Difinity Solutions Introduces the First Modular, Multi-Dose Emergency Medication Delivery System

Co-founders and long-time friends Dr. David Kim and Damien Tak describe their innovation as “EpiPen meets Keurig Pods.” Their new way to deliver rescue medications like naloxone and epinephrine could lower costs while increasing accuracy and saving lives.

The Challenge

Imagine you are enjoying a meal at your favorite restaurant with friends. A waiter shouts for help as a man has collapsed from an overdose. He’s not breathing. His skin is blue and you have a matter of seconds to save his life. You’re handed a naloxone kit, an overdose reversal medication. Fumbling with a syringe and needle, you break open the medication vial, carefully drawing up the medicine into the syringe. This takes time. Though you’re one of the few people who has actually been trained in delivering naloxone, you’re hesitant because you’ve never done it before and you know that errors can be deadly. You double check, making sure that you are giving the man the right drug. Then you check the dosage in the syringe. Wait, now you need to tap on the syringe, pressing the plunger to remove bubbles. By the time you’re ready for injection, it’s too late.

More than a million people have died since the opioid crisis began. More lives have been lost from opioids than from COVID-19. In 2020 alone, there were 90,000 drug overdoses. Additionally, 250,000 lives are lost every year due to medication errors. Confusing and slow medication delivery modalities contribute to the crisis. It can take up to five minutes to draw up and deliver a medication like naloxone using the traditional needle and syringe model. In many cases, one has less than 60 seconds to save a life. “Five minutes later” is too late.

Furthermore, $19B is spent annually on medical errors due to the slow delivery of medication, wrong dosage, or wrong medication. The CDC estimates that the total economic burden of the opioid crisis in the US is $78B per year.

People can’t get the rescue life-saving medicine they need on time, and when they do, errors practically bankrupt the system. It’s time for more innovative approaches.

Origin Story

Difinity is presenting a solution so seemingly simple you may be surprised it doesn’t exist yet.

The story began when David Kim, MD, and his best friend, Damien Tak, met in university. David went into pre-med as Damien went down the engineering path. After college, they had an idea as their independent experiences merged around the opioid crisis.

Damien was enjoying a Vancouver restaurant with physician friends when a man collapsed. Frothing at the mouth, skin blue, and not breathing, he was dying from an overdose. Damien watched as his friends called 911 and sought to preserve the man’s life. When the paramedics arrived, the first responder assured the bystander-physicians that he knew what he was doing. Believing he was reaching for naloxone, the paramedic grabbed the wrong drug. Thankfully, Damien’s friend caught the potentially fatal mistake and alerted this paramedic. The experience made an impression on Damien: If a deadly misstep so easily entangled a trained professional, how much more were well-meaning bystanders liable to make critical errors?

Around the same time, Dr. Kim saw the same problem from a medical professional’s point of view. He knew the power of delivering naloxone as an overdose rescue drug but was taken aback that the drug delivery system — the old method of drawing up the dose using needle and syringe — was so outdated. He witnessed first-hand the regularity of syringe and medication errors as well as how long this method took even for trained professionals.

Shortly after Damien’s experience in the restaurant, he and David imagined a plug-and-play auto-injector inspired by coffee-pod machines. It would be the “Swiss army knife” of auto-injectors. While drug manufacturers historically develop, sell, and make large returns from their own autoinjectors, such as the EpiPen, many medications are now generic. In addition to this, all emergency autoinjectors in the market are single use, disposable, and made only for a single drug indication. This allowed David and Damien to think outside of the box, taking the EpiPen idea and combining it with pre-filled pods which can be swapped in and out.

In 2019, the company launched. The early days were spent working on patenting and prototyping. In 2022, Difinity raised their first round of capital and improved the design. Their next step is to achieve a “design lock” and work on gaining FDA approval by 2026.

Under the Hood

David and Damien are designing the world’s first interchangeable, multi-dose, and modular emergency medication delivery system.

A few factors differentiate this auto-injector from the pack. One, the pods have preset doses of medication which eliminate room for error. Two, the pods are color-coded and bar-coded which improves accuracy. Three, a simple two-step process reduces delivery from a cumbersome five minutes with a traditional syringe and needle to less than 30 seconds with their auto-injector. Four, while today’s auto-injectors, such as the EpiPen, are expensive and single use — the entire unit must be replaced when the drug expires every year — Difinity’s unused medication pods can be replaced much more cheaply instead of replacing the entire autoinjector. Lastly, the modular injector eliminates bulky kits and allows for multiple medications (pods) to be carried with one universal injector. As an example, the military currently carries eight or more different injectors as well as multiple drug vials, syringes, and needles in a kit. Difinity’s system can simplify their kit to one universal injector with a suite of pods.

Difinity is initially focusing on the opioid crisis and developing a naloxone pod for bystanders and first responders. Next, they plan to develop a pod solution for epinephrine. Difinity believes their auto-injector system can ultimately become a tool for all emergency medications.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

Auto-injectors just make sense. Pre-loaded with the right amount of medication, even a child can use them safely and potentially save a life. But for too long these devices have been expensive, single-use, and limited to very few medications. We’re proud to back Difinity because they’re changing this entire drug-delivery paradigm. Their elegantly simple system — modeled after the coffee pod phenomenon — has the potential to save lives and reduce costs on a grand scale. Military medical kits can be replaced and simplified. The widespread impact may include their injector packaged in every first aid kit, found with AEDs, sold for non-emergency use like supplements, outpatient use, and more.

We’re also proud to back Difinity because their founding team combines ingredients that are essential to a strong health moonshot company. Both Dr. David Kim and Damien Tak have witnessed the opioid epidemic, and the crisis of medication delivery, but from different angles. Dr. Kim works with patients daily as an emergency physician and sees the impact of medication errors on the broader healthcare system. As an engineer, Damien Tak has seen the power of disposable pod technology leveraged in other industries. And this experience is bound together by a decades-long friendship that will help the team persist during the inevitably long road of FDA approval and commercialization.

Easy-to-use, interchangeable auto-injectors for rescue emergency medications is an idea whose time has come, and Difinity is bringing it to life. Join us in welcoming Dr. David Kim, Damien Tak, and the Difinity team to the StartUp Health family.

→ Learn more and connect with the Difinity team.

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Difinity Solutions Introduces the First Modular, Multi-Dose Emergency Medication Delivery System was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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