Biotech & Health

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, elizabeth holmes, TheranosNo Comments

Ten months after she was found guilty of fraud, the former youngest self-made female billionaire Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11.25 years in prison, plus three years of supervised release. At her trial, she was found guilty on four of 11 counts related to defrauding investors, but she was not found guilty of defrauding patients. The former founder and CEO of Theranos, Holmes could have faced up to 20 years in prison for each of the four counts. By comparison, former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud, but was released after a bit more than four years. At the courthouse in San Jose, both sides of United States vs. Elizabeth Holmes presented their cases regarding whether Judge Edward Davila can consider Holmes’ “reckless disregard” of patients in sentencing. Davila rejected that proposal, since at the original trial, Holmes was only found guilty of defrauding investors. Regardless, it took over four hours before Holmes’ sentence was decided. Alex Schultz, father of whistleblower Tyler Schultz, spoke to the court, recounting how his son slept with a knife under his pillow when he suspected he was being followed by Theranos’ private investigators. Alex Schultz says Holmes hired an investigator to follow his son Tyler Schultz and he slept with a knife under his pillow b/c he thought someone was going to kill him. “My family home was desecrated by Elizabeth and the lawyers,” he says. — Dorothy Atkins (@doratki) November 18, 2022 Then, Holmes herself spoke. “I regret my failings with every cell of my body,” she said. That was when Judge Davila delivered his decision. Holmes is expected to report to prison in April. Currently, she is pregnant with her second child. Fraud at Theranos Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford. She pitched investors and partners on technology that would revolutionize the healthcare system — instead of drawing blood intravenously and waiting days for test results, her technology would prick a tiny bit of blood and instantly conduct dozens of tests on it. Soon she was the CEO of a company with a $10 billion valuation, but it turned out that the technology didn’t work. Theranos has been defunct since 2018, but Holmes’ criminal trial only began last fall after delays due to the pandemic and the birth of her first child. According to a letter from Holmes’ husband in a public court filing, she is now pregnant with a second child. The filing includes 282 pages of other letters from Holmes’ friends, family and business associates, ranging from childhood photos and drawings to notes from high-profile supporters like Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and venture capitalist Tim Draper. “Although there is substantial popular outcry against Theranos and Elizabeth, the attitude in much of the venture world is very different,” Draper wrote. “Venture-backed startup companies often announce and deliver products to the market before they are ready.” The former CEO’s sentencing was further delayed because her lawyers tried to request a new trial, arguing that new evidence had come to light after former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff visited Holmes at home in an attempt to find closure. Rosendorff, who worked at Theranos between 2013 and 2014, testified for six days last year during Holmes’ four-month trial. With his highly technical knowledge of the inner workings of Theranos’ labs, Rosendorff’s testimony was key to the trial. In court, he said that Holmes knew that Theranos’ technology produced inaccurate blood test results, yet she pushed for it to be used on patients anyway. After repeatedly raising his concerns about the faulty technology, he ultimately quit Theranos. Holmes’ lawyers alleged that when Rosendorff visited her home this summer, he expressed guilt that he made Theranos seem worse than it was in court. But Judge Edward Davila did not find merit to these allegations. Rosendorff affirmed once again that last year’s testimony was accurate. The former lab director clarified that he felt sorry for Holmes’ child, who will grow up without a mother if she is sent to prison, but not for Holmes herself. Holmes’ former boyfriend and Theranos COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani awaits sentencing. He was convicted on twelve out of twelve counts in his own trial, where the jury found him guilty of defrauding both patients and investors.

