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Biotech & Health

Advanced Ionics teases electrolysis innovation ‘to clean up’ the filthy hydrogen business • ZebethMedia

Advanced Ionics, a climate-tech startup that hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is striving to drive down the price of green hydrogen by slashing how much electricity is needed for electrolysis by as much as 50%. That’s an admirable goal, because despite all the talk of hydrogen as a “fuel of the future,” the industry is still filthy for the most part — driving climate chaos via pollution-spewing production methods. Most of the hydrogen gas that humans produce is “grey“; a classification that means the producers rely on methane (or worse, burning coal) to isolate the element for use in fertilizer and as fuel. But as awareness of climate change and interest in hydrogen-powered freight grows, so too has demand for an environmentally friendlier alternative. In contrast to the grey stuff, “green” hydrogen taps renewable energy and electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a superior production method as far as the climate is concerned, but it is also costly because it demands a ton of clean energy. Image Credits: ZebethMedia As Advanced Ionics founder Chad Mason tells it, the startup’s coming electrolyzer will “use 35 Kilowatt-hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen by running at 300 Celsius,” while tapping industrial heat, non-ceramic materials (that work at lower than typical temperatures) and steam instead of liquid water. Per the CEO, “existing technologies are generally in the 45 to 60 [Kilowatt-hours] range, practically speaking.” The executive presented onstage today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. There are other ways to cut the cost of electrolysis, such as by manufacturing cheaper electrolyzers and limiting maintenance. “But if you don’t address electricity use and price of electricity, it doesn’t matter,” Mason told ZebethMedia. The company is targeting between 20% and 50% less electricity use. The CEO said his interest in electrolyzers was first sparked through anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, which his family applied to crops on their farm in North Dakota. “So I understood early on,” said Mason, “the importance of hydrogen to make all of these important commodities and chemicals that are also very polluting industries.” Armed with $4.2 million in seed funding from Boston’s Clean Energy Ventures and Texas-based SWAN Impact Network, Advanced Ionics has a ways to go. The company aims to deploy “demonstration units with a few partners” and kick off sales starting next year, and it is targeting 2025 for a commercial launch. Then, “we’re going to try to really hit the gas and produce as many of them possible, and try to have as big of an impact as possible as quickly as we can in the latter half of the decade,” said Mason.

RIF Robotics powers robots that inspect and organize surgical equipment • ZebethMedia

