The Healthy Enterprise

In this episode, Bill Wittmeyer discusses his journey as the CEO of Maggie's Breath, a company focused on using breath analysis for early detection of breast cancer. He shares insights into the technology behind breath analysis, the importance of early detection, and the challenges faced in the healthcare industry. Bill also reflects on the personal impact of breast cancer in his life and the future plans for Maggie's Breath, including clinical trials and funding efforts.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Bill Wittmeyer and Maggie's Breath
03:04 The Journey to Breath Analysis Technology
05:55 The Importance of Early Detection in Breast Cancer
08:56 Innovative Screening Methods and Their Implications
11:49 The Role of Metabolic Compounds in Disease Detection
15:05 Challenges in Implementing New Screening Technologies
18:01 Mobile Screening Solutions for Breast Cancer
20:59 Future Directions and Global Health Implications
26:55 Clinical Trials and Market Opportunities
30:02 Innovative Screening Technologies
34:04 Navigating Regulatory Challenges
36:10 The Journey of a Startup Founder
41:45 Personal Loss and Legacy
49:30 Fundraising and Community Engagement

Guest Information:
  • Guest's Name: Bill Wittmeyer
  • Guest's Title/Position: Founder & Chief Executive Officer
  • Guest's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-wittmeyer-b0628a/
  • Company / Affiliation: Maggie's Breath https://www.maggiesbreath.com/ 
  • Guest's Bio: Bill Wittmeyer is the Founder and CEO of Maggie’s Breath (formerly Pulmostics Limited) where he applies advanced detection technologies—such as high-speed gas chromatography—to protect human health and the environment. Maggie’s Breath was renamed in honour of Bill’s late wife, Maggie, who lost her battle with breast cancer while working to advance life-saving diagnostics. Her vision lives on through the company’s mission: to create a revolutionary, non-invasive breath-based screening tool that can detect disease early and save lives. Bill’s leadership spans innovations in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and public safety, all driven by a commitment to turning personal loss into global impact for a healthier, more sustainable world.
Takeaways:
-Bill Wittmeyer is the CEO of Maggie's Breath, focused on breath analysis for breast cancer detection.
-Maggie's Breath aims to provide a non-invasive screening tool for breast cancer.
-The technology can analyze breath samples in just one minute.
-Breast cancer is increasingly affecting younger women, necessitating early detection methods.
-Current mammogram practices may not be effective for women with dense breast tissue.
-Breath analysis could complement existing mammogram technologies.
-The goal is to provide diagnostically actionable information at the point of care.
-Maggie's Breath was named in honor of Bill's late wife, who passed away from breast cancer.
-The company is seeking funding and partnerships to conduct clinical trials in Mexico.
-Bill emphasizes the importance of early detection in improving survival rates and reducing treatment costs. 


Creators and Guests

Host
Heath Fletcher
With over 30 years in creative marketing and visual storytelling, I’ve built a career on turning ideas into impact. From brand transformation to media production, podcast development, and outreach strategies, I craft compelling narratives that don’t just capture attention—they accelerate growth and drive measurable results.
Guest
Bill Wittmeyer
Bill Wittmeyer is the Founder and CEO of Maggie’s Breath (formerly Pulmostics Limited) where he applies advanced detection technologies—such as high-speed gas chromatography—to protect human health and the environment. Maggie’s Breath was renamed in honour of Bill’s late wife, Maggie, who lost her battle with breast cancer while working to advance life-saving diagnostics. Her vision lives on through the company’s mission: to create a revolutionary, non-invasive breath-based screening tool that can detect disease early and save lives. Bill’s leadership spans innovations in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and public safety, all driven by a commitment to turning personal loss into global impact for a healthier, more sustainable world.
Producer
Meghna Deshraj
Meghna Deshraj is the CEO and Founder of Bullzeye Media Marketing, where she partners with eCommerce brands, healthcare institutions, and small businesses to scale profitably without outside funding. Under her leadership, Bullzeye has driven over $580M in annual growth and more than $1B in collective direct revenue for its clients. With a background spanning corporate strategy, IT, finance, and process optimization, Meghna brings a unique blend of data-driven marketing expertise and operational leadership. A Certified Six Sigma Black Belt with deep experience in program management and business transformation, she has successfully led global teams, large-scale integrations, and organizational change initiatives. Her superpower lies in marketing strategy and consulting, fueled by a passion for helping businesses grow through innovation, efficiency, and strong client relationships.

What is The Healthy Enterprise?

Join host Heath Fletcher on The Healthy Enterprise as he explores how healthcare leaders and innovators are transforming the industry from the inside out. Whether you’re a provider, tech entrepreneur, marketing strategist, or industry executive, these conversations deliver actionable strategies, innovative solutions, and human-centered insights to help you grow, lead, and make a lasting impact.

Created and produced by Bullzeye Growth Partners — let’s make something great together.

Heath Fletcher:

Hello there. Welcome to another episode of the Healthy Enterprise. My guest today is Bill Wittmeyer. Bill has a bachelor of science and an MBA. He has been in charge of the strategic and operational direction of a pioneering and chemical vapor analysis company called Electronic Sensors Inc, in which he is the CEO.

