Filed from Bethpace, NY · In the manner of a market columnist who reads the patent before believing the pitch
Here is a sentence that should not survive contact with a due-diligence meeting: we teleport energy to precisely selected microscopic locations inside the body. It has the cadence of a pitch that ends with someone quietly closing their laptop. And yet Holobeam Technologies, a 16-person company on Long Island, has been building a real business around exactly that sentence - and, more inconveniently for the skeptics, has a US patent with a number on it.
The number is 11,400,306. It covers what Holobeam calls Holographic Energy Teleportation, or HET, and the general idea is less mystical than the word "teleportation" suggests. Holography is the science of controlling waves so that they add up in some places and cancel out in others. Holobeam's claim is that you can arrange energy waves so they constructively interfere at one tiny point - a spot the size of a cell - while destructively interfering everywhere around it. Aim that hot point at a cancer cell, and in principle you cook the cell without cooking the neighborhood. The patent office, which is not famous for its sense of whimsy, agreed the method was novel enough to grant.
The founder is Gene Dolgoff, and his resume is the kind that makes an investor lean forward and lean back at the same time. He is widely credited with inventing the LCD projector. He founded Projectavision, took it onto NASDAQ, and reportedly returned 35x to investors in five years. He also says he conceived the Star Trek Holodeck and got it written into the shows, which is the sort of biographical detail that is either a charming aside or a warning label, depending on your mood. He holds more than 65 patents. When a man with 65 patents tells you he wants to teleport energy, the correct response is not "that's impossible." It's "show me the animal data."
"To bring energy teleportation to market, providing significant improvement in cancer and other-disease patient outcomes."
- Holobeam Technologies, company mission
The animal data is the part that keeps the story on the right side of credible. Holobeam says it has demonstrated HET, used its AdvaNan nanoparticles in animal models, and treated cancer in mice and dogs. That is not a cure, and the company is careful not to say it is. It is the pre-clinical stage every device company has to survive, the long unglamorous stretch between "the physics works on a bench" and "the FDA lets you point this at a human." Most companies that make bold claims never get here. Holobeam is here.
What makes the pitch genuinely interesting - as opposed to merely loud - is that it tries to do two jobs with one machine. Conventional oncology separates detection from treatment: one machine finds the tumor, another treats it, and the tumor usually has to grow to a visible size before anyone can act. Holobeam wants to collapse both into a single HET-based scanner that can find individual malignant cells and treat them in the same sitting. If that sounds like re-imagining what an MRI is for, that's because it is.