Several years ago, Kevin DeMarco’s aunt was an operating room nurse who asked DeMarco — knowing that he programmed robots for a living — if there was a robot that could prepare surgical equipment. After investigating the problem with a colleague at Georgia Tech, where DeMarco was working as a research faculty member, he decided to leave his position to create the robot that his aunt once mused about. In this quest, DeMarco ended up co-founding RIF Robotics, one of the startups in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. Led by DeMarco, Sergio García-Vergara and a third co-founder, Collin Farill, who’s an industrial designer by trade, RIF Robotics seeks to use a combination of AI and robotics to relieve healthcare workers of the burden of mundane tasks so they can focus on clinical work. Image Credits: RIF Robotics Sterile processing — the cleaning of medical equipment — is also tough on technicians performing it, who have to spend hours each day inspecting and cleaning tools. Some equipment requires over 100 steps to disinfect, and the pace in busy hospitals can be relentless. The costs can add up, too. One study estimates that just 20 instrument errors that end up creating delays in the operating room can cost a hospital as much as $3,385. Extrapolating out to a year, the cost to the hospital would be about $48,000, the research found. RIF isn’t tackling cleaning. But the startup claims its prototype product, which was developed in less than two months, can save surgeons time by identifying, classifying and manipulating four different instruments and assembling a small surgical tray. Two machine learning systems — an image segmentation system and an object classifier, trained on sets of both real and synthetic images of surgical tools — help a robotic manipulator arm grasp and move the instruments. “The major challenges that the sterile processing industry is facing are a lack of experienced surgical technicians, instrument-level tracking, infection traceability and cost traceability,” DeMarco told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Medical device manufacturers are interested in knowing how their equipment is used and degrades in the field. Instrument-level data will also help them to decide where to send sales reps. Hospitals are interested in instrument-level data because it will help them operate more efficiently by improving instrument-level tracking and instrument inspection. Currently, most hospitals only track at the tray level, but the industry wants to be able to track at the instrument level.” Image Credits: RIF Robotics Future prototypes will be able to recognize more tools and determine if there’s any leftover “bioburden” (i.e., blood and bone) on instrument surfaces and evaluate instruments’ sharpness and overall condition. But even in its current form, DeMarco believes that RIF has built a product hospitals would use. “Three Atlanta hospitals and the Veterans Affairs are interested in our product,” he said. “We have a collaborative research and development agreement with the Veterans Affairs, which allows us to conduct customer discovery and pilot studies at their facilities … [We’ll deploy] three alpha versions of our systems at local Atlanta hospitals, where we already have existing connections.” RIF is currently bootstrapping — DeMarco claims that the company has a burn rate of less than $1,000 per month. But the team isn’t naïve about the long road ahead. RIF is going after an $800,000 debt pre-seed round and hopes to hire a medical device industry expert after the round concludes. The company, which is pre-revenue, also expects to require three rounds of funding and close to four years before it reaches profitability. RIF Robotics’ co-founders pose for a photograph in scrubs. Image Credits: RIF Robotics There’s also competition from vendors like RST Automation, which sells a semi-automated medical tool identification and organization system. Steris and R-Solution Medical — two other rivals, albeit not direct ones — are developing robots to transport and store surgical trays and equipment. DeMarco claims that RIF’s solution is more capable. But the proof will be in the pudding — RIF aims to turn its prototype into a manufacturable product by fall 2023. “The healthcare industry is starving for innovation,” DeMarco said. “We are protecting ourselves from the potential headwinds by developing products and solutions that are directly asked for by the industry and the end users.”

Reverion eyes commercial launch to draw more energy out of biogas • ZebethMedia

Born inside the Technical University of Munich, the engineers behind Reverion say they’ve had their heads down for seven years developing a way to get more electricity out of biogas and existing fuel-cell technology. Biogas comes from decomposing waste and is mostly made up of methane. It’s a form of chemical energy that must be converted into electricity before it can flow into homes. You could do this by burning it, but that would release pollutants and waste around half the energy; a comparably cleaner and more efficient option is to use fuel cells, which generate electricity via an electrochemical reaction — sort of like a battery. Either way, some energy is lost in the conversion process, but Reverion aims to push biogas fuel-cell efficiency toward its limit. “Normally, the industry fights for say, a 0.2% increase in efficiency per year. That’s even an achievement,” Reverion chief executive Stephan Herrmann told ZebethMedia. “We get an increase from the best power plant that’s available, of 60%, to 80% just in one step.” According to Herrmann, Reverion achieves this 20% efficiency boost by capturing and processing gas that would otherwise go unused inside the fuel cell. The CEO of the Eresing, Germany-based company presented today in San Francisco at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield. “Fuel cells themselves always have had this like 80% efficiency in them, but they have some limits,” said Herrmann. “What typically happens is that up to 30% of the fuel you feed to the fuel cell comes out unused again.” The CEO added, “We eliminate that by basically re-increasing the quality of the gas in two steps and then recycling it into the fuel cell.” With $7 million in tow, the startup says it is now gearing up to pilot 10 modular power plant units, each housed in 20-foot shipping containers with enough capacity to power 100 households apiece. Reverion aims to deliver its first unit “roughly” by the end of the first quarter of 2023 — and all 10 before the end of the year. The company secured its seed funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, the European Social Fund and XPrize.