Heath Fletcher:

He's also the cofounder and CEO of another deeply personal company called Maggie's Breath that is focused on using breath analysis to deliver diagnostically actionable information on detecting breast cancer. Very important conversation, and I look forward to hearing it. So let's get started. So, Bill, thank you. Welcome to the Healthy Enterprise and for agreeing to be on this episode with me.

Heath Fletcher:

I'm looking forward to hearing about you, about Maggie's breath. And so why don't you take us back a little bit and tell everybody about who you are and what you're a bit about your journey and and about the company.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Okay. Well, let me start off to begin with since you're up there on Vancouver. I'm gonna let everybody know I was born in Calgary. Unlike most people, I had enough sense to move south when I discovered these things called warm winters.

Heath Fletcher:

Bill, I was born in Calgary. We didn't have that conversation yet. So we were both born in Calgary. Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But you didn't move down where there's warm winters.

Heath Fletcher:

No. I did not. What was I thinking? I went lateral.

Bill Wittmeyer:

You went lateral. That but it's also got a little bit warmer.

Heath Fletcher:

Yes. Yes. Indeed.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So get a little background along here. So moved down to The States, went to school in The US, got my MBA from Columbia, got involved in early stage companies. And since then, I've been involved in early stage companies. What brought me to, Maggie's breath is actually a friend of hers, called her up from Kuala Lumpur and said, hey. I'm just naming you on the board of a company I just invested in to which she's just said, Asmi, that's 400 miles away.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We were living in San Francisco at the time. And his response was, it's closer than Kuala Lumpur. He had to agree. So we came down and we got involved in the company. And what we found is we had a very interesting technology, but we didn't necessarily have a business.

Heath Fletcher:

And

Bill Wittmeyer:

so we got started in trying to figure out what was the business and how do we do it. And one of the things that we discovered is we make a high speed gas chromatography instrument that has sensitivities down to parts per billion. And by high speed, I mean, we can run a test in one minute. That brings up a lot of interesting uses, but then the question becomes, is this capability both deep and wide? And in our investigation, we found that that actually was in the field of health care.

Bill Wittmeyer:

There were some doctors, doing work associated with looking at, children with cystic fibrosis and identifying a pseudomonas infection. There was Ruth McInerney in London looking at tuberculosis and being able to identify markers associated with tuberculosis in the breath. And we had Michael Phillips over at Mensana Research who'd done some work associated with, detecting various types of cancers, lung cancer and others, that all indicated that there is an interesting opportunity. So what we did is we pivoted the company to become focused on health care, and in particular, we spun out an operation that we called Plomostics. Now tragically and ironically, during this development, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died from the disease.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So I renamed the company Maggie's Breath. Maggie, in her honor, and Breath, recognizing the technology we're using to screen for the various types of cancers. And at present, we are focused on screening for breast cancer. So what are we doing? And we've got a rapid high speed instrument.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We can analyze the breath in a minute, and this leaves us the opportunity to be a point of care screening tool for breast cancer. From a patient's perspective, as my wife said, everyone needs to get a mammogram. Every woman hates a mammogram.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

If test testicular cancer were found the same way that breast cancer was found, you men would have invented a painless solution for it by now.

Heath Fletcher:

She's great about that.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So that is exactly what we are doing. We're in the we're in the process of validating that we can screen for breast cancer. Early studies indicate we have approximately the same sensitivity and specificity as a mammogram.

Heath Fletcher:

Is that right?

Bill Wittmeyer:

A mammogram has a variability. It depends upon the type of equipment you have, the skill of the radiologist, how much AI is built into your pattern tracing and your contrast tracing solutions along there. But they range anywhere from if you've got a lousy radiologist and poor equipment, you'll be about a 70% sensitivity to about 85% sensitivity. Well, we fit right in about 80%.

Heath Fletcher:

Is that right?

Bill Wittmeyer:

So now the question is, why is this important? What do we do with it? Well, one of the big problems with breast cancer today is it is moving down age. It used to be a postmenopausal disease.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now it's occurring in women that are premenopausal. One of my young dear friends is a young woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 27, stage three. Wow. And the poor girl, you know, had to have bilateral radical mastectomies and go through all the treatment and everything else and go through this. And to a large extent, that youthful, vibrant girl became a reasonably depressed woman for a while as all of this goes along.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So but if you were looking at what the regulatory authorities, whether it be Health Canada, the US FDA, the Britain, anywhere else, they're all looking and saying, unless there are otherwise existing conditions, we do not recommend mammograms on women before age 40 or 45. Well, in one state in Mexico, in Sinaloa, one third of all new breast cancer cases are occurring in women 40.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

That used to be six percent. So we need to get a solution that can screen for these women that is noninvasive because the alternative of using radiation is if we can screen these women, we're going to induce cancers in a certain percentage of those women from this screening mammogram.

Heath Fletcher:

Why is that limit in place? I mean, traditionally

Bill Wittmeyer:

The FDA recognizes that if I go and screen women, I'm inducing ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation can create mutations in the cell's genes

Heath Fletcher:

Okay.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Which can create the cancers. Right. We want to eliminate that. Right. Now some of the other stuff that we're finding out now, as all men, we don't really know too much about this, but it turns out that breast tissue is not necessarily of uniform density.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And there are women who have dense breast tissues. With a mammogram, it's not very good at detecting breast cancer in women with dense breast tissues.

Heath Fletcher:

Oh, is that right?

