Biotech & Health

Southeast Asia health tech platform Speedoc raises $28M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Asia, Biotech & Health, health care, Health tech, healthcare, malaysia, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Speedoc, Startups, telemedicineNo Comments

Speedoc, a health tech platform that brings hospital care to homes, has raised $28 million in pre-Series B funding. The round included Bertelsmann Investments, Shinhan Venture Investment and Mars Growth. Returning investor Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, which led Speedoc’s $5 million Series A in 2020, also participated. Based in Singapore, Speedoc was founded in 2017 by Dr. Shravan Verma and Serene Cai. Its services include telemedicine consultations, on-site doctor and nurse visits, virtual hospital wards and ambulance hailing. Speedoc is available in a total of nine cities, including eight in Malaysia. Dr. Verma told ZebethMedia that he became interested in creating an app for on-demand medical services while he was a doctor in an emergency department, and saw how many patients had to wait hours for minor conditions. Cai, meanwhile, wanted to create an easier way for people to get medical help, especially in underserved communities, while her family was caring for her grandmother, who had severe dementia. Speedoc is currently participating in the Ministry of Health Office for Healthcare Transformation’s Mobile Inpatient Care@Home initiative, and its hospital partners include National University Health System (NUHS), the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. As part of the program, Speedoc plans to expand its virtual hospital program, which includes a 24/7 patient care team. H-Ward is one of the main ways Speedoc differentiates from other telemedicine platforms, Dr. Verma said, because it standardizes services like telemedicine, remote monitoring and home-based doctors and nurses for continuous care. Patients are able to receive frequent medical reviews, 24/7 nursing, intravenous therapies, blood tests and in-person visits. “Research and survey findings have shown that given the same medical care and treatment, patients could recover faster at home,” Dr. Sherma said. “We have also been encouraged by our patients advocating for home-based care, and preferences to be admitted at home. Most importantly, on the impact on the healthcare landscape, the thrust towards virtual hospitals will ensure more optimal utilization rates, and more capacity for medical personnel to attend to life-threatening conditions.” Speedoc will use its new funding to expand in Southeast Asia, especially in cities where there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. In a statement about the funding, Shinhan Venture Investment (Global Investment) director Jinsoo Lee said, “Healthcare provision and delivery in Southeast Asia is poised for tremendous change in the next decade. We believe the healthcare model Speedoc champions will see greater adoption in meeting the healthcare gap in the region.”

Stability AI backs effort to bring machine learning to biomed • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in artificial intelligence, Biotech & Health, medicine, Robotics & AI, Stability AI, StartupsNo Comments