Protein programmers get a helping hand from Cradle’s generative AI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, cradle, Generative AI, machine learning, proteomics, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Proteins are the molecules that get work done in nature, and there’s a whole industry emerging around successfully modifying and manufacturing them for various uses. But doing so is time consuming and haphazard; Cradle aims to change that with an AI-powered tool that tells scientists what new structures and sequences will make a protein do what they want it to. The company emerged from stealth today with a substantial seed round. AI and proteins have been in the news lately, but largely because of the efforts of research outfits like DeepMind and Baker Lab. Their machine learning models take in easily collected RNA sequence data and predict the structure a protein will take — a step that used to take weeks and expensive special equipment. But as incredible as that capability is in some domains, it’s just the starting point for others. Modifying a protein to be more stable or bind to a certain other molecule involves much more than just understanding its general shape and size. “If you’re a protein engineer, and you want to design a certain property or function into a protein, just knowing what it looks like doesn’t help you. It’s like, if you have a picture of a bridge, that doesn’t tell you whether it’ll fall down or not,” explained Cradle CEO and co-founder Stef van Grieken. “Alphafold takes a sequence and predicts what the protein will look like,” he continued. “We’re the generative brother of that: you pick the properties you want to engineer, and the model will generate sequences you can test in your laboratory.” Predicting what proteins — especially ones new to science — will do in situ is a difficult task for lots of reasons, but in the context of machine learning the biggest issue is that there isn’t enough data available. So Cradle originated much of its own data set in a wet lab, testing protein after protein and seeing what changes in their sequences seemed to lead to which effects. Interestingly the model itself is not biotech-specific exactly but a derivative of the same “large language models” that have produced text production engines like GPT-3. Van Grieken noted that these models are not limited strictly to language in how they understand and predict data, an interesting “generalization” characteristic that researchers are still exploring. Examples of the Cradle UI in action. The protein sequences Cradle ingests and predicts are not in any language we know, of course, but they are relatively straightforward linear sequences of text that have associated meanings. “It’s like an alien programming language,” van Grieken said. Protein engineers aren’t helpless, of course, but their work necessarily involves a lot of guessing. One may know for sure that among the 100 sequences they are modifying is the combination that will produce The model works in three basic layers, he explained. First it assesses whether a given sequence is “natural,” i.e. whether it is a meaningful sequence of amino acids or just random ones. This is akin to a language model just being able to say with 99 percent confidence that a sentence is in English (or Swedish, in van Grieken’s example), and the words are in the correct order. This it knows from “reading” millions of such sequences determined by lab analysis. Next it looks at the actual or potential meaning in the protein’s alien language. “Imagine we give you a sequence, and this is the temperature at which this sequence will fall apart,” he said. “If you do that for a lot of sequences, you can say not just, ‘this looks natural,’ but ‘this looks like 26 degrees Celsius.’ that helps the model figure out what regions of the protein to focus on.” The model can then suggest sequences to slot in — educated guesses, essentially, but a stronger starting point than scratch. And the engineer or lab can then try them and bring that data back to the Cradle platform, where it can be re-ingested and used to fine tune the model for the situation. The Cradle team on a nice day at their HQ (van Grieken is center). Modifying proteins for various purposes is useful across biotech, from drug design to biomanufacturing, and the path from vanilla molecule to customized, effective and efficient molecule can be long and expensive. Any way to shorten it will likely be welcomed by, at the very least, the lab techs who have to run hundreds of experiments just to get one good result. Cradle has been operating in stealth, and now is emerging having raised $5.5 million in a seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, with participation from angels John Zimmer, Feike Sijbesma, and Emily Leproust. Van Grieken said the funding would allow the team to scale up data collection — the more the better when it comes to machine learning — and work on the product to make it “more self-service.” “Our goal is to reduce the cost and time of getting a bio-based product to market by an order of magnitude,” said van Grieken in the press release, “so that anyone – even ‘two kids in their garage’ – can bring a bio-based product to market.”