Bill Wittmeyer:

The US FDA has recently gone out on notice and told radiologists that they are supposed to notify women that they have dense breast tissue so that they may, if they choose, find an alternative screening technology, whether it be ultrasound or some other device that does that to screen for breast cancer because a mammogram isn't going to be that accurate.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Well, we believe that we complement that because we are not looking at tissue density.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We are looking at metabolic compounds that are generated by abnormal breast tissue. Mhmm. And, therefore, we think that we are a complementary test for that. We don't expect that we will be the primary screening tool for a long time because there is not enough data out there. Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But one of the more interesting things long term is we get a lot of information from volatile compounds that our bodies produce. Most of it is no longer taught to physicians. Years ago, they used to teach doctors that, oh, if your patient smells like fresh baked bread, you might think the patient has typhus.

Heath Fletcher:

Really?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Use all of your senses. Well, we've gone to using all sorts of laboratory tests, we tend to ignore these.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now I'm wandering off base a little bit. What we're doing with analysis is we're taking these volatile organic compounds that your body produces and that we're able to identify what they are, and we can now start to correlate those compounds with certain diseases. And what I would love to see and probably won't happen until I'm on the wrong side of the grass, but what we want to have is an instrument that can give the physician diagnostically actionable information at the point of care. I don't know how it goes in Health Canada when you go see a physician for your annual checkup. But down here in The US, we currently have what I call the most expensive data entry clerks in the world.

Bill Wittmeyer:

These are our primary care physicians. You go in. He chats you up for about five minutes. He's got your chart. He makes a few notes on the chart, and then he orders a certain set of tests.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And then he lets you know that, oh, we'll get the results back in about two weeks. And if there's anything amiss, I will let you know. Well, wouldn't it be nice if we had a way of gathering information about your body's metabolism and understanding what's happening so that when you show up, his chat isn't to go find out who you are and get some information, but his chat is based upon what information we have right now.

Heath Fletcher:

Review your data.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Be here. You're so healthy. We don't have to do anything. Oh, but by the way, go lose five pounds because you better you're better off being thinner than where you are right now. But getting that type of activity in place.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And we know that if you look at what's on the skin, you look at what is in the urine, you look at what comes out of your breath, are three areas where we can get information noninvasively about what is going on in the body. Why don't we do it now? Because we don't know enough yet.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We just have we're just getting instruments that can get the sensitivity, the specificity, and the speed to start to be able to use for essentially screening applications at the point of care. And there's some really interesting stories on this. And one that I find most interesting is in The United Kingdom, up in Scotland, there was a nurse who probably should have been a chef. She had a fantastic sense of smell, and she told the doctors that she could smell patients with Parkinson's. Rather than dismissing her as being just one more wacky nurse, they actually gave her a test.

Bill Wittmeyer:

They took T shirts from 10 healthy patients and T shirts from 10 patients that had Parkinson's and gave it to her and asked her to identify which T shirts came from which patients. She correctly identified 11 of the 10 patients who had Parkinson's.

Heath Fletcher:

Way. Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now the one that she supposedly misidentified six months later was diagnosed with having Parkinson's.

Heath Fletcher:

No kidding. Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now they led them to be very curious, and so an investigation started to figure out what is going on. And what they found is that patients with Parkinson's have a slightly different sebum, And that different mixture of those skin compounds results in a slightly different smell.

Heath Fletcher:

So it can be that subtle.

Bill Wittmeyer:

It's that subtle. And the University of Manchester has brought out a test that by wiping the skin and doing some things along there, they can be used this to help identify whether a patient has Parkinson's or not. That's the good news. The bad news is we don't know how to treat Parkinson's yet. Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But the point I'm making in all of this is the sense of smell on these compounds that our body puts out from the metabolism as we are able to analyze them will be able to give us diagnostically actionable information. We know, for example, that dogs can be trained to smell men's urine and identify prostate cancer.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm. Yes. I've heard this before. Yeah. Was gonna bring that up.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Detection dogs in The UK trains them to do that with about an 85% sensitivity. So there is something in the pattern of compounds that are coming out that are we can probably correlate. Now do we have instruments that can detect this and get it all? I don't know. Because when we look at what mother nature does in terms of odors and ability to identify odors, she engineers some really amazing things.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We know that a moth can detect the pheromones of a female from over a mile away.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah. Exactly.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Oh, we're talking about getting a compound probably that's dispersal of that pheromone is done in the parts per quintillion. Some ridiculously low number.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But that moth can follow that scent gradient to the female. Mhmm. What the dog is smelling, we don't know yet. To put in my local joke on that, doctor Doolittle died, and nobody's been able to talk to the animal since. But it is something that's relevant to start to study

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah.

Bill Wittmeyer:

To see if we can identify and screen for prostate cancer and use that. Now how relevant that's going to be for health care, I don't know because by the time you're about 70 years old, most men have some sort of low form of prostate cancer.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And the real question is, do you have an aggressive form of prostate cancer, or are you gonna be hit by a bus before the prostate cancer kills you?

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And that that

Heath Fletcher:

is is early, early, early analysis or early preventive.

Bill Wittmeyer:

It's early preventive. And and to a certain extent, there are many cancers in which we overly intervene because they are slow growth cancers

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

That you the health the cost of the health care system exceeds the value you get from intervening in it. Mhmm. But this is what we're really trying to be able to do. And our focus is to start on breast cancer for a very simple reason.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

It is the most common cancer in women today. Mhmm. One in twelve women are going to get breast cancer in their lifetime. The disease is affecting younger women, and women are the center of the family. They're the center of the village.