Stability AI, the venture-backed startup behind the text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion, is funding a wide-ranging effort to apply AI to the frontiers of biotech. Called OpenBioML, the endeavor’s first projects will focus on machine learning based approaches to DNA sequencing, protein folding, and computational biochemistry. The company’s founders describe OpenBioML as an “open research laboratory” — aims to explore the intersection of AI and biology in a setting where students, professionals and researchers can participate and collaborate, according to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque. “OpenBioML is one of the independent research communities that Stability supports,” Mostaque told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Stability looks to develop and democratize AI, and through OpenBioML, we see an opportunity to advance the state of the art in sciences, health and medicine.” Given the controversy surrounding Stable Diffusion — Stability AI’s AI system that generates art from text descriptions, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 — one might be understandably wary of Stability AI’s first venture into health care. The startup has taken a laissez-faire approach to governance, allowing developers to use the system however they wish, including for celebrity deepfakes and pornography. Stability AI’s ethically questionable decisions to date aside, machine learning in medicine is a minefield. While the tech has been successfully applied to diagnose conditions like skin and eye diseases, among others, research has shown that algorithms can develop biases leading to worse care for some patients. An April 2021 study, for example, found that statistical models used to predict suicide risk in mental health patients performed well for white and Asian patients but poorly for Black patients. OpenBioML is starting with safer territory, wisely. Its first projects are: BioLM, which seeks to apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the fields of computational biology and chemistry DNA-Diffusion, which aims to develop AI that can generate DNA sequences from text prompts LibreFold, which looks to increase access to AI protein structure prediction systems similar to DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 Each project is led by independent researchers, but Stability AI is providing support in the form of access to its AWS-hosted cluster of over 5,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train the AI systems. According to Niccolò Zanichelli, a computer science undergraduate at the University of Parma and one of the lead researchers at OpenBioML, this will be enough processing power and storage to eventually train up to ten different AlphaFold 2-like systems in parallel. “A lot of computational biology research already leads to open-source releases. However, much of it happens at the level of a single lab and is therefore usually constrained by insufficient computational resources,” Zanichelli told ZebethMedia via email. “We want to change this by encouraging large-scale collaborations and, thanks to the support of Stability AI, back those collaborations with resources that only the largest industrial laboratories have access to.” Generating DNA sequences Of OpenBioML’s ongoing projects, DNA-Diffusion — led by pathology professor Luca Pinello’s lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School — is perhaps the most ambitious. The goal is to use generative AI systems to learn and apply the rules of “regulatory” sequences of DNA, or segments of nucleic acid molecules that influence the expression of specific genes within an organism. Many diseases and disorders are the result of misregulated genes, but science has yet to discover a reliable process for identifying — much less changing — these regulatory sequences. DNA-Diffusion proposes using a type of AI system known as a diffusion model to generate cell-type-specific regulatory DNA sequences. Diffusion models — which underpin image generators like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 — create new data (e.g. DNA sequences) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As they’re fed the samples, the models get better at recovering all the data they had previously destroyed to generate new works. Image Credits: Stability AI “Diffusion has seen widespread success in multimodal generative models, and it is now starting to be applied to computational biology, for example for the generation of novel protein structures,” Zanichelli said. “With DNA-Diffusion, we’re now exploring its application to genomic sequences.” If all goes according to plan, the DNA-Diffusion project will produce a diffusion model that can generate regulatory DNA sequences from text instructions like “A sequence that will activate a gene to its maximum expression level in cell type X” and “A sequence that activates a gene in liver and heart, but not in brain.” Such a model could also help interpret the components of regulatory sequences, Zanichelli says — improving the scientific community’s understanding of the role of regulatory sequences in different diseases. It’s worth noting that this is largely theoretical. While preliminary research on applying diffusion to protein folding seems promising, it’s very early days, Zanichelli admits — hence the push to involve the wider AI community. Predicting protein structures OpenBioML’s LibreFold, while smaller in scope, is more likely to bear immediate fruit. The project seeks to arrive at a better understanding of machine learning systems that predict protein structures in addition to ways to improve them. As my colleague Devin Coldewey covered in his piece about DeepMind’s work on AlphaFold 2, AI systems that accurately predict protein shape are relatively new on the scene but transformative in terms of their potential. Proteins comprise sequences of amino acids that fold into shapes to accomplish different tasks within living organisms. The process of determining what shape an acids sequence will create was once an arduous, error-prone undertaking. AI systems like AlphaFold 2 changed that; thanks to them, over 98% of protein structures in the human body are known to science today, as well as hundreds of thousands of other structures in organisms like E. coli and yeast. Few groups have the engineering expertise and resources necessary to develop this kind of AI, though. DeepMind spent days training AlphaFold 2 on tensor processing units (TPUs), Google’s costly AI accelerator hardware. And acid sequence training data sets are often proprietary or released under non-commercial licenses. Proteins folding

Trio of Brown University grads think elder care needs a helping hand with data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Brown University, Deerfield Management, elder care, Intus Care, StartupsNo Comments

