Can We Detect Skin Cancer Without a Biopsy? with Stefan Mazy

What if the biggest problem in skin cancer diagnosis is not finding suspicious lesions, but what happens after we find them?

Stefan Mazy joins Christian Espinosa to discuss the personal experience that led him to explore a different approach to skin cancer testing after his mother underwent extensive surgery for an aggressive basal cell carcinoma.

Stefan explains how his team is developing a microneedle patch designed to collect cellular tissue without a traditional surgical biopsy, and why he believes the current diagnostic pathway is struggling to scale as skin cancer awareness and testing increase.

The conversation also explores the role of AI in identifying suspicious lesions, the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity, and why detecting more abnormalities could increase pressure on an already strained clinical pathway.

Christian and Stefan also discuss cybersecurity in medical technology, manufacturing risks, brain-computer interfaces and why connected devices require founders to think beyond the device itself.

In This Episode:

• 03:33 Stefan’s mother’s skin cancer diagnosis

• 08:14 Why he began searching for an alternative to biopsy

• 10:08 The scale of unnecessary skin biopsies

• 12:37 How the microneedle patch works

• 15:13 Why uncertainty creates a diagnostic bottleneck

• 23:44 Can AI reliably identify skin cancer?

• 28:07 The problem with false positives

• 31:50 Cybersecurity, brain-computer interfaces and future risk

• 35:20 Stefan’s key takeaway on technology and healthcare