Bill Wittmeyer:

They're the center of the community. To have a healthy community, you have to have healthy women. And we need to make certain that these women get diagnosed and get treated when it is early stage such that we can actually treat that, cure them, give them an extended life.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah. Because isn't it true that the earliest it's breast cancer is one of the cancers that the earlier the stage it's discovered, the higher the re the survival rate.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Two things go. The the cure rate and the survival rate goes very high

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And the cost of treatment goes down. If you get breast cancer in The US and diagnosed at stage one or stage two, it's going to be somewhere on the order of about $20,000 to treat it. Right. Then if you go to stage three, it's gonna be a 125,000 or greater. And then you're at stage one, you have close to about a ninety nine percent cure rate.

Bill Wittmeyer:

At stage two, you've got about a ninety percent cure rate, and you've got a ninety five percent five year survival rate. Those are numbers that come off the top of my head,

Heath Fletcher:

so people can

Bill Wittmeyer:

go check them. But Sure. That's what you're trying to get to is this type of thing. So it is very important to be able to get it early. From the woman's perspective, it can be a lumpectomy.

Bill Wittmeyer:

It can be a number of different processes that are very low and very noninvasive or low invasive as opposed to its stage three where you're going to have a big tumor. You're gonna be limping, taking lymph nodes away, and everything else.

Heath Fletcher:

And you're

Bill Wittmeyer:

going to meet her, with some permanent injury Right. Even if she survives.

Heath Fletcher:

Sure. So conceivably, you know, you've got this device as a way to kind of early screen somebody to say, oh, this this we're getting indications that you may be at risk of breast cancer, which would then say trigger that that individual to go to the next step.

Bill Wittmeyer:

That that is exactly what it is because And

Heath Fletcher:

go down the line.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Yeah. One of the things we can do is say to the woman, the pattern of these trace gases in your breath is consistent with the pattern that is present in women who have breast cancer. But we can't go beyond that because we can't tell you where it is. No. You need to get another test to localize it.

Heath Fletcher:

It's like a it's like a a machine that's sitting in the drugstore where you go down and, you know, get your your blood pressure test, the same idea. I just have a

Bill Wittmeyer:

breath test. Exactly. Yeah. You just go in, give us a breath sample.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We analyze the breath sample. Here you go. There's a lot of learning curve to get there.

Heath Fletcher:

Sure. Sure. I can see where it's going, though.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Yeah. And the other thing that comes in there is let's take the next step. Supposing we take a urine sample as well. Because right now, what do you do with the urine when you go in on your basic physical? They can take a sample of urine.

Bill Wittmeyer:

They spin it down, and they look for gene proteins and say, oh, your kidneys aren't failing you good. But there's a lot of information in there.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now how much of it is present in the volatile organic compounds that can be taken through gas chromatography versus how much of it would be in some of the heavier stuff that you would get through an HPLC and give you some indication as to what the diseases that you have are. Don't know. But the gas chromatography is something that can be done very rapidly at the point of care. And if you do that with a urine sample, you would just do a headspace analysis. Just let it sit in a vial, take the air off that, let it reach equilibrium, and analyze at the same time.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And one of the interesting things that comes out in looking at that is there's a paper by doctor Herman Safar from Ben Gurion University of the Negev that by analyzing both breath and urine for women, he was able to establish that he had a ninety percent positive predictive value for breast cancer.

Heath Fletcher:

Really? Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now small study, so it could have been a vampire correlation, could have been all sorts of things go in the way of what that study means, and it needs to be replicated in a much larger study Mhmm. To validate that says this makes a lot of sense. So let's ask the next question that obviously comes along, and it is, so if this is so positive, why isn't it going anywhere? Yeah. Why isn't it in place?

Heath Fletcher:

That was my next question. How did you know?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Gee. I'm what what what was that guy's name? Karnak the Magnificent? And you will get it, but a lot of your audiences do not because that is so old. But medicine is a very conservative process.

Bill Wittmeyer:

First, do no harm.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We have standards of care. We want to have large amounts of data to establish that this standard of care isn't going to change anything. So if we take The US, for example, we at the median stage of diagnosis of breast cancer in this country is stage two. About sixty five percent of all of the women follow the screening recommendations of the FDA. So from that perspective, we've gone from stage three, might get getting it down to stage two.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So from the FDA's perspective, speaking for them, they've not paid they're doing a good job of starting to manage this disease and get it under control. And if we turned around and said, oh, we've got this great new screening technology along here, the last thing they want to do is see women migrate away from that to something that they don't have a large statistical database with to validate that it's not going to change the results, the outcome in there. They don't want to see us going from, oh, we're detecting everything in stage two to, oh, now we've got about it's about stage two and a half because we've got this process going along in there. So they're gonna want large amounts of data. That makes perfectly good sense.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So where does this have the initial thing to get started? You want to identify countries that have breast cancer, but don't have the wealth to invest in and maintain an imaging screening infrastructure

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

To drive the business. If you go to a country like Mexico, for example, then seventy percent of all breast cancer cases in Mexico are diagnosed at stage three.

Heath Fletcher:

Is that right?