As a young boy growing up in Michigan, Robbie Felton went on home visits with his geriatric social worker mother. Seeing low-income, elderly and disabled patients so vulnerable stuck with Felton. As a student at Brown University, he became interested in how Medicare and Medicaid integrate to take care of these patient populations — so much so that he even left school for a while to work full time across the long-term care continuum and learn as much as he could about “very integrated high-touch models of care for seniors.” Serendipitously, while studying at Brown, he realized he wasn’t alone in his desire to help this population when he, Evan Jackson and Alex Rothberg wound up in the same class pitching the same idea — separately — to their teacher. Jackson had been introduced to the senior care space when in high school as he worked alongside a mentor in private equity who invested in and acquired elderly care facilities. Recalls Rothberg: “We had to apply to the class with an idea. The three of us basically submitted the same idea.” That idea ended up being the genesis of what is today Intus Care, a healthcare analytics startup that aims to synthesize financial, clinical and administrative data to identify trends in long-term care facilities by integrating with electronic health record, claims and accounting software to highlight clinical risks in elderly patients. If you’ve ever had an elderly relative in long-term care you can see firsthand how difficult it is for everyone involved in a patient’s care — especially with all the staffing shortages that are prevalent today — to have the time or ability to go through all of a patient’s clinical history to truly understand how to better care for them or prevent future illnesses or falls from happening. “We’re trying to address some of the core issues surrounding the way health care has been built,” Felton said. “And the fact that it’s disparate in nature makes the process of managing and caring for our loved ones so difficult.” In summary, Intus’ mission is “to catalyze data-driven change” in the care of older adults. “At the base layer, we’ve created a solution that integrates with all of an organization’s data and surfaces the insights most important for them to tangibly push the needle on outcomes related to the quality of care that they’re providing,” Felton, who serves as the company’s CEO, told ZebethMedia. “We want to help them scale a high-quality, high-value model of care to as many participants as efficiently and effectively as possible, nationwide.” Image Credits: The trio — who just graduated five months ago — raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding for their venture in March of 2020 and then another $1.6 million in May of 2021 from some angel investors and smaller institutional investors. They raised another $3 million in May of this year and today Intus is announcing a $14 million Series A financing led by Deerfield Managementm, with participation from existing backers Jumpstart, Nova and Collab Capital. The startup operates as a SaaS business and its customers are the organizations providing care. “Our end users are the care coordinators — the individuals who are on the ground providing care services to the patients,” said COO Jackson. “We want to enable them with data so they can make more informed decisions.” But really, anyone who is making proactive decisions — whether it be care coordinators, facility managers or social workers — can use Intus’ offering. “You can use our tool at two levels,” Rothberg, CTO, explained. “One being very individual in terms of how do we get a snapshot of a person’s health in a much more comprehensive way than any other technology will let you.” “And then zooming out a little bit — how do we plan for this person’s health over a six- and 12-month period…not just oh, someone fell yesterday. But more of ‘How do we prevent that?’ So if our data shows there’s a pattern of falls and every single time it’s between 4 and 6 am.” The end goal is to not only recognize the patterns, Rothberg added, but let clinicians make plans going forward. Intus plans to use its capital primarily toward hiring people experienced in scaling healthcare ventures, with a focus on engineers and product folks. It also wants to hire sales and marketing staff because thus far, the three founders and one other person have been working to acquire customers. Even with that small crew, Intus says it has experienced 50% revenue growth quarter-over-quarter this year. Julian Harris, operating partner at Deerfield Management, said his firm invests across the healthcare industry and believes that Intus has built “elegant, intuitive tools to serve a range of users…in ways that impact cost and quality outcomes.” “We believe they have incredible account management infrastructure, and they leverage insights from their customers to drive enhancements to the platform faster than any incumbents in the space,” Harris wrote via email. “They also have deep regulatory and compliance expertise on their team, enabling them to infuse their tools and services with these insights. And, the founders are among the best sales leaders I’ve encountered in my career.”

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

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, contraceptives, Contraline, 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.

5 ways biotech startups can mitigate risk to grow sustainably in the long run • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, biotech startups, Column, EC Column, EC Digital Biotech, EC How To, fundraising, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Omar Khalil is a partner at Santé Ventures, where he focuses primarily on biotechnology and medical technology companies. The unprecedented explosion of investment in life sciences over the past decade has resulted in incredible new therapies for patients, strong financial returns for companies and an overall increase in translational research, which is critical to advancing the next generation of therapies. It has also led to eye-popping levels of capital raised by early-stage companies, some of which were years away from entering the clinic with their first product. Naturally, a generous flow of financing generates excitement for everyone involved. Capital is the fuel that advances scientific and technological innovation, and it means a life science startup can create products that benefit the world at large. But what happens when the funding suddenly dries up? In the world of biotech, for example, it’s extremely capital intensive to develop multiple products that are all going through clinical trials simultaneously. The infrastructure needed to maintain these different programs can be too unwieldy to weather a financial drought. A better approach would be to focus on a lead program — a single product that they can take through various stages of development, ultimately leading to FDA approval. In fact, lead programs validate the value of an underlying platform, enabling companies to raise capital through licensing and partnerships. Founders shouldn’t let peer pressure or investor check size mandates dictate their financing strategy. There will always be ebbs and flows in funding, so here are five ways life science startups can optimize for success regardless of the economic climate. Don’t confuse successful fundraising with a successful company At the end of the day, fundraising is a means to an end. The mission for most life science startups is to improve patient outcomes. However, science is hard, and cash in the bank does not overcome the complexities of human biology. Plenty of companies have successfully raised significant amounts of capital but were never successful in developing a beneficial product, therapy or technology. While not a perfect proxy, the value at which a venture-backed company exits (through M&A or IPO) can be an indication of its success in developing a new product. However, there is practically no correlation between the amount of capital a company raises and its ultimate exit value. Since 2010, the R-squared between exit value and total invested capital — a measure of how correlated the two variables are — for all healthcare exits is a paltry 0.34. When you drill down to a correlation between the exit value and the amount of capital raised in a company’s Series A financing, it drops to a practically negligible value of 0.05, according to PitchBook. These statistics support the notion that just because a company raises significant amounts of capital (especially early on), there is no guarantee of a successful investment outcome. Founders shouldn’t let peer pressure or investor check size mandates dictate their financing strategy. Instead, focus on advancing your program through the key stages of technical and clinical development.