Hormona wants women to track their ‘hormonal health’ with at-home testing • ZebethMedia

Quantified health activity is all around us these days, as scores of people use mobile sensing technologies to keep an eye on their well-being by tracking their steps, workouts and even how long and deep they sleep — so why shouldn’t women who cycle (as in menstrual cycle) track monthly changes to their hormone levels? London-based femtech, Hormona, which is pitching its hormone tracker in the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt, hopes to encourage people with periods to do just that: Add hormone-monitoring to their quantified health mix. Today it’s announcing the launch of its app in the U.S. after a period of early testing with “a few thousand” women in Europe (it’s been beta testing in Sweden). The 2019-founded U.K. startup has already spent a couple of years in R&D developing an easy-to-perform, proprietary at-home hormone test to underpin a forthcoming monthly subscription business that will enable users of its (freemium) app to pay to regularly test and report their hormone levels. In the near future, in return for “roughly” $40 per month (for the subscription package which includes a supply of self tests), paying users will get feedback on whether they’re inside or outside the normal hormonal range for women their age — and suggestions for treatments if something looks amiss. That’s for starters. Hormona’s overarching goal, as is often the case with femtech startups, is to encourage a critical mass of users to get on-board with a mission to help plug the data gap that persists around women’s health (as a result of medical research being historically skewed towards male biology) — by agreeing to pool data for research aimed at improving understanding of the roles hormones play in areas like fertility and the menopause. (This side is of course optional: Hormona confirms that any studies it engages in involving user data will be consent-based, i.e. requiring the user to opt their information in.) Jasmine Tagesson, COO at Hormona pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “As of now, there isn’t enough data around hormonal health and it’s really affecting every single woman in different stages of her life so it’s a very important topic that we really need to spend more time to do more research and understand,” says Hormona CEO and co-founder, Karolina Lofqvist, ahead of today’s on stage pitch at the Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. “With this test we can really help women to figure out if they have irregular cycles, if they’re going to have problems getting pregnant or if they’re going into menopause,” she continues. “Our full solution is really on hormonal health — and follow[ing] a woman from her first cycle all the way to her last.” “We are hoping that with the data [users opt in] we can do more studies around how women are affected by their hormones, how different connections and different levels between hormones can be connected to hormone related issues such as PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or — eventually, perhaps — endometriosis as well, even if it’s not a direct hormonal issue. But PCOS for sure, and infertility and menopause,” she adds. “There are a lot of things that are connected to your hormones that are currently understudied that we are very excited to do more studies and bring more awareness around.” The startup has raised a total of $1.5 million in early backing from three VC firms so far: SFC Capital and Nascent Invest, as well as Techstars — after going through the latter’s LA accelerator program earlier this year. Cycling through hormone testing Hormona’s at-home hormone tests — which are lateral flow, urine-based tests for (initially) three separate hormones (FSH; progesterone; and estrogen) — will be available from Q1 next year, per Lofqvist, starting in the U.S., with a European launch to follow later. That means, for now, its (free-to-download) app is essentially a general resource that provides information about the function of different female hormones. As tests become available, it’s also designed to funnel users towards regular self-testing (and paying a subscription) to unlock personalized hormonal insights once the testing component of the business launches early next year. “In the app today you can start to understand what is supposed to happen with your hormones and then when the test is available women can confirm that what is supposed to happen is actually happening,” says Lofqvist, going on to explain that subscription users will be testing roughly one hormone per week (using a separate test per hormone) and doing this at home — “without the need for a lab”. The three hormones it’s selected for testing were picked because they’re “connected to so many different issues that we women go through”, she says, adding that they may add tests for more hormones in the future — with testosterone and cortisol being two others of potential interest. The initial batch of hormone tests are performed by users as three separate tests, rather than being bundled onto a single test strip. This is because Lofqvist says that certain hormones need to be tested on certain days to properly understand how levels are changing throughout the cycle. “You don’t test your estrogen on the same day as you test your FSH,” she notes, adding of the individual test dates: “It’s based on our algorithms telling when your estrogen and FSH is supposed to be at the highest or lowest level.” App users need to provide Hormona with some information about themselves (such as their age) and about their cycle (e.g. regular or irregular; and its length) in order that it can calculate personalized testing dates. Lofqvist confirms these dates “can vary a bit” depending on what the user’s goal and age is. While she tells us the overall accuracy of its hormone tests is “on par” with an at-home blood test. “We’ve spent the last two years in order to evaluate antibodies to give us as good result

Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models • ZebethMedia

Cityblock Health is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that healthcare is a right, that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” Ajayi said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022, that we’re looking at exactly the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about health care disparities, health care outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID,” she added about the current health care system. “Everyone’s like, oh my god, black and brown people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, poor people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, essential workers who don’t have health insurance. We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.” Based in Brooklyn, New York and now live in seven markets, including Indiana and Ohio, Cityblock works with many people who lack access to basics like food, safe places to sleep and social support, which creates more risk factors for worsening chronic conditions. As a result, many rely on emergency rooms for crises, like running out of insulin or acute psychiatric care, because they didn’t received the kind of care that would have kept them at home. “I come to this work as a physician, I’m deeply passionate about caring for underserved communities. I come to this work from a place of real heart. This is my life’s work and my mission,” Ajayi said. “I’m also a deep pragmatist and I recognize that there are real economic forces that drive most of the decisions that people make in our healthcare system, certainly in the for profit space, but even as we learn and read more about it, even in the not-for-profit space.” Addressing systemic issues like health disparities is important on a moral level, but for payers there is also an opportunity to figure out how to create a more viable business by caring for people differently. When launching in a new market, like Indiana or Ohio, Cityblock looks for places where there are socioeconomic disparities and then looks for partners, payers and health insurers who they launch into markets with. “Pre-launch we spend the time figuring out where exactly in the neighborhood should we be,” Ajayi said. “Can we be near public transportation, near grocery stores, making sure that we’re really mapping the ecosystem and showing up in places that are accessible to our members and also positioning ourselves so we can go to the home and see people from there.” Part of this means working with community-based organizations, include shelters, housing agencies and food pantries. “We think of ourselves as part of the glue within an ecosystem that knits together existing providers, the specialty providers, the hospitals, the communities, organizations and creates a seamless experience for the people we serve,” Ajayi said. She noted that many of these organizations run on tenuous and vulnerable business models. For example, during the pandemic, many community-based organizations couldn’t get enough workers to continue coming in. Many run on tiny margins and are grant-funded. This means Cityblock has to be prepared to support community organizations in its ecosystem, including tasks like packaging and bring over groceries. Tech and data science can also support more individualized care. For example, data science can help Cityblock figure out who it needs to engage with first in patient populations that are often very diverse in terms of age and needs. “I have to engage all of them. Who do I go after first. Who do I call first? Who’s going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who’s not home today because they’re likely not working, or who’s likely to be engageable on the weekend,” Ajayi said. “Those are types of things we can use our data and our data products to help us better refine.” Better data science means people also have to repeat their story less as they seek care. “When we interview our members about what they dislike about the traditional health care system, it’s ‘I gotta tell my whole story over and over again.’ And then you add on layers of discrimination and stigma that many people face. More than half of our members are people of color, because that’s the best representation of Medicaid and dually-eligible populations.” “Telling your story over and over again seems benign, but the healthcare system makes people tell their story over and over again, it subjects them to friction, abrasion and sometimes even trauma, that is entirely counterproductive to a therapeutic relationship that’s going to result in better health outcomes. Even alleviating that is such a meaningful lever for us.”