Bill Wittmeyer:

That tells you right away that they don't have adequate screening infrastructure.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now if you can turn around and say, well, we've got a test along here that we can do this, and we can eliminate a large portion of those women that show up negative on our breath test. And you can use your screening infrastructure now for those women that appear to be positive, you're using those resources

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Far more efficiently than you can right now.

Heath Fletcher:

And that's something that could be mobilized. You know? It's not something you have to have bricks and mortar. It's something you can do on a on a vehicle that, you know, is a mobile unit.

Bill Wittmeyer:

You you and you can do mobile mammograms along there as well. But one of the nice things about breath is there's no nudity Mhmm. At all. There's just just exhale. We analyze your one.

Bill Wittmeyer:

You can put it into a Toyota van

Heath Fletcher:

and

Bill Wittmeyer:

go around because you don't have to have the radiation. You don't have to have the power source. You don't have to have anything like that. So it allows you to have the potential to go do large scale mobile screenings in places very efficiently

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And then identify those

Heath Fletcher:

rural, remote, you know, where they don't have access to as many facilities as you could imagine.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But yeah. And since the result is virtually in real time Mhmm. Because it takes you longest part of the test with this is it's about two and a half minutes to get the breath sample into the instrument. The analysis time on it takes a minute.

Heath Fletcher:

Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So at the end of that, you're going to have a screen that is going to basically give you a probability of having breast cancer. So you screen through this village, and you're able to go and say, okay. There are only two women. And now you can go ahead and start making arrangements for them to go into a city center or something to go get the mammogram done right at the point of care. Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So that is sort of the where this, I believe, has its initial activity along there, and you can validate it. And there's a lot to be learned. I mean, you you think about you just ran up a flight of stairs. How long from riding up that flight of stairs before your breath starts to be back into the normal steady state that you can get these compounds out? These are all questions that you need to get answered, and these are all questions that the FDA or Health Canada would ask along there.

Bill Wittmeyer:

The but you want to have answers because we're wealthy countries, and wealthy countries can invest in the health care system. But lower middle income countries can't. Mhmm. And it is in those lower middle income countries where the rate of increase in breast cancers incur the rate of increase in breast cancer in Mexico is expected to double over the next fifteen years.

Heath Fletcher:

Is that right? Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

I just saw a paper in El Salvador. Breast cancer is very low, but it's growing at two and a half percent per annum. So the incidence is growing fairly rapidly.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah. That's fast.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So this is taking place pretty much around the world. And if anybody can explain that increase and why it's occurring, you might get a Nobel Prize in medicine.

Heath Fletcher:

So where are you at now? What's the next step? Where

Bill Wittmeyer:

how far are gonna be? Are looking at conducting a series of clinical trials in Mexico to validate that in Mexico to get established and approved for screening in that country. And we look at Mexico being a very good place to do this because there's a clear and present need. And to put it onto the business side of things, which will get me in trouble maybe, but one of my business school profs said one time, you never want to get into fight with Muhammad Ali. You may win, but you are definitely gonna get hurt.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And if you look at the screening population in The US, we'll take that as a market we understand, it's about $4,000,000,000 a year. And it has incumbent service providers in there, and they've got investments in assets. They've got investments in screening in people and everything else. And yet I've never met a woman who's looking forward to her next mammogram. So if there is a screening tool out there that is both faster, lower cost, no nudity, and painless, we would expect that there would be a high migration across there.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Yeah. Here is Muhammad Ali, which has a very large business. They're doing a very good job of it. I'm not gonna criticize anything they're doing because they're doing an excellent job. But from a business perspective, they could see that they would get a large migration of their customers to a different solution.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And Yeah. Where we see this working, and this is where we don't want to have that happen, where we see this potentially working, but we need to get studies done to validate this, that by combining breath with a mammogram, do we reduce the number of false negatives in that mammogram?

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Because if we turn around and say you've got a sensitivity of eighty five percent, what we're really saying is out of every hundred cases of cancer, you're missing fifteen.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now if we can get that to where the sensitivity is 90%, while we're only missing ten, that's pretty amazing if we can get there.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was thinking, is this you know, this is something that would be more or less accepted or embraced by the preventative health by preventative disease medicine or preventative health where they're looking for ways and and the mentality of certain people sort of look at their lives and and approach their health in a preventative way. So I would imagine this would be a a very early adoptive community to say, oh, yeah. I would I would I would pay for that.

Heath Fletcher:

You know?

Bill Wittmeyer:

I would I have to get Health Canada, and we still have to get the FDA to turn around and give it the papal seal.

Heath Fletcher:

Right. So they still need to approve it.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We we were making medical claims. They need to approve it.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now some of the interesting stuff, we did some studies over in China and looking at lung cancer. We have about a seventy five percent sensitivity, but about a ninety four percent specificity. So when we say you've got lung cancer, you better start making out your will and all the rest of that.

Heath Fletcher:

Right. It's

Bill Wittmeyer:

fine. And we don't know what else we do we do know that from other people's studies that you can identify gastric cancer. You can identify liver disease. In there, you're not necessarily be able to go between fatty liver disease and other forms of hepatitis and liver cancer, but you can identify that through the breath. There are all of these things that are coming along.

