Another non-sensical fluff piece sponsored by Nanox:
Nanox said that its Yongin plant will be annually producing 220,000 MEMS chips, enough to make 50,000 Nanox.ARC devices. The temporary facility in Cheongju currently has a monthly production capacity of 1,000 MEMS chips.
That is interesting. 220,000 divided by 50,000 is 4.4. In other words, each Arc device will have 4 tubes and another very special partial ( 4/10, exactly) tube, just short of the 5 tubes in the investor presentations. Also, Nanox has not disclosed any plans to make 50,000 Arc devices (only 15,000 by 2024).
The capacity is also wrong - it was supposed to be 120,000 (based on the 10,000 a month from inventor presentations).
The equipment shown in the article's photo appears to be Precision 5000 by Applied Materials, an almost 40-year-old CVD machine - baking the very innovative fake Nanox.Source! Let me know, if I am mistaken.
Nanox tweets that is going to change the world, and the stock jumps 15%.
The market is oblivious to the irony that it is investors who have been waiting for months for "FDA approval," whatever that is supposed to mean. As of today, no Nanox x-ray system is legal anywhere in the world.
Expect FDA approval in early 2020 (quoted November 2019 conversation with the CEO)
Note also that all my research so far indicates that it is not true that two-thirds of the world cannot reach medical imaging and that one-third of the world waits too long to get a scan. The availability of low-cost x-ray systems (both stationary and portable/mobile) and ultrasound devices has solved this problem years ago.
Nanox stock is up more than 15% today. The catalyst may have been a nice promo that claims that Nanox, the healthcare disrupter, is about to receive FDA clearance within a month and start distributing its new X-ray device.
Quite interesting, given that Nanox claims that it has not submitted its magic device for FDA clearance yet. Nanox claims instead that it has submitted another, a "single-source," device that it does not intend to market or ship or distribute or offer for subscription or service.
Here are some of the factual inaccuracies and false implications in the promo:
Nanox has a new kind of X-ray
X-rays are kind of boring
[X-ray devices] are very expensive
MRI devices use or create X-rays
A CT scanner costs about a million, 2 million, 3 million dollars
Nanox has made a radical new discovery
The traditional X-ray devices and CT scanners create X-rays by heating the machine up over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, might be 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit
X-rays devices and CT scanners are incredibly hot machines and have to be cooled down
The expense in X-rays devices and CT scanners is in cooling the devices down
Nanox can create X-rays without having to manufacture all this heat and cool the machine down
Nanox proposed machine is far cheaper (to manufacture), $10,000 instead of a $1,000,000
Nanox will radically disrupt the market, and is also going to expand the market
We are going to see a lot more X-rays
The proposed Nanox machine (a rudimentary tomosynthesis device) can generate images that are comparable to MRI images or CT images, not just to traditional X-ray or tomosynthesis images.
Update (March 13/14, 2021): thedudemd @ Stocktwits disagrees that the factual inaccuracies are factual inaccuracies and argues that
a) "Traditional xray tubes used in cts do get incredibly hot; so much so that scanners automatically shut down if tube gets overheated," and
b) "ct scanners do cost millions of dollars."
Tubes or devices/machines? The Fool contributor said that the traditional x-ray device or traditional CT scanner was being heated up over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is clearly not true. These systems operate at room temperature.
But let's talk tubes. Both the traditional and the proposed Nanox tubes use the exact same inefficient mechanism of generating x-rays, whereby nearly 99% of the heat is generated at the anode and nearly 99% of the energy used to generate x-rays gets wasted as heat.
Interestingly, the filament in the tiny incandescent Christmas tree lightbulb gets even hotter - 2,200 degrees Kelvin to 3,200 degrees Kelvin - or 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit to 5,300 degrees Fahrenheit! Each one filament operates at about 2.5 V consuming about 0.4 W, and there are hundreds of them on the tree. Christmas trees must get incredibly hot and burn up instantly, no?
Regarding costs - maybe the latest and greatest CT scanner could cost over $2 million, but you can buy a used one for $80,000, as described here and here. Of course, the proposed fake five-source Nanox.Arc is in no way comparable to even the oldest, cheapest and abused CT, as it cannot generate axial slices, even in theory. Moreover, it is not even submitted for clearance, according to Nanox. The device that Nanox claims to have submitted for clearance is a single-source device that cannot be cleared.
Update June 3, 2021: The Nanox single-source device that got cleared was the Nanox.Cart.
Even the best artists (scam artists included) slip sometimes - they are human, after all. Let's take a listen to what the CEO has to say in the Nanox "vision" video released in late November ahead of RSNA 2020:
"Our mission is to democratize medical imaging, to make it way more available. There are simply not enough machines today - it is too expensive - expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, expensive to operate, and therefore not very practical." (starting at 47s)
So, medical imaging is not practical and accessible today?
Here is what he wrote in his March 30, 2020 blog post:
In Israel, as in practically every country in the world, we have a real shortage of [COVID-19] testing kits. Lung scans on the other hand are accessible, cheap, and the results are immediate - a critical factor in patient outcomes and in preventing the spread of the infection.
He can't have it both ways. Chest (or lung) radiographs represent the majority, about 40%, of all imaging procedures performed worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (Communicating Radiation Risks in Paediatric Imaging, page 16). The CEO states that they are accessible, cheap, and with immediate results in practically every country in the world. So, it seems there are enough medical imaging machines, they are not expensive, and they are easy to operate and quite practical, no? Poof goes Nanox vision!
In his blog post, he also states that Nanox machines
can be installed not only in medical facilities but also in offices and even retail locations, so people don’t need to drive hours to get to a scanning machine.
But Nanox now admits that is not possible - Nanox proposed machines leak radiation - and any potential deployments of those proposed machines, in the unlikely event that they ever become real, is at risk due to:
the inability or unwillingness of potential customers to invest in the required safety infrastructure, including customary X-ray shielding, to allow the Nanox.ARC to be safety[sic] operated (page 17, prospectus)
Nanox has not submitted anything for FDA approval.
It is illegal to market a Class II MEDICAL device, such as an x-ray diagnostic system, in the United States without clearance (or De Novo grant) pending (there are limited exceptions, but they don't apply here).
Nanox now claims to have submitted an x-ray system for FDA clearance in January 2020 and that it does not intend to ever market that system. That "system" is very ugly, and is completely different from what Nanox has been showing in its investor presentations. The one shown in investor presentations has not been submitted for clearance, approval, or De Novo grant. There are reasons to believe that Nanox did not submit anything for clearance in January 2020, or, if a submission happened, it was fraudulent.
These are the facts. They are indisputable.
Fake (notice the XANON label) source: November 2020 Investor Presentation, Slide 3
"Personally I never care for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now, for instance, before you came in"—he pointed to an encyclopedia on the shelves—"I was reading an article about 'Mathematics.' Perfectly pure mathematics.
"My own knowledge of mathematics stops at 'twelve times twelve,' but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn't understand a word of it: but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful. That mathematical fellow believed in his facts. So do I. Get your facts first, and"—the voice dies away to an almost inaudible drone—"then you can distort 'em as much as you please." (Mark Twain, according to Rudyard Kipling)