‘Hybrid meat’? Meatable wants to get lab-grown meat to market faster by combining with plant-based proteins • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Climate, Love Handle, Meatable, SingaporeNo Comments

Alternative meat, seafood, and dairy products are all the rage in startup land, with countless companies raising bucketloads of cash and showcasing their first products throughout 2022. There are two broad categories within the meat-substitute space specifically: plant-based foods that strive to mimic the texture, look, and feel of real meat, and “lab-grown” cultivated meat that’s created from animal cells in a test tube. While each is effectively trying to solve similar problems, vis-à-vis saving the planet by weaning humans off their animal protein dependency, they each have their respective pros and cons. For starters, plant-based meat alternatives are already widely available to buy globally, whereas lab-grown meat is still in its relative infancy, with Singapore currently the only market in the world where cultured meat is permitted to be sold. The Asian city-state has emerged as a center of gravity of sorts for the burgeoning fake meat movement — just this week, Australia’s Vow announced a $49.2 million round of funding to bring its cultured meat product to Singaporean restaurants by the end of this year. It’s against that backdrop that Meatable, a VC-backed Dutch company that recently debuted its first product lineup in the form of synthetic sausages, today announced a partnership with Singaporean food startup Love Handle to create what it touts as “the world’s first hybrid meat innovation center.” This builds on Meatable’s recent expansion into the Singaporean market where it partnered with Esco Aster to develop cultivated pork products, with plans afoot to invest some $60 million in the next five years in the broader Singaporean market. Meatable’s fake sausages look like the real deal It’s (not) alive… The phrase “hybrid meat” in the context of a lab-grown meat company could perhaps stir some dystopian vision straight from the pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but when you learn that Love Handle is in fact a “plant-based butcher,” one can start to relax a little — Meatable isn’t stitching together components from different animals. The two companies are teaming up to blend the best of both their respective worlds — cultured meat and plant-based protein alternatives. What Meatable and Love Handle are striving for here isn’t entirely novel — others are working toward a similar end, and we’re seeing similar moves elsewhere to reduce animal consumption through products that mesh real meat with plant-based alternatives. The idea there is that while a burger might still contain real beef, it contains less of it, which can only be better for the environment (and people’s health). But what is the motivation, exactly, from a company such as Meatable which operates entirely off the back of its “fake real-meat” foundations? It all boils down to costs, and getting things to market more quickly. Cultivated meat is expensive to develop in a lab setting, and critics argue that there is little to suggest it will be affordable enough to scale at any meaningful level in the near future. On top of that, there are significant regulatory barriers (even in Singapore where it is approved for consumption), not to mention the mental barriers associated with eating meat grown in a lab. So by meshing cultured and plant-based meat alternatives, this could essentially lower all the barriers to entry. “We’ve decided to start launching with hybrid products in Singapore to help customers become acquainted with cultivated meat faster,” Meatable’s chief commercial officer Caroline Wilschut explained to ZebethMedia. “We know that the idea of consuming cultivated meat still requires further education in terms of what it is, how we develop it, and how we can produce it without harming animals, the planet, and people. The faster we launch, the faster we can start that education to build consumer acceptance and begin making an impact with harm-free meat.” Learning from electric cars It’s worth noting that Meatable isn’t going all-in on the hybrid model — it’s still very much continuing its lab-based work to rollout 100% lab-grown meat. But with the new innovation center in Singapore, it’s “seizing an additional opportunity in a supportive regulatory environment,” according to Wilschut. “Meatable continues with the development of full cultivated meat — however, we’ve also determined that hybrid products can be launched faster than entirely cultivated meat,” she said. “Meatable believes that a hybrid product will help gain acceptance amongst customers and maximise its reach within Singapore.” The goal here can perhaps be compared to something like that of a hybrid electric vehicle — it helps bring a nascent technology to the masses more quickly. And while there are a few other players dabbling with hybrids in terms of adding a bit of cultivated meat to a substantively plant-based product, Meatable says that it’s turning the tables on this concept. “In this instance, Meatable and Love Handle are taking a cultivated meat-led approach, which means they are starting with Meatable’s cultivated meat and adding Love Handle’s plant-based protein to develop a hybrid product that — in testing — has emerged as indistinguishable from real meat in taste and texture,” Wilschut said. This gets to the crux of why hybrid products could be a better idea. Purely plant-based meat alternatives typically lack the taste and texture of real meat, so by bringing together two distinct forms of animal-free meat alternatives, this could help everything scale for everyone involved — a win-win for both Meatable and Love Handle. This leads us back to the main thrust of today’s announcement. What, exactly, will the new innovation center in Singapore do? According to Wilschut, the lab is scheduled to open fully in 2023, with both companies co-investing in talent starting with around 10 new hires. It will sport a kitchen and a lab featuring all the machines and materials needed to bring hybrid food products to market, while it will also serve as a commercial front-end for everything going on behind the scenes, with space for consumers to try and buy products directly. “Both companies will invest in the lab, operate the innovation center, and will together hire the talent and resources to