Bill Wittmeyer:

There are some hints that you may be able to get some soft tissue carcinomas like pancreatic cancer. But because pancreatic cancer has about six different forms, whether it's going to be robust, the how large a population you need to have

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

To get that and tease out whether there's the same metabolic effect or different metabolic effects that go in there. So, ideally, what we would love to be able to do is find people who understand the metabolism. And if I use a model, the H. Pylori test, in which if you're looking to see whether you have a H. Pylori infection for your ulcers, what do they do?

Bill Wittmeyer:

They sit down. They take a sample of your breath, and they look at the c o c o two ratio. And then they give you some Eurase, and you drink it. And fifteen minutes later, they go and look at the c o c o two ratio on your breath. And what Eurase does is it activates the bacteria, and one of their byproducts is to produce more c o two c o in that process.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So when I see that, then I can turn around and say, okay. Fine. You have a an H. Pylori infection because I gave you something. It induced this type of response, and I know precisely what it is.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Now one of the interesting things would be and this this is where I end up on the wrong side of the grass, and you probably end up on the wrong side of the grass by the time. But if we can come up with a mechanism whereby I give you something to ingest and it changes and identifies a certain metabolic reaction that is highly correlated with the presence of that cancer.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Then and we can identify that. Then we have a test that becomes far more accurate. Because right now, we're just looking at a series of compounds and seeing how correlated they are. Right. What you'd wanna do is, okay.

Bill Wittmeyer:

I've got this thing that's correlated like this. That's sort of positive. Now let me give you this. And okay. Now this particular compound spikes.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Okay. And we know that that particular compound spikes because I gave you this, which does that in your body. And that would be ideal if you can get there. But there will be a that that requires some scheduled inventions and some people who are highly knowledgeable about the the biology and the metabolism. And then you start running into questions about, well, what's the genotype and how does that work?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Because we know that there are depending upon your inheritance, you may not metabolize ibuprofen the same way somebody else does.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And ibuprofen can be hazardous to your health where for 99.9 of the people, doesn't matter at all. Right. Or the more one that's more common is essentially in the Asian population, they metabolize alcohol differently. So they get a flushed face very quickly.

Heath Fletcher:

I see. Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So that agent so there's a different metabolic metabolic process. So we don't know enough about that either to get there.

Heath Fletcher:

So now you're just you need data. So that's what that's the goal right now.

Bill Wittmeyer:

You're collecting data. A lot of data to do this. And once we get the data, then we go back. And we want to get approvals first in Mexico so we can start to commercialize this so we can start getting revenues. And then we come back into the wealthy countries and say, here's what we're doing.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Right. Here's how we're doing that. And we've worked with the incumbents in here to introduce a solution that is better for everybody in the health care system because it's better for all of us to identify something at stage one than at stage three.

Heath Fletcher:

Is it easier to get approved in underdeveloped nations?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Don't have an answer to that. They all are they are going to want to see the same data. Yeah. They are going to want to establish that you do have a process that does answer their question Mhmm. Along there.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Right. The the question that comes up in these countries is if I'm the regulatory authority and I'm looking at the effect within the overall system, if my screening by if I'm if I'm at stage three, I'm using Mexico as an example, and if all of you people from Mexico I'm not insulting you or anything. But if my median stage of diagnosis of breast cancer is stage three and somebody comes in and says, I can screen a large part of the population and my sensitivity is only 80%, the net effect to the health population will be a lot better because we identify a lot of women who have the disease, and we can then go treat that disease at a stage two.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We do have to be able to say we can detect this at stage two or stage one because anybody can detect breast cancer at stage three.

Heath Fletcher:

Stage three. Right. Very interesting. Wow. This is I didn't know.

Heath Fletcher:

I I I didn't think I was gonna get all this. This is amazing. What a story. So you started this by telling us that you've been in the startup world for a long time. You're a bit of a startup junkie, apparently.

Heath Fletcher:

Right?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Well, I as I joke to people and I actually when I went to business school, one of my professors when we were first at orientation and by the way, that's what little aside on my wife, just to give you a little bit of entertainment.

Heath Fletcher:

Sure.

Bill Wittmeyer:

I met my wife at business school. I sat right next to her. Right at orientation. She sat there. And okay.

Bill Wittmeyer:

She's at one of about five Chinese school girls that were in that class. So when we finally started dating, I turned to her and said, you know, I met you right at orientation, to which she said, I'll show you exactly how impressive I was. She looked at me and said, I don't remember. But then to show how clever she was, she then turned around and said, but, of course, you all looked alike to me.

Heath Fletcher:

Well, so That's awesome. That's a good story.

Bill Wittmeyer:

It is. It's one of the cute stories I I tell about her because it was really fantastic that she had that sense of wit.

Heath Fletcher:

That's good. So you So when you start up, what is it what is it you like about the start up? What's your what's what what attracts you to that sort of state of business?

Bill Wittmeyer:

The interesting part is how the problems you have, the problems you have to solve, and the potential impact you have on the world. So examples of things that we got involved with that were intriguing. So I got I started out, and as I said, one of the questions that a professor asked in business school was, why are you here? And a lot of people Fair

Heath Fletcher:

fair question.