Galen Robotics looks to assist ENT surgeons with new bot and $15M round • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Galen Robotics, Hardware, robotic surgery, Robotics & AINo Comments

Medical devices and robots have been making their way into operating rooms in an increasing number of procedures. Now a new robot is trying to forge its path in the OR and assist surgeons who don’t yet have that advantage. “There are surgeons out there that have really no robotic assistance at all,” said Bruce Lichorowic, CEO of Galen Robotics. “So you have surgeons out there that are doing everything still by hand, using their training to keep their tremor under control to keep themselves stable. Our goal is to see if we can assist them in these areas where there’s really no help today.” The company’s first robot aims to assist in soft tissue surgeries. Called Galen ES, it acts as a support for surgeons performing ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeries, particularly laryngeal cancer operations. Swappable instruments follow the surgeon’s hand movements but allow the user to take a break if needed. According to Lichorowic, the goal is to gain more clearances to help in other ENT, brain, spine, and cardiothoracic procedures. ZebethMedia Clip 10_13_22 v3.mov from David Saunders on Vimeo. The Galen ES fills up the space of a person and the company claims it takes no longer than four minutes to set up. While the device is in use, it tracks and records a surgeon’s movements to later be used for training purposes. The product is currently going under FDA review for clinical use approval, which the company said it hopes will come by Q1 or Q2 of 2023. Although the product is under review, a 2019 study showed surgeons who used the device performed better and had close to a 3 times boost in manual dexterity. The Da Vinci surgical system opened the market to adopting surgical robots. Subsequently, other robots have entered the market addressing general, cardiac and orthopedic surgery needs. According to Galen, its robot will be the first to address neurosurgery and spine surgeries, once clearance is earned. Image Credits: Galen Robotics Hospitals adopting the robot must commit to using the device in 200 cases and pay upwards of $1,500 per use. Though, if a hospital wants to flat-out buy the robot they can do so with a cool $350,000. Surgeons at Stanford, Harvard Medical School, UCSF, USC, and Johns Hopkins have expressed interest in the product according to Galen. The device was originally developed and tested at Johns Hopkins. Galen has garnered support in the form of a $15 million Series A round from Ambix Healthcare Partners. The company has also opened a second close for its Series A, hoping to raise an additional $5 million. ”We watched this team take an early surgical robotic prototype from Johns Hopkins University’s Robotics Lab, develop it into a potential game changer, and submit it to FDA, all during a pandemic,” said Arron Berez, managing director of Ambix Healthcare Partners, in a written statement. “Add to that the current state of supply chain issues, and economic uncertainty, and we’re very impressed with how this team was able to consistently execute and hit their milestones.” This round’s funds will be used to develop a surgeon training program and expand various teams within the company.

54gene valuation slashed by over $100M amid job cuts and CEO exit • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in 54gene, africa, Biotech & Health, StartupsNo Comments

