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By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com
Thursday, April 14, 2022 has a big red star beside it in John Redmond’s professional journal.
That was the day that the former Fighting Illini gymnast’s company, InspectIR Systems, was granted authorized emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first-ever breathalyzer test to quickly detect the presence of COVID-19.
Remember how we all lined up to get a nasal swab sample to see if we had contracted the dreaded disease? Well, Redmond’s InspectIR COVID-19 Breathalyzer made that method so “old school.”
His apparatus analyzes the gases in the breath and picks up the specific chemical signature of SARs-VoV-2 infection. Once infected, the cells produce a biological reaction that generates gases that are captured in the blood stream and transferred to the lungs and exhaled in the breath. Within three minutes, thanks to the InspectIR Breathalyzer, patients have a nearly definitive answer.
“It is everything that customers and our investors had asked for,” said Redmond, co-founder and President of the Frisco, Texas based company. “The challenge that we faced was the timeframe in which we were approved. By the middle of last April, it was kind of the beginning of fatigue that was setting in around COVID. Now, the reality is that people are only testing symptomatic folks. Part of the excitement for our solution is that asymptomatic spread is a thing.”
The process of securing FDA approval requires a great deal of patience.
“We reached out to the FDA and had our first conversation with them in July of 2020,” Redmond said. “We were all over the country testing people, testing them against other known respiratory infections, doing genomic sequencing to see not only it they had COVID but what kind of COVID. There were analytical and precision studies. It was a very rigorous process. Altogether, the process to get approval took about 20 months.”
Redmond maintains that one of the many challenges of the current COVID testing is the frequency of both false positives and false negatives.
“Since the beginning of the crisis, accuracy has always been a major issue,” he said. “Our device is specifically designed for trace detection in the high parts-per-trillion. We are confident that it will provide the most accurate results. Market-wide, there are only a few viable, non-invasive detection tools that are available.”
So, within the next several months, what are Redmond’s goals for InspectIR?
“Ideally, with one single breath, we want to be able to let people know what health issues they’re dealing with,” he said. “Do you have COVID or the flu or RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) or whatever? We don’t have to take blood or urine or saliva samples. Just take a deep breath, blow into our instrument, and let it do its work. And within three minutes, you’ll have your answer. Then, go see a doctor to get a treatment.”
Other long-term goals of InspectIR are discovering ways to detect gastric, lung and breast cancer, and also identifying an individual’s usage of cannabis and opiates.
Originally an accounting major and ultimately an administration/marketing graduate from the University of Illinois’ Gies School of Business, Redmond says his formula for success begins with a simple, age-old axiom: hard work and dedication.
“Knowing how to roll up your sleeves, knowing how to set goals and, and working towards those goals are things I believe in,” Redmond said. “My upbringing, my education, and being an athlete at the University of Illinois have all combined to create my entrepreneurial fortitude.”
Redmond gives ample credit to the educational instruction he received at the U of I.
“Looking back, I can see that our business school professors were preparing us for real life, exposing us to market research and case studies that we could eventually apply in our careers,” he said.
As a former gymnast and gym owner, Redmond is cognizant that his sport, especially men’s gymnastics, is in a tenuous place.
“When you consider the mind, spirit and body connection and when you think of strength and flexibility and speed and quickness all embodied in one thing, the ultimate athlete is a male gymnast,” he said. “Historically, Illini gymnastics has been our most successful program, so to have something that has been so fundamental to be at risk really bothers me.”
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