Bill Wittmeyer:

A lot of people turned around and said, oh, I wanna learn how to run a business. To which he said, well, you're gonna get you're gonna spend about a $100,000 and give up about $50,000 worth of income along here to go get this program. Take your $150,000, go buy a bodega in Harlem, and you will really learn how to run a business. I turned to him and said, well, I'm here because I want my union card. Oh.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And if I graduate from one of these schools with an MBA, I essentially have my union card. I have said, I'm willing to forego this amount of money in order to establish that I can work with all of you people in this area. And that's one of the real values of the top end business schools is, hey. I fit within here. Here's my union card.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But what got me going into early stage was this was back when we were first starting to get various types of applications of electronics into vertical applications. Whether the An Wang had brought out his word processing software. There are a number of companies doing activities along there, and you are getting this whole transition away from electronics or from mechanical devices to electronic devices to solve problems. And that was very interesting and very exciting because there's a growth opportunity in there. There's multiple different ways of failing.

Bill Wittmeyer:

There are lots of this that you can go out, so you get a vast set of experience in learning these things and trying to solve problems and make them happen. I I remember meeting with one venture capitalist who when you go make the pitch to him, his first question is, you went on look outside, you'll see all of our tombstones. Some of them have little black felt crepes along on the outside of them. They're ones that failed. So, you know, I know you may not succeed, but if you aren't going to succeed, at least find a new way of failing.

Heath Fletcher:

That's good advice too.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So that was what made it interesting. And the other part that makes it interesting is when you're in this startup space, the the intelligence, the drive, the creativity yes. I begin to understand in this space what it must be like to be an artist, a musician in a in a session where you're creating jazz with people that are as creative, as exciting, and they feed off one another. And you're feeding off one another, and it's very energizing.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Very interesting. Why you get into Yeah.

Heath Fletcher:

I can see that. For sure.

Bill Wittmeyer:

You get into early stage stuff to go see what the heck happened.

Heath Fletcher:

Right. So and and you get into that. So and as you're the founder of Maggie's Breath and

Bill Wittmeyer:

Well, my wife and I founded it.

Heath Fletcher:

Today together.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Yes. Yes. She she was the she was the one who basically said, here's I I had more understanding what the technology is. She was the one who said, here's the business, the model, and everything. This is what we're going to do, and here's why we're going to do this.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Right. So And

Heath Fletcher:

you've been doing and you've been you've been working on this company since when? You started

Bill Wittmeyer:

Well, we started in 02/2016.

Heath Fletcher:

'15. Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We had to go 2015 was when we founded, but getting it all going and everything started in 02/2016. Mhmm. Okay. We get a certain ways along. We have to modify some equipment.

Bill Wittmeyer:

We have to get things going. We get various things going. And then comes this stupid bit of crap called COVID.

Heath Fletcher:

Right. Of course.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And COVID puts paid to any clinical trials or anything else. You're just sitting there. So if you look at it from the the I I look at it from the financial perspective, you're the jet that gets out to the end of the runway. You're ready to take off. They close the airport.

Bill Wittmeyer:

All of the gates are closed there, so you can't go back to the gates. Mhmm. But you still gotta keep the APU running to keep the lights and the air conditioning and everything running. So we're sitting there just running our APU and not able to do anything. And our partner in Mexico, which was at that time ISTE, which the best way of looking at it from an American perspective is ISTE was a government employee's HMO.

Bill Wittmeyer:

They were going to be a great launch customer because they ran about 20 hospitals and they had about 200 clinics, and they provided health care services to about 6,000,000 people and their families. So you had all of these, and they had a desire to get better screening tools for breast cancer. But during COVID, the whole place got reorganized and it disappeared. So after we came out of COVID, it was let's go find a different site to go see if we can get clinical trials started, and we found Christus Mugerza in Monterrey. But the challenge was, now where do we go get all of the funding to get this thing done?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Because the initial funding we got we ran out of that funding. So half the time has been, let's keep these things going, and half the time is going out, finding frogs, kissing frogs, hoping they turn into princes with long arms and deep pockets. And so that's been the process over this period. And during that period, my wife was diagnosed with the breast cancer. Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And I can say when that happened, complete focus on something entirely different than she ended up passing away from that breast cancer.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah. Takes the wind out of your sail, doesn't it?

Bill Wittmeyer:

Yeah. But it also changes this in a sense because instead of just being a business, it is now looking at it as a monument to her.

Heath Fletcher:

A legacy. 100%. Yep. And I love that you changed the name to Bengie's Breath.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Everybody will remember it.

Heath Fletcher:

100%. 100%. So you're so today, that's the focus is you have you found a partner now to help you've all found partners?

Bill Wittmeyer:

All the partner yet.

Heath Fletcher:

We're talking

Bill Wittmeyer:

to people all over about getting partners in to do this and get it going and re reenergizing it.

Heath Fletcher:

Well, let's hope someone's listening right now. And they are

Bill Wittmeyer:

I also what we have is we have some people that are interested in doing this down in El Salvador.

Heath Fletcher:

Mhmm.

Bill Wittmeyer:

They they've talked to me. We have a group that's very interested in possibly doing this over in India. Mhmm. Again, that is the type of process that makes sense along here. That is exactly what we have to do.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So this is the process that we have to go through. Mhmm. And if people are very interested, I'd be quite willing to talk to them.

Heath Fletcher:

They can reach out to you on LinkedIn?