It’s been a strange couple of months at African genomics startup 54gene. In August, it sacked 95 employees, mostly contract staff (in labs and sales departments) hired to work in 54gene’s COVID business line launched in 2020. In September, co-founder and VP of Engineering Ogochukwu Francis Osifo left the company. And this week, founder and now ex-CEO Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong stepped down from his executive role to be replaced by General Counsel Teresia L. Bost. This news coincided with more job cuts. The company confirmed to ZebethMedia that this second round of layoffs, which took place on Tuesday, affected over 100 staff: 55% of the total workforce remaining after the first round of layoffs. The biotech didn’t specify what roles and departments got trimmed. The Washington- and Lagos-based genomics startup has been considered the showpiece of Africa’s fledging biotech space since it got into Y Combinator in 2019. But while 54gene launched to address the gap in the global genomics market, where Africans make up less than 3% of genetic material used in pharmaceutical research, its growth in 2020 overlapped elsewhere, with the COVID-19 pandemic, and it hired aggressively to meet the demands of being one of Nigeria’s largest providers of COVID testing. Its preparedness to meet this opportunity with its clinical diagnostic arm was also a catalyst to increasing its revenue and raising two huge growth rounds in quick succession: a $15 million Series A that year and a $25 million Series B in 2021 from investors such as New York-based Adjuvant Capital, Pan-African firm Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund (CAIF), KdT Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst. Yet, 2022 will be a year to forget for the biotech startup. Not only has its revenues dwindled and laid off almost 200 employees, but the company’s value has also been significantly trimmed in a period when startups’ valuations are taking a beating. According to people with knowledge of the matter, 54gene’s valuation has dropped by two-thirds, from the $170 million secured when it raised its Series B to about $50 million in a bridge round involving lead investors from the company’s board. Sources also said the down round closed at a 3x to 4x liquidation preference, meaning that investors — typically the lead investor — would be paid back triple or quadruple their money before other stakeholders, including other investors, founders and employees in the case of an exit. These terms, which shift power back to investors, were rare during the venture capital boom between mid-2020 and last year but are now commonplace in this fundraising environment. 54gene didn’t confirm or deny the premise of this deal. Still, it stated in an email response: “The existing investors injected fresh capital into the company at terms that reflect current market conditions. We hope this round not only supports the company through this challenging period but also positions it for success in the future — whether it be to raise additional capital, attract strategic partners, or another future path.” Often, liquidation preferences signal that investors want to protect themselves if a growth-stage portfolio company exits at a value lower than initially expected. In some cases, the investors believe that the startup might struggle to produce a solid exit due to underlying challenges affecting its business. When the company’s first layoff news broke, allegations of financial impropriety were leveled against the then-CEO and his executives from a group of employees. And though they remain unfounded, these accusations have come to light again following Ene-Obong’s resignation. Affected employees — who claim they haven’t received their severance packages and spoke to ZebethMedia on the condition of anonymity — unsubstantially blame 54gene’s current troubles on irresponsible hiring, questionable expansion drives and misappropriation of funds. The YC-backed biotech didn’t respond to ZebethMedia’s request for comments about its former executives’ alleged mismanagement of funds and employees’ unpaid severance packages. 54gene’s tight-lippedness on the matter and Bost’s appointment from her legal role to interim CEO arbitrarily raises questions and leaves room for interpretation tilting toward these accusations, especially as both co-founders resigned a few weeks apart. However, in an email to ZebethMedia, the company subtly counterargues that Osifo’s resignation had been in process for some time and was unrelated to this month’s activities, while Bost, hired last September, was what 54gene needed — with support from COO Delali Attipoe — for its next phase. “Teresia is a well-rounded executive with a depth of experience in the global pharmaceutical and biotech industry, leading global teams and overseeing corporate governance,” the company said. “These skills, coupled with her breadth of experience driving business operations and translating complex regulatory requirements, will be invaluable at the helm of 54gene in this next phase of the company. Delali and Teresia will make a great team that together will strengthen 54gene’s position as a genomics leader in the industry.” Meanwhile, 54gene stated that its ex-chief executive “will continue to support the company in its go-forward plans such as strategic partnerships and fundraising” without explaining why he stepped down. However, according to several people with knowledge of happenings at the company, the terms of 54gene’s new deal contributed to Ene-Obong’s resignation. They say Ene-Obong — retaining his position on 54gene’s board while moving to a new senior advisor role — may have resigned as CEO in protest of 54gene’s new valuation and the liquidation preference offered by investors in the bridge round. There is some speculation that some of the investors also attempted to reprise the company’s previous prized round to get more shares while diluting that of the founders and other investors. 54gene declined to comment on the matter. The fact that 54gene had to arrange a bridge round in-house despite securing over $45 million over the last three years is a reminder that biotech projects are highly capital-intensive — for instance, it costs about $700 to sequence a human genome (one of 54gene’s main procedures). Typically, biotechs deploy investors’ funds into research while thinking about revenue later and the case isn’t different with 54gene. Still, the

US sanctions on China could extend to biotech, official says • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in biotech, Biotech & Health, China, Sanctions, usNo Comments