Alaffia Health taps AI to detect errors in hospital bills • ZebethMedia

The multi-decade rise in healthcare costs isn’t expected to reverse course any time soon. In search of a fix, Adun Akanni and TJ Ademiluyi co-founded Alaffia Health in 2020, one of the startups participating in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. The healthtech company uses machine learning to try to identify fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare claims. “We leveraged key insights from our family’s medical billing company in founding Alaffia,” Ademiluyi told ZebethMedia in an interview. “We determined that the majority of the waste in the system results from natural human error, lack of transparency in claims processing, and misaligned incentives between healthcare providers and payers. We founded Alaffia to tackle these issues using nascent machine learning and AI, built on top of deep healthcare domain expertise.” Alaffia sells services primarily to health insurance payers and enterprises that provide their employees health coverage. Using AI to extract and standardize data from hospital bills, including various medical billing procedure codes and dates of service, the platform aims to reduce payers’ spending by finding errors and overcharges within the bills sent by healthcare providers. The causes of medical billing errors are myriad, but often arise from double billing, missing the payer submission deadline and a failure to capture patient information. Non-specific diagnostic codes are another common issue, leading to instances of upcoding and undercoding. Upcoding is when a coder reports a higher-level service than patients received or never had performed, while undercoding is when billing codes don’t capture the full scope of work performed by a physician. Medical expenses are expected to grow by an average of 5.1% from 2021 to 2030, reaching $6.8 trillion, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and a significant portion of those expenditures are derived from errors in health insurance claims. It’s estimated that about 80% of claims in the U.S. contain at least one medical billing error, and that as much as $300 billion is lost to provider fraud, waste and abuse each year. Image Credits: Alaffia Health “This is a quite challenging technical problem due to the lack of data standardization in the healthcare system, so we’ve rigorously trained machine learning models using training data generated by our in-house annotation team,” Ademiluyi said. Alaffia reviews facility bills for errors such as “unbundling” — i.e., using multiple codes for individual parts of a procedure — while checking the accuracy of more complex claims like implants and surgeries. The company says it taps registered nurses, certified coders and certified billers to cross-reference the AI’s findings, as well as a clinical review team that examines each claim and corresponding medical record. When asked about competitors, Ademiluyi says he sees “legacy industry participants” who manually process and review claims as Alaffia’s principal rivals. But Alaffia isn’t the only startup attempting to tackle the medical billing error problem with AI. Anomaly, which works with insurance companies and providers, offers an AI-driven platform designed to detect irregularities in medical bills. There’s also Nym, whose technology converts medical charts and electronic medical records from physician consultations into auditable billing codes automatically. Alaffia has managed to gain traction in the space, however — and funding. Ademiluyi claims the company’s services currently cover over 300,000 health plan members in aggregate. And to date, Alaffia has raised $6.6 million in venture capital from backers including Anthemis, 1984 Ventures, Aperture Venture Capital, Tau Ventures, Twine Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and ERA’s Remarkable Ventures Fund. Ademiluyi says that 2022 revenue is on pace to more than double year-over-year. The near-term plan is to expand Alaffia’s commercial footprint and product offerings, he added, starting with hospital bill review services direct to patients. The company currently employs “just over” 20 people and expects to hire five more by the end of the year. “Fortunately, we operate in an industry resistant to recession. Regardless of pandemics, macro trends, or the outlook for interest rates, people will still visit the doctor to receive care,” Ademiluyi said. “When patients receive care, it leads to further healthcare spending, which benefits our business as we review generated hospital bills for errors. As we move into a slowdown in the market, large enterprises — both health insurance institutions and employers whom we support are actually looking at ways to lower their expenses, which we directly support by reducing healthcare spending. As such, we believe the pandemic and current slowdown in the economy to be a net positive for the business.”