Bill Wittmeyer:

They can link reach out to me on LinkedIn. They can go to maggie'sbreath.dotcom?dotcom. That's maggiebreth. Now one other aside on her, her father decided that he he named her Maggie because you're you're growing up in Malaysia Malay at the time, and the education system was was English. So it's a name that people will recognize because if you'd stayed with her Chinese name, nobody know how to spell it.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So she went with Maggie. Right. And so it's Maggie's breath. And what I can say is a brilliant woman, first class honors from LSE, and went to Columbia for her because her basic goal was all of my friends over here have their MBAs, and they're making partner. I'd better go get my MBA, and I'll be making partner in Malaysia.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And then she ended up marrying me.

Heath Fletcher:

Well, I I'd say she won. Well She got partner.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Certainly think I won.

Heath Fletcher:

She got partner. Well, you both got partner in that sense.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Yeah. And the the the sad part is that there is one of the things that I don't think we'd be able to do was be able to identify the type of cancer she had. Right. Because what we think why we get these compounds are that you have hard tumors, and the hard tumors elevate the pressure. And with that comes hydrogen peroxide, And the peroxide cleaves the lipids and starts making these alkane compounds and other compounds.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Her particular type of cancer formed a mesh, a net. And as such, it was very hard to be diagnosed and let alone treated. And as as we all learned, we play the hand god deals us.

Heath Fletcher:

Yeah. It's a tragic irony in this situation, but you're carrying her her name. You're carrying her vision on in her honor and in her name. I think it's a it's a

Bill Wittmeyer:

Our goal is to make certain that every woman has the opportunity to be screened for this.

Heath Fletcher:

Yes.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And what we don't know is once we have this large amount of data that we can start to find other things that are out there. I can tell you, for example, that if I find mercaptan on your breath, you may have colorectal cancer.

Heath Fletcher:

Wow.

Bill Wittmeyer:

But is this a good screening tool for colorectal cancer? No. But going back to what I said at the beginning, if we've got a screening technology in place that we have all of this when I take your breath, I've got a lot of information about your metabolism.

Heath Fletcher:

Right.

Bill Wittmeyer:

And I'm quite certain that if I took your breath right now and went through it, I'd basically be able to say, go on your way. There's nothing much I can do for you.

Heath Fletcher:

Well, three hundred years ago when they took someone's blood, they didn't get much information.

Bill Wittmeyer:

So That's right.

Heath Fletcher:

It we're it's another, you know, three hundred years later, and now look what they can do once they take someone's blood and analyze it. So it doesn't surprise me that we can do the same with our breath or any other body fluids for that matter. It's like, all the information, all the data is within us as to what's going on, but it takes, intelligence and and smart people, smart technology to bring it together so that we can actually do something with that information and make the world a better place and help people be healthier and live longer. And, I just think what you're doing is incredible. I appreciate you so much for sharing your story with myself.

Heath Fletcher:

I felt like I was the only one in the room, but there are gonna be listeners here.

Bill Wittmeyer:

I'm looking around, and I think you are the only one in the room.

Heath Fletcher:

But when this goes live, there'll be other people in the room, and I really hope they appreciate your story. And I hope someone hears this who's wants to help and wants to be part of of your journey. And

Bill Wittmeyer:

Well, let me make one other little pitch along here for anybody. Music Beats Cancer, which is a five zero one c three, is conducting fundraising for Maggie's Breath. And anybody can go to musicbeatscancer.org, click on their campaigns, enter Maggie's breath, and they can make a donation. And one of the things that we are doing is we are for anybody who makes a donation of a $100 or more, we will give them a free breath screening for breast cancer if and when we have approval by the FDA.

Heath Fletcher:

That's an amazing offer. That's great. I will make sure

Bill Wittmeyer:

you that information. Awareness of this among the women's population as well.

Heath Fletcher:

That's a great idea.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Because for our own basic one, when women hear about this, they become our best lobby.

Heath Fletcher:

100%.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Get approval by the

Heath Fletcher:

People already that would wanna wanna know. Yeah. Absolutely. I'll make sure that information is also on our Yeah.

Bill Wittmeyer:

I I will send you the QR code so they can go right to it.

Heath Fletcher:

Oh, that's a great idea. That's a great idea. Okay. Thank you again, Bill, and I really appreciate your sharing with us, and thanks for taking me up on on being on this show.

Bill Wittmeyer:

Hey. I really enjoyed it. Great to have let me talk for an hour and get an appreciative audience.

Heath Fletcher:

You got it. Such a deeply deeply rooted vision and passion for what he's doing, creating that legacy for Maggie. And, you know, those are the kind of personal experiences that really drive passion and purpose for people and and motivate so many health care innovations. So, man, I wish him all the luck in his data collection and and hoping that he gets FDA approval. So if you're interested in that, you should reach out to Bill.

Heath Fletcher:

He's on LinkedIn, Bill Wittmeyer, or you can go to maggie'sbreath.com. This is an incredibly important topic, you know, around early detection and prevention. Breast cancer is increasingly affecting younger and younger women, and there has never been more of a need for noninvasive screening methods. And, you know, that's that's where it's at. If you wanna help raise funds for this cause, you can go to musicbeatscancer.org, and it's conducting fundraising for Maggie.

Heath Fletcher:

And for every $100 or more that are donated towards the cause, they will get a free screening for breast cancer once it's approved by the FDA. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Healthy Enterprise, and please stay healthy, and we'll see you again soon. Thanks.