risk off you?

Steve Becker: No, generally they take the risk and we provide some amount of support, but if it's their name, whatever company's name is on the product, they're the ones who take all the liability. They're the ones who have to do the filings and they're the ones on the hook.

Going back to our COVID example, many of us got tests given to us so that we could do home testing before, right? Yeah. There was a handful of companies that made those kits. I remember that one [00:25:00] of the ones I had was marketed by Roche, but it was actually the original manufacturer was a Korean company. So they did a bit of a partnership, but you know, for most people, they thought it was a Roche product that was showing up in their door. But if you looked at the small print on the back, it'd say manufactured and it was a Korean company name in the back.

Wendy Pease: Okay, so they would both share the liability on that then.

Steve Becker: I think Roche had to take the winning share of that. I don't know what the FDA said about how they had to label it, but that was just an example.

Wendy Pease: Now I've heard about the regulations becoming more strict in Europe, and , it used to be the partner would take the liability of it, if they did the translations and they put their name on it, but now it's going back to the manufacturer, so if the instructions for use are translated wrong, the manufacturer would be liable.

Steve Becker: Yeah, I hadn't heard that. That's interesting.

Wendy Pease: And what did you hear about [00:26:00] European launches being more difficult?

Steve Becker: Well, in the diagnostic world, there was supposed to be a change creating greater stringency around regulating diagnostic tests. It was supposed to launch though in 2020, and obviously that was a bad year to go try to change the world of diagnostics as we're all facing COVID.

That can got kicked down the road, but in essence, right, that these, assays are going to have to be treated more and the workflows associated going to be treated more like a medical device. They'll have to be filed through something called the regulatory body. It's just a lot of time, energy, and it's all for a good cause, right?

To increase safety for the populations. But, it's a lot of work that everybody had to go do, and it's still going to be doing, being done for quite some time.

Wendy Pease: If you've got all these partners around the world, and they're holding the liability and then they're taking it to market. Then the US company who developed it is getting a licensing fee. But then they're [00:27:00] not managing any of the commercialization in other countries.

Steve Becker: It's going back to the vaccine production, right? BioNTech, for example, was the technology creator of one of the versions of an mRNA vaccine. And Pfizer was their regulatory and their distribution partner, right? So they had all the commercial aspects. And so people often would say, Hey, did you get the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccine?

Right. But, and so everyone. I was thinking Pfizer, but the real technology was developed through this other company called BioNTech, which is a German based company.

Wendy Pease: Right. So you don't really know where it's coming from. .

Steve Becker: Well, you do, and and I

Wendy Pease: mean, it's labeled. Yeah.

Steve Becker: That, and also a lot of the folks at contract manufacturing, different companies provided support for the clinical trials. You know, there's a lot of partners all along the way. To bring any product in the healthcare space to market. To the point of this podcast in this group, if things get lost in translation, they go right [00:28:00] quickly, right? And so having strong translation capabilities is super important.

Wendy Pease: What's some good examples that you've seen in the industry?

Steve Becker: Oh, I, I don't, I don't have a one particular, that's a good question, but I mean, just, you just know when you deal with people, and you play that child's game, the telephone game, you whisper in one person's ear, they whisper in another, and then it gets changed. It's funny until it's not. And so, you don't want to take risks in the healthcare world.

Wendy Pease: We've heard of all sorts. kinds of things. We were asked to prove something and somebody had used the word, the disease AIDS instead of mobility aids.

It was supposed to be just all lowercase aids. Heard about people not understanding what a suppository is, so they're taking the medication orally, you know, so we would come in sometimes a little late on those and we're trying to clean it up and save the company.

Steve Becker: Yeah.

Wendy Pease: You know, at Rapport International with doing the translations.

Steve Becker: Yeah, I can [00:29:00] imagine it's important.

Wendy Pease: Yeah, yeah, well, this has been fascinating. We are past our time, but you know, there's a question coming to you at the end, because you've done so much traveling. And so you've heard a lot of different languages. What is your favorite foreign word?

Steve Becker: It's actually Obrigado, which is a Portuguese word for thank you.

Again, working with so many different great folks around the world, , it's right to give thanks. And, so for me, that's a big one on the top of the list.

Wendy Pease: Oh, that's great. I love that. I love that word. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming here today. I really appreciate you sharing all this really valuable information.

Steve Becker: Obrigado to you and all your colleagues listening to the podcast.

Wendy Pease: Obrigado. So if you like this podcast, and learned something, please give us a five star rating. Steve, where can people reach you if they'd like to connect with you?

Steve Becker: I'm available on LinkedIn at Steve [00:30:00] Becker, all one word.

So that's, that's probably a good place. I haven't yet set up a website, so that's a good place to start.

Wendy Pease: Okay. So go to LinkedIn and Steve, S T E V E, Becker. B as in boy, E C K E R. You can find him on LinkedIn and read more about him. So while you're online, give us a five star for this episode along to somebody else that you know in the diagnostic medical device or biotech industry.

And if you have questions, you can certainly reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's Wendy Pease, easy to find, or just put Wendy Pease translation. So thanks so much. And, please tune in to the next episode. [00:31:00]

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