On the heels of the Biden administration’s decision to impose sweeping chip sanctions on China, there are signs that China might also lose access to other types of critical U.S. technologies including biotechnology, an area that has historically seen close cooperation between the two countries. Areas “on my radar” for possible additional export controls include quantum computing, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, said Alan Estevez, Commerce Department undersecretary for industry and security, according to The Washington Post. The message is worrying for an industry that’s intrinsically global. Biotech is one of the few areas, alongside climate policy, that transcends nationalities and boundaries between countries. Scientific progress in China could well save lives in the U.S. The globalization of the sector has also resulted in greater efficiency. As we wrote before, biotech firms often maintain a presence in China and the U.S. to leverage the different strengths of both sides. In China, they harness large reams of patient data, fast and cost-efficient clinical trials, as well as local tax cuts, government funding, and subsidized offices to advance their research. At the same time, they keep operations in the U.S. to tap the country’s R&D talent and work towards FDA regulatory approval and commercialization. It’s not uncommon to see biotech startups increasingly labeling themselves “born global” and employing executives with experiences in China, the U.S., and other countries. Needleless injection device maker NovaXS, for example, was founded by a Berkeley researcher who headquarters the company in the U.S. but conducts clinical trials in China. Xtalpi, one of China’s most-funded drug discovery startups, conducts research and business development in Boston, where it “maintains close communication with professors and experts from the research community as well as from the pharmaceutical industry,” while keeping multiple R&D centers across China. When asked previously why the drug discovery firm Insilico straddles China and the U.S., founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov compared the space to the early semiconductor industry where “research was done mostly in the U.S. while hardware production happened in China.” Eastern Chinese city Wuxi especially has emerged as a global hub for contract research organizations, which conduct outsourced work for international pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Biotechnology is “a highly complex, uncertain, and very risky process that fails 95-99% of the time if you start from target discovery. To put one drug on the market, you need 10-15 years, $2-3 billion dollars, and the process fails 95-99% of the time,” Zhavoronkov observed. “International collaboration in biotechnology is a way to share this huge risk and cost. And by limiting collaboration in this field or even talking about it, the politicians demonstrate a lack of fundamental understanding of the industry and disregard for the health and well-being of their electorate,” he added. Indeed, treating the biotech sector with a security-driven approach could harm U.S. competitiveness, argued two U.S. scholars specializing in China, writing for ChinaFile: Unlike the semiconductor and telecommunication sectors, whose development depends on expensive equipment and hard-to-acquire manufacturing expertise, barriers to entry in biotechnology are low. Likewise, as Eric Lander’s now infamous mapping of CRISPR’s development illustrates, both foundational research and key innovations in biotechnology often take place in the public domain and build on incremental advancements made across the globe. When breakthroughs, like employing CRISPR as a means of gene-editing, do occur they spread through global scientific networks with little heed for national boundaries. Consequently, it is not a zero-sum industry in which a single innovation sets any firm or country ahead for a prolonged period.

Navina secures $22M to process and summarize medical data for clinicians • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in AI, Alive, Biotech & Health, Grove Ventures, Robotics & AI, Schusterman Family Investments, Startups, Vertex Ventures IsraelNo Comments