Calm launches clinical mental health offering, Calm Health • ZebethMedia

Calm, the subscription-based mindfulness app, today announced its first foray into a clinical mental health offering: Calm Health. Offered through payers, providers and self-insured employers, Calm Health includes condition-specific programs designed to “bridge the gap between mental and physical healthcare,” according to the company. Calm Health both replaces Calm’s previous employer offering, Calm for Business, and builds off of Calm’s acquisition of tech startup Ripple Health Group in early February. Using Ripple’s technology, Calm Health connects users with different healthcare options, starting with support for patients suffering from anxiety or depression or using programs in-between therapy sessions. Calm plans to eventually add mental health programs for people with physical conditions like hypertension, obesity, heart disease and cancer. “Mental health has risen to the forefront of our nation’s health concerns,” Calm CEO David Ko said in a statement. “From the tolls of the pandemic to financial uncertainty and workplace anxieties, people have turned to Calm over the past ten years to manage their mental health. As we move into healthcare, our goal is to reach even more people with clinical mental health tools and destigmatize the importance of regular mental healthcare.” The rollout of Calm Health comes after a bit of a rough patch for Calm, which laid off 20% of its staff in August as usage fell from a pandemic peak. Prior to the layoffs, Ripple CEO David Ko became Calm’s chief executive, signaling the company’s ambitions to move into new market opportunities. As of December 2020, Calm was valued at $2 billion and had raised $218 million from investors including Insight Venture Partners, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and Creative Artists Agency. It competes against rivals including Headspace Health, the result of a 2021 merger between mental health company Ginger and mindfulness-focused Headspace. Headspace Health recently acquired Shine and Sayana as the macroeconomic climate spurred consolidation in the health tech space.

Circular Genomics uses RNA to stop depression meds being a guessing game • ZebethMedia

For many people who live with depression, medication is an important part of managing the condition. But knowing which will work for you can be a difficult months-long process. Circular Genomics claims its new form of genetic testing can identify which medications will work for a patient in a fraction of that time. As some of our readers no doubt already know — depression affects hundreds of millions, after all — finding the right medication is basically a crap shoot. Your provider picks one that they think meets your needs, then slowly ramps up the dose over a month or two, and if it doesn’t work, ramps it down again and tries a new one. If you’re lucky, the first one works; if not, it could be many months before you find a working dose — if it isn’t a resistant condition. And all that time you’re living with inadequately treated depression, possibly even exacerbated by the disruptive process of a constantly shifting drug regimen. Circular Genomics, which presented today as part of the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt, is taking aim at this huge problem with a new testing method that relies on a molecule in our body we’ve known about for decades but only recently started paying attention to: circular RNA.   DNA, as we all know, encodes our genes using a base code; when it’s time to actually make things, that code is processed and it produces RNA, which more directly describes the proteins that will eventually be created, but is much easier to read than either DNA or the proteins themselves. The problem with RNA is that it degrades quickly, more or less by design: the ends of each strand are reactive and the whole thing starts getting unraveled by enzymes within a few hours. But sometimes those two ends join and form “circular RNA”: the same molecule, but it lasts much, much longer. “Circular types were discovered 5-10 years ago; we’ve known they existed since the 70s, but until deep sequencing technologies advanced we were never able to pull them out of the data,” explained Circular Genomics co-founder and president Alexander Hafez. “The stability increases substantially, you go from 18-24 hours to a week.” This matters because if you want to know what’s going on in the brain, RNA expression is your best bet — but you can’t extract it directly, and by the time blood carries it out of the brain, it’s already started to fall apart. DNA and protein analysis aren’t much help either. But with the advent of new sequencing tools, that’s all about to change. “Circular RNA is the first reliable biomarker that lets us look at brain conditions,” Hafez said. Depression is the first target, in particular what type of medication would likely work best for a person. The company has undergone two clinical studies so far: “We used blood samples, and got an idea of class response — for example, whether they would respond to an SSRI or not. Then we did another where we were able to look at whether a patient would respond to Zoloft specifically.” (Zoloft is a commonly prescribed antidepressant.) Having a starting place for what medication is mostly likely to work cuts out a huge amount of unnecessary care: not just the meds themselves but appointments, paperwork, insurance scuffles, risk of hospitalization, and so on. The all-inclusive cost of 6-12 months of care as someone works through the options is considerable, and that’s without reckoning with the more subjective costs of the process. Hafez did say that circular RNA is rapidly expanding its presence in the biotech world. “When we first started the company, there weren’t a lot of publications available; now it seems like every week there’s an article about how they’re useful biomarkers for cancers and other things.” Circular Genomics has a few patents pending, though, and are holding onto a some of the IP, like the actual identification process — this isn’t something anyone can just do with a sequencer and a bit of free time. The company is currently working on getting additional clinical testing done so the product can be confidently brought to market. But there are other applications on the horizon as well. Hafez said that they may also have located biomarkers for depression itself — something that could be immensely helpful. “Our society has a big stigma around depression diagnosis,” and mental illness in general, he said. But if depression, like so many other conditions, could be shown on a simple blood test, it would help remove that stigma. People who have trouble accepting depression as the cause of their or another’s experiences — or stubborn insurance companies, for that matter — may find a + sign on a blood test more convincing. Of course that opens the door to requiring biological markers as proof of mental illness, but we can cross that bridge when we get there. In the meantime the company is still working out the best way to get the technology in patients’ hands. At first it may be an optional test not covered by insurance, with a cost around $1,000. Obviously that’s not accessible to everyone, but like many new approaches not yet qualified for reimbursement, there are grants and other offsets that can be brought into play if the benefits are substantial.