After mothballing Amazon Care, Amazon reenters tele-health with Amazon Clinic, a marketplace for third-party virtual consultants • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Amazon, Biotech & Health, Commerce, telehealthNo Comments

The ink is not yet dry on Amazon’s $4 billion acquisition of OneMedical, but in the meantime, the online services giant is making one more move into telehealth, and into medical services overall, on its own steam. The company today is taking the wraps off of Amazon Clinic, which Amazon describes as a virtual health “storefront”: users will be able to search for, connect with, and pay for telehealth care, addressing variety of conditions that are some of the more popular for telehealth consultations today. Amazon’s launch — which appeared to leak out about a week ago when users spotted some quiet landing pages — is coming only a few months after it shut down Amazon Care, which had been a telehealth service that it initially created for its own employees before stepping up plans to launch it nationwide and to third-party companies. Amazon Clinic represents another pass at the market and problem, but one that is very much built in the Amazon mold: as a marketplace where third parties can leverage Amazon’s platform and reach to find customers, and Amazon can leverage third parties to quickly scale what offers to its consumers, as well as to extend the business funnel for other Amazon operations — in this case Amazon Pharmacy, which can fulfill any prescriptions that come out of Clinic consultations. (Users can fill the scripts in other pharmacies, too.) Amazon Clinic is initially launching in 32 states in the U.S.. It does not work with health insurance and this point, and overall pricing will vary depending on providers, conditions, and location. (One example, connecting with a clinic for acne treatment in Nevada will cost around $40, and you get a choice of two providers whose different offers are provided in a comparative table. Another example, for pink eye (conjunctivitis) in New Jersey, has a wider price gap of between $30 and $48 between the two providers listed.) Other conditions include asthma refills, birth control, cold sores, dandruff, eczema, erectile dysfunction, eyelash growth, genital herpes, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), hayfever, hyperlipidemia refills, hypertension refills, hypothyroidism refills, men’s hair loss, migraines, sinusitis, smoking cessation, urinary tract infections (UTIs), yeast infections and so on. We’ve asked Amazon if it plans to provide its own in-house (private label, in e-commerce parlance) telehealth consultancy utalongside third parties, and what the plans are for further states, whether there are international ambitions, and if it will accept health insurance for Clinic in the future. It may well be that this is laying the groundwork for Amazon to link up what it is building here with OneMedical when that acquisition closes. The bigger picture for Amazon Clinic is that the service will sit within Amazon’s bigger ambitions in the healthcare market. The company already has an online chemists, Amazon Pharmacy, which fulfills subscriptions and lets users additional buy over-the-counter drugs via Prime memberships that ship the items within two days. Amazon also believes its new telehealth service addresses a gap in the market for providing users with health consultations for more minor ailments. Some situations need more direct physician involvement, which might be covered with One Medical or one’s existing healthcare coverage; some situations might be addressable by visiting a pharmacy on one’s own steam. “But we also know that sometimes you just need a quick interaction with a clinician for a common health concern that can be easily addressed virtually,” the company noted in its blog post announcing the service. Amazon has been making inroads, and laying out its ambitions, in healthcare for a number of years. Amazon Pharmacy was launched off the back of its acquisition of PillPack. And it’s been exploring healthcare as an enterprise opportunity, with integrations of Alexa into healthcare environments. But Amazon Care is not the only step back it’s taken in its longer journey. In 2018, it formed a JV with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to build an employee healthcare operation, appointing a high-profile doctor to lead it. That service never appeared to take shape as expected and shut up shop in 2021. We’ll update this piece as we learn more.