Navina, a company developing AI-powered assistant software for physicians, today announced that it raised $22 million in Series B funding led by ALIVE with participation from Grove Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel and Schusterman Family Investments. Bringing the startup’s total raised to $44 million, inclusive of a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority, the proceeds will be put toward product development and widening Navina’s footprint to home, virtual and urgent care, CEO and co-founder Ronen Lavi told ZebethMedia. Navina was founded by Ronen Lavi and Shay Perera, who previously led the Israel Defense Forces’ AI lab, where they say that they built AI “assistant” systems for analysts suffering from data overload. Their work there inspired the products they went on to built at Navina, which aim to help physicians drowning in medical data. “The funding comes at a pivotal time for the U.S. healthcare industry on the heels of the pandemic, when physician burnout is at an all-time high,” Lavi told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Navina’s platform is uniquely able to put exactly the right patient information in front of physicians at the right time to give them a deep understanding at a glance, along with actionable insights at the point of care.” Several startups — and incumbents, for that matter — are developing AI assistant technologies for clinical settings. For example, there’s Suki, which raised $20 million to create a voice assistant for doctors, and Bot MD, an AI-based chatbot for doctors. Lavi claims that Navina is distinguished by its ability to “understand the complex language of medicine,” including non-clinical data. Trained on a dataset of imaging notes, consult notes, hospital notes, procedures and labs curated by a team led by medical doctors, Navina’s AI systems integrate with existing electronic health records software to identify potential diagnoses and quality and risk gaps requiring attention. Navina.ai uses AI to process and summarize medical records data. Image Credits: Navina “Navina differentiates in the way it structures and organizes data specifically for primary care physicians at the moment of care,” Lavi said. “Navina fits into existing workflows and familiar tools, meeting physicians and staff where they are … Its goal is to align workflows to effectively serve patient populations and improve value-based care.” One point of concern for this reporter is Navina’s diagnostic capabilities. While perhaps helpful, medical algorithms have historically been built on biased rules and homogenous datasets. The consequences have been severe. For example, one algorithm to determine eligible candidates for kidney transplants puts Black patients lower on the list than white patients even when all other factors remain the same. In response to a question about bias, Lavi said that Navina takes steps to “address health inequities and bias” and “ensure high accuracy of data sets and models.” He added that the company is compliant with HIPAA requirements and underwent a third-party privacy audit, and is in the “final stages” of SOC2 certification. With “thousands” of clinicians and supporting staff using the platform, Lavi says he doesn’t anticipate the economic downturn significantly impacting Navina. He demurred, however, when asked about the company’s revenue and precise customer count. “The pandemic gave Navina and other health tech companies a boost as it required both patients and physicians to grow accustomed to new modalities of care, such as telemedicine and remote visits,” Lavi said. “This has led traditional primary care providers to look for solutions that can help them take responsibility for their patients no matter where they enter the health system.” Navina has 65 employees currently. It expects to end the year with around 75.

HealthJoy raises $60M to make benefits easier to navigate • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, health benefits, health care, healthcare, HealthJoy, StartupsNo Comments

Healthcare benefits are great, but navigating them often isn’t. HealthJoy wants to make the experience more seamless for employees, while helping HR departments reduce the number of underutilized benefits. The Chicago-based company announced today it has raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Valspring Capital with participation from Endeavor Vision and CIBC Innovation Banking. Returning investors U.S. Venture Partners, GoHealth founders Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones, Health Velocity Capital, Nueterra Capital and Epic also joined the round. ZebethMedia last covered HealthJoy when it raised its Series C. The latest funding brings its total raised to $108 million. Founder Justin Holland told ZebethMedia that HealthJoy’s client base has doubled to more than 1,000 employers, covering more than 500,000 employees and dependents, since its Series C funding. It integrates with every benefit in an employer’s package (including medical, dental, vision, savings accounts, clinics and wellness initiatives) and has a live 24/7 concierge. The platform expanded its virtual care suite to be more comprehensive, including a partnership with telemedicine provider Teladoc, which Holland says is an example of how HealthJoy is helping HR and brokers deal with additional major claim categories like cancer and cardiometabolic disease by making it easier for people to get preventative care. “Our belief is access has to be simple and seamless for employees to drive engagement,” he said. HealthJoy also introduced a new feature called “automated steerage” that guides members to lower cost and more efficient solutions in the app. In addition to Teladoc, it also has partnerships with services for medical and prescription claims, utilization management data and virtual care resolutions. “As we continue to invest in data partnerships, we’re building out a comprehensive member profile and engagement engine. That will enable us to engage members earlier and more often in the course of their healthcare journey,” Holland said. “Ideally, we are able to be more proactive than reactive to their personal needs.” HealthJoy sees a 60% activation rate after 30 days and 25% of its employee base logs into its app every month. “When we have the engagement, we use technology to drive utilization across all benefits. We know that members have healthcare needs, but they don’t always think about how their benefits programs can support these needs,” Holland says. An examplee of how HealthJoy helps them find these benefits include virtual assistant tech that automatically guides members to online options when they’re looking for the doctor. It also helps them compare costs for treatments and procedures when recommending providers and facilities, which Holland says saves members on average $2,000 in out-of-pocket costs. In a statement, Aneesha Mehta, co-founder of Valspring and a former partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, “As users of healthcare technology ourselves, we genuinely identified with a core issue that HealthJoy fights: a serious lack of benefits awareness that leads to under-utilization by employees. Offering a solution that simplifies benefits is a key differentiator in the talent war the market currently finds itself in. We look forward to amplifying HealthJoy’s solutions as we’ve seen the value they bring firsthand.”