NXgenPort aims to detect early signs of infection in cancer patients before symptoms arise • ZebethMedia

Meet NXgenPort, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based startup that’s looking to remotely monitor cancer patients in between doctor visits using a port catheter. NXgenPort, which presented today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is building an implantable chemo port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions. The port combines chemo-port efficacy with sensor technology to measure and remotely monitor early onset of complications by reporting and tracking patient response over the course of their treatment. The goal of the port is to alert physicians to signs of infection, reduce hospitalizations and gather important physiological data to improve patient outcomes. NXgenPort is the brainchild of CEO and co-founder Cathy Skinner, who came up with the idea for the port based on her own experience after her father passed away from cancer 20 years ago. His diagnosis sent Skinner on a course to work in the oncology space and become a cancer exercise specialist. In 2016, she was working with a breast cancer patient and noticed that her condition had worsened from the last time Skinner saw her. The patient went to her doctor and learned that the medication she was taking to fight the cancer was also damaging her heart. “When she was telling me the story, I saw that she had an implanted chemo port in her chest for the drug, and I wondered, how come we couldn’t know sooner that the drug was damaging her heart,” Skinner told ZebethMedia in an interview. “I always knew that I had a good idea, but I needed a team to build around it.” That’s when NXgenPort COO Rosanne Welcher, PhD and CTO Mohamed Ali MD, PhD came into the picture. In 2019, Skinner was at a conference at Harvard and sat next to Welcher for lunch and the two began discussing their professions. Once Skinner found out that Welcher was a scientist with 25 years of experience working in cancer diagnostics and leadership, she shared her idea for the NXgenPort. Skinner and Welcher then formed the company in May 2020 and filed a non-provisional patent with an attorney in Utah. Their attorney had hired Ali to create drawings of the product for the patent, after which Ali shared his interest in the product and joined their team with his expertise in rehabilitative science and cardiac care. The NXgenPort is embedded with micro electronics and a battery. The device has optical sensors going through the catheter. Once the port is implanted in the chest and the catheter goes through a patient’s heart, the device captures images of blood cells and then compresses the data and sends it to the cloud, after which it is analyzed via machine learning. Skinner notes that cells are differentiated by their size and composition, so the company has trained the algorithm to count the different cells and then provide trends as to whether blood cells are changing in a good or bad way. “With the chemotherapy port being implanted and then with us embedding with technology for remote patient monitoring, we’re able to detect changes in red blood cells and white blood cells, cardiac output and vitals,” Skinner said. “Right now, if a patent needs to determine if they are eligible for their next chemo appointment, they have to drive to the clinic and get their blood tested. And if their blood cell counts are off, they’re ineligible and have to drive back home. We’re monitoring remotely and showing trends over time and seeing if the data shows signs of infection, if patients need to come in early for a blood transfusion or if chemo needs to be rescheduled.” NXgenPort is still in the process of receiving FDA approval, so the company can’t test on humans yet. The startup is going into animal testing this year, and is starting with swine. Skinner says the startup anticipates human testing to begin toward the end of 2025. “It’s a very hard and ambitious thing that we’re seeking to do by taking optical sensors that are used in labs to count cells, miniaturizing them and having them be activated in blood flow,” Skinner said. “So we’re facing some important challenges, but at the same time, when we accomplish this, it’s going to completely change how cancer patients are monitored. The timing when we come to market in 2025 will be well-suited because Hospital at Home models will be more mature and we’ll be ready to integrate.” In terms of funding, the startup closed a pre-seed round in March 2022 that included investment from the co-founders’ friends and family, mHUB accelerator and Edward-Elmhurst Health Ventures. NXgenPort is in the midst of raising a $4 million seed round, but is currently unable to disclose the lead investor. The company’s Series A investment round, which Skinner says will consist of $10 million, will occur in 2023. As for the company’s business model, Skinner says the startup will look at licensing the technology to port manufacturers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and virtual clinic trial companies. The NXgenPort itself will cost a bit more than a standard port, which is usually priced at around $270. In addition to the hardware, the startup will have a subscription model for its software that will collect and analyze results for physicians. Skinner says the software will be priced at around $40 or $50 per month and will be payable to the hospitals administering the ports. Although the startup is currently focused on cancer, Skinner says the startup aims to turn into an umbrella company with different product lines in the future. The startup sees opportunities in having implanted devices with optical sensors collecting patient blood counts and heart function in dialysis, cardiac care and veterinary care. 