Google’s Health Connect app is now available in beta • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Apps, Biotech & Health, Google, health connectNo Comments

Google announced today that its Health Connect app is now available in beta on the Play Store. Health Connect is designed to centralize access to health and fitness data from various eligible apps. Today, more than 10 health and fitness apps are launching integrations with Health Connect, including MyFitnessPal, Oura and Peloton. The app syncs health and fitness data from eligible platforms and allows other apps to gain access to this data with their consent, while providing centralized privacy controls for users. Developers have previously had to establish multiple API connections to share data between different apps, which limited developers’ data sharing capabilities and made it hard for users to unlock this data for use in different apps. With Health Connect, developers no longer have to build a whole new integration. Google says building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect. “For example, Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum,” Google said in a blog post. “Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.” Image Credits: Google Google says Health Connect provides a standardized data schema that supports 40+ data types across six categories. The schema covers a wide range of use cases, from exercises to sleep tracking to vital signs. The app not only simplifies app connectivity, but also give users more privacy controls by allowing them to monitor which apps have access to data. In the past, users have had to navigate to multiple apps to manage data permissions and developers had to build out permissions management UIs themselves. Health Connect allows users to manage permissions in a single place. As for developers, Health Connect provides the permissions management hub and granular permissions UIs out of the box. Google collaborated with Samsung to build Health Connect with the goal of simplifying the connectivity between health and fitness apps. The company first unveiled the initiative earlier this year at its I/O developer conference. Health Connect is available to download as a public beta via the Google Play Store starting today. Google hasn’t detailed its plans regarding a full public release. At launch, the app has integrations with Fitbit, Samsung Health, Google Fit, MyFitnessPal, Peloton, Oura, WeightWatchers, Flo, Lifesum, Signos, Tonal, Outdooractive and Proov Insight.

Sight Tech Global 2022 agenda announced • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in accessibility, Biotech & Health, Sight Tech GlobalNo Comments