‘She Matters’ is the name and mission of a BIPOC-focused postpartum care startup • ZebethMedia

After Jade Kearney suffered postpartum depression and anxiety but was dismissed by care providers, she hoped to create a platform where Black women like her can access culturally competent care. Her experience led her to found and lead She Matters, a digital health platform focused on supporting Black women experiencing postpartum comorbidities, and providing cultural competency training for care providers. The company is part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. “It’s not only up to black women to understand terminology around postpartum care, and understand maternal health and submerge ourselves in all things birthing,” Kearney said. “It’s up to the health care system and health care professionals to meet us halfway and be culturally competent and help us.” Training requires providers to attend courses but also interact with Black women in the community. Kearney told ZebethMedia they require those interactions so doctors can better understand the communities’ concerns and needs. At a given time the company can train upwards of 500 care professionals per contract across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 3 U.S. territories. Image Credits: She Matters In addition to providing physicians training, She Matters allows individuals to access what they call “The Pink Book”, making a reference to The Green Book used by Black motorists in the Jim Crow era. The book is an interactive map that users can use to find what they believe are “the safest hospitals across 14 states with the largest African-American populations in the United States.” Individuals can also request to be part of the She Matters community to access events and information from qualified physicians. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, infant mortality rates are highest among BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities, especially among Black birthing people. For every 1,000 live births close to 11 infants pass away. Additionally, Black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth and 80% more likely to be admitted to an emergency room during postpartum than their white peers. The hope for companies like She Matters is that by increasing cultural competency, the rates above will lessen. “The only way a doctor can truly help you is if you feel comfortable being honest with what you’re experiencing, and there are a lot of barriers to honesty for black women,” Kearney said. “There’s so much negative history between black women in the healthcare system, that it makes it hard to get to the root of a lot of postpartum maternal illnesses in general because we’re afraid of doctors, we feel like we won’t be heard. And if you look at the health care system in America, it needs to be improved because it is steeped in systemic racism.” Although the company’s main focus is on Black birthing people, the company will be releasing We Matter as an additional product line in 2023 to better serve other historically marginalized communities. We Matter will include Ella Importa (Latinx/a community focus); Native Her (Indigenous community focus); and They Matter (LGBTQIA+ community focus).

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