The third annual Sight Tech Global conference, a virtual, free and highly accessible event on December 7 and 8 convenes some of the world’s top experts working on assistive tech, especially AI, for people who are blind or visually impaired. If you don’t follow this topic, maybe you should, because a lot of cutting-edge tech over the years — think OCR and NLP — was developed at the outset with blind people in mind, and went from there to more mainstream uses. Register today! At this year’s event we have sessions with the creators of several new devices to assist with vision, and we’ll talk about the technology architecture decisions that went into balancing capability with cost and tapping existing platforms. We’ll also take our first look at accessibility in VR, which is an area of huge concern because if/when VR takes off in the entertainment and business worlds, it’s vital that people without vision have access, as they do today on smart phones and computers thanks to screenreaders like JAWS, VoiceOver and NVDA. Our third big slab of programming is about AI itself. There is no shortage of hype as far as AI’s capabilities, and it’s important to push back on that by discussing some serious limitations and deficits in the way today’s AI works for people with disabilities, not to mention humanity in general. At the same time, AI is arguably the best core tech ever for people without sight. Understanding AI is vital to the future of everyone with disabilities for all those reasons. Don’t forget to register today! And before you browse this awesome agenda: For technologists, designers and product folks working on earthshaking assistive tech, we’re hosting a small, in-person event on December 9 featuring workshops on assistive tech, many run by the same luminaries on the agenda. Interested? Contact us. Here’s the agenda. To see times and more, go to the Sight Tech Global agenda page. The Dynamic Tactile Device: That “Holy Braille” for educations is near Following up on last year’s discussion of the APH and Humanware collaboration to create an education-focused tactile display (see next session), Greg Stilson updates Sight Tech Global on the project’s progress and APH’s work toward an SDK for developers to build on the tactile display. Greg Stilson will also lead a breakout session for attendees who want to go deeper on the Dynamic Tactile Device. Greg Stilson, Head of Global Innovation, APH Moderator: Devin Coldewey, Writer & Photographer, ZebethMedia The DOT Pad: How the Bible and smartphone speaker tech inspired a breakthrough For decades, engineers have worked toward a braille display that can render tactile images and multiline braille. DOT Pad may have cracked the code with an innovative approach to generating dynamic fields of braille pins actuated by smart integrations combined with existing technologies, like Apple’s VoiceOver. Eric Kim and Ki Sung will also lead a breakout session for attendees who want to learn more. Eric Ju Yoon Kim Co-Founder/CEO DOT Ki Kwang Sung Co-Founder/CEO DOT Moderator: Devin Coldewey Writer & Photographer ZebethMedia Virtual Reality and Inclusion: What does non-visual access to the metaverse mean? People with disabilities and accessibility advocates are working to make sure the metaverse is accessible to everyone. This panel will delve into research on the challenges current virtual and augmented reality tools create for people who are blind or have low vision.The panelists will share their experiences using immersive technologies and explore how these tools can be used to enhance employment opportunities in hybrid and remote workplaces — but only if they are built with inclusion in mind. Moderator Bill Curtis Davidson Co-Director, Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT) Alexa Huth, Director Strategic Communications, PEAT Brandon Keith Biggs, Software Engineer, The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute and CEO XR Navigation Aaron Gluck, PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing, Clemson University Inventing the “screenreader” for VR: Owlchemy Lab’s Cosmonious High For developers of virtual reality games, there’s every reason to experiment with accessibility from the start, which is what the Owlchemy Labs team did with Cosmonious High, the 2022 release of a fun, first-person game situated in an inter-galactic high school that one reviewer said “has all the charm and cheek of a good Nickelodeon kids show.” And it reveals some of the earliest approaches to accessibility in VR. Peter Galbraith, Accessibility Engineer II, Owlchemy Labs Jazmin Cano, Accessibility Product Manager II, Owlchemy Labs Moderator James Rath, Filmmaker, Accessibility Advocate and Gamer Audio Description the Pixar Way AI-driven, synthetic audio description may have a place in some forms of accessible video content, but the artistry of the entirely human-produced audio descriptions Pixar produces for its productions set a creative standard no AI will ever attain, and that’s all for the good. Meet members of the Pixar team behind excellence in audio descriptions. Eric Pearson, Home Entertainment Supervisor, Pixar Anna Capezzera, Director, Audio Description Operations, Deluxe Laura Post, Voice Actress Christina Stevens, Writing Manager, Deluxe Moderator Tom Wlodkowski, Vice President, Accessibility, Comcast Seeing AI and the New AI Microsoft’s hugely popular Seeing AI is one of the apps that appears to do it all, from reading documents to recognizing people and things. Those services are enabled by Microsoft’s rapidly advancing cloud-based AI systems. How is Seeing AI advancing with those capabilities and what is the future for Seeing AI? Saqib Shaikh, Co-founder of Seeing AI, Microsoft Moderator Larry Goldberg, Accessibility Sensei & Technology Consultant Accessibility Is AI’s Biggest Challenge: How Alexa aims to make it fairer for everyone Smart home technology, like Alexa, has been one of the biggest boons in recent years for people who are blind, and for people with disabilities altogether. Voice technology and AI help empower people in many ways, but one obstacle stands in its way: making it equitable. In this session, learn from Amazon about how they’re approaching the challenge ahead. Peter Korn, Director of Accessibility, Devices & Services, Amazon Josh Miele, Principal Accessibility Researcher, Amazon Caroline Desrosiers, Founder & CEO, Scribely Hands on with Seleste Rapid

Even Healthcare lands additional capital to advance primary care adoption in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Even Healthcare, funding, india, primary careNo Comments

Even Healthcare, an Indian “healthcare membership” company, landed new financial support in the form of $15 million to further drive its mission of providing affordable care to communities across India. Even isn’t insurance, but allows members to access primary and preventative care at any of over 100 partnered hospitals. Typically, the way Indians access healthcare is through emergency services as opposed to the preventative care model followed in Western countries. They most often pay for services out of pocket, but Even provides what it describes as a more affordable, comprehensive care model. The company said last year when they last raised money that less than 5% of the Indian population has insurance and plans that do exist mainly cover emergency services. “For us, Even is about giving members access to complete healthcare and building trust like a family doctor,” said co-founder Matilde Giglio. “Right from preventive care to diagnostics to hospitalization, our members will be assured of our support throughout their healthcare journey.” Depending on a user’s financial capabilities, there are three plans they can choose from. The cheapest is ₹ 40 per month ($0.50 USD) which includes unlimited consultations and a care team, but according to the company is meant for individuals looking to still pay for some services out of pocket. The plan gives users a glimpse at the care provided to then transition individuals to the second tier plan, Even Lite. Even Lite costs users ₹ 320 ($4 USD) per month and includes tests, consultations and a care team. For ₹ 528 ($6.54 USD) per month care becomes more comprehensive including COVID-19-specific services, emergency care across India and cashless hospitalization. The company’s standard pricing is for individuals, but it does have group plans for companies and groups. Even currently has 20,000 active members and has partnered with over 100 hospitals since its launch in 2020. Just a year ago the company had 5,000 on a waitlist. The Bangalore-based company asks new users to talk to a doctor to collect health information and assess risk for underlying conditions. According to Giglio, conditions like diabetes, high cholesterol, high BP and obesity are common in India, but often go uncontrolled due to a lack of primary care. The company claims half their new users learned they suffered from diabetes during the onboarding process. The new capital raised comes from Alpha Wave and Aspada (Lightrock). They are joining existing investors Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Lachy Groom, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, CRED CEO Kunal Shah and DST Global partner Tom Stafford. Even first raised a $5 million seed round in 2021 led by Khosla Ventures. This round’s funds will be used to expand its clinical team and scale preventive care in conditions like diabetes, PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) and obesity.

Contraline erects $7.2M for contraceptive implants for men • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, contraceptives, GVNo Comments

The cervix industry has had implants to prevent pregnancy since the late 1960s, but there hasn’t exactly been stiff competition to slow down the fallopian swim team at its source. In fact, Contraline claims it is the first major innovation in this space since the vasectomy was performed on a human some 125 years ago. The company calls its product ADAM, and it just raised a wad of cash to continue its trials. “The first-in-human male contraceptive implant is a major clinical milestone that opens up new possibilities for men who wish to take contraception into their own hands,” said Kevin Eisenfrats, Co-founder and CEO of Contraline. “The patient demand for the ADAM Study has been tremendous, with the entire trial oversubscribing within three weeks of opening enrollment. We are looking forward to advancing ADAM through clinical development and bringing this product to market to transform how people think about contraception.” ADAM works by injecting a hydro gel into the vas deferens (the little tubes that carry the sperm). Image Credits: Contraline. The company just raised $7.2 million in funding led by GV. The goal is to advance its in-human clinical trials of its injectable hydrogel designed to provide long-lasting, non-permanent contraception for men. The product uses a “hydrogel” designed to occlude sperm flow through the vas deferens for a predefined period of time, eventually degrading and thus offering a non-permanent contraceptive option. The company suggests that the contraceptive is long-lasting but non-permanent, and claims it has no hormonal impact on the patients. The company told ZebethMedia that four men were implanted with ADAM at a hospital in Australia, using a minimally invasive, no-scalpel approach, with ADAM being injected using a patent-pending delivery device. The procedure marks the first patient implanted in “The ADAM Study,” which is being conducted under Human Research Ethics Committee approval. The ADAM Study is assessing the safety of the ADAM Hydrogel, while monitoring the semen parameters of the study subjects over three years. “Contraline has the potential to fundamentally change the market for contraception,” said Cathy Friedman, executive venture partner at GV. “We look forward to working with the team as they continue developing a long-acting, reversible male contraceptive that empowers more people with more choices over family planning.” Contraline’s study in Australia continues, and its next, longer-term goal is to run a second study with a larger group of patients in the United States.

“Self-therapy” startups are blooming in the ‘moderate mental health’ space • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Apps, Biotech & Health, StartupsNo Comments

Mental health problems – and the tech products which aim at them – come in all shapes and sizes. There are ‘mental wellness’ products like Calm and Headspace. On the more severe side of things there is Cerebral, Betterhelp, and, of course, marketplaces for actual, card-carrying therapists. If you have more moderate mental health problems there are players such as Noom (raised $657.3M) with NoomMood, NASDAQ-listed Talkspace with Lasting, and Youper (raised $3.5M) which offers self-guided CBT therapy. Also in the CBT field there are chatbots like Woebot (raised $123.3M) and Journals like Alan Mind that leverage CBT. In this ‘moderate mental health’ problems space is also Bloom, a New York-based digital mental health “self-therapy” startup that claims it can help with mild to moderate mental health problems. The startup says its users become “their own therapist” by using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) via video self-therapy sessions, to address stress, anxiety, and sleep issues. All the sessions are devised by Dr. Seth Gillihan, author on CBT and Bloom’s Head of Therapy and CBT. It’s now secured a $8m seed round, led by Berlin-based VC Target Global. Also participating was Elysian Park Ventures, Angelpad and Sequoia Scout, plus founders as Scott Chacon (Github), Dominik Richter (HelloFresh), Niklas Jansen (Blinkist), Roland Grenke (Dubsmash), Joshua Cornelius & Mehmet Yilmaz (Freeletics), Ryan Bubinski (Codecademy), Mariya Nurislamova (Scentbird). So a pretty European-band line-up of Angels. Leon Mueller, Bloom’s CEO and co-founder says “Bloom is doing for therapy what Calm and Headspace have done for meditation – making it affordable, accessible, mainstream and everyday” (he said in a statement). He and cofounder Daniel Lohse say they got the idea for Bloom after moving to New York last year and each trying to find therapists.

Elizabeth Holmes is denied new trial, will be sentenced on Nov. 18 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Biotech & HealthNo Comments

The disgraced founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes will be sentenced on November 18 after she was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors in January. Once the youngest self-made female billionaire, Holmes is could face up to twenty years in prison for each of the four counts of fraud. Holmes had delayed sentencing by trying to request a new trial, arguing that new evidence had come to light. In August, former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff visited Holmes at her home in an attempt to find closure. Rosendorff, who worked at Theranos between 2013 and 2014, testified for six days last year during Holmes’ four month trial. With his highly technical knowledge of the innerworkings of Theranos’ labs, Rosendorff’s testimony was key to the trial. In court, he said that Holmes knew that Theranos’ technology produced inaccurate blood test results, yet she pushed for it to be used on patients anyway. After repeatedly raising his concerns about the faulty technology, he ultimately quit Theranos. Holmes’ lawyers alleged that when Rosendorff visited her home this summer, he expressed guilt that he made Theranos seem worse than it was in court. But Judge Edward Davila did not find merit to these allegations. Rosendorff affirmed once again that last year’s testimony was accurate. The former lab director clarified that he felt sorry for Holmes’ child, who will grow up without a mother if she is sent to prison, but not for Holmes herself. After a long-delayed trial, Holmes’ legal team is expected to file an appeal after next week’s sentencing, dragging out the legal process further. Holmes’ former boyfriend and Theranos COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani is expected to be sentenced on December 7. While Holmes was found guilty of four counts of fraud relating to investors, Balwani was found guilty on all twelve counts of defrauding and conspiring to defraud both patients and investors.